Documents / Document
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 Invaders”15 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 (e.g., France, Germany), and to a relatively isolated, self-contained country like the United States.” In the past our safety had rested upon a strong Navy; so long as there was a fleet in being, the United States had been immune to large-scale invasions, and it had been un- necessary to maintain a large Army. But from 1919 Mitchell was convinced that the airplane had outmoded that system of national de- fense; his success in the experiments of I 92 1-2 3 merely confirmed a theory which, he explained, had received no wartime test because of the overwhelming strength of Allied naval power.81 H e taught that with pursuit and attack planes an air force could establish air su- premacy over a fleet, neutralize its antiaircraft defenses, and in low- level attacks dispose of light warships and merchantmen. Bombers, equipped either with bombs or torpedoes, could sink the most heavily armed ships. Air power (aided perhaps by submarines) could thus interdict to any enemy ships all approaches to American shores and hence in itself constitute a sufficient protection against invasion. Sur- face units of the Navy, thus deprived of their prime mission, might at best find a limited career on the high seas beyond the operational radius of aircraft. In 1920 Mitchell believed that the Navy was the “first line of defense” but that, when equipped with carriers, “the air force will be the first line of defense and that surface navies, at least, will disappear.” 8 2 T h e U.S. Navy was loath to “disappear,” and consequently the naval aspects of air warfare assumed in Mitchell’s writings an inordi- nate importance: he was writing a brief for the united air force, not a scientific treatise on war. But if the airplane offered an effective and relatively inexpensive protection against the traditional pattern of in- vasion, it constituted also a new and terrible threat against national security. As airplane performance improved, the new threat assumed a predominant part in Mitchell’s thought. His Winged Defense, pub- lished in 1925, analyzed the danger and offered a solution. In future wars there would be no tedious process of wearing down the enemy’s armed forces by attrition. Instead, aircraft would strike directly at the enemy’s “centers of production of all kinds, means of transporta- tion, agricultural areas, ports and shipping, . . . they will destroy the means of making war.” 8 3 Wars would be sharp and short, inexpensive for the victor but terrible for the vanquished. Because war would affect the civil population more directly, the very threat of the new techniques would be a powerful deterrent to war, and so “air power 39
Document, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 863 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.