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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
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 off from Bolling Field, Washington, D.C., bound for Scotland by way of Montreal and Newfoundland. Between that date and mid-Oc- tober, when the service was forced to close down by the approach of winter, an average of six round trips a month had been flown. Modi- fied B-24’s were used on all the trips, the passengers sitting in the bomb bays.’* The “Arnold Line,” as the British termed it ia tribute to the Chief of the Army Air Forces, regularly operated over a route that ran from Bolling Field to Montreal to Gander Lake, Newfoundland, thence across the Atlantic to Ayr, Scotland, and return. There were three special trips, however, that departed considerably from the regular run. One of these carried Capt. Elliott Roosevelt during the summer on an aerial survey of the east coast of Greenland in a search for a suitable site for an airdrome on the far-northern ferry route to Britain. Capt. James H. Rothrock, a veteran of the North Atlantic run, piloted the p1ane.l’ In September, two B-24’s of the service were employed in transporting a portion of the Harriman mission to Mos- cow by way of Great Britain. On the Scotland-to-Moscow leg of the journey the two planes, piloted by Maj. Alva L. Harvey and Lt. Louis T. Reichers, took a circular route north of the Scandinavian peninsula and flew a nonstop distance of 3,150 miles before reaching the Soviet capital. From Moscow, Major Harvey proceeded on a globe-encircling homeward flight by way of the Middle East, India, Singapore, Darwin, Port Moresby, and Wake Island to Hawaii and Washington.2oLieu- tenant Reichers took a route by way of Cairo across central Africa, the South Atlantic, and up through Brazil to the United States.z1Both of these exploratory flights involved hazardous landings a t undevel- oped airfields barely able to accommodate the heavy bombers and take-offs into all kinds of weather without briefing, weather informa- tion, adequate communications, or maps. Their importance was gen- erally overlooked in the excitement of the greater events of the war; but the recorded experiences and observations of the two pilots were of the utmost value to the AAF in planning for the development of two of its major overseas air lanes-the Pacific and the South Atlantic routes. The aircraft ferried over the North Atlantic route to Britain prior to American involvement in the war were, with few exceptions, pur- chased for cash on orders placed in 1939 and 1940. Of the approxi- mately 2,400 planes of American manufacture delivered by air or by 3 18
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