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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.
“The Invaders”15 pages
A I R T R A N S P O R T A N D F E R R Y I N G land and thence to Iceland and to Britain.'l3 Such a route would have required the construction of only one base in addition to those already in use-the one in Greenland. But after the United States became an active participant in the undertaking, and when the Lend-Lease Act raised the prospect of a greatly increased volume of traffic, the project was altered and expanded. Several factors made the field at Gander Lake a very unsatisfactory staging point. Traffic moving through the base and directly across the Atlantic to Scotland was already heavier than could be well a c c ~ m m o d a t e d . ' ~ ~T h e airport lay considerably to the east of a direct line of flight from embarkation points in Maine or eastern Canada to southern Greenland. Moreover, weather condi- tions in Newfoundland were much worse than in the mainland region of Labrador, which enjoyed a better location on the line of flight to G~een1and.I'~Accordingly, a site for development was selected at Goose Bay in Labrador; and Canada having undertaken the respon- sibility for construction of airdrome facilities, the work was begun there in September 1941.T h e first airplane landed on one of the temporary snow-packed runways two days after Pearl Harb0r.l'' T h e primary responsibility for development of needed facilities in Greenland fell to the United States under the terms of the Danish- American agreement of 9 April 1941.' ''' Steps toward completing preliminary surveys had already been taken, and early in July of that year an advance task force of engineer, coast artillery, and general service troops arrived in the waters of southern Greenland and pro- ceeded up the Tunugdliarfik Fjord to Narsarssuak, a site previously selected for the major staging base between Labrador and Iceland. Construction of a landing field and other base facilities began at once, and with the help of reinforcements that followed, continued on through the winter.*'' T h e Narsarssuak base, which was given the code name of BLUIE WEST I (BW-I), was ideally located about midway between Goose Bay and Reykjavik, Iceland, lying approxi- mately 775 miles from each. These relatively short hops from the continent to Iceland and the one from Iceland to Scotland would make it possible to move even fighter aircraft along the route without too great difficulty. Work on a second air base in Greenland, located farther north on the west coast just above the Arctic Circle and to be known as BLUIE WEST 8 (BW-8), began in late September 1941."~Plans + See above, p. IZZ. 343
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