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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
C H A P T E R 8 * * * * * * * * * * * AIR DEFENSE OF T H E W E S T E R N H E M I S P H E R E N ORDER flashed to air defense units in California shortly after noon on 7 December 1941 brought word that the Japanese A had attacked Hawaii, that 700 miles west of San Francisco a transport had been sunk, that by direction of the Secretary of W a r RAINBOW No. 5 had been put into execution, and that all bases were to be alerted for attacks by air or gr0und.l That order was typi- cal of many which on that day brought the war home to the United States and its key outposts throughout the Western Hemisphere. Overnight, air raid alerts and blackouts became routine in American cities, as the average citizen assumed the additional duty of air raid warden. T h e success of the attack on Hawaii had put the United States on the defensive and suggested that the homeland itself was not beyond the range of similar carrier-borne air assaults. For the first time since the W a r of 1 8 1 2 the country faced a serious threat of attack. Estimates of the seriousness of the threat to continental United States varied widely with the perspective of the men who made them. Military planners, thinking in terms of world-wide strategy, were apt to minimize a danger which to an individual in an exposed community appeared to be highly personal and threatening. This emotional el;- ment in the situation, the feeling that it took only one bomb to wipe out a home, meant that in continental defense political factors were no less important than strictly military considerations. T h e initial reaction of the people in one of the more exposed areas was described in an account written on 10December 1941by Richard L. Neuberger, Oregon journalist: “People who had pooh-poohed any hint of peril on Saturday kept their children home from school on Monday.” While 2 7 ’
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