Page:A Concise History of the U.S. Air Force.djvu/26



Despite the heroics of such airmen as Lieutenant George Welch, who was credited with having downed 4 enemy aircraft, the surprise strike on Pearl Harbor showed the limitations of the USAAF's preparations for war. The Hawaiian Air Force lost 66 percent of its strength on December 7, 1941, while the Japanese lost only 29 pilots. Across the International Dateline, Lieutenant Joseph Moore claimed 2 Japanese aircraft the next day in the skies over Clark Field in the Philippines, but General Douglas MacArthur's air force of 277 aircraft, including 2 squadrons of B-17s (35 aircraft in all), was destroyed. These greatest concentrations of American air power at the time had failed to deter or hinder the Japanese.

At the start of World War I a solid industrial infrastructure on which to construct the world's greatest air force had not existed in the United States. At the start of World War II this was not the case. The aircraft manufacturing sector was large and growing daily. Before the war, General Arnold had established nine civilian primary flight training schools, two Air Corps basic flight training schools, and two Air Corps advanced flight training schools. The number of trained pilots had jumped from 300 in 1938 to 30,000 in 1941 (plus 110,000 mechanics). On December 7, 1941, the USAAF had a running start and was in the war for the duration.

Arnold planned first for vastly expanded production, training, and research, with the long-term military interests of the nation in mind. While German factories maintained a one-shift peacetime work week until 1943, American plants ran around the clock. Swelled by hundreds of thousands of women, more than two million American workers built nearly 160,000 aircraft of all kinds for the Army and 140,000 for the Navy and Allied nations during the war. America's aircraft production overwhelmed that of every other nation in the world. Altogether, its factories turned out 324,750 aircraft for the war effort; Germany's factories turned out 111,077 and Japan's 79,123. Where other nations stopped production lines to make modifications, or manufactured models long obsolescent, the United States, according to Arnold's orders, left its factories alone to insure high production levels and established separate depots to modify and modernize older models. Until the German Me 262 jet, American aircraft set the standard for performance and combat success with their ruggedness (the B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, and P-47 Thunderbolt); their range and bomb load (the B-29 Superfortress); their range, speed, and agility (the P-51 Mustang); and their utility (the C-47 Skytrain). Eventually, they were to equip 243 groups, consuming about 21