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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
L O S S O F N E T H E R L A N D S E A S T I N D I E S mantle on 2 2 February, however, three of them, carrying most of the Army personnel, ten P-~o’s,and many motor vehicles, had been directed to Burma rather than to Java in keeping with a decision which had been reached by 17 F e b r ~ a r y . ’ ~The decision had been dictated by considerations which apparently also brought into ques- tion the destination of the Langley, with its deckload of thirty-two fully assembled P-~o’s,and of another vessel, the Sea Witch,in whose hold twenty-seven crated P-40’s had been stored. But on the day of its sailing General Wave11 ordered the Langley to Java, and a similar order was subsequently issued for the Sea Witch; for shortly after sailing, the Langley and, sometime later, the Sea Witch parted com- pany with the other ships to set a course for Tjilatjap on southern Java.98 The Sea Witch got through five days later, but the Langley went down on 2 7 February-and none of the P-40’s they carried sur- vived to fight the Japanese.” Meanwhile, the I 7th Pursuit Squadron (Prov.) approached the end of its brief and tragic history. Between 2 1 and 26 February, its pilots claimed ten enemy planes shot down, but the unit at the same time had lost Lts. George W. Hynes, Wallace J. Hoskyn, and Gerald McCallum. On 26 February it had only thirteen P-~o’Sin reasonable readiness to fight an enemy who, as he closed in on Java, counted his planes by the hundreds.” The American bombers knocked out a number of grounded aircraft a t the Denpasar airfield on 2 2 February, “definitely sank” two transports at Makassar two days later, and on the 28th claimed the sinking of one transport and probably another off the northern coast of Java. But under conditions of increasing insecurity on the ground between missions, which added to the wear and tear on both men and machines, the bomber command sent out a total of eleven missions, or thirty-one sorties, between 2 1 and 2 8 February which could only be recorded as failures.100 The last missions were flown against Japanese forces gathering for the invasion of Java. By 2 7 February a large enemy convoy had come down from Jolo through Makassar Strait to join the main elements of the enemy’s Third Fleet, while a second amphibious force moved into position off Batavia in the west. Reports reaching the bomber command were confusing and incomplete; one transport claimed by a flight of three A-24’s seems to have been the extent of the damage * See below, pp. 398-99. 397
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