#Ibomber defense eastern europe free#

#Ibomber defense eastern europe free#

1 Now, as an officially constituted antisubmarine unit, the AAFAC was able to attack its problems with undivided energy, free at least from any immediate uncertainty as to its mission. The efforts of its predecessor and parent, the I Bomber Command, had been handicapped by the fact that the task allocated to it was presumably a temporary one. 15.Īnd a new administrative machinery for coordinating research in the tactics and techniques of antisubmarine warfare.

* The beginning of AAF antisubmarine operations and the steps leading up to the organization of this command have been discussed in Volume I, chap.

Not only did it have to increase its effective strength as rapidly as possible but to meet its enlarged obligations it had also to inaugurate an entirely new training program, new supply procedures, The new command faced large and complex problems of organization and build-up. In this debate the AAFAC became a test case, with the result that its exploits, though by no means inconsiderable, are overshadowed by the larger issues of policy. It involves a controversy concerning the control and use of long-range, land-based aircraft which raised certain fundamental issues of American military organization and which culminated in one of the key decisions made in that regard during the war. Moreover, the aircraft on antisubmarine duty operated during that same period in a campaign calculated to complement exactly the bombing of the European bases by the RAF and the Eighth Air Force.† But the story of the AAFAC reaches beyond the strategic situation in the Atlantic. This enterprise, on which the newly activated Army Air Forces Antisubmarine Command (AAFAC) embarked in October 1942, * formed an integral part of the air effort in the west, for until the summer of 1943 the U-boats remained the gravest threat to that buildup of forces, both air and surface, on which the long-range air plans depended. WHILE the AAF was preparing its major air offensive against Hitler's European stronghold, it was also engaged effectively, if somewhat anomalously, in hunting submarines.