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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 and movement of the project. This consultation proved advantageous, for when the aircraft reached Morrison Field very little time was lost in last-minute processing. The detachment was organized into three flight echelons of 7-8-8 aircraft, with flights spaced about two days apart in order not to overcrowd facilities along the route. A few of the aircraft were delayed briefly but caught up with their flights, and all three echelons arrived in the Middle East on schedule. Altogether, it was a highly successful operation and pointed the way to improved methods of handling mass flights of aircraft in the future.l'O The North Atlantic Route Through the winter and spring of 1942, as aircraft moved in in- creasing numbers over the South Atlantic to the Middle East and beyond, the upper Atlantic area was the scene of hurried and at times almost frantic preparation for an air movement that would permit the weight of American air power to be thrown against the Germans a t the earliest possible moment. The American and British chiefs at the ARCADIA conference had reaffirmed their faith in a strategy which assigned priority to the European theater and gave to the AAF an initial mission to participate with the RAF in the bombardment of Germany. Questions remained regarding the timing and the scale of that effort, but there was no question as to the necessity for prompt action to prepare for the movement by air of AAF units to the British Isles. That preparation called primarily for a more adequate develop- ment of North Atlantic air routes. The principal need was to complete facilities along a more northern route than that originally put into service by the Canadians and the British in 1940-0ne that would take full advantage of the stepping- stones provided by Newfoundland, Labrador, Greenland, and Iceland for the purpose of ferrying shorter-range planes to Europe. The British and Canadian governments had been the first to develop plans for such a far northern route and had made initial surveys when the passage of the Lend-Lease Act early in 1941 lent new importance to the project and when, a t the same time, plans for an eastward ex- tension of hemispheric defenses by the United States and Canada gave to the undertaking still stronger support." 'I2 Original British-Canadian plans contemplated a route running from Gander Lake, Newfoundland, to a proposed base in southern Green- * See above, Chap. 4. 3 4 2
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.