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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
T H E E I G H T H A I R F O R C E mission, which of course included protection of our own bases in Britain, continuing in the experienced hands of the RAF Fighter Command. General Spaatz defined the primary function of the AAF fighter planes as that of supporting “our bombers in an effort to secure air Supremacy and not for the defense of England,’’ but he agreed that they should be so trained as to permit their assumption of defensive obligations in the event of an emergency.47 O n this basis the decision was finally made.48 T h e R A F would be responsible for aerial defense of the sectors in which American airdromes were lo- cated, and AAF fighter forces would be committed principally to the escort of bomber strikes against the continent. It had been agreed between General Arnold and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, Chief of Air Staff, RAF, in May that the Americans, in line with an earlier decision dividing production responsibilities between the air- craft industries of the two countries, would assume a primary re- sponsibility for the provision of air transport, even for the training of British airborne division^.^' Thus in the great airborne operations that followed, American troop carrier units would provide most of the lift. T h e defensive responsibilities assumed by the British included anti- aircraft and other ground defense of American airdromes. T h e AAF had assumed in the earliest planning for a bomber command that such an arrangement could be effe~ted,~’but as the number of our projected installations increased, it became apparent that British forces would be unequal to the task. Steps had been taken as early as August to set up an air defense organization within the Eighth Air Force,‘l but American antiaircraft and infantry units could not be made available even in the number required to supplement those provided by the British, much less in sufficient quantity to replace them.52 Our allies consequently continued to carry the main responsibility into the early part of 1943, a t which time the Eighth Air Force took over the job with forces hardly more adequate than those the British had been able to At no time during the war, fortunately, did the Germans undertake large-scale attacks on American installations in the United Kingdom. T h e heaviest indebtedness of the Eighth to its British allies fell, perhaps, in the field of intelligence. When war began, the AAF prob- ably was more deficient in its provision for intelligence than in any other phase of its activities-a deficiency brought home with increas- 6 2 3
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