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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 tion-saw also the development of facilities and policies upon which the Air Corps’ experimental program would depend. McCook Field at Dayton, Ohio, had been selected as an experimental center for the Air Service in 1917.During the war the Engineering Division estab- lished there had devoted its attention chiefly to modification of Euro- pean models for American manufacture. Essentially that was a production rather than a research job, but, with the coming of peace, the emphasis shifted toward the latter field.Is4As in the great industrial laboratories of America, however, the research efforts of the Air Service naturally tended to fall under the general classification of applied science. Experiments were conducted with a view primarily to practical military need, and necessarily the testing of newly devel- oped equipment went hand in hand with the search for improved designs, better fuels, and more adaptable materials. In June 1926 the Engineering Division and the Fairfield Air Depot, also located in the Dayton area, were joined under a newly created Ailateriel Division which became responsible to the Supply Division of the Office of the Chief of the Air Corps. After a transfer in the following year of the Materiel Division from McCook to better quarters at near-by Wright Field, that installation became the chief center of Air Corps research, engineering, and testing acti~ities.”~Its experimental facilities repre- sented an investment valued in 1939 at about ten million dollars. In keeping with long-established policy, 1,759 of a total personnel of 1,984were at that time ~ivi1ians.l~~ Fortunately, the Air Corps did not have to depend wholly upon its own resources. T h e NACA, established in 1915 with a congressional mandate to undertake “scientific research on the fundamental prob- lems of flight,” conducted experiments in its Langley Memorial Aero- nautical Laboratory a t Langley Field, Virginia, upon which the Air Corps in common with other agencies of the government drew re- peatedly. Similarly, the Air Corps became indebted to the Civil Aero- nautics Authority and its predecessors in the Department of Commerce which were charged with responsibility for the safety of civil aviation. Especially helpful was the Bureau of Standards, which on request undertook projects in the development of such essentials as fuels, lubri- cants, and a110ys.l~~For the development of radio and radar equipment it was necessary to look to the Signal Corps, for until October 1944 that organization would retain control of experimental work in the important field of c o r n m u n i c a t i o n ~ . ~ ~ ~ 5 5
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