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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 coast at any one time. O n the whole, however, it was a creditable effort, considered as an emergency measure. By the end of January, I Bomber Command aircraft available for antisubmarine duty num- bered a total of I 19. Only forty-six of the aircraft could be considered in commission, but of this effective strength, nine were B-17’s capable of long-range patrol, and the rest were B-18’s and B-t5’s,l5 both types capable of covering extensive stretches of the threatened sea lanes. Even so, Army forces were themselves seriously inadequate. In addi- tion to the insufficient number of AAF forces available, Army units began antisubmarine operations under serious handicaps of organiza- tion, training, and equipment. Hunting submarines was a highly spe- cialized task, as all concerned found out during the next few months. Yet little had been done prior to the outbreak of hostilities to train and equip Army units for work of this sort or to establish a system of joint Army-Navy control. Some steps, it is true, had been taken to provide the means of co-operation between the services, with the result that a joint control and information center was ready for opera- tion at New York four days after the opening of hostilities. For- tunately, the delay of nearly a month in the enemy’s invasion of American waters gave the I Bomber Command time to organize some sort of wire communication service to all its bases, and to establish an intelligence system through which information could be relayed from headquarters to squadron operations rooms. But to the end of January the problem of transmitting intelligence remained a vexing one.’’ In addition to the fact that most of the Army air units involved in the antisubmarine war were still in a training status, those best trained having been taken away for service in the west, they brought to their task equipment and experience conditioned almost entirely by the requirements of ordinary bombardment, which had little in common with antisubmarine attack. It is hardly surprising, then, that Army planes at first flew in search of U-boats armed with demolition bombs instead of depth bombs and manned by crews who were ill trained in naval identification or in the techniques of attacking submarine targets. Moreover, the aircraft themselves, although intrinsically better suited to this type of operation than most of the available Navy planes, nevertheless fell far short of maximum efficiency in antisubma- rine patrol. All, with the exception of the few B-I~’s, possessed 5 24
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