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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 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 nothing to meet the problem of deploying land-based aviation effec- tively in antisubmarine warfare. The trouble was that no single com- mand, either in the Navy or Army, was solely responsible for the conduct of the antisubmarine war. The result was that a multiplicity of regional headquarters within a system constructed originally to meet the needs of a static defense robbed the air arm of what the AAF considered its primary advantage, namely its mobility as an offensive striking force. Most AAF units engaged in the campaign served under the opera- tional control of the I Bomber Command, which remained the only organization capable of co-ordinating such an enterprise. But the I Bomber Command was still theoretically a bombardment force, and as long as it retained a dual responsibility its training and tactical development had literally to be carried on at two levels-for high- level bombardment and for low-level attack against submarines. This situation prevented it from concentrating as fully on the anti-U-boat war as the nature of that conflict required. The system over which it presided was, moreover, loosely integrated. The Civil Air Patrol served under the I Air Support Command for operational control. I Air Support Command, in turn, operated under the control of I Bomber Command. Units of the Third Air Force, brought in as an emergency measure t o meet the crisis in the Gulf area in May, operated under the control of the Gulf Task Force of the I Bomber Command. And this system, such as it was, as yet did not extend to the Caribbean, where the Antilles Air Task Force operated inde- pendently under the Caribbean Sea Frontier. Administratively speak- ing, the situation was even more complicated because all units were administered through either the First Air Force or the Third Air Force, both of which had to go through their respective defense com- mand headquarters before reaching Headquarters, AAF.e' Within the Army itself, then, the organization was poorly adapted to meet the challenge of an opponent that operated with extreme mobility under a strictly unified command. Another serious difficulty arose from the fact that the AAF units were, according to joint agreement, allocated to the sea frontier commanders. These allocations were treated by the Navy as more or less permanent arrangements which, except in grave emergency, would prevent the AAF units serving under one frontier commander from operating in the territory of another. This tendency to tie 542
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