商品簡介
When the United States entered the Second World War, its capacity to move cargo and troops by air was, in the candid words of this monograph, underdeveloped and out of date. The Army Air Corps owned almost no large four-engine transports for transoceanic work, relying on trimotor relics and a handful of amphibians while European powers and Pan American Airways had already pioneered intercontinental routes. The humiliating 1934 attempt to fly the U.S. mail, which produced sixty-six crashes and twelve deaths, had laid bare how far the service trailed commercial aviation. Within a few short years, that same force built the most far-reaching air transport system the world had ever seen. Airlift and Airborne Operations During World War II tells how. Written by the respected aerospace historian Roger E. Bilstein and published in 1998 by the U.S. Air Force History and Museums Program in its popular series on the Army Air Forces, this concise official monograph distills the multi-volume Craven and Cate record and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey into a single, briskly readable narrative. Bilstein's organizing insight is to pair two missions usually told apart: the global logistics of airlift and the combat insertion of paratroops and glider troops. He foregrounds the civil-military fusion that made rapid scale-up possible, from airline executive Edgar Gorrell's 1936 mobilization blueprint to American Airlines' C. R. Smith helping lead the Air Transport Command, which in 1942 leaned on the airlines for nearly 88 percent of its ferrying work and grew from 11,000 personnel to more than 200,000, operating some 3,700 aircraft across a 180,000-mile network. The quantitative spine is matched by vivid operational history. Readers follow the workhorse C-47, C-54, C-46, and C-87 transports, the first military helicopters, and thousands of Waco gliders. The airborne chapters trace a doctrine learned in blood: scattered, disastrous drops in North Africa and Sicily, where trigger-happy Allied gunners downed two dozen C-47s; James Gavin's insistence on mass employment; the great Normandy drops of OVERLORD; the costly failure of MARKET-GARDEN at Arnhem; and the maturer Rhine crossing of VARSITY. Bilstein gives special weight to the airlift over the Himalayas, the legendary Hump into China, where monthly tonnage climbed from a thousand tons to a peak of seventy-one thousand by July 1945 and ultimately carried 81 percent of all supplies reaching Chiang Kai-Shek's armies. He closes by tracing the wartime legacy forward to the Berlin Airlift, Korea, Vietnam, the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, and the transformation of air transport from high-risk adventure into a permanent instrument of strategy. This Nimble Books edition, enhanced with text analytics by PageKicker, reproduces the monograph faithfully and surrounds it with an editorial apparatus prepared for this volume. A new Historical Context essay frames the work within the AAF's pre-war neglect and the official-history tradition it belongs to. Two complementary abstracts serve every reader: an accessible plain-language summary and an advanced analytical summary that weighs the monograph's strengths against the limits of its celebratory genre, including its light treatment of the hundred thousand Chinese and Indian laborers who built the runways. A Glossary, Indexes of persons, places, and concepts, and an original computational RKHS knowledge-graph analysis situating the book among related works complete the edition. For military and aviation historians, students of logistics and air power, veterans and their families, librarians, and general readers fascinated by the wartime feats that built modern air mobility, this volume offers both a reliable gateway and the scholarly scaffolding to read it with care.
