CHAPTER 14

AMERICA AT WAR

For each generation, there seems to be a particularly momentous day, often a day of disaster, on which all those of that generation will always remember where they were and what they were doing. For some, it is Tuesday, September 11, 2001. For others, it is Friday, November 22, 1963. For that generation, or gathering of generations, which we have come to call “the Greatest Generation,” the day was Sunday, December 7, 1941.

The bombs started falling on Pearl Harbor and on the USAAF’s adjacent Hickam Field at 7:48 a.m. Hawaii time. In less than two hours, the US Navy suffered loss of or damage to eight battleships and a number of other vessels, the heart of the Pacific Fleet. Nearly 200 aircraft were shot down or destroyed on the ground. The next day, President Franklin Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress, described December 7 as “a date which will live in infamy,” and asked for a declaration of war. Germany declared war on the United States three days later.

—

On that Sunday, Tooey Spaatz was at home in Alexandria, across the Potomac from Washington, in a house that he and Ruth were in the midst of remodeling. They heard the news from Pearl Harbor on the radio shortly after noon. He immediately dashed to USAAF headquarters. With Hap Arnold out of town, he found himself the senior officer on duty. Arnold, who had just seen a flight of B-17 Flying Fortresses off from Hamilton Field, bound for Hickam Field, had flown to Southern California to go on a quail hunt with his friend Don Douglas of the Douglas Aircraft Company. It was late in the day before Arnold would learn what had happened.

Spaatz ordered the implementation of AWPD-1, which had been integrated into the larger joint US Army–US Navy contingency plan known as Rainbow 5—though it was an offensive plan and the United States was still reeling from the attack and dreading more attacks, so defensive actions seemed more to the point. Within the next few days, Lieutenant General Delos Emmons, late of GHQ Air Force and now in charge of the USAAF Combat Command, was reassigned as the military governor of Hawaii. With a promotion to major general, Spaatz succeeded Emmons as chief of Combat Command, which was headquartered at Bolling Field, across the Anacostia River from Washington.

—

Ira Eaker, who had test flown the XP-47B in New York the day before, was at his mother-in-law’s home in Washington, where he and Ruth were staying while they were on the East Coast. After going out for Sunday brunch, he lay down for a nap. When Ruth woke him to tell him about Pearl Harbor, he mumbled, “You’ll have to think of a better story than that to get me out of bed.”

She then turned up the radio so that he could hear the news reports.

He phoned Arnold’s office and talked with Spaatz.

“I think I’ll catch a civil airliner tonight and get back to the West Coast and join my old 20th Pursuit Group,” Eaker said, wanting to be where the USAAF needed fighter pilots.

Recalling this conversation in a later interview with Donald Shaughnessy that is in the Columbia University Oral History Collection, Eaker remembered that Spaatz replied, “I think you’re headed in the right direction. Get going.”

Once Eaker reached California, Arnold put him in command of the air defense of the Pacific Coast against a Japanese attack that was considered imminent. In this role, he began setting up a defensive control center, tying radar sites and fighter squadrons into an integrated network such as he and Spaatz had observed in England.

Eaker also paid visits to aircraft manufacturers on the West Coast. While in Southern California, he stopped in at the North American Aviation headquarters in Inglewood, where he had an opportunity to fly the Model NA-73 Mustang fighter, the first of which had been delivered to the RAF. The USAAF had assigned the P-51 designation to the aircraft but had not ordered it in quantity.

In a later conversation, he told Tom Coffey that he “thought it was the best fighter plane I had flown. It was somewhat underpowered, but I knew it was possible to correct that with the bigger engines coming along.”

Indeed, later variants were retrofitted with Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, which were also manufactured in the United States as the Packard V-1650 Merlin. The Mustang itself proved to be the best piston-engine fighter widely used in World War II. Though the USAAF was slow to acquire them initially, when they arrived in quantity, they would be a game changer for the service, especially for the Eighth Air Force.

—

That Sunday, Jimmy Doolittle’s family was scattered to the four points of the compass and planning to converge in Southern California two weeks later for Christmas. While Joe was in California, Jimmy was at Wright Field. Their older son, James Junior, was in his second year of a mechanical engineering course at Purdue and planning to follow in his father’s footsteps and begin USAAF flight training in March. Having attended Culver Military Academy, John Doolittle was at the University of Michigan and scheduled to enter West Point the following June.

Doolittle spent Sunday glued to the radio and contemplating what he should do next. On Monday morning, he penned a letter to Hap Arnold, asking that he be relieved of his duties as a technical troubleshooter and given an operational command. He reminded his boss that he had 7,730 hours of flying time, most of it in fighters.

On Monday morning, he started this letter up the chain of command to Brigadier General George Kenney, the assistant chief of the Materiel Division at Wright Field, and a former deputy to Frank Andrews at GHQ Air Force.

“The answer is no,” Kenney told Doolittle, though he sent him on to see Major General Oliver Echols, the chief of the Materiel Division. Both men had already approved Doolittle’s promotion to lieutenant colonel, and they both wanted him to remain as part of their organization.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Echols told Doolittle. “Kenney just called. His answer was no. My answer is no.”

However, Echols did forward the request to Washington.

—

The morning of December 7 found Brevet Major Curtis LeMay waking up in the home that he had rented for his family in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Though it was Sunday, it was LeMay’s custom to drive over to his office at Westover Field in nearby Springfield on the weekends.

As he drove home about noon, he tuned his car radio to listen to the football game between Brooklyn and New York that was being broadcast from the Polo Grounds. The broadcast was interrupted so that a breathless announcer could inform listeners about what was happening at Pearl Harbor. To his biographer, Tom Coffey, LeMay later admitted feeling “some sense of relief” that the might of the United States could now be channeled into the defeat of the Axis.

LeMay continued home to tell Helen what he had heard, then turned the car around and drove back to Westover. After a stint as an intelligence and operations officer with the 2nd Bomb Group at Langley Field, he had been reassigned to the 34th Bomb Group at Westover. Far from being up to strength, the group had only a couple of B-17s and a few B-18s. Their mission had consisted mainly of submarine spotting in the North Atlantic. These activities could not be called “antisubmarine” operations because the American bombers carried no bombs or depth charges to drop on the German submarines that patrolled close to the Atlantic Coast.

For much of 1941, LeMay had not even been at Westover; instead he had been involved in ferrying new B-24 Liberators to Britain. The B-24, a four-engine bomber like the B-17 Flying Fortress, was developed by Consolidated Aircraft in San Diego. First flown in December 1939, it earned orders from both France and the United Kingdom. Under the policy prevailing at the time—which was supported by Roosevelt and opposed by Hap Arnold—foreign sales took precedence over Air Corps orders, and so the first production-series Liberators were earmarked to go overseas.

For LeMay, this began as a cloak-and-dagger secret mission. Early in 1941, he had been ordered to fly to Montreal in civilian clothes to visit an office occupied by a civilian entity called the Atlantic Ferry Organization. It had been quietly established on behalf of the British Ministry of Aircraft Production to facilitate transfer of aircraft from the United States to Britain. By the end of November 1941, more than 100 Liberators had gone to Britain, while the USAAF had just 11, and LeMay was one of the few pilots in the USAAF to have extensive practical experience in the aircraft.

During December 1941, LeMay’s career was like a yo-yo of unrelated assignments. Suddenly at war, the USAAF was in the midst of an organizational upheaval. With his “overt” job, the 34th Bomb Group had been ordered to Pendleton Field in Oregon to prepare to develop a West Coast antisubmarine capability, so the LeMay family pulled up stakes in Massachusetts and prepared to move across the country.

Almost as soon as he reached Pendleton, however, LeMay’s “covert” job resulted in orders to turn around and report to Wright Field in Ohio, where his experience with the Liberator could be put to use. This assignment, however, was also short-lived, and within weeks he found himself on his way to Wendover Field in the desolate desert of western Utah as executive officer of the newly formed 306th Bomb Group—equipped with B-17s, not B-24s.

—

On December 7, 1941, Hub Zemke was in Kuybyshev (now Samara), a city of half a million people that was serving as the temporary seat of government of the Soviet Union. At that moment, 560 miles to the northwest, German armies were encircling Moscow and preparing for their final assault on the Soviet capital. As Zemke and Johnny Alison pondered the news of the Pearl Harbor attack against the backdrop of the gloomy prospects of their Soviet hosts, the fate of the Allies seemed desperate in the extreme.

They had been in the country for three months as the Germans were slicing through Soviet defenses like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Advancing across an 1,800-mile front, they had occupied an area of the Soviet Union larger than the German Reich by the time that the two Americans and their crates of P-40s disembarked at Arkhangelsk on the last day of August.

They were graciously welcomed by their hosts, and were feted at vodka-soaked parties given by pilots of the Soviet air force, who were much more open with the American airmen than they were with their own political commissars, with whom the average Russians shared a deep mutual distrust. The two USAAF men had ample opportunity to fly a variety of Soviet aircraft. Zemke was flying a Polikarpov Po-2 biplane one day when he encountered a German Do 215 reconnaissance aircraft. Fortunately, the German pilot was not in the mood for a fight. When he saw Zemke, he banked away and disappeared into a cloud.

When Zemke and Alison learned of the Pearl Harbor attack, their first reaction was to request an immediate transfer into a combat unit back in the States. Though Alison was ordered to remain to help acquaint the Soviets with other types of aircraft that would soon be arriving as part of Lend-Lease, Zemke was granted a transfer almost immediately. He later surmised that he was ordered back to the States because he was married and Alison was single.

—

By December, Bob Morgan was a pilot, but not quite a USAAF pilot. He had graduated from basic flight training in Georgia in September, and December found him at Barksdale Field near Shreveport, Louisiana, preparing to graduate from advanced flight training on December 12.

On December 7, a group of aviation cadets from Barksdale, along with a parallel group of girls, had converged on a downtown hotel room, where they were, in Morgan’s recollection, “dancing to Glenn Miller records, enjoying a few drinks, laughing, and flirting.” Because no one had bothered to turn on the radio, it was not until they drove back through the gate and onto the base that they learned what had happened at Pearl Harbor that morning.

As Morgan recalled in his memoirs, their reaction was not one of fear or anxiety, not of thoughts that “the fate of the world, and of our own young lives, was in the balance.” Instead, he and his fellow pilots, less than a week short of being commissioned as second lieutenants, felt “a scalding surge of anger at Japan for hitting us that way. It was a sneak attack. . . . The strike at Pearl Harbor offended every virtue, every notion of honor and fair play that my generation of American boys had grown up with, handed down to us from the Western movies, from our schools, from church, from the neighborhood policemen who let us ride around in their cars, from our households. You didn’t hit somebody from behind. . . . Besides, what was Japan doing messing with us anyway? We were the good guys!”

—

For those young men who were not in uniform on the day when the radio announcers interrupted the regularly scheduled programming with news from Hawaii, there was an overwhelming urge to be in uniform that was unlike anything before or since. On the following day, and in the following weeks, recruiting centers were mobbed by men who wanted to fight for their country.

Robert Rosenthal, who had gone to class at night in order to get through Brooklyn Law School in three years, graduated summa cum laude in 1941—achieving what Ira Eaker had hoped to accomplish two decades before—and was preparing to go to work at Poletti, Diamond, Rabin, Freidin and Mackay. His family could use the extra money. When his father, Samuel Rosenthal, had died in January 1941, his mother, Rose, had gone to work in the garment industry. Meanwhile, though, his older sister, Jeannette, was working as a designer with Bergdorf Goodman, the Fifth Avenue luxury department store, and presumably earning a good salary.

Like LeMay, Rosenthal saw Pearl Harbor as a terrible turning point that had the potential of being a decisive turning point in the war to defeat totalitarianism. For the past several years, he had watched the march, both real and metaphorical, of Hitler and the ideals that he represented—not to mention the strutting of the pro-Nazi German American Bund on New York’s own streets. He had yearned for a mechanism to stop this dark tide. With the entry of the United States in World War II, he imagined that this had come at last.

“Suddenly [my] frustration disappeared,” he recalled. “I felt now that I could do something, I had the ability to offer some resistance to that regime.”

On Monday, December 8, the recent law school graduate went to the US Army recruiting station and volunteered for flight training with the USAAF Aviation Cadet Training Program, for which he would receive a monthly paycheck of $75, substantially less than he would have made on Madison Avenue.

“Suddenly the nation came together,” Rosenthal recalled in an interview preserved by the 100th Bomb Group Foundation. “Our nation had been attacked. . . . We had been split down the middle . . . people who wanted to help England and those who . . . believed we shouldn’t have been in World War I and we shouldn’t be in World War II, and there were some groups who were pro-Nazi. But when the attack came on Pearl Harbor, the nation came together. The voices of dissent were silenced. I don’t think our nation was ever more strongly united than after Pearl Harbor.”