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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 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 week, and Calcutta, chief port of India, had been rendered unsafe by enemy action on the periphery of the Bay of Bengal. The loss of all Burma seemed imminent, an invasion of India not unlikely. Hope of substantial reinforcement, even the prospect of receiving the minimum administrative complement of an air force, depended upon a line of communications extending across the Indian and At- lantic oceans by way of the Cape of Good Hope, for Australia had need of all the limited resources available there. Moreover, the Japa- nese conquest of Java and the prior fall of Singapore had made the passage from Australia to India altogether too hazardous. The first convoy from the United States for India-carrying the Headquarters and Headquarters Squadron of the Tenth Air Force, the ground echelon of the 23d Pursuit Group, the 3d Air Depot Group, and personnel of the I st Ferrying Group-was dispatched promptly enough on 1 9 March from Charleston, South Carolina. But with calls along the way at Puerto Rico, at Freetown, and at Capetown and Port Elizabeth in South Africa, this convoy would not reach India until m i d - M a ~ . ' ~ Fighter planes, meantime, had been shipped by water to the west coast of Africa for delivery by ferry to India. The first of them began to come into Karachi in April, but losses in transit were heavy and the planes themselves were destined ultimately for China." As for the sorely needed bombers, production was as yet unequal to the urgent demands of the several theaters, the expanding training pro- gram, the Navy, and our allies. Moreover, the ferry route across the Atlantic and Africa, still imperfectly developed and incompletely manned, exacted its toll of delay and loss en route." There was an additional factor of misunderstanding between Washington and the theater, attributable to the inadequacy of communications and the unavoidable confusion which marked the first months of war, as to the number of planes actually on hand in India. Thus, War Depart- ment records indicated in mid-March that eighty P-4oE's had been delivered by the Australian convoy, and that nineteen B- I 7's had been reassigned from Java to India. It appeared, then, that the Tenth Air Force possessed in the ~ 1 s ta full pursuit group and with the 7th the equivalent almost of one equipped heavy bombardment group, when actually there were only ten p-40'~and the B-17's were for the most part strung along the ferry route awaiting repairs or spare parts. * See above, pp. 339-40. 494
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