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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 more specific defense mission than that implied in the Joint Action of I I September 1935. The recommendations contained therein were indorsed by the Chief of the Air Corps, General Westover, and for- warded to The Adjutant General for action; but by the summer of 1937 it was evident that no revision in the Army-Navy agreement would be made. By the following year the international situation was such that national defense had come to assume a new significance, and the concept of hemisphere defense was being shaped. On 17 October 1938 the Air Corps Board completed a study, “Air Corps Mission under the Monroe Doctrine,” in which the primary air role was con- ceived as defense against hostile efforts to operate from air bases estab- lished in the This concept, which subordinated both antishipping strikes and offensive strategic bombardment to counter- air activities, was to exert a tremendous influence over air planning and designing during the emergency years of 1939-41.* Meanwhile there was no lack of a more aggressive doctrine within certain circles in the Air Corps. Expounded by some officers in OCAC, these doctrines received special attention in the Air Corps Tactical School, which was moved from Langley Field to Maxwell Field, Alabama, in 193I . The establishment of the GHQ Air Force, however much that force might be considered as a defensive weapon, seemed to many officers as a means by which a theory of offensive air war might be revived. Even when the school in 1935 had emphasized the defensive role in its comments on Kilbourne’s paper, the transitory nature of that role had been stressed: “There is no intention anywhere in these comments of not conveying the thought that the principal and all important mission of air power, when its equipment permits, is the attack of those vital objectives in a nation’s economic structure which will tend to paralyze that nation’s ability to wage war and thus con- tribute directly to the attainment of the ultimate objective of war, namely, the disintegration of the hostile will to resist.” 1 3 5 That theme, from 1935 on, assumed even larger proportions in lec- tures given a t the school. A full roster of the instructors might prove of high significance for a history of World War 11, for it would include an important proportion of officers-many still in junior grades-who were to direct air strategy, as members either of the AAF Head- quarters staff or of some joint or combined agency: Hal George, Ken Walker, Tony Frank, Sandy Fairchild, Larry Kuter, Possum Hansell, See below, Chap. 4. 50
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