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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.
“King”32 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 Wake carried one Japanese outpost to a point less than 1,200 miles from Midway, and both islands lay squarely astride the central Pacific air route to the Far East. Defense of the South Pacific Route It has been indicated elsewhere that the fear of just such a loss of the central Pacific bases had driven Air Corps planners to push hard for an alternate line through the islands of the South Pacific. By the spring of 1942,their efforts were approaching completion and the route across the islands was usable; actually, the trail-blazing flight had been made in January. But establishment of the operating facilities alone was not the only claim placed upon the resources of the Allies by the island bases; unless adequate defenses were provided for these Pacific steppingstones, the southern line to Australia might well be cut even as the northern route had been blocked. The attempt to reinforce the Philippines by sending planes eastward across the South Atlantic and Africa, thence on to India and down through the Netherlands East Indies, carried with it a prohibitive attrition rate. Furthermore, the fall of the Indies to the Japanese in February and March had placed the enemy athwart this route and threatened possible air lanes across the Indian Ocean, so that now nothing remained but the new and untried path down through the South Pacific islands. In their prior planning, Army and Navy commanders had devoted scant attention to the problems of moving land-based aircraft across Pacific atolls and islands, or of defending the bases which made such movement possible. The Army and Navy Joint Board Estimate of September 1941had ignored the necessity of such defense; the Philip- pines were in US.hands and, accordingly, the board had planned to concentrate land-based aviation in these islands and the Hawaiian group.2 Elsewhere in Pacific waters it was assumed that the U.S. Navy would restrain the Japanese, but this theory now was open to revision in view of the fact that the bulk of what then was regarded as the fleet’s offensive and defensive power lay fast in the mud at Pearl Har- bor. Thus the island bases stood in more urgent need of local defense than was originally appreciated, for there could be no assurance that the enemy would terminate his expansion with the capture of Rabaul or Wake; at this stage of the war it was the Japanese rather than the Allies who determined the limits of enemy aggression. Even though much of the U.S. striking power had been lost in the 428
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