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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 they performed much of their own maintenance, pumping the gas from barrels and pouring oil from five-gallon cans. Crews which had previously never loaded torpedoes now for the first time fitted these weapons into the B-26’s under naval supervision, and pilots took off over strips which left them only a four-inch clearance between tor- pedo and rnat.lz5Fortunately, many of the twenty-three PBY search planes possessed radar, which proved of inestimable value in the fog and mist which prevailed. Far off to the southwest in the direction of the Kurils, a weather front was moving up concealing under its fog and clouds the enemy’s Second Air Fleet on the Junyo and Ryujo, supported by the heavy cruisers Takao and Maya, an oiler, and three destroyers. Already the enemy had conducted his own reconnaissance, sending up a plane from a submarine to scout Seattle harbor, while another plane checked on Dutch Harbor from a submarine lying I O O miles north of the island.1zEThey saw nothing to alter the master plan, and the task force proceeded. But on 2 June while the ships were refueling, a PBY plane picked up the two carriers, reporting them at a point some 400 miles south of Kiska, and all available striking planes immediately were ordered forward to Forts Glenn and Randall.1z‘ The American plane had been spotted, fighters were sent in pursuit, and the PBY was driven off, thus losing the contact in the fog. On the morning of 3 June, Rear Adm. Kakajugi Kakuda, fated to die on Tinian two years later, had his force 180 miles south of Dutch Harbor in a position to strike. Despite unfavorable weather conditions, bombers and fighters took off and a t 0545 several fighters swept over Fort Mears and the naval installations a t Dutch Harbor, causing very little damage in their single strafing run. Ten minutes later the first of four waves of bombers, of three or four each, attacked the area, this time destroying barracks and killing approximately twenty-five men.’*’ Out on Umnak Island, all the P-40’s had been sent aloft on patrol but they could not make contact with the enemy striking force. However, the two Japanese cruisers had catapulted four seaplanes to search the islands west of Fort Randall, and two of these blundered into the Umnak area unaware of the P-40’s or of the existence of the Umnak Lt. John B. Murphy, on patrol with the I Ith Squad- ron’s P-~o’s,saw them, pulled out of formation with Lt. Jacob W. Dixon, and these two pilots immediately shot one plane down into the Umnak Pass at the end of the runway as the other fled in damaged 466
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