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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 came, preparations were far from complete, and for months the United States fought on the defensive, pushed about by the Japanese in the Pacific and harried by German U-boats in the Atlantic. Before a year had run out, though, production and training programs initiated earlier were sufficiently advanced to support limited offensives in both the European and the Pacific theaters. The history of the Army air arm during the period 1917-41 reflects, sometimes in exaggerated form, the general pattern set by the nation’s military policies. Created virtually from whole cloth in 1917, the Air Service experienced a vast but tardy expansion. After a few months of combat in France came peace and, in 1919, rapid and thorough de- mobilization. Twenty lean years followed. National policy, in the interests of world peace and domestic economy, opposed a large and expensive military establishment; the air arm, as a junior member of the military team, suffered from lack of funds and personnel and enjoyed little control over its own fortunes. The period was not wholly sterile, however, and, when in 1939 the nation began again to gird for war, the expansion of the Air Corps was along lines conditioned by the experiences of two decades of peace as well as by those of World War I. And so, while the present volume deals largely with the air war which began at Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field, the operational narrative is prefaced by a brief account of the development of the Army’s air organization in the quarter-century which followed the establishment in 1914of the Aviation Section, Signal Corps, and by a more detailed description of the efforts made in 1939-41 to prepare the air force for war. The present section, which deals with the early heritage of the Army Air Forces, is more in the nature of an interpretative essay than of a substantial history of the period. The intrinsic importance of those years for the development of American air power was sufficient to warrant serious study, but in a history of World War I1 no more than a rapid survey is appropriate. No effort is made here to present a well- balanced account of all phases of military aviation from 1914 to 1939 or to document fully and with equal regard for all points of view the story of those controversies which colored all air force activities during that era. Rather this and the following chapter purport to be no more than an attempt to sketch, in bold lines and from sources readily avail- able, those salient features of aviation history which will help explain 4
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