The culmination of more than 50-years of research, this first volume in
a multi-volume set describes in detail, for the first time, the
extraordinary array of classic aircraft that deployed to defend the
vital Panama Canal and its approaches during World War II. Unlike their
combat brethren in the European and Pacific theaters, the units,
aircraft, and airmen of the Sixth Air Force - often cited as the
"Forgotten Air Force" - have been all but ignored in the vast body of
literature that has been published since the war.
While primarily charged with defending the vital Canal which, during the
first year of America's war was viewed as almost certainly the next
obvious target of Axis aggression from both the Atlantic and Pacific
approaches, the tropical warriors were also plunged into the shooting
war that soon saw German and Italian submarines rampaging through the
Caribbean. During the first 18 months following Pearl Harbor,
unbeknownst to the average Allied citizen on the home front, the
submarine offensive nearly severed the vital oil lifeline from the
Maracaibo, Venezuela fields, and the equally priority bauxite mines in
Surinam, a mineral needed to make aluminum. More than 330 surface
vessels were sunk in the Caribbean and its approaches during that
period, and the aircraft and units of the Sixth Air Force and a regional
offshoot, the Antilles Air Command, created to deal specifically with
the submarine menace, saw hitherto undocumented combat in one-on-one
actions that have eluded historians.
Faced with defending a huge geographic region, stretching from Atkinson
Field, British Guyana on the east, up through the entire Antilles chain
to Cuba, west through the Caribbean to the Canal itself, and then up and
down the Central American and mainland South American landmass from
Guatemala City to Talara, Peru, and Salinas, Ecuador - the extremely
dispersed units of Sixth Air Force anchored their western defenses in
the remote and mysterious Galapagos Islands, far to the west. The
defenders of the Canal soon realized that this vast and largely
over-water operating area demanded camouflage for its aircraft that the
standard, prescribed USAAF mix did not provide. As a result, for the
first two full years of the war, Sixth Air Force leaders evolved
markings unique within the Army Air Forces and, for the first time, a
coherent description of these often-exotic schemes are detailed in this
ground-breaking series. But besides the overall schemes applied, Sixth
Air Force and Antilles Air Command crews, nearly always operating in
squadron-size elements or smaller, saw no utility in the unit code
identifiers applied to USAAF aircraft in Europe and the Pacific, where
large formations required a means of identifying members of individual
operating units. Instead, they relied upon a system of so-called "unit
numbers" and color coding of easily recognizable aircraft components,
such as prop spinners, fin tips, and the individual unit numbers
themselves.
The defense of the Canal was a classic instance of "point defense" as
preached at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field during the
pre-war years, and against which many major USAAF wartime aircraft
series were in fact designed and evolved. Consequently, heavily armed
variants of the oft-maligned Bell P-39 Airacobra series predominated
during the war - and the fact that they were also found to be nearly
ideal for anti-submarine surface actions, was an added bonus. Curtiss
P-40s were also issued in numbers and it wasn't until late in the war
that the P-39s were finally withdrawn and replaced with the superb
Lockheed P-38 Lightning, nearly ideal for the threat posture that proved
the reality in the Caribbean.
