Documents / Document
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 down the antisubmarine aviation to regional commands fortunately did not extend to the naval districts, for if the practice had been followed there it would have vitiated the effectiveness of the air arm. Mobility, on which this effectiveness was considered to depend, was nevertheless seriously obstructed by the difficulty of moving aircraft assigned to one sea frontier to meet sudden requirements in an area under the jurisdiction of another.62 Although a function of COMINCH, the antisubmarine campaign in the western Atlantic remained in practice a decentralized effort, its flexibility, especially in the deployment of land-based aircraft, and its integration of tactical procedure seriously compromised by a rigid system of regional A centralized command thus became the key to AAF thinking as far as it concerned the participation of Army air units in the antisub- marine war. That campaign needed other things, to be sure. It needed better equipment, a better training program, a better communications system. Above all, AAF observers felt it needed a truly mobile air arm. But all of these requirements depended in one way or another on the attainment of a more unified command. Opinion, however, in AAF quarters was not quite unanimous as to the nature and extent of this unified jurisdiction. Obviously the entire American anti- submarine campaign, involving surface as well as air forces, would profit by centralized control if any part thereof would. And, if oper- ational control by the Navy were to continue, as seemed likely, then it would be well for a single Navy commander, rather than several, to exercise that control over AAF units. But many AAF observers, apprehensive of the direction in which a unified naval command would lead the air forces allocated to itl preferred to think in terms of a unified command for antisubmarine aviation as a matter of primary importance, assuming, no doubt, that such an air command would be capable of answering the needs of the air arm even under the over-all control of the Navy. Some felt that this command should consist only of land-based units; others argued that it should also include Navy and Marine heavier-than-air craft engaged in the anti- submarine campaign. All agreed, however, that the successful partici- pation of the AAF in the Battle of the Atlantic depended on the creation of a separate command, comprising at least the AAF units, responsible directly to Headquarters, AAF, and trained and equipped for the sole purpose of hunting U-boat~.'~ 54.4
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 863 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.