Documents / Document
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
A I R T R A N S P O R T A N D F E R R Y I N G crews of Pan American Air Ferries, some were flown out by military crews.1o2 Lend-lease A-20's for the Russians began to arrive in the Persian Gulf area by water transport as early as January 1942,'03 but not until the following October were the first deliveries of these Douglas light attack bombers completed by air." Following the collapse of the Allied effort in Java, urgent demands for reinforcements came from Burma, China, and India, where the American Volunteer Group, the newly established Tenth Air Force, and the Chinese Air Force sought the means for a continued resistance to the Japanese. Fifty P-4oE's had been allocated to the A V G in Jan- uary, and during the same month thirty-three A-29 Hudsons had been earmarked under lend-lease for the Chinese."' From beginning to end, the A-29 movement was beset with trouble, vexatious delays, and untimely accidents. T h e aircraft were in poor mechanical condition when taken over by the ferrying crews and were overloaded with medical and other supplies for China before arriving at Morrison Field in late June for final staging. These factors, together with the relative inexperience of many of the crews, were responsible for an unusually high accident rate. Three planes were lost in crashes before the project left the United States, and six others were similarly lost in the course of the movement overseas. Because of Rommel's threat to Egypt that summer, the A-29's were held up in the Middle East for a time and might have been assigned permanently to General Brereton's forces there had not the persistent demands of the Chinese brought about their release. Of the thirty-three planes originally allo- cated, twenty-two were turned over to the Chinese Air Force during the summer and fa1l.lo6 While it was impracticable to ferry fighter aircraft over the whole of the southeastern route, they were moved in large numbers under their own power over the land route from West African bases to the Middle East, India, and China. As early as 1940 the British had begun shipping fighters and two-engine bombers by water to Takoradi, where they were assembled and then ferried across Africa to Cairo. Within a few months after Pearl Harbor, the United States also began to make use of combined water and air supply lines in moving P-40's to the American Volunteer Group in China, to the Tenth Air Force in India, and during the summer of 1942 to American air units in the * Seventy-one were delivered in October, sixty in November, and seven in De- cember. 3 39
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 863 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.