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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
P L A N S , P O L I C I E S , A N D O R G A N I Z A T I O N E. Stratemeyer, wrote consolingly that T O R C H was not to be “at the expense of the bombing offensive from the UK but in addition to it, and therefore at the expense of anything but the UK.” 71 That was a very poor prediction. Four days earlier, on 2 I August, Admiral Leahy had remarked to the Combined Chiefs that T O R C H might necessitate revision of deployments currently under ons side ration.^^ Time was to prove him right. One adverse concomitant of the T O R C H diversion could not be measured wholly in quantitative terms. The Eighth Air Force had built its plans around a new weapon-the day bomber-and a new tactical principle. Arnold had originally wished to hold the B- I 7’s and B-24’s out of action until he could unleash against the Germans a considerable force. Though that scheme had not been adopted in principle, delays in movements of the initial units and schedules for a rapid build-up for BOLERO had promised to accomplish the same purpose. But T O R C H meant that AAF heavy bombers would be fed in piecemeal and that American equipment and techniques would be exhibited to the G A F without adequate returns. The results were not as disappointing as the premature introduction of the tank in World W a r I only because the novelty of the weapon was not so pronounced in I 942 ; fundamentally the cases were parallel. Comand and Organization The constant flux in grand strategy for the war against Germany pade it difficult to plan, with any degree of firmness, the practical measures by which success in the air phase might be assured. Perhaps the most obvious example of that difficulty has been suggested in the references above to frequent changes in allocation of AAF combat units to the European theater. Both over-all strategy and contemplated deployments, in turn, affected the organization and the chain of com- mand through which those units would operate. The problems in- volved in this latter respect were to AAF Headquarters hardly less significant than that of finding sufficient forces. In a popular account of air warfare published in 1941, General Arnold and Colonel Eaker had written: “Organization is a dry topic. . . . It is likely, for that reason, that it will receive less attention than it merits. Actually, or- ganization . . . is the most important of all the military functions.” 73 If that judgment reflected something of the Air Corps’ long struggle 575
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