“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…
D E F E N S E O F T H E W E S T E R N H E M I S P H E R E
T h e divergence of views between the W a r and Navy departments,
and the unsatisfying conjectures advanced by the Army to explain the
affair, touched off a vigorous public discussion. The Los Angeles
Times,in a first-page editorial on 2 6 February, announced that “the
considerable public excitement and confusion” caused by the alert, as
well as its “spectacular official accompaniments,” demanded a careful
explanation. Fears were expressed lest a few phony raids undermine
the confidence of civilian volunteers in the aircraft warning service.
In Congress, Representative Leland Ford wanted to know whether
the incident was “a practice raid, or a raid to throw a scare into
2,000,000 people, or a mistaken identity raid, or a raid to take away
Southern California’s war industries.” 87 Wendell Willkie, speaking in
Los Angeles on 2 6 February, assured Californians on the basis of his
experiences in England that when a real air raid began “you won’t
have to argue about it-you’ll just know.” 8 8 He conceded that military
authorities had been correct in calling a precautionary alert but
deplored the lack of agreement between the Army and Navy. A strong
editorial in the Washington Post on 27 February called the handling
of the Los Angeles episode a “recipe for jitters,” and censured the
military authorities for what it called “stubborn silence” in the face of
widespread uncertainty. The editorial suggested that the Army’s
theory that commercial planes might have caused the alert “explains
everything except where the planes came from, whither they were
going, and why no American planes were sent in pursuit of them.” 89
The New York Times on 2 8 February expressed a belief that the more
the incident was studied, the more incredible it became: “If the bat-
teries were firing on nothing at all, as Secretary Knox implies, it is a
sign of expensive incompetence and jitters. If the batteries were firing
on real planes, some of them as low as 9,000 feet, as Secretary Stimson
declares, why were they completely ineffective? W h y did no Amer-
ican planes go up to engage them, or even to identify them? . . .
What would have happened if this had been a real air raid?” These
questions were appropriate, but for the War Department to have
answered them in full frankness would have involved an even more
complete revelation of the weakness of our air defenses.
At the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send
planes over the area at the time of this alert,’l although submarine-
launched aircraft were subsequently used over Seattle.82 A careful
study of the evidence suggests that meteorological balloons-known
2 8 5