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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.
“King”32 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 and hasty writer, was not always consistent. His works, usually slanted toward the organizational dispute and polemic in nature, were not without exaggeration in detail. His thought underwent important modifications between I 919 and 1930 as technological improvements (and perhaps the heat of controversy) led him to logical conclusions which had been only implicit in his earliest statements. But one axiom, with its corollaries, never varied. T o him the airplane was first and last an offensive weapon. In the vast theater of the air there were no frontiers, no battle lines, no terrain features. Subject only to limita- tions of bases, operating range, and weather (and he was not inclined to overstress any as an adverse factor), the airplane with its speed and mobility could be applied against any enemy objective. Consequently, there could be no fixed defenses against aviation: “the only defense against an air force is another air force,’’ and the destruction of the enemy’s aviation is the necessary preliminary to a successful air of- fensive. It is only in respect to the nature of the air offensive that his thought shows any considerable development. which had guided the Air Service in those battles described in the preceding chapter shows how completely air employment had been dedicated to the immediate support of the ground armies. Save for units attached to army corps for observation and local defense, the Air Service had conceived as its primary mission the gaining of “complete ascendency . . .in the air.” On any desired front this was to be accomplished by adhering to principles of surprise, mobility, and concentration of forces. Available units of whatever category were to be massed into a striking force, but the significance attached to the air battle itself led Mitchell to speak of pursuit as “the most important branch of avia- tion. . . which fights for and gains control of the air,’’ and to calculate a well-balanced air force as comprising 60 per cent pursuit, 20 per cent attack, and 20 per cent bombardment air~raft.~’Yet control of the air was in itself but a negative thing, a means to some other end. For the Air Service in 1918,that end had been limited. Air ascendancy would free U.S. troops from enemy air attack and allow U.S. aviation to be employed offensively against the enemy’s “ground troops, his trains, his depots of ammunition and supplies, and his railroad stations and lines of comm~nications’~and airdromes.“ Mitchell referred to his striking force as “our independent or what might be termed strategical aviation,” 7 2 but its operations were His analysis in 1919 of the “theory of operations” 36
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