Free The Burning Shore by Ed Offley Page A

the fall of France in June 1940, air corps planners formally proposed to field a force of fifty-four combat groups and receive over 4,000 modern warplanes by April 1942. Each bomb group fielded between seventy-two and ninety-six aircraft. Just seven months later, on February 14, 1941, General George C. Marshall ordered air corps commander-in-chief Major General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold to prepare for a force of eighty-four combat groups totaling 7,800aircraft. To man this emerging behemoth, Marshall also directed the expansion of army pilot training in 1941 to 30,000 cadets per year. This also unleashed construction crews from coast to coast building hundreds of new air corps bases, as well as pilot and aircrew training centers. The USAAF would ultimately grow to a force of 231,099 aircraft of all types, including 35,000 long-range bombers and 68,712 fighters, and a manpower of 2.1 million personnel.
    In the spring of 1942, however, the USAAF was still a mere shadow of the force it would become by the end of the war. Harry Kane and his fellow fliers in the 396th were part of a fighting organization still in its infancy. Few USAAF bomber units were fully certified for combat, and none had the sensors, weapons, tactics, and aviator skills needed for the difficult mission of locating and destroying a U-boat. This was especially true on the US East Coast. 1
    On December 8, 1941, the I Bomber Command under Brigadier General Arnold N. Krogstad had begun patrol flights offshore. Krogstad had a force of fewer than fifty bombers, including nine long-range B-17s, a handful of the underperforming B-18s, and several dozen medium-range B-25 and B-26 bombers. Daily patrols of two aircraft apiece originated at Bangor, Maine; Westover Field, Massachusetts; Mitchel Field, New York; and Langley Field, Virginia. The B-17s patrolled out to six hundred miles offshore, while the medium-range bombers flew shorter circuits of up to several hundred miles. Meanwhile, single-engine utility and trainer aircraft from the I Air Support Command bolstered Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews’s ragtag air fleet of 103 similar planes in mounting short-range missions several dozenmiles off the coast. These latter aircraft were unarmed, and most lacked radios, so their value—if any—was in tricking U-boat commanders into crash-diving upon sighting them, thereby safeguarding any civilian ships in the area until navy warships—if available—could rush to the scene.
    While the army’s B-17 aircraft enjoyed a greater range than its motley collection of utility aircraft and trainers, the bombers’ aircrews were totally unprepared for hunting U-boats. They lacked aerial depth charges, the aircraft had no effective bombsights or radar, and they had received no training in hunting enemy submersibles. A typical incident occurred nine days after Pearl Harbor when one of Krogstad’s B-17s sighted an unidentified vessel in Block Island Sound. It was the Benham -class destroyer USS Trippe , which was steaming independently from Norfolk Naval Station to Newport, Rhode Island. The 1,850-ton warship had reached a point fourteen miles south-southeast of Montauk Point at the eastern tip of Long Island, when at 0640 hours Eastern War Time (EWT) its lookouts sighted an unidentified multiengine aircraft flying at an altitude of 5,000 feet. As officer of the deck Lieutenant R. C. Williams tersely noted afterwards, “Plane was challenged [by blinking Aldis Lamp] but correct reply not received. Four bombs landed 200 yards on port bow at 0643 as plane circled overhead. . . . Crew was called to General Quarters when attacked, but plane was out of [antiaircraft gunfire] range before fire could be opened.” Fortunately for the destroyer USS Trippe , the bomber aircrew’s accuracy matched their vessel-recognition skills, and the bombs fell more than two hundred yards away from the two-year-old warship. Unharmed but doubtlessly energized, the Trippe ’s crew resumed their normal