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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.
“Cairo”26 pages
C H A P T E R 11 * * * * * * * * * * * T H E DEFENSE OF AUSTRALIA N THE rapid southward thrust which by the opening days of March 1942 had placed Japanese forces in control of the Malay I Peninsula, of the Netherlands East Indies, and of the BismarckArchipelago, and which had brought them to the very doors of Australia, the enemy had given effective demonstration of the type of amphibious warfare that until the B-29’s began full-scale operations would dominate the struggle in the Pacific. Operating under a plan to throw overwhelming force against strategic points, Japanese land- ing parties had moved forward in leaps of several hundred miles a t a time, preceded by submarine and flying boat reconnaissance and by light air raids mounted from the nearest land bases, and then by heavier bombing attacks with escort provided as the occasion required by carrier-borne or land-based fighters. An immediate objective of the landing parties, while overcoming such local opposition as might be met, was seizure of an airfield on which a prompt basing of fighters for defense of the invading forces was merely preliminary to the bringing in of bombers in preparation for the next move forward. Within a week of the landing, the Japanese usually had repaired or extended the facilities with the aid of local labor to permit their use by two-engine bombers.’ T h e enemy’s tactics, which included the device of passing by cer- tain points of resistance in accordance with a plan to reduce them at leisure or merely to leave them to the ultimate penalties of isolation and blockade, resembled those that were to be employed later by Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur in their offensives of 1943 and 1944. Indeed, General MacArthur had been the war’s first victim of a type of warfare he subsequently would make peculiarly his own. 403
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