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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
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 reached in December, but the runway would not be ready until May 1942.’’~Upon his return to the United States, Secretary Stimson initiated action to secure a base in southern Mexi~o,’’~but the negoti- ations were held up by the problem of control of the field that was to be built.“’ Although ASV radars were on their way to Panama, pilots a t the time were still depending on visual observation, and the planes were so few in number that even had they all been radar-equipped they would have been unequal to the task assigned. The burden of maintaining the daily patrol was so heavy that no planes could be kept ifi reserve for a striking force, with the result that even if an enemy carrier had been detected there would have been no way of offering immediate resistance. By mid- I 942 the bomber forces available had been improved by the gradual substitution of more modern planes, and, with substantial progress by the AAF in the installation of ASV equipment, the problem of airborne radar as an aid to patrol was no longer ~ r i t i c a 1 . l ~ ~ The problems involved in providing a serviceable radar screen to alert the inner defenses of the canal were less easily solved. In March 1942,there were only eight early warning radar stations in operation in Panama, with six more under construction.les Equipment in use at these stations was inadequate for early warning and “quite useless” for purposes of controlled interception. Sites had been selected for four British-type radars, the sets to be supplied from Canadian production, but improvement in equipment could not overcome deficiencies of operating personnel. Operators in Panama were largely untrained, had been given no indoctrination in the need for precision standards, and were frequently unenthusiastic about their assignmeht. Radar crews had made no effort to plot the permanent echoes in their search areas, and therefore could not discriminate between such echoes and “live” targets. The combination of inadequate equipment, poor site selection, and untrained operators produced such inefficiency that even the best station in Panama was “far below any acceptable standard of oper- ational utility.” The elimination of all the deficiencies noted depended on action by the War Department to provide improved equipment and better trained crews. No complete remedy was available to local commanders. Conditions among the fighter units themselves had been improved with the addition of more modern equipment, new satellite fields, and facilities for dispersing and concealing aircraft. Effective strength was 302
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