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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
T H E A R M Y A I R F O R C E S I N W O R L D W A R I 1 of the existing system and raised no objections to the proposed changes.’ O 8 The results of the deliberations of McNarney’s committee were incorporated in War Department Circular 59, issued on t March 1942 and effective on 9 March. As a circular, its provisions lacked permanent validity. The new directive abolished GHQ. The field forces remained under the control of the General Staff, and the War Plans Division (later OPD) assumed planning and operational functions over all theaters of operation and the four defense commands. T o care for Zone of Interior functions, three autonomous and co-ordinate commands were established under the Chief of Staff-the Army Air Forces, the Army Ground Forces, and the Services of Supply (later Army Service Forces). The General Staff was reorganized to include a more equable proportion of air officers. This arrangement removed a long-standing grievance by giving the air arm equal status with the ground arm, if not with the Army itself. It did away, too, with the internal friction which had stemmed from the ambiguous division of authority between the Office of the Chief of the Air Corps and the Air Force Combat Command. Those agencies indeed were eliminated in the new AAF, and the functions of the former were divided between a reorganized Air Staff and a number of subordinate commands in the Zone of In- terior. As for the AFCC, its very raison d’ktre had disappeared during the early months of the war. Of the four continental air forces pre- viously assigned to it, the First and Fourth had been turned over to the Eastern and Western Defense Commands, respectively, and the Second and Third had become essentially agencies for unit training.log For all his elevation from Chief, AAF to Commanding General, AAF, Arnold had been shorn of the limited combat functions he had pre- viously enjoyed by virtue of his control over the Combat Command. Ostensibly, the Army Air Forces had been reconstituted merely as a supply and training agency. That fact may have been overlooked by the casual reader of public announcements of the new “stream- lined” War Department organization, which according to one jour- nalist was so pleasing to air officers that they “practically trod on air.” 1 1 0 But the limitation was clearly indicated in the new statement of the AAF mission-‘‘to procure and maintain equipment peculiar to the Army Air Forces and to provide air force units properly or- ganized, trained and equipped for combat operations.” In theory it was only through W a r Plans Division that Arnold, as Commanding 264
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