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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.
“Churchill”21 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 for dispatching all United States military aircraft, transmitting arrival and departure reports, providing for fueling and maintenance facili- ties, making arrangements for feeding and lodging transient crews and passengers, collecting and forwarding intelligence on route con- ditions, and exercising general administrative control over transient aircraft and crews. Considerable difficulty was experienced at first in securing competent officers to send out. Regular Army and experi- enced Reserve officers were more urgently needed in combat units or in the AAF training program. For a time, the Ferrying Command was forced to use young weather or communications officers, only recently commissioned, as control officers a t such important bases as Trinidad, Belem, Natal, Accra, and Karachi. These were gradually replaced by more experienced officers with higher rank who were better able to handle the multitude of problems that came with the great increase in traffic and to control rapidly expanding base organ- izations. While that segment of the southeastern route from Florida through Brazil was reasonably secure from attack, operations across Africa during most of 1942 were forced to proceed in the face of an ever- present threat of enemy interference. Most of the bases along the west coast of Africa and across central Africa were within easy bombing range of Vichy French territory. More threatening were Rommel’s forces in North Africa, for the very existence of the air connection with southern Russia, India, and China depended on the holding of the Middle East crossroads. Should the Germans and Italians have driven the British from Egypt and the Near East, the high strategic value of the southeastern route as it then existed would have been immediately destroyed and the whole line, hinging on Natal, would have been forcibly swung back far to the With this possibility in mind, the W a r Department early in 1942 directed the survey of an alternate bomber route across Africa and the Indian Ocean to Austra- lia along a line roughly parallel to, and a few degrees south of, the equator. The most feasible route was determined to be from Natal to Ascension Island to Pointe Noire in French Equatorial Africa, and thence by way of bases in the Belgian Congo and Tanganyika to Mombasa in Kenya Colony, the point of take-off from the east coast of Africa. Flight across the Indian Ocean was to be made by way of island steppingstones in the Seychelles group or on Coetivy Island, the Chagos Archipelago, and the COCOSIslands to Port Hedland, 3 3 0
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