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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 B A T T L E O F T H E A T L A N T I C in which the American forces found themselves fighting in 1942. The British had solved the problem of co-ordinating the activities of land-based aviation with those of the Royal Navy and the Fleet Air Arm by creating a special RAF command, equipped and trained for sea search and attack and placed for purposes of operational control under the Admiralty. Details of this arrangement had been made available to interested headquarters in Washington by the British officers detailed to advise the American antisubmarine forces. Ad- mittedly far from perfect, the system they described bore the author- ity of more than two years' experience in joint action, experience marked by close and effective co-operation between the services. The Admiralty set forth the general pattern of antisubmarine oper- ations and left it to Coastal Command to direct the activities of its own units within that over-all strategic pattern. Sea and air officers in charge of operations worked in the same quarters from identical intelligence data presented on the same plotting charts. Interchange of information thus became virtually automatic." 'O N o immediate results followed General Arnold's proposal. By May, however, the submarine situation itself pointed more imperatively than words to the need for some change in the existing system of control. Most of the May sinkings had occurred in the Gulf and Caribbean areas. Scarcely adequate to protect shipping in the Eastern Sea Frontier, the existing organization of antisubmarine operations proved powerless to cope with a greatly extended area of activity. Above all, there was the ugly fact that during that month sinkings in both these sea frontiers had risen to an alarming figure. Despite ener- getic efforts on the part of both Navy and AAF agencies to meet a rapidly changing situation with machinery constructed essentially on static principles, the extension of AAF antisubmarine operations merely emphasized the faults inherent in the existing system of com- mand and control. The agreement reached late in March had placed unity of command over all air forces operating over the sea in the coastal defense areas in the hands of the sea frontier commanders. This seemed a con- venient enough arrangement for the time being, but in reality it merely made more definite what had hitherto been left vague. It did * The contrast between this concept of operational control and that followed by the US.Navy should be noted. The US.Navy preferred to exercise more detailed supervision of the operations of Army units assigned to its control through such lower echelons of command as the sea frontier and the naval district. 541
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