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Antisubmarine Command

The news of Pearl Harbor alerted America's military leaders for defense of the coastal areas of the United States. On that day, at the Navy's request, the First Air Force's I Bomber Command was ordered to begin over-water reconnaissance for enemy shipping, especially submarines. The patrols started the following afternoon; from then until August 1943 the AAP shared with the Navy, while acting under the latter's operational control, the responsibility for countering the German U-boat menace.

To the initial emergency patrols the AAF (Army Air Force) assigned all bombardment and reconnaissance aircraft available on the East Coast after some of the most experienced units had been dispatched to the pacific. This improvised antisubmarine striking force consisted of A-20s, A-29s, B-17s, B-18s, and B-25s, none equipped with radar. By March 1942, a few B-18s had radar, and for the rest of the year they became the work horses of the command. The ultimate backbone of the counter-attack on the U-boat fleet was the radar-equipped B-24, its large capacity and long range making it an ideal land-based antisubmarine plane. In time other special devices, lacking on the early patrols, were adapted to anti-submarine aircraft. This progress was made with the help of the Sea Search Attack Development Unit, established at Langley Field in 1942, and other research organizations, including that of the Navy.

Fortunately for the motley antisubmarine force assembled by the AAF in December 1941, the enemy's U-boats took nearly a month to begin their devastating work in American waters. Their first success in the Eastern Sea Frontier occurred on January 14, 1942. Through the following spring and summer the Nazis kept enough U-boats in America's East Coast waters to make the area a veritable graveyard of Allied merchant shipping vessels. The offensive in the Eastern and Gulf Sea Frontiers reached its peak in May 1942 with a toll of 47 sinkings. By October 1942 the enemy had been virtually eliminated from home waters; and the U-boats continued southward to prey oil United Nations shipping in the Trinidad area, posing a serious threat during the coming African invasion.

In October 1942 the I Bomber Command officially became the AAF Antisubmarine Command, under Brig. Gen. Westside T. Larson. This command, greatly aided in organizational and tactical matters by the Royal Air Force Coastal Command, was able to deploy its forces so as to strike at U-boats both in the Bay of Biscay, temporarily home waters for the submarines, and on the North Atlantic convoy route. They thus contributed to the defense when, in the spring of 1943, the Nazis began an allout U-boat offensive against the lifelines of the anti-Axis war effort along the North Atlantic route. Through Allied cooperation, air and surface defenses successfully countered the attacks. In September Churchill was able to announce that for the past three months no United Nations vessel had been lost to submarine action in that area. Never again were U-boats to constitute a major threat to United Nations war strategy, although they continued to be a problem, even after D-Day, June 5, 1944.

The record of the Antisubmarine Command cannot be measured entirely by the number of enemy submarines attacked and sunk. Simply by patrolling vast areas of vital shipping lanes, its 25 squadrons materially reduced the efficiency of enemy operations. But the I Bomber Command and its successor, the Antisubmarine Command, nevertheless did deal telling blows against the U-boat fleet, particularly after being provided with specially equipped and modified B-24s. These ordinarily went out singly many hundreds of miles from base, farther than any other type of land-based aircraft at that time, and thus were ready to attack suddenly whenever a target might be discovered in the vast stretches of the Atlantic.

These sorties, carried out in large numbers, did much to disperse the U-boat wolf packs and demoralize their crews in the North Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay, and in the waters off Gibraltar. Among the most effective units were the 479th and 480th Antisubmarine Groups. In nine days of July 1943 the B-24s of the 480th made twelve attacks on enemy Submarines in the approaches to Gibraltar, sinking one, probably sinking three, and damaging three others. Thanks in a measure to their efforts, convoys on the way to reinforce invasion troops in Sicily reached the Mediterranean relatively untouched. By August 1943 the worst was over and the Navy assumed full responsibility for antisubmarine activity. The AAF Antisubmarine Command turned over the specially equipped B-24s to the Navy, and returned to its former functions as the I Bomber Command.

Excerpts from The Official Pictorial Hostory of the USAAF. The USAAF Antisubmarine Command. The Journal 2nd Air Division. Volume 43 Number 1, Spring 2004.

click image to enlarge Map shows routes totalling 140,000 miles as of the end of 1944.

Air Transport Command

The Army's great aerial transportation agency was the Air Transport Command. Whenever men, planes, and supplies had to be delivered in a hurry or whenever there was no other means of getting them where they were needed, the Air Transport Command took on the job. Under wartime conditions transport or combat planes crossed the Atlantic on an average of one every 13 minutes, the broader Pacific, every hour and a half; and, in one year, more than a billion pounds of high priority cargo, passengers, and mail were carried to war theaters around the globe.

An ATC C-46 flies "the Hump" between India and China, making routine a feat almost unheard of in pre-war days. Douglas C-54 Skymaster This ship, used for long overwater hops by commercial airlines under contract with the Army, is the type in which President Roosevelt returned from the Casablanca conference and made the Teheran-Cairo trip of 1943. Powered by four Pratt & Whitney engines, it is capable of carrying heavy loads to any part of the globe. Contracts were made with all airlines, TWA, United, etc.

The ATC began as the Air Corps Ferrying Command on May 29, 1941 with two officers, one civilian, a world map posted in a Washington office, and an assignment to assist in delivering military aircraft to the countries then fighting for democracy. Within a year, airfields, isolated stations, and lonely weather and communications outposts had been built on deserts, tropical islands, and arctic wastes. The first ferry delivery reached Montreal on June 9, 1941. The first transatlantic flight - from Washington to Prestwick - departed on July 1. A trip to Cairo was undertaken in September, followed by a round-the-world journey touching Washington, Prestwick, Moscow, and Singapore. From the first contract in August 1941, fullest use was made of the skill and experience of the commercial airlines flying under contract to the War Department and dependent for control upon the ATC.

After America entered the war, many civilian transport pilots were commissioned as officers to ferry military aircraft. Experienced commercial airline executives donned uniforms to serve on the staff of veteran flyer Lt. Gen. Harold L. George, who had assumed command of the Ferrying Command on April 1, 1942.

By June 1942, ATC routes touched all six continents. Routes were inaugurated to Alaska in April 1942, and in June, when the ATC took its present name, B-17s were delivered on short notice to participate in the Battle of Midway, and personnel and munitions were rushed to Dutch harbor to check the Japanese in the Aleutians. In July the first plane landed at Ascension Island, base on the South Atlantic route, P-38s were flown to the United Kingdom in August, and A-20s to North Africa with the U.S. landings in November. In December the ATC took over the route from Assam to China, flown since April 1942 by the lst Ferrying Group of the Tenth Air Force.

By 1945 the ATC, with more than 200,000 members in uniform, was flying with clocklike regularity routes that were considered unflyable before the war. To supply the Fourteenth Air Force and the XX Bomber Command, it carried fuel, bombs, jeeps, five-ton trucks, and 12 1/2-ton roadscrapers over the towering Himalayas, achieving during July 1945 an average of one plane every 1.3 minutes over the Hump. By the war's end, ATC operated 11 divisions, delivering at airplane speed to every front the critically needed items on which global victory was to hinge.

Excerpts from The Official Pictorial Hostory of the USAAF. The USAAF Air Transport Command. The Journal 2nd Air Division. Volume 43 Number 2, Summer 2004.

Air Training Command

The Air Force team, fighting and winning the sky battles of World War II above the wadies of Africa and the growing ruin of Europe, braving the frozen fury of Aleutian williwaws and the enemy-infested skies of the vast Pacific, was a team of Americans that appeared almost miraculously out of the nowhere of national unpreparedness to establish air superiority, the keystone of victory.

The realities that created the "miracle" Air Force of World War II were the realities of training. The realities of training are of one with the background and being of the Air Training Command. It is in the story of how the Air Training Command came to be that one finds the story of how the greatest Air Force in history came to be.

Between the two World Wars, Chanute Field was the lone Technical Training Command school and it operated only three training courses until 1938 - mechanics, communications and armament. In the 20 year period prior to 1941, it produced 14,803 technicians.

The Flying Training Command, operating Randolph and Kelly Field, Texas, had produced only 3,851 pilots in the seventeen years between December of 1922 and December of 1939. The training program began to expand somewhat in 1939 when the light of peace was extinguished in Europe. This preliminary expansion was continued through 1940 and 1941 as peace deteriorated rapidly in the Far East, but when that peace was destroyed in one stroke on the dawn of December 7, 1941, the vast majority of the men who were to become the Air Force team were not even in training for that team.

Each immediately had a job to do, but each required training of a highly complex, technical nature to do that job. It was up to the Air Force training establishment to provide that training. By 1942, with the nation fighting for its life, the feverish expansion of the Air Force training program as it sought to produce a miracle began to magnify the ills of the decentralized, divided training structure. Shortages in construction materials, in technical equipment, in instructor and administrative personnel; shortages in time itself, were beginning to plague a structure that labored, in semi-autonomous establishments.

The team was being produced, but it became clear that centralization of mission, authority and control could do the job better. This was translated into the activation of Headquarters, the Air Training Command, on July 7 1943, to direct the training, as individuals, of all air crewmen and technicians of the Air Force. The arbitrary distinction between air and ground training was retained and both the Flying Training Command and the Technical Training Command were retained, but both were subordinate to the top level headquarters which brought continuity between the two, welding all trainmg into one massive effort.

The amalgamation made the Air Training Command the largest concordant educational effort in world history. At peak strength, personnel of the command membered one million men and women. There were 475 active Training Command establishments and thirty thousand airplanes were utilized.

It was from this effort and the 20-year effort that preceded it that the Air Force team emerged. It emerged -in the war period from December, 1941 through August of 1945-as 193,240 pilots, 50,976 navigators, 47,354 bombardiers, 195,422 radio mechanics and operators, 51,357 radar mechanics, 347,236 gunners and 497,533 aircraft and engine mechanics.

All courses were briefed considerably below pre-war schedules and all featured considerable practical or "learn by doing" study. Men who desired pilot training, for example, were selected upon the basis of special tests and entered a concise four-phase pilot training curriculum.

The pilot-to-be first attended a nine-week preflight school, where many of the basic facts of pilotage were imparted to him. He studied radio code, navigation, meteorology, air and naval identification and the theories of flight. He learned the meaning of horsepower and aeronautical terms; the importance and use of oxygen.

Next, he entered the primary phase of pilot instruction. During the war, primary flying schools were civilian contract schools, with Aviation Cadets operating directly under military control and discipline. After approximately ten hours of instruction in a primary trainer, the student soloed and began working to increase his proficiency. He learned "stages" and traffic patterns, acrobatics, map reading and the practical use of landmarks for contact flying. His primary flying time added up to 65 hours, during which his proficiency was checked at frequent intervals.

From primary, the student advanced to the higher-powered basic training planes, where he centered his efforts on precision. He flew formations, added to his knowledge of maneuvers and acquired the knack of flying at night. Supplementing his hours aloft, the Cadet perfected the sending and receiving of radio code and blinker signals in classroom study. He drew weather maps, interpreted weather reports, studied cloud formations and "fronts".

After 130 hours of flying with the real power of a basic trainer at his touch, the Cadet was graduated into the advanced phase of his instruction. He specialized as either a single-engine fighter pilot or as pilot of a multi-engined bomber or cargo plane. The advanced single-engine course utilized the AT-6 aircraft, a 600-horsepower airplane which accurately prepared the student for the speed and maneuverability of combat flying. The bomber or cargo pilot was, in the meantime, learning to handle an airplane with more than one source of power. Because the bomber is essentially a long-range weapon, this course featured greater concentration on practice missions, navigation and instrument flying. If destined for medium-bombardment craft, the pilot also had a special six-hour course in gunnery in order to direct effectively the fixed machine guns of his plane. After receiving his wings at the twin-engine advanced school, the pilot progressed into one of the "post graduate" twin-engine or four-engine schools where he flew the type of bomber he was destined to use in combat.

The training of specialists followed a similar pattern. The radio operator-gunner was selected for his special aptitudes for the job before him. His first task was to master radio and, at one of Air Training Command's radio schools he received this specialized instruction. He learned how to send and receive messages and to repair, maintain and install aircraft radios. He mastered operational net and airdrome tower procedures and was graduated from the school as an efficient radio operator.

He then advanced into gunnery training where he acquired the technique of shooting. He studied the .50 calibre machine gun, learning to identify the more than 200 parts of this weapon. He learned to disassemble and reassemble the weapon and to repair minor malfunctions. He was thus equipped to serve his bomber as radioman and to double as a machine gunner for the defense of that bomber in combat.

Training Command approached the training of airplane mechanics in a manner calculated to permit a high degree of specialization. The demand for mechanics was almost insatiable and each specific aircraft used by the operational units demanded specialized mechanics. Training Command produced mechanics with specialized knowledge of the B-24 for groups utilizing this type of bomber. With the introduction of the B-29 into the combat picture, the entire facility of one of the largest installations was shifted to the training of Superfort mechanics. Other schools were producing mechanics for each of the cargo and fighter models and for the other types of medium and heavy bombers in use.

The production of more than half a million mechanics was no easy job. Men were selected for training upon a basis of demonstrated mechanical aptitude. The student then entered school and immediately began working with the engines and the aircraft which were to mark his specialization.

It was in the airplane mechanic schools that Training Command's "learn by doing" theory of mass education was most clearly demonstrated during the war. "Learn by doing" meant just that. The student received a working knowledge of the basic theories governing operation of his equipment and then spent the remainder of his training period as an apprentice at work on that equipment. Upon graduation, the mechanic was an experienced technician for whom operational duty held few surprise maintenance problems.

Aircraft Versus Submarine The Evolution of the Anti-Submarine Aircraft, 1912-1945. Price. This newly revised book tells the story of the cat-and-mouse tactics employed by aviators and submariners to outwit each other, including accounts of some of the most dramatic actions during both world wars. It also covers the development of electronic warfare and purpose-built weapons and the role they played in the lethal duel fought over World War II waters.

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