“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
ing the capacity of a civil population to bear up under aerial bombard-
ment and of a bomb-wrecked industry to rise phoenix-like from its
own ashes. His belief that aerial use of gas would figure prominently in
the next war was shared by most of his contemporaries, and perhaps
his main thesis can be fairly judged only if the horror of the atomic
bomb be substituted for that of the gas bomb he relied on so heavily.
In respect to the tactical means by which he would carry out his grand
strategy, Mitchell’s ideas were both sound and imaginative-witness
his concept of airborne operations and of air supply for mobile avia-
tion units, his mixture of deck-level and medium-level attacks on ships,
his plans for a national system of airways and for an adequate weather
organization, his realization of the significance of the great circle
route in the northern latitudes. H e stressed, too, the intirnate relation
between a civilian air industry and military air power, and, if he over-
emphasized the ease with which civilian transports could be modified
into bombers, he erred in that respect less than did many of his con-
temporaries, including Douhet.
While Mitchell’s ideas on air power had raced ahead of the techno-
logical development of his weapon, those of the W a r Department had
followed a more leisurely course. It was not unnatural that the Army’s
thinking should be largely conditioned by its experiences in France,
where Pershing’s victories had seemed to confirm traditional prin-
ciples of war but little affected by the advent of aviation. For ten years
or so after the Armistice the General Staff’s chief concern with the
airplane was for its utility in close support, and it vigorously and
successfully opposed any official sanction of Mitchell’s ideas of an
independent air mission. Having been won over to the idea of a GHQ
air force by the I ~ J O ’ S , the General Staff allowed a more positive role
to the air arm in national defense without changing its position radi-
cally on the crucial issue of strategic bombardment.
T h e Dickman Board, appointed by Pershing in I 9 1 9 to record the
lessons of the war, had stated that “nothing so far brought out in the
war shows that aerial activities can be carried on, independently of
ground troops, to such an extent as to materially affect the conduct of
the war as a whole.” This came to be the official attitude of the
W a r Department. Secretary of W a r Baker indorsed it in his annual
report of 1919, decrying “upon the most elemental ethical and hu-
manitarian grounds” the “aerial bombardment of back areas and inland
cities” and rating observation and artillery spotting as the most im-
43