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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
T H E A R M Y A I R A R M B E T W E E N T W O W A R S exert a tighter control on the purse strings. N o t unnaturally the Air Service wanted a separate budget. This was not the only source of friction. Personal ambitions and rivalries, the tendency toward “empire-building,” and service loyalties and jealousies were frequently in evidence. Fundarnental consider- ations were occasionally obscured by specific problems which were important enough to service morale but were symptomatic rather than causal in nature. As a new arm, the Air Service had few general offi- cers. In the lower grades, where promotion was controlled inexorably by seniority, Air Service pilots found themselves many files behind ground officers who had entered the service at the same time but whose commissions bore an earlier date because of the longer training required of the aviator. T h e proportion of nonflying Air Service officers in the lower grades, flight pay, and insurance were perennial causes of complaint. So too was the matter of uniforms: much feeling was engendered in arguments for and against the stiff collar as a necessary adjunct of the military aviator. Comparatively few pilots were graduates of West Point, and, in general, they felt discriminated against for that reason. One flying officer testified, on the basis of a study of returning veterans of World W a r I: “There was great dis- satisfaction among the Air Service personnel with the treatment they had received particularly by Army Officers, and I am a graduate of West Point and I found that graduates of West Point were anything but popular among the personnel which came in from civilian life.” Beneath these problems, serious or trivial as they now appear, the underlying issue was clear enough: it hinged on an attitude toward the airplane and air power. T o some the airplane was simply another weapon, effective enough but comparable in species to the tank or the submarine; like those weapons, the plane could best be employed by the Army and Navy in fulfilling their traditional missions, and its development could best be intrusted to agencies comparable to the Tank Corps or the Bureau of Construction and Repairs. But to most airmen the plane was genus, not species-a new and unique instrument of destruction of such revolutionary potentialities as to demand a sweeping reorganization of the national defense structure. Only by securing a considerable measure of autonomy could the Air Service formulate its own combat doctrines, develop equipment appropriate thereto, and direct its forces in battle. Literally dozens of plans were suggested for the control of air I9
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