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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 B A T T L E L I N E I N T H E P A C I F I C Marine ground forces on the i~1and.O~Finally, at 0904 on the morning of 3 June, the searchers made the first contact when a patrol plane picked up two enemy cargo vessels 470 miles west of Midway. The stage was set. What followed was perhaps the most important single engagement of the Pacific naval war. Excepting the role of the submarines, it was exclusively an air-surface action involving the planes of both services, and in which most of the damage to the enemy was inflicted by the dive bombers of the carriers. Superficially, it was the first test of the B-17’s as defensive weapons against attacking surface forces, and the first occasion on which the heavy bombers based on Hawaii were pushed out to forward island bases to strike at the enemy in defense of the mid-Pacific. Here, it seemed, was an opportunity a t last to test out one of the cherished beliefs of many of the heavy bomber expo- nents: that the B- I 7’s could stop the carriers.Q4 Preliminaries to the Battle of Midway opened on the afternoon of 3 June, when at I 62 3 nine B- I 7E’s led by Lt. Col. Walter C. Sweeney, Jr., of the 43 1st Bombardment Squadron surprised the transport force with its supporting craft some 5 7 0 miles west of Midway, dropping 36 x 600-lb. demolition bombs from 8,000 feet. T h e claims were sub- stantial, including five direct hits and several near misses; they were representative of the scores credited after the subsequent missions of the engagement, for Maj. Gen. Willis H. Hale, who became com- mander of the Seventh Air Force on 20 June, firmly believed that a fair percentage of the bombs had struck home. Assessment was difficult and in part was based upon the statements of the handful of enemy survivors picked up after the action; not until the war ended and the teams of interrogators invaded Japan was it possible to interview a number of the survivors of this initial action. And even their testimony had suffered from the destruction of records, from the lapse of three and one-half years between the action and interrogation, and from the fact that the Japanese officers reporting were not always aware of the source of the bombs which were dropped upon them. But their evidence indicates the necessity of a radical scaling down of the origi- nal claims as sent in by the Seventh Air Force. At any rate, in some cases these enemy officers stood on the decks of the targets and were in a fair way to determine when and by whom they were bombed, better perhaps than pilots who bombed from zo,ooo feet and saw tall geysers spout up around their rapidly maneuvering targets, for it has 45 7
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