“Nevers”44 pages
- p. 43 …cavalry mounted on gas driven flying horses” never arrived to
“sweep the Germans from the sky…
- p. 46 …Mitchell never received an American air force commensurate with
the ambitious idens of air power which…
- p. 49 …This project, like so many others, had lagged, and the Air Service was
never equipped during…
- p. 50 …the Army or the Air Corps?” but never, “Are
you in the Army or the Corps…
- p. 55 …any Air Service officers, and I have never heard
anybody yet-any Air Service officer-against…
- p. 69 …But one axiom,
with its corollaries, never varied. T o him the airplane was first and…
- p. 75 …Powerful air attacks resolutely pressed home could never be
completely stopped, but their effects could best…
- p. 94 …rate for the time being, the decision never-
theless left an open question as to how…
- p. 121 …large-scale warfare; production of combat types never exceeded 300
aircraft a month. The pattern of…
- p. 122 …the German Air Force, the
Regia Aeronautica never exhibited sufficient power to be decisive in
the…
- p. 133 …Except for a few raids against French
factories, the force had never been employed in a…
- p. 140 …into
a complete war economy production was never equal to the demands
of our own forces…
- p. 150 …Long-term needs
of the Air Corps and the sudden availability of funds in quantities
never…
- p. 181 …Actually, the Air Staff had
never approved of the method followed in RAINBOW No. 5 . l…
- p. 217 …Members of the Hawaiian Air Force, who had never flown
heavy bombers, began to receive intensive…
- p. 219 …were not then satisfactory for permanent garrisons. Never-
theless, the commander of the Hawaiian Department, Lt…
- p. 227 …T h e planes never reached their destination. Other
bombardment units were being prepared for transfer…
- p. 241 …responsible officers, a few crucial points
have never been satisfactorily explained.
T h e general pattern…
- p. 277 …motors, sole-
noids, and gun mounts-were never found. After many hours of fruit-
less search…
- p. 288 …planners and
from which AAF Headquarters was never to deviate.
The translation of the accepted grand…
- p. 303 …the principal features of the plan
were never challenged, it was subsequently revised in a draft…
- p. 309 …W a r Plans Division was
never incorporated into GHQ and remained a potential rival to…
- p. 336 …the shooting and wrote that they were never
able to make out an airplane.g6It is…
- p. 412 …As it happened, the B-24's never
returned to India, but, instead, remained in the…
- p. 457 …Meanwhile the Edsall with the remaining
pilots had headed for Java, never to be heard from…
- p. 492 …Squadron was assigned, but which it would never reach, going from
Australia to Tongatabu; ( 3 ) Christmas…
- p. 500 …deck of a carrier presented a problem never
before challenged by Army planes. Hence an accelerated…
- p. 502 …the bows and wetting the flight deck. Never before had this been
accomplished, yet now it…
- p. 509 …Island, in the
Louisiade Archipelago.” They were never needed, for on 7-8 May
the two…
- p. 513 …exist, it was at a point which never reached the
aircrews, for on the operational level…
- p. 524 …handicaps under which
AAF planes had operated. Never were more than fourteen B- I 7’s…
- p. 527 …AAF planners clung firmly to their belief that
proper observance of economy of force would never…
- p. 531 …Crews which had
previously never loaded torpedoes now for the first time fitted these
weapons into…
- p. 544 …But the Japanese never at
any time based their bombers in appreciable numbers a t either…
- p. 548 …26's in torpedo-dropping, but they never would be put into
All told, the record…
- p. 556 …until it had been thoroughly trained and never to com-
mit it piecemeal. General Magruder had…
- p. 560 …pressed into service against the Germans," and never reached the
CBI." Colonel Haynes had reached India…
- p. 606 …reason that the Antilles Air Task Force
never evolved, as did I Bomber Command, into an…
- p. 614 …that reason deserving a high
priority, could never dispose of the U-boat menace but must…
- p. 635 …In Washington the Munitions Assign-
ments Board t had never considered this schedule as more than…
- p. 670 …they bombed from 39,200 feet, and never
below 30,000. By AAF standards they had…
- p. 672 …Goering had never put enough bombers over England,
nor had he concentrated his forces on the…
- p. 690 …of co-operation and combined action probably never
before equaled by the military forces of two…
- p. 729 …shoot at aerial targets, and several
had never operated a turret in the air. This deficiency…
F U N D A M E N T A L B A S E S O F S T R A T E G Y
its member was the Chief of the Air Staff, Maj. Gen. Millard F.
Harmon. H e served also as chairman of a subsidiary group, the Muni-
tions Assignments Committee (Air), and the AAF in this body con-
tinued to play the important role it had previously enjoyed in the
Joint Aircraft Committee.82
As the war went on, the combined and joint machinery grew more
complex, the size of its personnel greater. It could not, in the nature
of things, wholly escape the taint of bureaucracy, and that its officers
could partially escape the standard “battle of the Pentagon” jokes was
perhaps due to the fact that they were more often housed in another
building. But the war, being global, was also complex and great in
size; the task of planning operations and deployments in every con-
tinent, of finding resources and establishing relative priorities-this
required a staff organized on a scale and in a manner hitherto un-
known in the United States. Perhaps the magnitude of the task can
be fully appreciated only by those who have made an intensive study
of the files of the Combined and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The respon-
sibility for keeping those records, incidentally, was no light one. It
was vested, at the two levels, in the Combined Secretariat and the
Joint Secretariat, which prepared and circulated the various draft and
final papers and which kept a permanent record of the proceedings
at staff meetings. Here again initial British influence was
The establishment of the new machinery for combined and joint
control of the war effort did much to secure for the air arm a position
commensurate with its growing size and power through the inclusion
of AAF representatives in each new agency. Concurrently, the War
Department was undergoing structural modifications which contrib-
uted to the same end. The reorganization which went into effect on
9 March 1942 was the fruit of months of study and debate precip-
itated by the military crisis of 1940-41; to understand the issues
involved, it is useful to recall briefly the nature of the Army’s admin-
istrative machinery when mobilization began. At that time most re-
sponsible leaders within the War Department were agreed that the
existing organization was ill attuned to the needs of modern war-
specifically :hat reforms should be instituted which aimed at decen-
tralization of staff work in Washington, at unity of command in the
field. In practice, those principles were difficult to reconcile, and
among the several agencies concerned there existed wide differences
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