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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 development of the air force which went to war in December 1941 that it is legitimate to confine the present discussion to them even at the risk of overemphasis and oversimplification. Organization of the Army Air Arm, 1919-39 Of the trends designated above, that of broadest implication was the fight for independence of military aeronautics. Originating as a juris- dictional problem within the Army, the struggle became a major national issue and hence should be viewed in the broader context of the whole American scene. T h e two decades after the Armistice saw in the United States a revulsion from the enthusiasms of the great crusade to save democracy, a widespread skepticism concerning the real war aims, and a profound distaste for militarism and for war in general. The slogans of the period are suggestive of its temper- “return to normalcy,” “disarmament” and “limitation of armaments,” “outlawry of war,” “Merchants of Death,” “neutrality legislation.” Neither isolationism nor pacifism, the great depression nor the New Deal, was conducive to heavy expenditures for the Army and Navy; and, indeed, until the aggressor nations began to march in the mid- thirties, the problem of national defense seemed to many Americans but an academic exercise invented by the militarists. In spite of the prevailing mood, defense appropriations for 1919-39 were heavier than for any similar peacetime period, but they were inadequate by standards to which the armed forces had become accus- tomed. In the inevitable competition for limited funds, the requests of each service were guided by its peculiar philosophy of national security. The Navy held out for a strong battle fleet built around the capital ship. T h e War Department wished to increase the size of the Regular Army-the 1919request for half-a-million men was scaled down to z80,ooo-and to organize it as a nucleus for rapid and vast expansion in an emergency rather than as an integral force. According to this scheme existing air units would be spread thin as cadres among the several armies.’ Aviation officers had to accept this concept, but the most advanced thought in the Air Service favored a relatively small body of highly trained professionals welded into a compact striking force ready for instant service. This view found no support in the General Staff, composed exclusively of ground officers only mildly interested in air power. In 19 I 7 they had vainly opposed the $640,000,- ooo appropriation for aeronautics; after the war they were able to I 8
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