United States Strategic Air Forces In Europe
The US Eighth Air Force in World War II, later designated the United States Strategic and Tactical Air Forces (USSTAF) was the first and became the overall command and control authority of the United States Army Air Forces against the European Axis members (and as the Eighth Air Force, responsible in and for the Northern Europe Theater) during World War II, where it had started as a complementary command to that of the smaller theater organized Ninth Air Force, Twelfth Air Force, and Fifteenth Air Forces. As the oldest command, initially beginning the earliest American operations in Europe as VIII Bomber Command, the Eighth had provided British liaison and strategic tasking guidance over each of those younger organizations throughout the war, whereas each had different command and control areas and responsibilities including those of the Mediterranean region air force operations.
With the in-depth Allied contacts and overall responsibility directly affecting the strategic bombing of industrial regions of Germany the Eighth's planning and intelligence staffs were the natural best choice to assert overall coordinated control with the D-Day pre-invasion needs of the Allies, under General Dwight D. Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander. Subsequently, the strategic bombing effort's intelligence, targeting and planning, co-ordination, including mission designation command and control were separated—not without controversy and opposition—from actual operations commands in direct control of air forces on 23 February 1944. The new command was organized on the large nucleus of Eighth Air Force planning staff members, thereby creating the USSTAF—at which time the USSTAF was also given mission planning control over other US Air Forces opposing Germany and Italy, and shrinking the man-power assigned to the Eighth Air Force in WWII.
The USSTAF was established with the redesignation of the former VIII Bomber Command as the Eighth Air Force on 22 February 1944. The strategic planning command staff of what had formerly been the Eight AF became a higher echelon command coordinating with the British in the target prioritization of the strategic bombing of the Axis. In this expanded role, USSTAF exercised operational control of the reorganized Eighth Air Force, the Ninth Air Force in the European Theater of Operations, and to an extent, the operations of Twelfth and Fifteenth Air Forces in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations—all of which had theretofore exercised their own strategic planning. USSTAF was the functional equivalent in Europe of U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific.
Read more about United States Strategic Air Forces In Europe: Formation of USAFE
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states, strategic, air, forces and/or europe:
“The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“If the Soviet Union can give up the Brezhnev Doctrine for the Sinatra Doctrine, the United States can give up the James Monroe Doctrine for the Marilyn Monroe Doctrine: Let’s all go to bed wearing the perfume we like best.”
—Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
“The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure.... And that’s why S/M is really a subculture. It’s a process of invention. S/M is the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.”
—Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
“Nature is a setting that fits equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Her wrongs are ... indissolubly linked with all undefended woe, all helpless suffering, and the plenitude of her “rights” will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason and justice and love in the government of the nation. God hasten the day.”
—Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964)
“riding flatcars to Fresno,
Across the whole country
Steep towns, flat towns, even New York,
And oceans and Europe & libraries & galleries
And the factories they make rubbers in”
—Gary Snyder (b. 1930)