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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 A R M B E T W E E N T W O WARS a congressional committee showed I O I members of the staff opposed to a Department of National Defense with coequal subdepartments for Army, Navy, and Air, and only one who favored it.’ In spite of disingenuous statements to the contrary, the General Staff commonly dictated War Department policies.5 In 1919General Foulois testified: T h e General Staff of the Army is the policy-making body of the Army and, either through lack of vision, lack of practical knowledge, or deliberate in- tention to subordinate the Air Service needs to the needs of the other combat arms, it has utterly failed to appreciate the full military value of this military weapon and, in my opinion, has utterly failed to accord it its just place in our military family.6 This attitude toward the General Staff was shared by other advocates of air autonomy, whether officers or civilians, at that time and later. Sometimes their language was less temperate than that of Foulois. Representative Fiorello H. La Guardia, an aviator in World War I and an ardent supporter of the independent air force, testified in 1926: “There is one obstacle in the way of new legislation, Mr. Chairman. That is the General Staff. If this committee does not lock the doors to the General Staff, you will not get a bill through.. . . T h e General Staff are either hopelessly stupid or unpardonably guilty in refusing to recognize the necessity of making a change in aviation.” Even today it is difficult for interested parties to view the controversy dispas- sionately. In behalf of the General Staff it should be pointed out that its members were responsible for the current as well as the future defense of the United States and that they were therefore prone to evalu- ate the potentialities of the airplane in terms of its known accomplish- ments in the recent war. If this tendency at times injected a certain degree of realism into considerations of immediate defense measures, it also acted as a deterrent to future development of a weapon still in its infancy. Because for many years the Air Service was denied mem- bership in the General Staff and thus any real opportunity to affect policies a t the highest level, it was natural that many airmen should look on that agency as a stronghold of bureaucratic conservatism. T h e chief impetus for change came from returning officers of the Air Service, AEF. They were backed by Air Service officers who had remained in the States. No accurate poll of opinion was taken, but in 192s a congressional committee found that an overwhelming majority of aviators favored an independent organization. As a typical response to the committee’s standard question in that respect one might cite the 2 1
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