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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.
“Italian Air Force”14 pages
T H E A R M Y A I R A R M B E T W E E N T W O W A R S and with the rapid technological improvements of the next two decades the process of revision continued sporadically. It might there- fore appear simple to trace in the successive training directives and manuals the evolution of the combat doctrines of the Army air arm. That procedure, if followed literally and exclusively, would hardly repay the not inconsiderable effort involved in assembling a complete file of an Army publication. For, however accurately the manuals may reflect current teachings on the details of aerial combat, they seldom represent the most advanced thought within the Army air arm on the broader problems of air power. T o this conservatism of thought -or expression-several factors contributed. Formulation of doctrine within the W a r Department was a function of the General Staff, and, while the air arm wrote its own manuals, those had to be watered down to make them acceptable to the ruling hierarchy of ground officers. Prevailing national sentiment encouraged the tendency to discuss war publicly only in terms of national defense in its narrowest sense, an attitude not wholly compatible with the offensive nature of the air weapon, and to keep all talk of attacks on nonmilitary objectives sotto voce. Finally, the whole subject of aircraft in national defense involved delicate Army-Navy relations, and in that dread no-man’s- land prudent men trod softly. So it was that the training guides, as textbooks for young officers, were not only dull in the inimitable style of Army manuals; on con- troversial issues they were at best noncommittal and at worst mislead- ing. Joint Army-Navy agreements were so ambiguous as to permit widest latitude in interpretation. And hence, paradoxically, we must seek the air arm’s underlying philosophy of warfare not in the official pronouncements but first in the public utterances of its radicals and later in the less widely disseminated thought of its most advanced school. This approach is not wholly satisfactory, but it is the only way to explain, other than by supposing a sudden reversal of opinion, the emergence shortly before World W a r I1 of a well-developed theory of warfare in which strategic bombardment played the predominant role. In its most essential features this theory was evolved by Mitchell in the mid-twenties; by 1939it had become an article of faith privately held if not publicly proclaimed by the Air Corps. Mitchell’s concept of air power is more difficult to analyze than is that of his Italian contemporary, Giulio Douhet. Mitchell, a prolific 3 5
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