United States Army Air Forces Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ====March 1943 reorganization==== [[File:USAAF Reorganization Chart, 29March1943.pdf|thumb|29 March 1943 reorganization of the United States Army Air Forces]] [[File:Winning Your Wings.ogv|thumb|thumbtime=16:03|The recruiting film ''[[Winning Your Wings]]'' (1942) helped enlist 150,000 pilots]] Among the headquarters directorates were Technical Services,{{sfn|Frye}} Air Defense, Base Services, Ground-Air Support, Management Control, Military Equipment,{{sfn|Futrell|1951}} [[Muir S. Fairchild|Military Requirements]], and Procurement & Distribution.<ref name=VolumeSix>{{Cite report |author=Craven and Cate |volume=Six: Men and Planes |title=The Army Air Forces in World War II |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wm2mz4weQNsC&q=%22Flight+Control+Command%22+USAAF&pg=PA70 |format=Google books |access-date=2013-10-16 }} (page 233, others).</ref> A "strong and growing dissatisfaction" with the organization led to an attempt by Lovett in September 1942 to make the system work by bringing the Directorate of Management Control<ref group=n>Management Control coordinated all the other directorates through the activities of organizational and legislative planning, statistical control, and the Adjutant General, who under the operating staff system was chief of administrative services rather than the issuer of orders and directives as he had been under the Chief of the Air Corps.</ref> and several traditional offices that had been moved to the operating staff, including the Air Judge Advocate and Budget Officer, back under the policy staff umbrella. When this adjustment failed to resolve the problems, the system was scrapped and all functions combined into a single restructured air staff.<ref>Craven and Cate, Vol. 6, p. 42</ref> The hierarchical "command" principle, in which a single commander has direct final accountability but delegates authority to staff, was adopted AAF-wide in a major reorganization and consolidation on 29 March 1943. The four main directorates and seventeen subordinate directorates (the "operating staff")<ref>Mooney and Williamson (1956), chart p. 30</ref> were abolished as an unnecessary level of authority, and execution of policies was removed from the staffs to be assigned solely to field organizations along functional lines. The policy functions of the directorates were reorganized and consolidated into offices regrouped along conventional military lines under six assistant chiefs of air staff (AC/AS): Personnel; Intelligence; Operations, Commitments, and Requirements (OC&R); Materiel, Maintenance, and Distribution (MM&D);<ref group=n>MM&D became "Materiel and Services" (M&S) on 17 July 1944 in conjunction with the planned consolidation of the Air Materiel and Air Service Commands.</ref> Plans; and Training. Command of Headquarters AAF resided in a Chief of Air Staff and three deputies.<ref name="afhra10">Mooney and Williamson (1956), pp. 29, 33, 40, 41, 43, and 68.</ref> This wartime structure remained essentially unchanged for the remainder of hostilities. In October 1944 Arnold, to begin a process of reorganization for reducing the structure, proposed to eliminate the AC/AS, Training and move his office into OC&R, changing it to Operations, Training and Requirements (OT&R)<ref group=n>"Commitments" would be consolidated as part of AC/AS, Plans.</ref> but the mergers were never effected. On 23 August 1945, after the capitulation of Japan, realignment took place with the complete elimination of OC&R. The now five assistant chiefs of air staff were designated AC/AS-1 through -5 corresponding to Personnel, Intelligence, Operations and Training, Materiel and Supply, and Plans.<ref>Mooney and Williamson (1956), pp. 61β62.</ref> Most personnel of the Army Air Forces were drawn from the Air Corps. In May 1945, 88 per cent of officers serving in the Army Air Forces were commissioned in the Air Corps, while 82 per cent of enlisted members assigned to AAF units and bases had the Air Corps as their combat arm branch.<ref>Correll, "But What About the Air Corps?", pp. 64β65.</ref> While officially the air arm was the ''Army Air Forces'', the term ''Air Corps'' persisted colloquially among the public as well as veteran airmen; in addition, the singular ''Air Force'' often crept into popular and even official use, reflected by the designation ''Air Force Combat Command'' in 1941β42.<ref group=n>The term "air force" had appeared officially as early as 1923, when Training Regulation TR 440-15 and Army Regulation 95-10 used "air force aviation" to denote combat air units in contrast to "air service aviation" (auxiliary units to support ground forces). (Futrell, Historical Study 139, p. 40) In a letter of farewell to all members of the Air Corps on 27 February 1933, outgoing Assistant Secretary of War (Air) [[F. Trubee Davison]] wrote: "Ours may not be the biggest air force in the world, but, my gracious, it is one of the best!" (''Air Corps News Letter'' 24 February 1933, Vol. XVII No. 2)</ref> This misnomer was also used on official recruiting posters (see image above) and was important in promoting the idea of an "Air Force" as an independent service. [[James Stewart|Jimmy Stewart]], a [[Hollywood (film industry)|Hollywood]] movie star serving as an AAF pilot, used the terms "Air Corps" and "Air Forces" interchangeably in the narration of the 1942 recruiting short ''"[[Winning Your Wings]]"''. The term "Air Force" also appeared prominently in [[Frank Capra]]'s 1945 War Department indoctrination film ''"[[War Comes to America]]"'', of the famous iconic ''"[[Why We Fight]]"'' series, as an animated map graphic of equal prominence to that of the Army and Navy.<ref group=n>By 1945 the term had also found its way into feature cinema, such as ''"[[They Were Expendable]]"'', in which a naval officer ([[John Wayne]]) and an AAF pilot ([[Louis Jean Heydt]]) chide each other about lack of reinforcement from their respective services. Wayne's character asks, "And where is the Air Force?"</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). 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