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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 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 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
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