Documents / Document
This is Volume One of The Army Air Forces in World War II, titled Plans and Early Operations, January 1939 to August 1942, edited by Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate. The University of Chicago Press first published it in 1948, and the Office of Air Force History reprinted it in 1983. The front matter explains how the AAF historical program was set up during the war. The index covers Pacific, Atlantic and European operations, and nothing in the text concerns unidentified aerial phenomena.
“The Invaders”15 pages
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 2 5 7
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 863 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.