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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.
“United Press”36 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 Genesis of the Army Air Forces Antisubmarine Conmaand Meanwhile, the American high command was struggling with the more fundamental problems of antisubmarine policy. As has already been noted in this volume and will be noticed repeatedly hereafter, the question of shipping proved again and again the most crucial of those faced in attempts to meet the demands of our hard pressed forces in the Pacific and to provide for an early assumption of the offensive against Germany. And so threatening to the basic strategy agreed upon for the conduct of the war was the submarine attack that no possibility of taking effective action against it could be over- looked. T w o things the submarine crisis had immediately made clear: an effective antisubmarine campaign would require more aircraft than could be supplied from current production designed for Navy use, especially in view of the many demands on naval air strength; and a large proportion of the necessary aircraft would have to consist of land-based types, admittedly better suited, because of their speed, range, and firepower, for antisubmarine attack than the seaplane.” It was soon evident, too, that these requirements could be met either by turning over to the Navy a force of Army land-based bombers sufficient to allow that service to accomplish the task by itself, or by setting up a separate command within the AAF to be specially trained and equipped for antisubmarine warfare and with that as its sole duty. Thus the AAF units engaged in the anti-U-boat war became almost a t once the subject of a jurisdictional controversy. The issue first arose in acute form when the Navy acted early in 1942 to secure a force of land-based bombers for its own use. O n 1 5 January, the Air Staff had under consideration a request from Rear Adm. John H. Towers, chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, for the transfer to the Navy from future production of Army-type * O n 5 March 1942, Admiral King wrote to General Arnold as follows: “The experience of the last two winters has demonstrated that naval aviation missions such as convoy escort, observation, scouting and patrolling over the sea, and the pro- tection of shipping in the coastal zones, cannot be accomplished by seaplanes based on ice-bound bases in the North Atlantic and Pacific areas. In addition to this ex- perience, a study of the purely naval operations of the Coastal Command of the Royal Air Force has led to the conviction that for such missions, carried out from prepared fixed bases, multi-engined landplanes have certain characteristic advantages in increased range, ease of maintenance, and facility of operation, over seaplanes.” The Navy’s carrier-based planes which lent important weight to the antisubmarine war in its later phase were not employed in the Atlantic until March 1943. 538
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