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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.
“Pacific Ocean”16 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 important tactical conclusions. For example, they determined that the probability of a successful attack on a long-submerged submarine was extremely small. Conversely, only U-boats which could be at- tacked while on the surface or within, a t most, thirty seconds after submerging offered profitable targets, a fact which encouraged the use of depth bombs set for detonation at relatively shallow depths, say twenty-five to thirty feet. British experience also indicated that, to insure a successful attack, one of the bombs dropped must explode within little more than a dozen feet of the U-boat’s hull3’ Such items of tactical information the American units welcomed and found very valuable. But much of the job of hunting U-boats had necessarily to be learned by doing. Consequently, during these early months of the campaign, each AAF unit operated for tactical pur- poses in large part as its commander saw fit; and the data on each attack were eagerly studied in I Bomber Command headquarters with a view to the evolution of a tactical doctrine of its own. Many of the lessons were elementary. It was found to be well, for instance, not to pay too much attention to the appearance of oil slicks on the surface of the water, as they did not indicate necessarily the presence of a submarine. From the air, too, it was easy to mistake the wake left by the fin of a shark for that produced by the periscope of a sub- marine, a fact from which the larger forms of marine life may on more than one occasion have Many other lessons involved increasingly subtle understanding of the conditions under which attacks might be undertaken with the greatest chance of success-the use, for example, of cloud cover as a means of concealment and surprise in daytime attacks, and an ap- proach toward the target down the moon path by night. If a sub- marine submerged before an attack could be delivered, it was found to be advisable for the attacking plane to use “baiting” tactics, which involved leaving the area for a good interval and then returning to it in the hope that the enemy might in the meantime have surfaced and be thus open to another attack. In many other respects the learn- ing process was far from complete by July of 1942. Opinion still dif- fered as to the advisability of dropping an entire bomb load on the initial contact; and it was still debated whether it was better to attack the U-boat from the side or along its longitudinal axis. But the data was beginning to arrive in quantity sufficient soon to remove such questions from the realm of opinion. Finally, the development of 5 3 2
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