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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 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 sider some of the more far-reaching potentialities of his weapon. He pointed out that “Bombardment Aviation asserted itself more and more as the War developed.” Victory had become a matter of “whip- ping the reserves” or delaying them, so that bombardment had been used to cut communications and to interfere with the manufacture of munitions.“ In modern warfare with its idea of the nation in arms it was becoming difficult to distinguish between military and civilian objectives: W e must expect, therefore, in case of war, to have the enemy attempt to destroy any or all of our combatant or industrial forces-his attacks being entirely controlled by the dictates of strategy, and the means of bringing the war to a quick conclusion. It may be at times the best strategy to damage and destroy property, and to kill and disable an enemy’s forces and resources at points far removed from the field of battle of either armies or navies.“ But this unpleasant thought was advanced as a possibility, not as dogma. Mitchell could still believe that “it was an established fact that the principal mission of an air force was the destruction of the hostile air force” ‘* and could deliver his most succinct summary of the role of air power without reference to attacks against civilian resources: “Our doctrine of aviation, therefore, should be to find out where the hostile air force is, to concentrate on that point with our Pursuit, At- tack, and Bombardment Aviation, to obtain a decision over the hostile air force, and then to attack the enemy’s armies on the land or navies on the water and obtain a decision over them.” ‘9 Whatever the future might hold, war was still a matter of defeating the enemy’s armed forces. Mitchell’s failure to push his theory to the limits he later reached need not be ascribed to prudence, but it should be realized that the War Department, with which he had not broken in 1 9 2 I , was skepti- cal of the utility of strategic bombardment and that certain implica- tions of total air warfare were repugnant to the public whose support he wished to elicit. But far more important in conditioning Mitchell’s thought was the relationship between the geographical situation of the United States, its traditional ideas of national defense, and the po- tentialities of the air weapon. Aviation requirements of the several powers, he pointed out, dif- fered with their geographical and military situations. No one policy could be appropriate to an island nation threatened by continental air forces (e.g., England), to powers having contiguous land frontiers 38
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