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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.
“Cairo”26 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 St. Lucia, and Antigua, and in British Guiana on the South American continent.26The Trinidad and British Guiana bases became major stopping points for transient aircraft, bridging the 2 , 0 0 0 miles that separated Puerto Rico from Belem, Brazil, the northernmost base in that country capable of handling heavy traffic. The base on Ascension Island was located on British territory, as were most of the bases along the west coast of Africa and across central Africa to Cairo. Ferrying operations over the South Atlantic route had begun in June 1941,when Atlantic Airways, Ltd., a Pan American Airways subsidiary corporation organized especially for the job, undertook to deliver twenty transport-type aircraft to the British in western Africa. Shortly after the passage of the Lend-Lease Act, the British govern- ment had requested, under terms of the act, a minimum of fifty trans- port planes for its trans-African operation.27These planes were to be placed on the run between Takoradi in the Gold Coast Colony and Cairo-an airway of the highest strategic value in the line of communi- cations between the British Isles and the Middle East. The trans- African route had been pioneered by the British in the immediate prewar years, and at the outbreak of the war Imperial Airways main- tained a regular transport service over the run between Khartoum in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and Lagos on the Nigerian coast. Coastal bases had been constructed a t Bathurst (Gambia), Freetown (Sierra Leone), and at Takoradi and Accra in the Gold Coast Colony. Across the waist of Africa, airfields had been cut from the jungle or laid out on the desert at Kano and Maiduguri in Nigeria, at Fort Lamy in French Equatorial Africa, and a t El Geneina, El Fasher, and El Obeid in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. With the loss of the French fleet in 1940 and the growing activity in the spring of 1941 of German air forces based on Sicily, the British line of air and water communications with Egypt by way of the Mediterranean was virtually closed. For- tunately, the existence of the trans-African air route enabled the British to avoid shipping aircraft by water all the way around Africa and up through the Red Sea to Egypt. A large base and an assembly plant were developed a t Takoradi, and here fighter and bomber air- craft, waterborne from Britain, were assembled, tested, and then fer- ried across Africa to Cairo. Beginning in the fall of 1940,British ferry pilots began moving Hurricanes and Blenheims along this route. The ferrying operation demanded also a transport service for returning 3 2 0
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