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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 Wash”17 pages
A I R T R A N S P O R T A N D F E R R Y I N G December 1941, and the B-24’s. With the exception of a few addi- tional Liberators converted to transports, these were all the four- engine planes that were available for overseas operations by the Ferrying Command and the contract carriers during the first six months of the war. The Douglas Skymaster, or C-54, which was to become the mainstay of long-range transport later in the war, was not yet ready, although the first numbers were in production and were turned over for testing during the summer. The C-87, a fundamental modification of the Consolidated Liberator, built especially for transport purposes, did not come into use until August or September of 1942. Almost a t once after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a part of the four- engine equipment controlled by the War Department was thrown into the desperate effort to reinforce and hold the Philippines. Certain critical items of supply-.So-cal. ammunition and aircraft parts espe- cially-were needed badly by the air forces remaining to MacArthur, and air transport offered the only means of getting them there quickly and on time. In China, the American Volunteer Group was awaiting the shipment of P-40 parts to enable Chennault to keep his few fighters in the air. The only approach by air at this time, as indicated earlier in the discussion of the heavy bomber movement to the Far East, was by way of the southeastern route and across Africa and southern Asia. On 1 3 December a new contract was entered into by the War Department and Pan American Airways by which the latter agreed to sell the remainder of its four-engine equipment and, using a portion of that equipment on lease, to open a transport service be- tween the United States and Singapore by way of Africa and India.156 Within a week, one of the newly purchased Clippers departed for Calcutta loaded with P-40 parts for Chennault. Before the month was out, two other Clippers left New York for the Far East, each carry- ing a full load of .So-cal. ammunition destined for MacArthur’s forces in the phi lip pine^.'^^ In the meantime, three of the Ferrying Com- mand’s B-24’s manned by military crews were diverted from their normal operations between Washington and Cairo and sent to the Far East. A plan now emerged whereby the Clippers would take the ammunition as far as Darwin, Australia, a t which point it would be picked up by the B-24’s and flown into the Philippines. Because of the rapidly deteriorating tactical situation, however, the plan could not be put into effect. When the Clippers got as far as Calcutta, they were ordered to return across India to Karachi and there unload the 3 5 3
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