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.
A I R T R A N S P O R T A N D F E R R Y I N G already existed. Fortunately, they did exist and could be quickly harnessed for military purposes.147 As early as 1936 the Air Transport Association of America, the trade organization of the civil airlines, working in conjunction with the Air Corps and the Army W a r College, had formulated a plan for the mobilization of the airlines in case of war. T h e plan had been kept up to date during the intervening years, and after Pearl Harbor it pro- vided a broad program for the wartime utilization of the civil aviation resources of the However, the emergency expansion of overseas transport services in the early months of the war grew out of immediate and specific needs, and was not based on carefully laid plans drawn up in advance. First there was the need for rushing emer- gency supplies by way of Africa to the Philippines and to China, then of supporting the heavy bomber ferrying movement to the Southwest Pacific, and at the same time increasing the flow of lend-lease supplies to the Middle East to bolster British and Russian resistance. Soon after 7 December, it became necessary to open air transport services to the air bases under construction in the upper Atlantic area, and by the spring of 1942 to establish regularly scheduled flights to Britain, Alaska, Australia, Panama, and the Caribbean area. Expansion on a piecemeal basis and under emergency conditions continued until the summer of 1942. Then, with the growing realization of the poten- tialities of air transportation, the concentration of control of air trans- port services in a single command of the Army Air Forces, and the great increase in the number of available aircraft and crews, it became possible to undertake a more orderly development in accordance with needs shaped by the long-range plans of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the several theater commander^.'^' As a first step in mobilizing the resources of the airlines, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order on 13 December 1941direct- ing the Secretary of War to take possession of any portion of any civil aviation system required in the war effort.15' Also on the 13th, the lend-lease administrator allocated twenty-five million dollars to the W a r Department and authorized it to enter into commitments up to that amount for the purchase of available four-engine aircraft, spare parts, equipment, and facilities for construction or for any other purposes necessary to the extension and operation of air transport services.'51 In establishing new overseas services, the most pressing need of both 3 5 '
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 863 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.