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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.
“Natal”13 pages
A I R T R A N S P O R T A N D F E R R Y I N G version of the A-toA) and Hudsons (A-29’s)-were the most numer- ous, but a large number of AT-6 Harvard trainers were flown to RAF training fields in Canada. Most of the Bostons were flown to the Floyd Bennett Airport, New Yorlq for water shipment to Britain, while some were shipped out of New Orleans and Savannah. The majority of the Hudsons were delivered a t Montreal to the RAF Ferry Com- mand, which had been created in July 1941 to take over the work of ATFERO, and were flown from there to Newfoundland and across the Atlantic to Scotland. Some sixty Liberator bombers were also turned over to the RAF a t Montreal.” During the fall of 1941 the Ferrying Command had assumed an additional responsibility for delivery of some of the AAF’s own planes from factory to stations within the United States1’ These de- liveries were relatively few in proportion to the whole, however, and until 7 December the primary task of the command remained that of assisting in the movement of British aircraft to Canada or to eastern ports for shipment to England. But after Pearl Harbor the domestic ferrying of American aircraft quickly became a major function of the command, and one, in time, of such huge proportions that the AAF had reason to congratulate itself on the possession of an agency al- ready organized for and experienced in the work. From the domestic ferrying assignment it was only a step to the taking over by the com- mand of responsibility for delivering or supervising the delivery of AAF and lend-lease aircraft to theaters of war scattered over the world. For assumption of this new responsibility, the Ferrying Command had been partly prepared by its operation through the latter half of 1941 of an overseas transport service. As relations between the United States and Great Britain had grown closer through the spring of 1941, the need for a more rapid means of transportation between the two countries than could be provided by surface vessels became increas- ingly urgent. Through the establishment of an air service across the Atlantic, the diplomatic mail and important military and diplomatic officials of the two countries could move back and forth with the speed demanded by the course of events; and, when the American government decided to open such a service in the summer of 1941, it was placed under the control of the newly created Ferrying Com- mand.17 The AAF’s pioneer overseas transport service began opera- tions on I July, when a B-24 piloted by Lt. Col. Caleb V. Haynes took. 3 ’ 7
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