Lectures of the Air Corps Tactical School and American Strategic Bombing in World War II

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
The Us ◽  
Army Air Force

In the 1930s the US Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) articulated the concept of high-altitude daylight precision bombing (HADPB), a coherent yet controversial theory for victory through the independent employment of air forces. The ACTS lectures present a uniquely American theory of strategic bombing later tested in World War II. These lectures, never before published, introduce Air Corps thinking on strategic bombing during the interwar period. Their originality is found in the causal logic for how HADPB operations would lead to victory by the direct attack of vital and vulnerable economic targets. The ACTS instructors and students would later be responsible for translating theory into practice. In so doing, the logic of HADPB was tested and in many ways found wanting. Though the US Army Air Force fell short of independently achieving decisive victory, the ACTS prewar rationale for the construction of heavy bombers offered the United States the offensive capability to conduct long-range air campaigns. HADPB proved to be a key component to the Allies gaining air superiority over western Europe. Finally, HADPB raids starved the German military of fuel such that it no longer had the means to maintain its desperate counteroffensive at the Battle of the Bulge. American air power did prove critical to the Allied victory, not in the independent and decisive way envisioned by ACTS but as a crucial component of a combined arms strategy.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
High Altitude ◽  
Air Force ◽  
World War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
The Us

This introduction describes the strategic bombing mission of the US Army Air Forces’ Eighth Air Force against the Fock-Wulfe plant at Bremen, Germany, on April 17, 1943, assessing the use of high-altitude daylight precision bombing,. The introduction then reviews American strategic bombing theory from its origins in World War I to the thinking of three great interwar air power theorists―the Italian Giulio Douhet, the Briton Hugh Trenchard, and the American Billy Mitchell―to the founding of the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), the development of the Norden bombsight and B-17 bomber, and the genesis of HADPB theory at the Air Corps Tactical School.

High-Altitude Daylight Precision Bombing in World War II

2019 ◽  
pp. 195-224
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
High Altitude ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Air War ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
Harsh Reality

This concluding chapter examines US air war planning in World War II and evaluates overall American strategic bombing effectiveness: how HADPB theory held up to the reality of combat. After sketching out the early air war in Europe leading up to the entry of the United States, the chapter considers several aspects of the role American strategic bombing played during World War II, including the Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO), and evaluates how well the underlying assumptions of HADPB withstood the harsh reality of war. Finally, the chapter assesses how air power contributed overall to the Allied victory in Europe and analyzes the USAAF experience with HADPB against Japan.

The Anti-Aryan Moment: Decolonization, Diplomacy, and Race in Late Pahlavi Iran

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 691-702
Author(s):  
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Cold War

In 1946, the entertainer and activist Paul Robeson pondered America's intentions in Iran. In what was to become one of the first major crises of the Cold War, Iran was fighting a Soviet aggressor that did not want to leave. Robeson posed the question, “Is our State Department concerned with protecting the rights of Iran and the welfare of the Iranian people, or is it concerned with protecting Anglo-American oil in that country and the Middle East in general?” This was a loaded question. The US was pressuring the Soviet Union to withdraw its troops after its occupation of the country during World War II. Robeson wondered why America cared so much about Soviet forces in Iranian territory, when it made no mention of Anglo-American troops “in countries far removed from the United States or Great Britain.” An editorial writer for a Black journal in St. Louis posed a different variant of the question: Why did the American secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, concern himself with elections in Iran, Arabia or Azerbaijan and yet not “interfere in his home state, South Carolina, which has not had a free election since Reconstruction?”

Super Soldiers (Part 1)

2014 ◽  
pp. 119-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Lin ◽  
Max Mehlman ◽  
Keith Abney ◽  
Jai Galliott
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Enhancement ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The Us ◽  
Psychedelic Drugs ◽  
Public Risk ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
New Type ◽  
Modern Warfare

After World War II, much debate unfolded about the ethical, legal, and social implications of military human enhancement, due in part to Adolf Hitler's war on the “genetically unfit” and the United States military's experimentation with psychedelic drugs such as LSD. Interest in that debate has waxed and waned since the 1940s. However, it would be foolish or perhaps even dangerous to believe that America and its modern allies have abandoned efforts to upgrade service members' bodies and minds to create the “super soldiers” necessary to match the increasing pace of modern warfare and dominate the strengthening militaries of China and North Korea. Slogans such as “be all that you can be and a whole lot more” still reign strong at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and, according to some military futurists, the so-called “War on Terror” has only proven that military superpowers need a new type of soldier that is independent, network-integrated, and more lethal than ever before. Patterns of public risk perception, military expenditure, and new technological developments suggest that it is now time to re-open or reinvigorate the original debate. The authors' contribution comes in two parts. In this chapter, they provide a brief background to military human enhancement before defining it carefully and exploring the relevant controversies. In the second, they more explicitly examine the relevant legal, operational, and moral challenges posed by these efforts.

4. The Second World War

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Frank Ledwidge
Keyword(s):  
Air Force ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Royal Air Force ◽  
Us Army ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Effect ◽  
Second World

‘The Second World War: air operations in the West’ considers the air capabilities of the main actors of the Second World War including the Polish air force, the German Luftwaffe, the Soviet air force, Britain’s Royal Air Force, and the US Army Air Corps. It discusses the strategies employed by the different forces during the various stages of the war, including securing the control of the air during the Battle of Britain in 1940, which demonstrated that a defensive air campaign could have strategic and political effect. The improving technology throughout the war is discussed along with role of air power at sea, and the results and controversy of the bombing war in Europe.

The Spectre of Americanization: Western Europe in the American Century

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Gassert
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
Film Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Threat ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time

By 1945, the spectre of Americanisation had been haunting Europe for half a century. With the United States still struggling to establish colonial rule over the Philippine Islands, European observers began framing the ‘American challenge’ as a cultural and most of all economic threat to national independence. Controversies about the impact of ‘America’ often served as a stand-in for a more fundamental reckoning with processes of modernisation. The initial period of sustained Americanisation was the 1920s, when American film, music, and automobiles were conquering Europe for the first time. A second heyday of Americanisation ‘from below’ started with the ‘American occupation of Britain’ and that of continental Europe during and after World War II. This article focuses on Western Europe and Americanisation, highlighting Americanisation from above and Americanisation from below. It looks at two concepts that often come up within debates about Americanisation: Westernisation and anti-Americanism.

W. H. Auden in an Age of Dark Oratory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Galvin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Poetic Language ◽  
World War ◽  
Bodily Experience ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
Military Uniform

This chapter charts how Auden’s strategies for writing about war as a civilian changed during World War II, extending the previous chapter’s inquiry regarding the journalistic aspirations of his 1930s writing and his vision of the transformation of bodily experience into text. It contends that the poems of Another Time offer parables of wartime interrelation: models for imagining the relation between contemplation and action, civilian and soldier. Further, whereas The Double Man has been read as superannuated and excessively rhetorical, this chapter argues that it shrewdly showcases the resources of poetic language available to the noncombatant. A concluding section examines a surprising episode in 1945 when Auden donned a military uniform for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and finally got the bird’s eye view of war he had imagined.

Internment of Japanese and Japanese Latin Americans During World War II

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Selfa A. Chew
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coastal Zones ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Government

The lives of Latin American Japanese were disrupted during World War II, when their civil and human rights were suspended. National security and continental defense were the main reasons given by the American countries consenting to their uprooting. More than 2,000 ethnic Japanese from Peru, Panama, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, and Nicaragua were transferred as “illegal aliens” to internment camps in the United States. Initially, US and Latin American agencies arrested and deported male ethnic Japanese, regardless of their citizenship status. During the second stage, women and children joined their relatives in the United States. Most forced migration originated in Peru. Brazil and Mexico established similar displacement programs, ordering the population of Japanese descent to leave the coastal zones, and in the case of Mexico the border areas. In both countries, ethnic Japanese were under strict monitoring and lost property, employment, and family and friend relationships, losses that affected their health and the opportunity to support themselves in many cases. Latin American Japanese in the United States remained in camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the army for the duration of the war and were among the last internees leaving the detention facilities, in 1946. At the conclusion of World War II, the Latin American countries that had agreed to the expulsion of ethnic Japanese limited greatly their return. Some 800 internees were deported to Japan from the United States by the closure of the camps. Those who remained in North America were allowed to leave the camps to work in a fresh produce farm in Seabrook, New Jersey, without residency or citizenship rights. In 1952, immigration restrictions for former Latin American internees were lifted. Latin American governments have not apologized for the uprooting of the ethnic Japanese, while the US government has recognized it as a mistake. In 1988, the United States offered a symbolic compensation to all surviving victims of the internment camps in the amount of $20,000. In contrast, in 1991, Latin American Japanese survivors were granted only $5,000.

Korean Immigration to the United States After World War II

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Mun-hye Baik
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Korean Women ◽  
World War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Korean Immigration

Korean immigration to the United States has been shaped by multiple factors, including militarization, colonialism, and war. While Koreans migrated to the American-occupied islands of Hawai’i in the early 20th century as sugar plantation laborers, Japanese imperial rule (1910–1945) and racially exclusive immigration policy curtailed Korean migration to the United States until the end of World War II. Since then, Korean immigration has been shaped by racialized, gendered, and sexualized conditions related to the Korean War and American military occupation. Although existing social science literature dominantly frames Korean immigration through the paradigm of migration “waves,” these periodizations are arbitrary to the degree that they centralize perceived US policy changes or “breaks” within a linear historical timeline. In contrast, emphasizing the continuing role of peninsular instability and militarized division points to the accumulative effects of the Korean War that continue to impact Korean immigration. With the beginning of the American military occupation of Korea in 1945 and warfare erupting in 1950, Koreans experienced familial separations and displacements. Following the signing of the Korean armistice in 1953, which halted armed fighting without formally ending the war, the American military remained in the southern half of the Peninsula. The presence of the US military in South Korea had immediate repercussions among civilians, as American occupation engendered sexual intimacies between Korean women and US soldiers. Eventually, a multiracial population emerged as children were born to Korean women and American soldiers. Given the racial exclusivity of American immigration policy at the time, the US government established legislative “loopholes” to facilitate the migrations of Korean spouses of US soldiers and multiracial children adopted by American families. Between 1951 and 1964 over 90 percent of the 14,027 Koreans who entered the United States were Korean “war brides” and transnational adoptees. Since 1965, Korean spouses of American servicemen have played key roles in supporting the migration of family members through visa sponsorship. Legal provisions that affected the arrivals of Korean women and children to the United States provided a precedent for US immigration reform after 1950. For instance, the 1952 and 1965 Immigration and Nationality Acts integrated core elements of these emergency orders, including privileging heterosexual relationships within immigration preferences. Simultaneously, while the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act “opened” the doors of American immigration to millions of people, South Korean military dictatorial rule and the imminent threat of rekindled warfare also influenced Korean emigration. As a result, official US immigration categories do not necessarily capture the complex conditions informing Koreans’ decisions to migrate to the United States. Finally, in light of the national surge of anti-immigrant sentiments that have crystallized since the American presidential election of Donald Trump in November 2016, immigration rights advocates have highlighted the need to address the prevalence of undocumented immigrant status among Korean Americans. While definitive statistics do not exist, emergent data suggests that at least 10 percent of the Korean American population is undocumented. Given this significant number, the undocumented status of Korean Americans is a critical site of study that warrants further research.

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