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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 Wash”17 pages
C H A P T E R 2 * * * * * * * * * * * THE ARMY AIR ARM BETWEEN TWO WARS, 1919-39 OR THE Air Service the Armistice brought surcease from battle but not from strife. From 1919to 1939 the history of the Army F air arm was dominated by a struggle for recognition whichleft a deep imprint upon the air organization and its personnel. Indeed, the character of the AAF on the eve of World W a r I1 and its self- conceived mission can be appreciated only in light of a conflict which had begun during the earlier war and was intensified after the return of the Air Service, AEF. In its second war the air arm occupied an anomalous position: it was a part of the Army, as its official title pro- claimed, yet there was a degree of separatism in thought and in action not to be found among the other arms and services under War Depart- ment control. This was tacitly accepted in the command structure which emerged early in the war; it was sensed, too, by the average civilian, who with fine disregard for the formal chain of command might ask, “Are you in the Army or the Air Corps?” but never, “Are you in the Army or the Corps of Engineers?” T o understand this special character of the air force, it is not necessary to recall the myriad routine incidents which constitute so large a part of the life of a military establishment in time of peace. It should be sufficient here to describe the three paramount trends of the period: the effort to establish an independent air force; the develop- ment of a doctrine of strategic bombardment; and the search for a heavy bomber by which that doctrine could be applied. An approach so circumscribed as this will inevitably omit much that is important and interesting; worse still, it might foster the erroneous idea that from an early date all activities of the air arm were directed consciously toward those three goals. Yet so important were those trends in the ‘7
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