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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 Wash”17 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 General, AAF, could affect the planning and control of combat op- erations. In reality the influence of AAF Headquarters on the actual conduct of the war went far beyond a literal interpretation of Circular 59. Here, as so often in the course of the war, it proved impossible to separate multiple functions held by one person, and what Arnold could not do as Commanding General of the AAF he might accom- plish as Deputy Chief of Staff. In that capacity he had helped frame military policy during the months before Pearl Harbor; he had attended the Atlantic conference; and he had sat sometimes-not always-in the President's unofficial W a r Council.''1 During ARCADIA, Arnold had acted as one of the Anglo-American chiefs of staff; and with the formation in February of the CCS and JCS he was designated un- equivocally as a member of each. There was still a curious anomaly in his situation. Within the W a r Department, Arnold was subject to Marshall as Chief of Staff, and though the latter had long since proved his interest in the cause of air power and had favored Arnold's in- clusion in the CCS,"* there were still the stubborn facts of seniority and rank: Arnold had only received his third star with the advent of war and was not to be made a four-star general for another year.l" Within the CCS and JCS there was no hierarchy and legally, at least, the Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, the Army Chief of Staff, and the Chief of Naval Operations shared equal responsibilities and powers. And it was as a member of those committees rather than as commander of the AAF per se that Arnold was to exert his most important influence in the air war. This tendency reached on down into the Air Staff. T h e policy initiated in AR 95-5 of giving the AAF representation in the General Staff was extended in Circular 59; the ultimate objective was that roughly half the members of that body should be air officer^."^ If this looked on paper as an equitable solution, it was not wholly satisfactory to the Air Staff. Perhaps the crux of the matter lay in the relationship between A W P D and W P D , with its peculiarly important influence in formation of strategic policies and in the conduct of operations. In October 1941,AWPD had objected that WPD was trying to monopo- lize planning functions which were more appropriate to the Air Staff and suggested that responsibilities for planning be divided along func- tional lines between the two offices.'15 This was in reality an effort to establish two distinct and correlative agencies; the same attitude 2 6 5
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