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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.
“United Press”36 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 they moved into Bhamo, and on 8 May the enemy climaxed his north- ward drive by capturing Myitkyina, key base in the current plan for maintaining an air cargo line to China. With this defeat, Allied re- sistance on the ground for all practical purposes ended, the AVG squadron withdrew to Kunming, and Stilwell began his famous walk out of Burma. T o the Allied defense against this drive, the Tenth Air Force had been in no position to make a direct contribution. Conferring with Stilwell on 24 March a t Magwe, near the current fighting, Brereton had reported that his air force would not be ready for combat for another month, an estimate which proved in fact to have been opti- mistic. Its assistance in combat was necessarily limited to the indirect aid provided by a few bombing missions which, considered either individually or collectively, can be regarded as having little more than a nuisance value. The first combat mission of the Tenth was flown on the night of 2 April. Brereton planned two missions for that date, one against the Rangoon area and another against shipping targets in the region of the Andaman Islands, where a Japanese fleet that included carriers was reportedly assembled for an attack on Ceylon. At Asansol one of the two B- I 7’s assigned to the Rangoon mission cracked up on take-off with loss of its entire crew, and though the second took off well enough, it was forced by mechanical failure to turn back to base before reaching the target. That night the second mission, led by Brereton in person and flown by two B-17’s and one LB-30, success- fully attacked enemy shipping near Fort Blair in the Andaman Islands. Having dropped eight tons of bombs from 3,500 feet, the crews claimed hits on a cruiser and a transport. Antiaircraft fire both from the ships and from batteries on shore was encountered, and the planes subsequent to the bombing were attacked by enemy fighters. T w o of the bombers received damage, but all returned to base.45 At General Stilwell’s insistence, the Tenth thereafter devoted its attention to the Japanese in On 3 April six bombers took off from Asansol to strike a t docks and warehouses in Rangoon. In- cendiary and demolition bombs were used to start three large fires; no resistance from enemy pursuits developed; one B-17 was lost on the return trip, cause By 1 6 April the planes had been put in good enough shape to send again six bombers to Rangoon. Having taken off this time from Dum Dum near Calcutta, they first dropped 500
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