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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.
“Independence Day”9 pages
C H A P T E R 1s * * * * * * * * * * * THE AAF IN THE BATTLE OF THE ATLANTIC HILE undertaking to meet the emergency demands of the Philippines, Hawaii, Java, India, China, Australia, Wthe South Pacific, Alaska, and Panama, not to mentionother requirements of hemisphere defense, the AAF had been forced to deal with still another emergency problem in the Atlantic. The Germans fully appreciated the fact that American participation in the European war would depend for its success on the free and rapid movement of supply. Consequently, with the entry of the United States into active warfare against the Axis, it became a key point in German strategy to extend into American waters the counterblock- ade already undertaken by the U-boat fleet in the eastern and north- ern Atlantic. Except for a few planes which through the latter part of 1941 co-operated with the Navy in patrol of the waters off New- foundland, the air forces of the U.S. Army had received neither re- sponsibility for antisubmarine warfare nor training in its techniques. But they found themselves immediately after Pearl Harbor committed extensively to antisubmarine patrol for want of other forces which were both available and competent for the task. That the Germans would move their U-boats into American coastal waters as soon as practicable after the formal entry of the United States into the war was implicit in the military situation as it de- veloped from 1939 to 1941. The U-boat fleet was the only weapon with which Germany could implement a counterblockade. And since 1939 the Germans had been operating against British and neutral shipping at every opportunity in a campaign which, after the fall of France, was greatly facilitated by the construction of five operating bases on the Bay of Biscay. In the beginning of the war the subma- 5 '4
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