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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 B A T T L E L I N E I N T H E P A C I F I C By the evening of the 4th, the issue had been decided; the enemy’s carriers were disabled and sinking, and Yamamoto realized full well that with his air strength gone, he had no alternative but to retire. Even his anticlimactical attempt on the night of the 4th to bombard Midway with the cruiser force was abortive. The M o g m i and Mikuma collided and had to be withdrawn, and fresh disaster overtook this unfortunate pair on the 6th, when dive bombers from the Enterprise and Hornet caught them, sinking the Mikzcma and damaging the Mogami very heavily.’ O O The battle had ended with Midway’s installations badly wrecked by enemy bombers but still in American hands and with runways intact. The problem was to assess the damage to the enemy and to examine the weapons which had inflicted it. During the three days, 3 to 5 June, the Seventh Air Force had carried out sixteen B-17 attacks involving a total of fifty-five sorties and one torpedo attack by four B-26’s. The heavy bombers had expended 3 14 x 500- and 6oo-lb. bombs which had been dropped, excluding the torpedoes, a t altitudes ranging from 3,600 feet up to ~ 5 , 0 0 0feet. Immediately after the action, General Emmons reported that his planes had scored a total of twenty-two direct bomb hits on carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers, that one destroyer had been sunk, and that three torpedoes had struck home on two car- riers. In addition, a total of eight Zero fighters had gone down before the guns of the B-I 7’s, two more to the B-26’s, and all this had cost two B-26’s with their crews, plus two B-I~’s,of which one crew was rescued, less one man.lol Results of the action revived the discussion over the merits of high- level bombardment attacks upon maneuvering surface vessels, rein- forcing the strong measure of skepticism persisting among Navy men, who regarded horizontal bombing as relatively ineffective against this type of target. But there could be no proof until the war had ended, and even then the evidence was not entirely conclusive. Because of the extraordinary amount of discussion and debate arising out of the battle, it is pertinent to examine the conditions and handicaps under which AAF planes had operated. Never were more than fourteen B- I 7’s over a group of targets at any one time, and even these failed to attack the same vessel simultaneously, thus further decreasing the existing slight probability of hits. Furthermore, most of the attacks were carried out by small flights of four planes or less per target, a number far too small 45 9
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