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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.
“Hamilton”9 pages
C H A P T E R 14 * * * * * * * * * * * C O M M I T M E N T S TO CHINA T WILL be recalled that just at the close of Allied resistance in the Netherlands East Indies, General Brereton, under instructions I from General Brett which were subsequently confirmed by theWar Department, flew to India for the purpose of organizing an American air force in the India-Burma area. H e had been preceded by Col. Francis M. Brady and was accompanied by a handful of AAF personnel who would form a nucleus for the new air force. Six heavy bombers were flown up from Java, and orders were issued for all planes and crews en route to the Netherlands East Indies by the African ferry to stop in India. Three vessels which had left Fremantle in Australia on 2 2 February, in company with the ill- fated Lungley and Sea Witch, were on their way across the Indian Ocean with the ground echelon of two squadrons of the 7th Bom- bardment Group (H), the grst Air Base Group, personnel of the 51st Pursuit Group, and ten P - ~ o ’ s . ~At Patterson Field, Ohio, the Tenth Air Force had been activated on 1 2 February. It was assigned to the newly created China-Burma-India theater,’ and General Brere- ton formally assumed command on 5 March. Such were the meager beginnings of an organization forced to operate at the end of a longer supply line than that of any other existing American air force, over distances within its theater that exceeded considerably those embraced by the bounds of the United States, and in an area possessed of few of the industrial facilities upon which air power is directly dependent. It was the third extraordinarily difficult assignment which had fallen to the lot of General Brereton in the initial stages of the war with Japan. Formerly commander of the Far East Air Force in the Philip- * See above, pp. 396-97. 484
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