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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 A R M B E T W E E N T W O W A R S tions and the Langley Field treatise on bombardment are deliberately limited to warfare against a major opponent in a land theater of opera- tions. Coast defense and landing operations are excluded; where and how air and ground forces were to come to grips with an enemy is not explained. Essentially the war described is that of I 9 I 7-1 8, but without reference to the allies who had provided the Army with bases and a lodgment in Europe. It was impolitic in the 1920’s to speak of ex- peditionary forces or allies, but without them the concept of air power as an auxiliary to great land forces was meaningless. During the next decade discussion within the W a r Department of the Air Corps mission assumed a more realistic tone. Here again Mitchell’s influence was important; if he had been somewhat circuitous in his approach, his treatment of air power had at least been couched in terms of concrete problems. But the deciding factor was the devel- opment of new strategic plans for national defense, initiated in ac- cordance with the implications of the MacArthur-Pratt agreement of 1931 and shaped more decisively thereafter by consideration of the growing unrest in Europe and Asia. It has already been shown how conflicting opinions as to the air mission led eventually to the creation on I March 1935 of the GHQ Air Force.” That reorganization called naturally for a reformulation of doctrine, and, since the idea of such a force had long been associated with air operations of a quasi-inde- pendent nature, exponents of strategic bombardment hoped for a more positive statement of the importance of that type of mission. That hope was unfounded. While recommending the establishment of the GHQ Air Force, both the Drum Board ( I 2 October 1933) and the Baker Board ( 1 8 July 1934) had denied the possibility of an air attack on the United States and of an effective defense by aircraft alone against other modes of invasion.’22 But they did allow that GHQ aviation would prove a valuable adjunct to coast defense. T h e Baker report summed up this attitude in a dictum which was often quoted in subsequent arguments: “The development of aviation has increased the power of the offense where the countries at war border on, or are close to, each other, and has increased the power of the defense where the contestants are widely separated. This new arm is, therefore, ad- vantageous to our national policy.” l Z 3 If US. planes could not attack European cities, foreign land-based aircraft could not operate against this country without aid of a large * See above, p. 3 1 . 47
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