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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.
“United Press”36 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 struck secondary objectives on the Japanese mainland, and enemy re- ports indicated that the missing planes also bombed their targets. Some honest errors of bombing and gunnery had occurred when bombardiers overshot their marks, sending bombs into thickly settled districts, and these were used by the Japanese to justify the subsequent execution of the captured men. On the positive side, the mission had demonstrated the feasibility of launching heavily loaded medium bombers from carriers at sea under actual combat conditions, although it should be remembered that such an attempt was not repeated during the war. Upon the Chinese the effects were most unforrunate, for not only had their theater lost the future use of the sixteen bombers, but they soon lost their eastern airfields to the Japanese, who advanced upon Chuchow from the Hangchow area on 1 5 May. Within a short time the fields a t Chuchow, Yushan, and Lishui had fallen into enemy hands. If the mission was designed permanently to depress enemy morale, it probably fell short. It was too light and could not be fol- lowed by a sustained effort, but significantly enough it did cause the Japanese to give serious thought to improvement of the homeland’s defenses and led them to retain four army fighter groups in Japan during 1942 and 1943 when they were urgently needed in the Solo- m o n ~ . ~ ?What was probably the greatest achievement of the Doolittle raid is the most difficult to assess. The prevailing evidence, however, indicates that it came at just the time when Japanese army and navy leaders were debating the advisability of further expansion beyond their originally defined defensive perimeter. The raid seems to have lent additional weight to the arguments for pushing out the defensive line-to rest perhaps even on Midway, New Caledonia, and the Aleu- tians.48 Finally, the Tokyo raid was a hypodermic to the morale of the United States, which had suffered the worst series of military re- verses in its history. T h e Coral Sea While the secretaries of the staff planners in Washington ex- changed proposals concerning the fate of the South Pacific islands, Japanese generals and admirals debated the strategy by which they most effectively might preserve their newly won southern empire. From later interrogations with some of the participants in these de- bates, it is possible to reconstruct the broad outline of their plans. They, like the Allied planners, faced divergent opinions within the 4-44
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