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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.
“Pacific Ocean”16 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 planned deployment of American pursuit units could be completed before late March, and every indication was that by then the fate of Java already would have been sealed. Japanese Encirclement of Java On 1 5 February Singapore fell. Already the enemy held virtually all areas of strategic importance in Borneo and Celebes. H e was slowly but surely eliminating a courageous Australian garrison on Amboina, where the Japanese had landed on 3 1 January. After an Allied naval force of four cruisers and seven destroyers had been driven back in Makassar Strait on 4 February, the enemy’s strength in the air had restricted efforts by naval units of the ABDA Command almost en- tirely to night operations. The invasion of Sumatra began on 14 Feb- ruary with a paratroop drop at Palembang, where on the following day a reinforced enemy controlled both the town and its airfield. The enemy was closing in on Java, and there was little if any prospect of wresting from him that air superiority which on all sides prepared the way for his advance. Indeed, General Brett already had suggested to the W a r Depart- ment the necessity for prompt attention to the probability that only through Burma and China and along a line extending northward from Australia would the Allies be given an opportunity to strike back. Fitting his actions to his words, he had sent Brady to Burma for a sur- vey of facilities, supplies, and munitions, and had called on General Barnes in Australia for pertinent study and report.66 Reinforcements for the bomber command continued to come in; five B-I~E’sreached Java by way of the Atlantic route during the first week of February and two LB-3o’s by the Pacific. In two LB-~o’s, twenty more officers and men were evacuated from Mindanao, and by submarine four officers reached Java from C~rregidor.’~But foul weather and enemy interception thwarted all attempts to bomb targets of importance for ten days after 2 February. T h e major effort was made on the morning of 8 February, when Capt. J.L. Dufrane led out nine B-17’~in an attempt to strike back at Kendari. The weather pro- vided a cloud cover that appeared inviting but actually contained so much turbulence as to make flying in formation almost impossible, and about halfway across the Java Sea the Americans were set upon by nine to twelve enemy fighters. In what the survivors agreed was the best-executed attack yet encountered, the Japanese concentrated first 388
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