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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 in support of the naval forces of the Caribbean Sea Frontier, from which headquarters they received their operational d i r e ~ t i o n . ~ ~ The U-boats had made their presence felt in the Caribbean on 16 February. Attacking with impunity, they sank several tankers off Aruba on that date and even shelled an oil refinery on the island itself.45By the end of September 1942, they had sunk 173 merchant vessels in the western area of the Caribbean Sea Frontier. Shipping losses reached their peak in August, with a total of thirty-three sinkings in that area.46 The Caribbean, which offered an especially valu- able opportunity in the oil and bauxite traffic between the CuraGao- Aruba-Trinidad area and the continental United States, had thus become a favorite hunting ground for the enemy raiders. The forces available to the commander of the Caribbean Sea Fron- tier, including those of the Antilles Air Task Force, were admittedly insufficient during the early months of 1942 to provide effective defense. Army bombardment forces available in February 1942 in- cluded not more than forty operational B-18's in the medium bomber class, plus about seven light bombers of the A-20 type. They in- cluded no long-range planes a t all. These meager bombardment forces, together with a few pursuit squadrons, were scattered about the Caribbean in Trinidad, CuraGao, Aruba, St. Lucia, Surinam, British Guiana, Puerto Rico, St. Croix, and Antigua. By the end of the summer, the task force could count on few if any more bombers than it had reported in February, although its strength in fighters had more than d~ubled.~'The U.S. Navy meantime, however, had ma- terially increased the scope and effectiveness of its effort in the Caribbean, and although the Antilles Air Task Force had remained in strength substantially as before, its units had acquired valuable experience since February. Whereas prior to July they had executed very few attacks, in July and August they reported more than a score.48 During the fall of 1942, the U-boat command sharply re- duced its activity in the Caribbean to concentrate its attention on the North Atlantic convoy area and the approaches to Northwest Africa. Despite its almost exclusive preoccupation theretofore with sub- marine warfare, the Antilles Air Task Force remained at the end of 1942 officially a striking force whose primary function was to guard against possible attack on the Panama Canal. The prolonged presence 5 36
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