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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.
“King”32 pages
A I R T R A N S P O R T A N D F E R R Y I N G Air Force in the Middle East and the Tenth Air Force in India. Fighter aircraft for the Ninth and Tenth Air Forces and for the American Volunteer Group in China were shipped by water to the west coast of Africa and were then ferried overland to their destinations. And, while ferrying operations were increasing steadily, an air transport service in support of both ferrying and combat operations was en- larged and extended. The ferrying service and the air transport service developed by the AAF in World War I1 operated over the same routes, used the same bases, and were interdependent to such a degree that control was lodged in a single military agency. Known originally as the Air Corps Ferrying Command, it became the Air Transport Command in June '942. The Air Corps Ferrying Command The Air Corps Ferrying Command had its origins in 1941 in an attempt to assist the British in the delivery of American-built aircraft to England. The British had pointed the way toward development of long-range strategic air supply services by establishing early in the war air supply lines from North America to the United Kingdom and from the home base to the Middle East.* In November 1940 a Canadian civilian agency under contract with the British government began .the ferrying of American-built bombers across the North Atlan- tic from Newfoundland to Scotland, a distance of approximately 2,100 miles. This was the first step in the spanning of the Atlantic with an aerial supply bridge, comparable as a development in military supply to the first use of the railroad as a logistical instrument in the wars of the nineteenth century. The hazardous route across the North Atlantic constituted, however, only one segment of a long supply line that reached from the factories of southern California to the airfields of Britain. The bombers, purchased for cash from American manu- facturers prior to the passage of the Lend-Lease Act, were first fer- ried by factory-employed pilots from California to Montreal. There they were turned over to the civilian pilots of the British Atlantic Before the war, Germany and the U.S.S.R. had led in experimenting with the use of military air transport in the deployment of airborne troops; and during the early period of the war, particularly in the invasion of Norway and later of Crete, Germany proved the tactical effectiveness of the transport airplane. But neither of these countries had envisaged, nor were they under a real necessity to ,develop under war conditions, the type of long-range strategic air supply services whlch the United States and Great Britain were to employ so effectively. 3 ' 3
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