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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
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 ammunition, where it was to be picked up later by the B-q's, which by this time had reached Australia. As it happened, the B-24's never returned to India, but, instead, remained in the Southwest Pacific where they were called upon to perform a series of remarkable special missions. Shuttling between Australia, the Philippines, the Nether- lands East Indies, and Burma, they operated a flying taxi service for high-ranking officers, evacuated personnel from forward areas just ahead of the advancing Japanese, and flew urgent cargo into the Philippines. By early March all three of the planes had been lost, two to enemy action and one as the result of a forced landing on the water. Lt. Edson E. Kester-the pilot who had inaugurated the Washington- Cairo transport service in November-was lost off Broome, Australia, when his B-24 went down in flames in an attack by two Japanese Zekes.15' With the abandonment of this attempt to open an air supply route all the way into Australia and the Philippines, the Ferrying Command turned its attention to the building up of the South Atlantic transport services to the Middle East and to extending operations into Iran and farther eastward to India. A supplementary agreement to the Pan American Airways-Africa contract had been signed on I 3 December, providing for the extension of the trans-African schedules from Khar- toum, the prewar terminal, to Cairo and to Tehran in order to sup- port lend-lease ferrying operations of Pan American Air The trans-African transport services of the PAA-Africa organization grew rapidly. Only seven planes were in use at the time of Pearl Harbor, but by February the contractor had eighteen in operation, and by the end of June a total of thirty-eight twin-engine transports were shuttling back and forth between West African bases and Cairo, with occasional trips as far as Karachi, where they connected with the trans-India transport service then under the control of the Tenth Air Force.lG0The latter organization had opened in April 1942 a service destined to fame as the Hump operation," thereby spanning the last gap in a strategic air supply line that reached from Miami, Florida, to Kunming, China.'" When the three Pan American Clippers returned to the United States from the Far East in mid-January, they were placed on the route from Miami to Lagos, Nigeria, connecting at that point with the trans-African service. The single Clipper purchased before the war *; See below, Chap. 14. 3 54
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