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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.
“Anderson”7 pages
C O M M I T M E N T S T O C H I N A pines and more recently of American air units operating in the Netherlands East Indies, he was now to command an air force based in India with a mission for the support of China. Key decisions would involve consideration of the interests, not always identical, of two major allies. Once again he had to improvise an organization in the face of a rapidly advancing enemy whose conquest of Burma, which held the key to any plan for the immediate assistance of China, would be completed before the Tenth could be given the means to fight. Lacking personnel, planes, and other equipment that make up an air force, Brereton would not even command the major American air unit operating within the theater. For ere the famed American Volunteer Group ( A V G ) had been inducted into the AAF in July, General Brereton was transferred, with such striking force as the Tenth possessed, to the Middle East. The AVG T h e exigency of war had determined the time and circumstances of General Brereton’s arrival in India, but the decision to conduct aerial operations in support of China came as a logical culmination of a well- defined American policy extending back to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 193 I . At that time the American people had been un- prepared to go beyond a general indorsement of the policy of non- recognition for such conquests enunciated by Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of State, who was now serving as the Secretary of War. But we had watched with growing concern the progress of Japanese forces in China, and with increasing admiration the evident purpose of the Chinese to continue their resistance. This concern had become acute by 1941, when all approaches to China had been sealed off ex- cept for the Burma Road, a tortuous truck route hewed through the mountains between Lashio and Kunming in 1937-38.2 A quickened interest displayed in the Sino-Japanese conflict by the American government in I 94 I reflected not merely a growing popular demand, in which the traditionally isolationist section of the press tended to join, but the government’s own concern over the prospect of an early involvement in war with both Germany and Japan. If we were to fight both of them (and the two had entered recently into a formal alliance clearly directed against the United States) , the most realistic of considerations argued for every possible effort to strengthen China, especially in view of strategic plans then taking 48s
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