U.S. Army Air Forces In The Pacific

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U.S. Army Air Forces In The Pacific (Aero Pictorials 2)

By Rene J. Francillon

Publisher: Aero Publishing 1969 96 Pages

ISBN: 0816803048

PDF 23 MB

When the Japanese struck at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines the AAF had some 231 combat aircraft on the Hawaiian Islands and 265 combat arc raft in the Philippines. However, the well-planned Japanese attacks soon resulted in placing the AAF in a bleak situation and two days after the fateful first Sunday in December 1941, the AAF was reduced to an almost ineffective state. Reinforcements were rushed to the battle fronts but the Japanese continued for another six months to advcnce through­out the South Pacific and the ill-equipped, outnumbered units of the AAF could do little but gallantly attempt to slow down the Nipponese onslaught.

During the first year of the war, at the insistence of the United Kingdom, the Allies hcd agreed to give top priority to operations in the E.T.O. and, consequently, the AAF units in the Pacific, Alaskan and C.B.I, theaters were deprived for many months of the necessary quantitative and qualitative reinforcements. However, as the war effort put up by the American industry resulted in greatly increased aircraft produc­tion, the AAF units begar to receive an increasing number of modern aircraft beginning in 1943 and the war of containment could at last give place to the offensive.

By the spring of 1944, the AAF, in collaboration with the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Army and forces of Allied nations, was ready to push back the forces of the Rising Sun. The Allied offensive marked by the conquest of the Marianas — from where the Boeing B-29 Superfortresses took the war to the heart of Japan — the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa culminated in the dropping of the first atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.