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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.
“Independence Day”9 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 reply of a pilot lieutenant: “It has been discussed everywhere I have been where there are any Air Service officers, and I have never heard anybody yet-any Air Service officer-against it.” * There were a few iconoclasts in the Navy who supported the move for reorganization in some particulars-not in all. There were, too, enthusiastic advocates of the separate air force in Congress, and eventually a large public fol- lowing was built up. Early incumbents of the Office of Chief of the Air Service (Corps) found it difficult to press vigorously for reorgani- zation and, by default, leadership devolved upon General Mitchell, assistant chief from 1 9 1 9 to 1925, whose energetic and sometimes flamboyant figure dominated the postwar struggle as it had the com- bat effort in France. The alignment was hardly an even one. Mitchell and his followers had enthusiasm, but their opponents had rank. Because the far-reaching and permanent changes sought by the Air Service demanded legisla- tive sanction, much of the struggle was aired publicly. In 1928 Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick, recently retired Chief of the Air Corps, wrote somewhat plaintively that “the Air Service or rather the air effort, of the United States since we entered the World War has probably been the most investigated activity ever carried on by the United States.” The end was not then in sight. Six years later the Baker Board listed fourteen such investigations (omitting the one most favorably inclined to the independent air force),” and others were to follow. The mem- bers of most boards were distinguished enough, but they were named by those in authority who were opposed to change: from the Menoher Board of 1919,composed of a nonflying Director of the Air Service and a group of artillery officers, to the Baker Board of 1934, with its military membership of four ground officers and one aviator, the in- vestigating committees from the airman’s point of view were usually stacked. Whatever may have been the logic of arguments redundantly cited, he viewed the conclusion, usually conservative in nature, with deep suspicion: as a disgruntled witness said in one instance, “the find- ings of the Morrow Board were approved before the Morrow Board ever assembled.’’ l 1 Filled with a missionary zeal and frustrated by lack of success, Mitchell and his followers spoke intemperately. Their opponents re- plied in kind and attempted to still dissident voices by authority rather than by reason. And so the fight for recognition of air power took on all the bitterness of domestic strife, with “the feeling on the part of 2 2
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