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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 Invaders”15 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 consider the possibility of turning eventually to daylight operations, for the present they felt it expedient to bomb under cover of dark- ness.IT5The success of the thousand-plane saturation attacks against Cologne on 3 I May and the Ruhr on z June 1942 offered grim evi- dence of what such tactics could American tactical principles, originally quite similar to those of the RAF, had been profoundly modified during the decade before Pearl Harbor. In 1941, AAF schools were teaching that strategic targets could best be destroyed by daylight precision bombing, delivered by compact formations of heavy bombers in level flight at high altitudes. The central idea was precision, which merely accentuated the prin- ciple of economy of force upon which the whole argument for strategic bombardment rested. If an enemy’s ability to resist was to be attacked through his industry rather than through long and bloody battles with his armies, paralysis of selected key spots would be as effective as, and far cheaper than, total obliteration. Because this con- clusion could be derived logically without reference to operational experience, it had been advanced a t an early date. In 1918,for ex- ample, there had been a plan to hamstring such elements in the German army as depended on internal combustion engines by de- stroying the few factories producing magnetos.lTTIn concept, this design was quite similar to the Eighth Air Force’s campaign against the antifriction-bearing industry in I 943-44, and it illustrates the tendency in air warfare for theory to rush ahead of current prac- ticability. For in 1918there was not available the equipment requisite for precision bombing on the necessary scale. Even against existing defense measures, daylight bombing was considered prohibitively costly, and the Air Service, AEF, had accepted British operational principles when adopting the Handley-Page night bomber as the principal weapon for strategic operations. To account for subsequent changes in doctrine, several factors may be suggested. There was in the United States a traditional reverence for marksmanship which went back to the squirrel rifle of frontier days when scarcity of powder and shot put a premium on accuracy. Even if the facts sometimes belied the tradition, it was an element of American folklore which could be taken over by analogy to the new weapon. Emphasis on precision was also an antidote to widespread antipathy toward attacks on “civilian” objective^."^ Most important was the stress placed upon the airplane as the nation’s best defense 597
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