“Nevers”44 pages
- p. 43 …cavalry mounted on gas driven flying horses” never arrived to
“sweep the Germans from the sky…
- p. 46 …Mitchell never received an American air force commensurate with
the ambitious idens of air power which…
- p. 49 …This project, like so many others, had lagged, and the Air Service was
never equipped during…
- p. 50 …the Army or the Air Corps?” but never, “Are
you in the Army or the Corps…
- p. 55 …any Air Service officers, and I have never heard
anybody yet-any Air Service officer-against…
- p. 69 …But one axiom,
with its corollaries, never varied. T o him the airplane was first and…
- p. 75 …Powerful air attacks resolutely pressed home could never be
completely stopped, but their effects could best…
- p. 94 …rate for the time being, the decision never-
theless left an open question as to how…
- p. 121 …large-scale warfare; production of combat types never exceeded 300
aircraft a month. The pattern of…
- p. 122 …the German Air Force, the
Regia Aeronautica never exhibited sufficient power to be decisive in
the…
- p. 133 …Except for a few raids against French
factories, the force had never been employed in a…
- p. 140 …into
a complete war economy production was never equal to the demands
of our own forces…
- p. 150 …Long-term needs
of the Air Corps and the sudden availability of funds in quantities
never…
- p. 181 …Actually, the Air Staff had
never approved of the method followed in RAINBOW No. 5 . l…
- p. 217 …Members of the Hawaiian Air Force, who had never flown
heavy bombers, began to receive intensive…
- p. 219 …were not then satisfactory for permanent garrisons. Never-
theless, the commander of the Hawaiian Department, Lt…
- p. 227 …T h e planes never reached their destination. Other
bombardment units were being prepared for transfer…
- p. 241 …responsible officers, a few crucial points
have never been satisfactorily explained.
T h e general pattern…
- p. 277 …motors, sole-
noids, and gun mounts-were never found. After many hours of fruit-
less search…
- p. 288 …planners and
from which AAF Headquarters was never to deviate.
The translation of the accepted grand…
- p. 303 …the principal features of the plan
were never challenged, it was subsequently revised in a draft…
- p. 309 …W a r Plans Division was
never incorporated into GHQ and remained a potential rival to…
- p. 336 …the shooting and wrote that they were never
able to make out an airplane.g6It is…
- p. 412 …As it happened, the B-24's never
returned to India, but, instead, remained in the…
- p. 457 …Meanwhile the Edsall with the remaining
pilots had headed for Java, never to be heard from…
- p. 492 …Squadron was assigned, but which it would never reach, going from
Australia to Tongatabu; ( 3 ) Christmas…
- p. 500 …deck of a carrier presented a problem never
before challenged by Army planes. Hence an accelerated…
- p. 502 …the bows and wetting the flight deck. Never before had this been
accomplished, yet now it…
- p. 509 …Island, in the
Louisiade Archipelago.” They were never needed, for on 7-8 May
the two…
- p. 513 …exist, it was at a point which never reached the
aircrews, for on the operational level…
- p. 524 …handicaps under which
AAF planes had operated. Never were more than fourteen B- I 7’s…
- p. 527 …AAF planners clung firmly to their belief that
proper observance of economy of force would never…
- p. 531 …Crews which had
previously never loaded torpedoes now for the first time fitted these
weapons into…
- p. 544 …But the Japanese never at
any time based their bombers in appreciable numbers a t either…
- p. 548 …26's in torpedo-dropping, but they never would be put into
All told, the record…
- p. 556 …until it had been thoroughly trained and never to com-
mit it piecemeal. General Magruder had…
- p. 560 …pressed into service against the Germans," and never reached the
CBI." Colonel Haynes had reached India…
- p. 606 …reason that the Antilles Air Task Force
never evolved, as did I Bomber Command, into an…
- p. 614 …that reason deserving a high
priority, could never dispose of the U-boat menace but must…
- p. 635 …In Washington the Munitions Assign-
ments Board t had never considered this schedule as more than…
- p. 670 …they bombed from 39,200 feet, and never
below 30,000. By AAF standards they had…
- p. 672 …Goering had never put enough bombers over England,
nor had he concentrated his forces on the…
- p. 690 …of co-operation and combined action probably never
before equaled by the military forces of two…
- p. 729 …shoot at aerial targets, and several
had never operated a turret in the air. This deficiency…
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