Army Air Forces in North Africa: The Earthquakers 1944 USAAF; World War II

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PRESENTS THE STORY OF THE 12TH BOMB GROUP OF THE 9TH AIR FORCE AND ITS ROLE IN THE AIR CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE GERMAN ARMY IN NORTH AFRICA DURING WORLD WAR II.

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_Operations_Group

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The 12th Operations Group is the flying component of the 12th Flying Training Wing of United States Air Force's Air Education and Training Command. The group headquarters is located at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. . The unit's main missions include aircraft instructor pilot training in Beechcraft T-6 Texan II, Northrop T-38C Talon and Raytheon T-1 Jayhawk aircraft, Air Force and Navy undergraduate combat systems officer training and fighter fundamentals student pilot instructor training in the Northrop AT-38C.

The group was first activated in January 1941 as the 12th Bombardment Group. After training and flying antisubmarine patrols off the Pacific Coast, moved to Egypt in July 1942. In the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, it took part in the Western Desert campaign and Italian campaign, earning a Distinguished Unit Citation. In 1944, it moved to the China Burma India Theater and participated in the Burma campaign before the war's end. The unit returned to the United States in January 1946 and was inactivated on arriving at the Port of Embarkation.

The group was briefly active in 1947 to 1948, but was not manned or equipped due to budgetary restrictions. It was activated on 1 November 1950 as the 12th Fighter-Escort Group, but transferred its resources to the 12th Fighter-Escort Wing in February 1951 and was inactivated in June 1952 as Strategic Air Command adopted the dual deputy organization.

With the implementation of the Objective Wing Organization, the unit was activated on 15 December 1991, as the 12th Operations Group and assigned to the 12th Flying Training Wing...

The group was first activated as the 12th Bombardment Group at McChord Field, Washington on 15 January 1941 as the United States began building up its armed forces after the beginning of World War II in Europe, drawing its initial cadre from the 17th Bombardment Group...

In June 1942, while in the United States for a conference with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill received word that the British Eighth Army had been defeated in a tank battle with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps near Tobruk, Libya, and was retreating back toward Alexandria, Egypt. Churchill immediately made an urgent plea for military aid to help stop Rommel from over-running Egypt, the Suez Canal and the Arabian oil fields. The United States dispatched the 12th and two other groups to the Middle East to reinforce the British forces there.

The 12th was the second of the three groups to leave the United States. Between 14 July and 2 August, aircrews departed Morrison Field, Florida for Egypt via the South Atlantic ferry route to Egypt by way of Brazil, Ascension Island, across Africa to the Sudan, and then north to Egypt. by mid-August, all crews had arrived in Egypt without a single loss. Ground personnel of all three groups and supporting units sailed from New York City on 16 July 1942 on the SS Pasteur, a fast French ocean liner that had been impressed by the British, for a month-long trip around South Africa and up the Red Sea to Suez, Egypt, arriving on 16 August 1942...

...The unit's first missions were flown to support forces opposing Rommel's final effort to break through to the Suez Canal at the Battle of Alam Halfa between 31 August and 4 September 1942. These missions helped the British Eighth Army repel the Afrika Corps attacks. Rommel attributed this defeat to air attacks enabled by the air superiority established by the RAF and Allied forces Both Allied and enemy forces had learned that the open nature of the western desert made it easy to disperse armored forces, making pinpoint bombing ineffective. As a result, the group adopted the RAF tactic of pattern bombing. Group Mitchells would fly at medium altitude, flying spaced apart to saturate a target area with bombs spaced to damage any vehicles or other objectives in a defined target area...