Aviation In The U S Army 1919 1939

Historians generally agree that the birth of American air power occurred in the two decades between the world wars, when airmen in the U.S. Army and Navy forged the aircraft, the organization, the cadre of leadership, and the doctrines that formed a foundation for the country to win the air war in World War II. Nearly every scholarly study of this era focuses on these developments, or upon the aircraft of the period; very few works describe precisely what the flyers were doing and how they overcame the difficulties they faced in creating air forces. In this detailed, comprehensive volume, Dr. Maurer Maurer, retired senior historian of the United States Air Force Historical Research Center, fills this void for land-based aviation. As Dr. Maurer explains in his personal note, this book grew out of his previous editing of the documents of the American Air Service in World War I. He decided to write a descriptive rather than an analytical book, taking the vantage point of the Army flyers themselves. While policy, organization, and doctrine form the background, they are not addressed or explained explicitly. Instead, Dr. Maurer focuses on men and planes, describing in the process how the Army Air Corps came to possess a supporting structure and the nationwide network of airfields. He exposes the difficulties encountered in training and organizing tactical units. However, Dr. Maurer does not write solely about problems and setbacks. In his capable narrative hands, readers cross the country and the continents on the many dramatic record flights with the flyers of the Army Air Corps. The value of this book is twofold: the wealth of detail Dr. Maurer provides about the scope, structure, and activities of interwar Army aviation; and the comprehensive portrait that emerges of a military service struggling with limited resources to develop a new weapon of tremendous destructive potential. As such, the book fills a gap in the literature and contributes to knowledge about the history of the Army air arm.

Examines the development of military night aviation from its origins through the 1st World War. Places emphasis on the evolution of night flying in those countries which fought on the Western Front, namely France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.

This study examines the development and usefulness of US air attack theory and doctrine during the interwar period, 1919-1941. This period represents more than twenty years of development in US Air Corps attack theory and doctrine. It was the first peacetime period of such development. Attack aviation during this time was a branch of aviation used to provide direct and indirect combat support to ground forces in the form of machine gun strafing, light bombing, and chemical attacks. From the earliest origins, attack theory and doctrine evolved primarily along two paths direct and indirect support of ground and air force objectives. The direct support approach was based on fundamental beliefs by the Army that attack aviation was an auxiliary combat arm, to be used directly on the battlefield against ground forces and to further the ground campaign plan. The indirect support approach, or air interdiction, was derived from the fundamental beliefs by the Air Corps that attack aviation was best used beyond the battle line and artillery range, against targets more vulnerable and less heavily defended, to further both the Air Force mission and the ground support mission. As attack doctrine evolved, range and hardened targets became problematic for the single-engine attack plane. Thus, attack theory and doctrine in terms of the indirect support approach, was adequately developed to be useful at the start of WWII. The use of light and medium bombers in North Africa showed the effectiveness of air interdiction and the indirect approach. Attack aviation had, indeed, established itself before WWII. Attack aviation, in the form of close air support, would have to wait for the lessons of WWII.

'The Army and Its Air Corps was James P. TateÆs doctoral dissertation at Indiana University in 1976. During the past 22 years, TateÆs remarkable work has gained wide acceptance among scholars for its authoritative and well-documented treatment of the formative years of what eventually became the United States Air Force. Thoroughly researched but bearing its scholarship lightly, TateÆs narrative moves swiftly as it describes the ambitions, the frustrations, and the excruciatingly slow march to final success that never deterred the early airmen. Robert B. Lane Director Air University Press