The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

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,
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