more at: http://scitech.quickfound.net/aviation_news_and_search.html '"An official overall report by Gen H.H. Arnold, C.G., Army Air Forces, on World War II, showing allies and enemy in action on all fronts, and showing also home front activity." This is AAF Combat Film Report #111 and is a joint Army Air Forces & Office of Strategic Services film. Reel 1 shows various training activities and explains the formation of fighting units. Shows warehouse facilities and airplane repair activities of the Air Service Command. Gen. Arnold introduces the film. Includes scenes of planes burning after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Reel 2 locates headquarters of the U.S. and overseas commands and shows activities of the 5th and 14th Air Forces in the Pacific. A Japanese convoy is bombed and strafed in the Bismarck Sea. The Troop Carrier Command flies men and supplies over the Owen Stanley Range in New Guinea. Reel 3, the 8th Air Force battles German planes and bombs Germany. Captured German films show bomb damage, antiaircraft guns, and fighter pilots preparing to intercept U.S. planes. Reel 4, low-flying bombers of the 12th Air Force attack German positions in Africa. Planes of the 9th Air Force assist in the invasion of Sicily. "Flying Tigers" fight over China before and after joining the 14th Air Force. Shows how supplies for the 14th are carried by ships, barges, trains, trucks, and airplanes (of the 10th Air Force) to and through India and to China. Reel 5, Hong Kong is bombed. Presents statistics relating to U.S. aerial warfare for 1943 and estimates greater quantities for 1944.' Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Air_Forces The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) were the military aviation service of the United States of America during and immediately after World War II, successor to the United States Army Air Corps and the direct predecessor of the United States Air Force. The AAF were a component of the United States Army, which in 1942 was divided functionally by executive order into three autonomous forces: the Army Ground Forces, the Services of Supply (which in 1943 became the Army Service Forces), and the Army Air Forces. Each of these forces had a commanding general who reported directly to the Army Chief of Staff. The AAF administered all parts of military aviation formerly distributed among the Air Corps, General Headquarters Air Force, and the ground forces' corps area commanders, and thus became the first air organization of the U.S. Army to control its own installations and support personnel. The peak size of the AAF during the Second World War was over 2.4 million men and women in service and nearly 80,000 aircraft by 1944, and 783 domestic bases in December 1943. By "V-E Day", the Army Air Forces had 1.25 million men stationed overseas and operated from more than 1,600 airfields worldwide. The Army Air Forces were created in June 1941 to provide the air arm a greater autonomy in which to expand more efficiently, to provide a structure for the additional command echelons required by a vastly increased force, and to end an increasingly divisive administrative battle within the Army over control of aviation doctrine and organization that had been ongoing since the creation of an aviation section within the Army Signal Corps in 1914. The AAF succeeded both the Air Corps, which had been the statutory military aviation branch since 1926, and the GHQ Air Force, which had been activated in 1935 to quiet the demands of airmen for an independent Air Force... In their expansion and conduct of the war, the AAF became more than just an arm of the greater organization. By the end of World War II, the Army Air Forces had become virtually an independent service... On 13 August 1941, the Air War Plans Division of the USAAF produced its plan for a global air strategy, AWPD/1. Formally known as "Annex 2, Air Requirements" to "The Victory Program," a plan of strategic estimates involving the entire U.S. military, the plan was prepared in accordance with strategic policies drawn earlier that year in the ABC-1 agreement with the British Commonwealth and the U.S. war plan Rainbow 5. Its forecast figures, despite planning errors from lack of accurate information about weather and the German economic commitment to the war, were within 2 percent of the units and 5.5 percent of the personnel ultimately mobilized, and it accurately predicted the time frame when the invasion of Europe by the Allies would take place...

• published: 09 May 2015
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