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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.
“King”32 pages
T H E B A T T L E O F T H E A T L A N T I C of a French aircraft carrier a t Martinique continued to lend an air of immediacy to the threat which originally had determined this mission, and it was doubtless for this reason that the Antilles Air Task Force never evolved, as did I Bomber Command, into an organization shaped for the primary purpose of antisubmarine warfare. Indeed, by the fall of 1942 plans were under way for extending the activity of I Bomber Command, in its as yet unofficial capacity as the AAF antisubmarine force, to bases in the Caribbean; and in August, a few B-18’s of its 40th Bombardment Squadron had been in fact sent on detached service to the Puerto Rican and Trinidad areas. This ex- periment in sending antisubmarine forces to outlying bases on a detached service status proved administratively unsatisfactory, but plans nevertheless continued to point toward I Bomber Command as the organization that would be responsible for AAF specialized anti- submarine activity wherever it might be undertaken:’ When on 1 5 October 1942 the I Bomber Command became the Army Air Forces Antisubmarine Command with a materially ex- panded mission, it was still a comparatively small organization and one as yet inadequately trained and equipped for its task. From a high point of 216 planes in July, a point reached just after the submarine menace within the area of its operations had begun to decline, the I Bomber Command had suffered a decrease in combat strength until in October it reported only 148 aircraft. Of these, twelve were B-17’s, fourteen B-I S’s, thirty-five B-zs’s, and three B-24’s; the rest, a mixture of A-ZO’S,A-zg’s, and B-34’s, lacked suffi- cient range for anything except strictly coastal patrol. Some twenty- seven planes were a t this time equipped with radar; this number, too, represented a marked decline since July. But the command had made great progress toward becoming an effective antisubmarine striking force. It had accumulated the many benefits of a wide and varied experience, and its personnel stood ready to provide effective leader- ship in the definition of tactical doctrine, the shaping of training, and the adaptation of equipment to the peculiar requirements of a larger mission. It had come to be recognized that the long-range B-24 was especially well suited to the demands of antisubmarine warfare, and in September the command had received the first of the planes that would thereafter become the principal reliance in the AAF’s antisubmarine effort.“O 537
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