Historians generally agree that the birth of American air power occurred in the two decades between the world wars, when airmen in the U. S. Army and Navy forged the aircraft, the organization, the cadre of leadership, and the doctrines that formed a foundation for the country to win the air war in World War II. Nearly every scholarly study of this era focuses on these developments, or upon the aircraft of the period; very few works describe precisely what the flyers were doing and how they overcame the difficulties they faced in creating air forces. In this detailed, comprehensive volume, Dr. Maurer Maurer, retired senior historian of the United States Air Force Historical Research Center, fills this void for land-based aviation.