Free The Burning Shore by Ed Offley

struggled to respond to the crisis. During World War I, the British had sent then-primitive aircraft and dirigibles offshore to hunt for the kaiser’s first-generation U-boats, but they lacked effective sensors and weapons to locate and destroy the enemy. As a result, aircraft sank none of the 204 U-boats lost between 1914 and 1918, although the British continued to expand aerial patrols since they succeeded in driving the submersibles under water, thereby allowing Allied ships to escape attack.
    It had been well known that aviation could be an effective tool against submarines; difficult for U-boat commanders to detect, airplanes were unusually effective at spotting and forcing the submersibles under water. Yet, although the Allies possessed several strong and growing air service branches, infighting hobbled most of them as the Battle of the Atlantic accelerated.
    In the United Kingdom, the Royal Air Force’s Coastal Command was struggling against its two more powerful rivals—BomberCommand and Fighter Command—for aircraft, resources, and trained personnel. In the United States, the USAAF and the navy were gridlocked over which service should take on the fight against the U-boats with the scarce numbers of long-range bombers then available. The USAAF, under long-standing federal law, owned and controlled all land-based bombers, while the navy merely operated seaplanes and smaller land-based aircraft to patrol the nation’s sea frontiers.
    Nor was this interservice rivalry alone hampering the development of aircraft antisubmarine capabilities. The USAAF itself was consumed with its own ongoing expansion, as Lieutenant Harry Kane and the rest of the 396th Medium Bombardment Squadron were well aware when March ended and April blew in on a fresh spring breeze. The weather had improved, but frustration levels remained high. Still based at Sacramento Municipal Airport, the 396th aircrews continued a nonstop slog of combat crew training and administrative duties that seemed as if they might outlast the war. “Most of it was training and patrol, flying up and down the Pacific Coast,” Kane later said. “There [were] other squadrons further north that [trained] up around Oregon and Washington.” Four months after Pearl Harbor, the USAAF was nowhere near ready to take on the Germans and the Japanese. Aviation strategists since the 1920s had predicted that air power would someday become a primary military force for any industrial nation, and the USAAF had indeed accomplished much in the past three years. But the newest military branch still had an incredible distance to go before it could feasibly take the war into the skies over the Axis.
    The Army Air Corps (as it had been called until mid-1941) was born four years after Orville Wright made the first powered flight in an airplane at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, in 1903. Buried within the army bureaucracy, its predecessor, the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps, initially had a maximum personnel strength of three men. While World War I saw a spike in its growth to 227 aircraft, during the early 1920s the air branch languished. It would take the rise of Adolf Hitler and the spectacle of German airpower wreaking havoc in the Spanish Civil War to prompt President Franklin Roosevelt and army leaders to get Congress to open the money spigot for new aircraft, airfields, training centers, and pilots. After the 1938 Munich crisis, when Hitler bullied the British and French into allowing Germany to swallow the Czech Sudetenland, FDR said he wanted to build a modern air corps of 20,000 combat aircraft and develop an aviation industry production capability of 2,000 aircraft per month.
    As the specter of war drew nearer, Roosevelt had to revise his initially ambitious goal as planners’ estimates of what army aviation would require rapidly expanded: in April 1940, FDR told Congress he wanted American industry to produce 50,000 aircraft per year. Nevertheless, a month after