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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 P R O B L E M O F N E W G U I N E A of both land-based and carrier-borne planes.s It was an ambitious proposal, indeed too ambitious for the means then a t hand, but it indicated a line of thought in the War Department that on broad principle would be favorable to General MacArthur's immediate proposal and to the development of tactics he would subsequently follow in the Southwest Pacific. But the Navy, apparently concerned over the prospect of com- mitting its forces between New Guinea and the Solomons while the enemy held the latter, objected to MacArthur's proposal that the New Britain area should be an immediate objective. It had proposed, rather, an initial conquest of Tulagi by South Pacific forces supported by those of the Southwest Pacific.' The introduction of this alterna- tive into the discussion posed, among other difficulties, a knotty problem of command; for Tulagi under the original directive to MacArthur fell within the Southwest Pacific, and it was evident that the Navy anticipated that, even so, it might control an operation to be mounted in the South Pacific against the Solomons. Such a command arrangement, in fact, had become formally a part of the Navy plan by 2 9 June, when Admiral King submitted to the Joint Chiefs a proposal that Vice Adm. Robert L. Ghormley, who had been in command of the South Pacific since 19 June, should be given command of an operation for seizure of Santa Cruz and Tulagi on the understanding that General MacArthur would assume control of its subsequent development into an attack on the Japanese position in New Guinea and New Britain.6 Though MacArthur had protested that his own plan for direct action against Rabaul presupposed the establishment of an air su- premacy that would remove the grounds of the Navy's objection, and though he warned against the dangers of divided command, Admiral King's proposal offered the basis of a workable compromise.' Ac- cordingly, on 2 July the Joint Chiefs issued a directive which defined their policy with reference to the Japanese threat in terms of three tasks.' Task one, the occupation of Santa Cruz and Tulagi, would be executed under the command of Admiral Ghormley with such support from air and naval units of the Southwest Pacific as could be rendered. T o remove jurisdictional uncertainties which might hamper the effort, the boundary between the South and Southwest Pacific theaters would be moved westward as of I August to the 159th meridian, a line that would place within the South Pacific all 473
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