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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 1 1 Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and consisting of men with wide executive experience in aviation, returned from a tour of Europe with an unequivocal indorsement of the separate department of air.l’ Baker gave wider circulation to the Dickman and Menoher reports than to the Crowell-indeed, the latter seems to have been deliberately suppressed-and he supported the proposals of the General Staff, which in modified form took effect in the Army Reorganization Act of 4 June 1920.’’ This law gave formal recognition to the Air Service as a combatant arm of the Army. The office of Second Assistant Sec- retary of War (then vacant) was abolished. Authorized strength of the Air Service was set at 1,5 1 6 officers, 2,500 flying cadets, and 16,000 enlisted men, out of a total of 280,000 for the Army. Specific com- plaints were answered by regulations requiring that tactical units be commanded by flyers, authorizing flight pay of 50 per cent base pay, and ambiguously stipulating a limit on the number of nonflying of- ficers. In spite of these minor concessions, the new law was regarded by many aviators as a crushing defeat for Air Service aspirations. In his annual report for 1919,the Secretary of War concluded a lengthy analysis of the case for air power with the judgment that “on the whole case, it seems quite clear that the time has not come to set up an independent department of the air.” H e was willing to soften that statement with the caveat that “the art [aviation] itself is so new and so fascinating, and the men in it have so taken on the character of supermen, that it is difficult to reason coldly, and perhaps dangerous to attempt any limitation upon the future based even upon the most favorable view of present attainment.” l9 The aviators, who rarely reasoned coldly, were confident of what the future would hold, but they thought that its arrival could be hastened by direct action in the present, Balked within the War Department, they carried their fight into a broader arena, seeking by spectacular stunts and by equally spectacular statements to win public support to their cause. For six tumultuous years Billy Mitchell was a national figure, seldom absent from the headlines for long. H e had returned from France as the best known of Baker’s “supermen.” With his war record he might have expected to head the peacetime Air Service, but instead he served as assistant chief successively to Menoher and Patrick-and to their frequent discomfiture. Later, Mitchell expressed the opinion that “changes in military systems come about only through the pressure of public opinion or disaster in war.” ’O Public opinion had been re- 24
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