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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 work of resiting Alaskan radar installations was further complicated by an involved command situation which made it necessary to refer recommendations of the fighter command of the Eleventh Air Force through regular channels to the Western Defense Command. Worse still, there was a procedure in effect which required that proposed changes in radar sites be processed through the War Department before corrective action could be instituted.la1 Indeed, there was not even an agreement in early 1942 as to how extensive a warning net was required for Alaska. General DeWitt of the Western Defense Command presented in January a strong plea for a “cordon” defense based on a screen of twenty radar sets so arranged as to guard all vital military installations.ls2 Officers in Washington found that commit- ments to other theaters made it impossible to provide all of the equip- ment that would be required and reduced the number of stations to ten.’83By June 1942,however, not even this minimum figure had been provided, for only two radar sets were in operation in Alaska, with two more en route.ls4 As a result, the Eleventh Air Force had to depend on bomber patrols for intelligence of enemy movements. The assignment in March 1942 of four heavy bombers equipped with ASV radars made the use of such aerial patrols more efficient,la5but the lack of an aircraft warning service was keenly felt. Only in the Aleutians and along the water routes of the western Atlantic and the Caribbean did our enemies make any serious effort to test the defenses of the Western Hemisphere, and it was fortunate that this proved true. The war found us, as this chapter has shown, by no means ready for large-scale enemy attack. T o remedy the many deficiencies revealed a t the outset, it was necessary to immobilize on purely defensive assignments substantial forces for which there was urgent need overseas, to divert from offensive preparations time, energy, and productive capacity, and to improvise and in other ways to rely upon uneconomical methods. Yet, when the test came, it was met, though hardly by a comfortable margin, and events proved that the gauge of the enemy’s intentions and capabilities had been well enough taken. Our strategy in defense of hemisphere security from the first had been to intercept the enemy a t the greatest possible distance from our own shores and to carry the battle to him. Though the unex- pected exposure of our western coast by the defeat a t Pearl Harbor gave us some uneasy moments, there was no popular hysteria to shake the commitment to predetermined strategy. Preparations for taking 308
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