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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.
“King”32 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 material development in the period 1919-39will indicate how much of the energies of the Air Corps was devoted to the search for a long- range heavy bomber and how intimately that effort was tied to the organizational and doctrinal issues which have just been described. Evolution of the Long-Range Bomber The Air Service emerged from World War I with a keen sense of its responsibility for a solution to the related problems of what the most effective air weapon might be and how that weapon should be utilized. Perhaps it was the novelty of the air weapon itself and the realization of its rapid rate of obsolescence that gave to the small group of airmen who remained with the service a fresher approach than was common in America’s peacetime military establishment. Perhaps it was the impetus provided by a wartime experimental program which bore its chief fruit after, rather than before, the termination of hostili- ties. Perhaps, too, an additional spur to action came from the airman’s desire to prove his case in the face of official disinclination to admit the validity of his claims. At any rate, appropriations by the Air Service for research and development during the three fiscal years immediately following the war were higher than at any time there- after prior to 1936. Indeed, they continued through the fiscal year 1926 to represent a greater percentage of the funds annually appro- priated for the Air Service than would be allotted to these purposes in any of the subsequent years.152 The figures taken alone are none too impressive: four and a half million for 1920,just under six million for 192I , just over four million for 1922, and a straight three million for 1924.But these sums acquire significance when considered with the fact that direct cash appro- priations for support of the Air Service had fallen precipitously from the wartime peak of 952 million for the fiscal year 1919 to the round figure of twenty-eight million for 1920.” Four years later the total had been pared to twelve and a half million, and for the fiscal year immediately preceding passage of the Air Corps Act of 1926 appro- priations amounted to less than sixteen million.*53Thus in 1924 the Air Service’s allotment for research and development represented nearly 2 5 per cent of its total appropriation for that fiscal year. These first postwar years-years of the initial struggle for recogni- * The figures include only “direct” appropriations and omit sums expended by such services as the Quartermaster and Finance for the benefit of Army aviation, 54
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