IV

ARNOLD

HAP ARNOLD WAS TAUGHT TO FLY by the Wright brothers. The course lasted eleven days (it would have taken ten except that the Wrights did not fly on Sunday). A two-seater Wright model B weighed 750 pounds and had a four-cylinder engine that delivered twelve horsepower; it could go above four thousand feet (Arnold set the military record at 4,167 on April 18, 1911), but when he tried to race an interurban trolley car with it, the trolley, making forty-five miles an hour, won. By the time of Arnold’s death in 1950, from the last of his many heart attacks, the British had a jet-propelled transport, the de Havilland Comet, that could carry commercial passengers at 42,000 feet and 490 miles per hour, while the U.S. F-86 Sabrejet was doing 675 mph at 48,000; soon an advanced version of the F-86 would break the sound barrier. Arnold’s career had spanned the dawn of manned flight from its bold inception to the routine acceptability in which we experience it today.

He was a pioneer among pilots. He was the first to fly the U.S. mail. He piloted the first plane from which a rifle was fired. When a bug caught in his eye he introduced the practice of wearing goggles. He was the first to win the Mackay Trophy for “outstanding aerial achievement” (on a reconnaissance flight over Virginia he successfully spotted a troop of cavalry on a country road), and in 1934 he won it a second time for flying nonstop from Juneau to Seattle (which also earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross). He and a friend developed the first system of aircraft nomenclature and maintenance. For a time they were the only two qualified pilots in the U.S. Army.¹

Those who flew in the early days did not enjoy a high life expectancy. Of the twenty-four Army officers who were qualified between 1909 and 1913, eleven were killed in training and seven others subsequently died in crashes; many are the U.S. military airfields named after men who then and later perished in their aircraft: Selfridge, Kelly, Rockwell, Scott, Hickam, Westover, Andrews. On November 5, 1912, Arnold’s Wright Flyer went into a flat spin from which he managed to recover only seconds before it would have hit the ground. He landed safely but came away with a classic case of fear of flying, which lasted four years. He overcame it by pure will power and on December 16, 1916, flew a Curtiss Jenny for forty minutes, putting it (and himself) through every test he could think of.²

Arnold had great affection for Wilbur and Orville Wright, unpretentious men who never (he wrote) “took themselves half so seriously as we took them.” Their father was a United Brethren bishop, who made his first flight at eighty-two and at 320 feet shouted to Orville, “Go higher, higher!” The Wright family would invite Arnold to Sunday dinner (not unwelcome for an impecunious second lieutenant) and he sat there marveling as the brothers told their quiet stories of the miracle he thought they had accomplished—“and it is a miracle to me today,” Arnold wrote years afterward. “More than anyone I have ever known or read about,” said Arnold, “the Wright brothers gave me a sense that nothing is impossible. I like to think—and during World War II often did think—that the Air Force has rooted its traditions in their spirit.”³

What the Wrights had invented was of course not so much a machine as a principle: By repeated trials with a glider they had arrived at an understanding of the need to compensate for an aircraft’s tendency to slew leftward when you tried to bank it to the right. Once this was established, the addition of a controllable vertical tail fin did the trick. True, they had also designed better wings and propellers than anyone else, but it was the discovery of the relationship between a rudder and the warping of the wings to bank that made possible the first true sustained level flight, and the phenomenally rapid development in aircraft design that followed. On a Wright plane, the warping of the wings and the turning of the tail were controlled by a single stick, the handle of which you pushed forward or back (wings) and twisted to the right or left (rudder). Learning to do this instinctively—and given the instability of the early aircraft it had to be instinctive—was what pilot training was about, and why not everyone could master it.⁴

Aviation was for many years rooted in the military (if you wanted to fly you joined the Army), and military aviation was a dedicated fraternity. Its members saw a different world from that of sailors or other soldiers; their perceptions of time and space had been so radically altered that they spoke a different language (the view of the ground from above at two hundred miles per hour is not communicable to someone who covers it on foot at two). They tended to become somewhat fanatical about their faith in air power, especially when it was greeted elsewhere in the services—as it almost invariably was—by incomprehension and obstructionism. For men like Arnold, the twenties and thirties were years of bitterness and frustration, of hopes dashed and a future wrapped in doubt. The observation was made of the Army Air Corps before World War II that it was fueled on ego, and there was truth in this. It took a degree of passionate conviction merely to keep the enterprise going.

Also, from the beginning, the pilots entered into a peculiarly intimate relationship with the machines they flew, inasmuch as their lives were linked with this aircraft and the mechanics who serviced it. The sea can be a treacherous medium but not half so menacing as the air, with its turbulence and pressure pockets. (The gallows humor of the air service songs, with their explicit references to going down in flames and having one’s innards tangled up with the crankshaft, were ways of coping with this.) Arnold saw it from the start. His report to the chief of the Signal Corps, during his first week with the Wrights, records eleven flights for a total of one hour, forty minutes, and adds: “During weather not suitable for flying I have been studying the construction of the machine.”⁵ He learned how to disassemble and assemble its wood and canvas frame; he had to: the Wright planes were packed in boxcars for a move from one field to another. The only instrument was a piece of string tied to a strut; if it pointed straight to the rear, you were flying properly.

Henry H. Arnold seems to have been picked for this duty almost at random. (The nickname “Hap” was attached to him later, when he commanded March Field in California; his family called him Harley, from his middle name.) He was Pennsylvania Dutch, son of a doctor in Ardmore whose own father had been the first of the Arnolds in two centuries to abandon the family’s Mennonite faith and become a Baptist. (Dr. Arnold remained a stern and uncompromising parent; he was a medical reserve officer who had served in the Spanish-American War and ran his household like an army barracks.) It had been intended that the older son, Tom, go to West Point, but he declined, and second son Henry—who had planned to go to Bucknell and become a Baptist minister—inherited the obligation. To everyone’s astonishment he passed the exams and on July 27, 1903, found himself in a plebe’s uniform on his way to a career, so he now hoped, in the cavalry.⁶

It was not to be. He became a proficient horseman, but otherwise his performance at the academy was lackluster; in a class of a hundred and ten, he usually stood somewhere between sixty-second and sixty-sixth, and he never made higher than cadet corporal. Much of his time there he seems to have spent walking punishment tours for being the ringleader in a series of ingenious pranks that culminated in a fireworks display on the barracks roof. To his deep disappointment, on graduation he was commissioned not in the cavalry but in the infantry. In despair, he requested duty in the Philippines, where he spent two years. (His memorable encounter near Batangas with George Marshall came on a later assignment there.)

During the summer of 1909, his regiment was reassigned to Governors Island in New York harbor; he had saved enough of his pay to make an extended trip home (partly in pursuit of the young lady who became his wife) by way of Singapore, Suez, Genoa, and Paris, where he heard a noise in the sky and looked up to see “a queer contraption overhead,” in which, only a few weeks before, Louis Blériot had flown the English Channel. Arnold at the time felt no great desire to fly, but he did remember wondering what would happen to England’s island defenses if a lot of men in a lot of machines crossed the channel by air. If he was ever going to be promoted to first lieutenant, he would have to find some kind of angle. At Governors Island he applied for “aeronautical work” with the Signal Corps; on April 21, 1911, he was detailed to it and ordered to report for instruction with the Wrights in Dayton, Ohio.⁷

Hap Arnold fathered the American air force. In six years, beginning in 1938, when he took command, he led it from an unimpressive twenty thousand men and a few hundred semi-obsolescent aircraft to a total of 2.4 million men and eighty thousand modern planes. “Never before or since,” writes his biographer, Thomas M. Coffey (himself a World War II pilot), “has a military machine of such size and technical complexity been created in so short a period.” Arnold did this less by intellect or organizational ability than by driving energy; he drove everyone else as relentlessly as he drove himself, at a pace that eventually punished his physical constitution beyond its ability to bear. He demanded, he cajoled; he was unreasonable and sly (he told manufacturers they would have to make planes faster because he had more pilots than planes, and he told the schools they would have to train pilots faster because he had more planes than pilots⁸). By asking the impossible, he worked his own miracle.

That Arnold ever ended up in senior command was of itself remarkable. Time and again he overstepped the bounds, taking actions on his own that his superiors neither had authorized nor were willing to countenance in retrospect. After one such he was sent to Panama, after another to Fort Riley, Kansas, widely regarded as the most disagreeable facility in the air service. When he attempted to send food and blankets to victims of the Long Beach earthquake in 1933, he was accused of giving away government property without permission and was nearly court-martialed. In 1940, he gave a congressional committee testimony displeasing to the President, and a gathering of notables was summoned to the White House on March 12, at which Roosevelt, looking pointedly at Arnold, observed that officers who were unable to “play ball” with the administration might be found available for duty on Guam. Many months passed before Arnold was asked to the White House again.⁹

Arnold hated Washington and had been miserable on previous tours of duty there. For all that—for all his often headstrong, tactless impatience with those who failed to share his vision—he had risen through the ranks to become, in September 1938, chief of the Air Corps. “He must have been doing something right,” his biographer remarks. Though he sometimes broke with discipline, he knew how to maintain it; though he was tough and exacting with those who worked for him, he had their respect and, often enough, affection. His boyish good spirits were so engaging that, whatever the President’s momentary annoyance with him, he ultimately became the one member of the Joint Chiefs whose company Roosevelt genuinely seemed to enjoy (Leahy, Marshall, and King were stiff sticks by comparison). As time passed, Arnold polished his political skills, learning to play the game of compromise until he could make the case for air power without upsetting the congressional-military applecart on which its achievement depended, and hold his more extreme colleagues in check until that extraordinary day, November 14, 1938, when he entered a meeting in the President’s office and came out of it with a mandate to create an American air force.¹⁰

Exactly how Roosevelt arrived at the conclusion that World War II would be an air war must remain obscure, but regarding the why and when there is little question. He was a relatively late convert. Earlier he had straddled the issue; though no enemy of aviation, he was no enthusiast, either. He admitted the possibility that in the long perspective, aircraft might make surface vessels obsolete, but for the present and immediate future he held traditional Navy views. In May 1921, he told the Kiwanis Club of New York that “it is highly unlikely that an airplane or a fleet of them could ever successfully attack a fleet of navy vessels under battle conditions.”¹¹ Some change may have been in prospect when he perceived, as a political candidate, that air travel was an aspect of the innovative spirit he wanted to exemplify. In 1932, breaking all precedent, he flew from Albany to Chicago in a Ford trimotor (making fuel stops in Buffalo and Cleveland) to accept the Democratic nomination for President. But he did not enjoy flying, and years later, on his return from Casablanca, told reporters that the more he did of it the less he liked it.¹²

The precipitating event was Munich. For at least a year, the President had been getting reports on the threat of growing German air power (a letter to him from Ambassador Hugh Wilson in Berlin had been “emphatic” on the subject¹³), and no great prescience was needed to see its connection with the reluctance of European statesmen to stand up to Hitler. On September 12, 1938, in his private railroad car on a siding in Rochester, Minnesota (where his son James was undergoing an operation in the Mayo Clinic), Roosevelt had listened on the radio to Hitler’s speech at a party rally in Nuremberg, the Führer’s voice filled with hatred and his audience shouting back at him, “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! (The capitulation of Chamberlain and Daladier in dismembering Czechoslovakia was two weeks away.) The President could understand German and much else besides; Harry Hopkins (who was present) thought this was the moment when he arrived at some certainty that the Nazis were bent on war. He thereupon sent Hopkins on a tour of inspection to investigate the capacity of aeronautical manufacturers on the West Coast for producing military aircraft. “The President,” Hopkins wrote, “was sure we were going to get into the war and he believed that air power would win it.”¹⁴

♦

In World War I, as executive officer and then assistant director of military aeronautics, Arnold was the youngest colonel in the Army, principally because he was one of the few experienced air officers they had. The job involved him in every possible aspect of the attempts, many of them far too slow for his liking, to develop and procure aircraft, set up schools and airfields, recruit and train personnel. When he finally managed to get himself sent to Europe (to brief General Pershing on the invention of a pilotless aircraft), he arrived at the front just in time for the Armistice.

On the way, he met an American flier who had actually fought in the air and shot down German fighters, Major Carl “Tooey” Spaatz.¹⁵ After the war, when Arnold was sent to command Rockwell Field near San Diego, he asked for Spaatz as his exec; as adjutant they were assigned a square-jawed Texan, Lieutenant Ira Eaker, who thought that Colonel Arnold was about the most impressive officer (with the exception of General Pershing) he had seen, tall and erect, wearing the uniform with dash and grace, possessing an engaging smile but also “a reserve and dignity of bearing which did not encourage familiarity.” Eaker decided to stay in the Army. He thought Arnold and Spaatz “were going places and this would be a good team to join.”¹⁶

Arnold thought an air offensive that Brigadier General Billy Mitchell had launched in the Saint Mihiel salient was “the first massed air striking power ever seen,” and that Mitchell was badly needed at home to be chief of the air service. The job went instead to another man, and an infantryman at that, with Mitchell downgraded to be his assistant. It was the beginning of a series of assignments, demotions, insults, budget cuts, and general humiliation with which the ground-minded officers in high position in the War Department exerted themselves to bring the air service to heel and hamstring its growth. Their cause was advanced in September 1925 with Billy Mitchell’s court-martial. He always talked too much, and this time, after the crash of the dirigible Shenandoah, he had accused the Navy and War departments of “incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the National Defense.”

Arnold, Spaatz, and other air officers testified eloquently on his behalf (Captain Ira Eaker had been detailed to provide Mitchell with documentation), but the verdict was never really in doubt. In December, Mitchell was found guilty of bringing discredit upon the military service and sentenced to five years’ suspension from duty without pay, an obvious move to force him to resign his commission, which he soon did. Arnold was so cast down that he considered leaving the Army and becoming president of Pan American Airways, a company he and Spaatz had helped to found. Arnold and others distributed a pamphlet suggesting that pro-air pressure be put on Congress, and when his role in this was discovered he was offered a choice between resignation and a court-martial; he chose a court-martial and the offer (thus shown to be a bluff) was withdrawn. (It was after this that he was sent to Fort Riley.) He wondered whether he should remain in a service that had so little future, and he in it even less.¹⁷

The air officers mainly had each other to fall back on. They all knew one another and their careers were intertwined. Arnold and Spaatz—a brisk, sardonic man who was well described as looking like a rusty nail—became not only the good team Eaker anticipated but close friends (they served together again when Arnold commanded March Field in California). Other names begin to appear. Eaker came to Arnold at Rockwell to report that there was a man at an auxiliary airfield to the south whose conduct was so reprehensible it required Arnold’s personal attention: This was Second Lieutenant James H. Doolittle, who had won a five-dollar bet that he could sit on the landing gear of a plane while it landed. (Arnold grounded him for a month but remembered the name.) When Spaatz flew a Fokker trimotor called the Question Mark in a test to see how long it could stay aloft by in-flight refueling, he chose as relief pilot a man who had shown some gifts at flying, Lieutenant Elwood Quesada. (They stayed up there a total of 150 hours, 40 minutes, 15 seconds.) Later Arnold was to learn that a commander has no friends, and he dealt impersonally and at times brusquely even with Spaatz and Eaker when Eighth Air Force did not live up to his expectations for it.¹⁸

Elliott Roosevelt—who had been a civilian pilot, had worked in the aviation industry, and had been aviation editor of the Hearst newspapers—spotted Arnold early (in 1934, when he was at March Field) and sent a note to his father recommending Arnold for promotion to brigadier general. But that would wait several years. Arnold’s upward progress when it came owed a lot to positioning, to being at the right place at the right time with the right position. Some of the more fanatic air advocates thought that he temporized because he was ambitious, but one could as well conclude that the fanatic argument—immediate and complete independence for an air force, on the British model—was in practical terms unworkable. The Army Air Corps simply did not have the backup—administration, budget, housekeeping, personnel—to go it alone, to train and pay not only the pilot, the air crew, the mechanic, but also “the cook, baker, military policemen, signal personnel, medics—all of it,” as Arnold wrote. Like it or not, these the Army provided, and Arnold realized sooner than did many of his co-workers that they “didn’t want an independent Air Force until we could sustain it properly.”¹⁹ Their problem meantime was to maintain some kind of doctrinal independence until the day came when they could prove that air power worked. It was not an easy row to hoe.

This was a period of constant improvement in aircraft technology—higher speed, higher altitude, better instrumentation—and given its stepchild status and low priority, the Army air service was barely able to keep up. Put to the challenge, as happened in 1934 when President Roosevelt in a misguided moment gave them the job of delivering the U.S. mail, they seemed to demonstrate that the critics were right. Of the 281 pilots available for the task, only 31 had more than fifty hours of night flying, and the rest had fewer than twenty-five hours on instruments. None of the planes was properly equipped; they had too few directional gyroscopes and artificial horizons, and few of those they had were mounted in aircraft. Inevitably there were crashes and deaths, and a very angry President. Actually they did not do too badly in the seventy-eight days they worked at it—one and a half million miles flown, 777,000 pounds of mail carried, close to 75 percent of flights completed, and not a letter lost—but the incident mainly had the effect of highlighting the weaknesses of the air service.

The doctrinal opponents continued to be obdurate. Their views were well expressed by General Hugh Drum, a senior and influential officer, when he said that antiaircraft would shoot down all attacking planes and that he saw no reason why any of them should be designed to fly farther than three days’ march by the infantry.²⁰ He and those like-minded did everything they could to sabotage the development of any but light and medium bombers, on the grounds that the national policy—as deputy chief of staff Major General Stanley D. Embick put it in May 1938—was one of “defense, not aggressiveness,” that defense of sea areas was “a function of the Navy,” and that the effectiveness of a heavy four-engine bomber like the B-17 “remains to be established.”²¹ When they punished, they could be mean. Major General Frank Andrews was rewarded for having successfully trained and organized a General Headquarters Air Force by being reduced to his permanent grade of colonel and dispatched to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where he was assigned an office in a latrine. The men who sent him there were not only individually unintelligent and vindictive, they were collectively dangerous; had they prevailed, we would have entered the war ill-equipped indeed to fight it.

The reason they did not prevail was the arrival of George C. Marshall. “I found everyone on the [General] Staff hostile to Air,” he later told Forrest Pogue, “and the young air officers were going to Congress and stirring up everything—and the [situation] was in a general muddle. They had something to complain about because they were not getting recognition.” While he was still acting chief of staff, Marshall brought Andrews back from Texas, promoted him to permanent brigadier general “of the line,” and made him assistant chief of staff, G-3 (operations), this over the strong objections of Secretary Woodring, Assistant Secretary Johnson, and Chief of Staff Craig, who thus had the privilege of being among the first in the upper administration to feel the force of Marshall’s personality.

Some thought that making Andrews a line officer was a devious maneuver to get him out of the Air Corps, but Andrews said, “George Marshall doesn’t work that way.” (He had earlier taken Marshall on a tour of air bases, during which Marshall had been impressed by the potentialities of air power and the qualities of Andrews as an officer; Andrews would have gone on to high command if he had not died in a crash in Iceland during May 1943.) His restoration to favor and greater authority than an airman had been granted before revived the flagging spirits of the air officers; one of them wrote him: “What was due to happen has happened.”²² They could feel a fresh breeze blowing.

Arnold, however, thought it had been the meeting at the White House on November 14, 1938, that gave the Air Corps its Magna Carta. (This was the occasion in the aftershock of Munich on which Marshall told the President he was sorry but he didn’t “agree with that at all.”) Roosevelt did most of the talking. He told them that he didn’t want to hear about ground forces, that a new barracks at some post in Wyoming would not scare Hitler one goddamned bit. What he wanted was airplanes! and lots of them! He wanted an Army Air Corps of 20,000 planes and an annual production capacity of 24,000, but since Congress wouldn’t give him that, he intended to ask for 10,000, of which 2,500 would be trainers, 3,750 line combat, and 3,750 combat reserve. He had much to say on the subject of mass production, about which he seemed to have been well briefed (long talks between Arnold and Harry Hopkins were having their effect). To be kept in mind: Boeing was at this time geared to produce thirty-eight B-17s a year, and other manufacturers were no different.

Mark Watson wrote that with this meeting, “the effective rearming of the nation’s ground and air forces took its start.”²³ Earlier there had been Army plans aplenty, but now for the first time the initiative was coming from the President. From his lack of interest in anything but the aircraft themselves it can be assumed that the idea had not left his mind of selling them to the British and the French, but Arnold, Marshall, and Craig managed to get him to change his mind on that. There were to be many vicissitudes, revisions, and arguments with Congress, but Roosevelt “had started a momentum,” writes air historian DeWitt Copp, “and the momentum once started could not be stopped, orchestrated as it was by a determined leader and the onrush of climactic events.”²⁴

Arnold sent for Tooey Spaatz and put him in charge of a three-man board (the other two members were Joseph McNarney and Claude Duncan; all were lieutenant colonels). They had no idea why they had been summoned until he told them, in effect: Boys, this is it! They were to draw up an expansion plan that would total 10,000 aircraft over two years. Since 2,320 already existed or were on order, that meant an additional 7,680, of which 2,000 would be built in two government-owned plants and the remainder by the aircraft industry. The President had appointed a board to rewrite the procurement laws so that they could award split contracts. They were to provide Arnold with arguments for the necessary expenditures so that he could defend a budget to Congress. They had a month in which to do this. Any questions? “The grin was wide,” writes Copp, “and the sparkle in his eye must have been an inner reflection of the sun rising after twenty years of overcast.”²⁵

II

Arnold had the dream and the inner drive to undertake a great mission, but neither the brains nor the organizing capacity to carry through on it. His idea of administration, writes Thomas Coffey, “was to think of something that ought to be done and tell somebody to go do it right away.”²⁶ Fortunately, he also had the good sense to recognize his limitations and to form an alliance that compensated for them. A combination of luck and business-world enterprise sent him an ally in the person of Robert A. Lovett as assistant secretary of war for air (later he was assistant secretary of state and later still, secretary of defense). A man of commanding ability who deserves to be even better remembered than he is for his part in forging American air power, Lovett, wrote Arnold, “possessed the qualities in which I was weakest, a partner and teammate of tremendous sympathy, and of calm and hidden force.”²⁷

Arnold and Lovett took to one another from the start and eventually (like Marshall and Stimson) had adjacent offices. Lovett saw that Arnold could be “very bouncy” but then have fits of depression: “He’d think things weren’t going well. He needed help. He was a young boy in many ways. Not sophisticated.” Arnold said that Lovett knew exactly how to handle him: “When I became impatient, intolerant, and would rant around … [he] would say with a quiet smile, ‘Hap, you’re wonderful! How I wish I had your pep and vitality! Now … let’s get down and be practical,’ and I would come back to earth with a bang.”²⁸

Robert Lovett was nothing if not sophisticated. A well-to-do investment banker, he lived with style. He and his wife, Adele, moved with ease in the New York worlds of theater, literature, and journalism. He knew Arthur Krock, C. L. Sulzberger, Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce; to the Lovetts’ town house near the East River on Eighty-third Street, or to their summer home in Locust Valley on Long Island, came Robert Benchley, Archibald MacLeish, Tallulah Bankhead, Philip Barry, Lillian Hellman, Robert Sherwood, Greta Garbo, Dorothy Parker. Lovett was described as likely to quote Dorothy Parker and George Santayana in the same paragraph.²⁹

His urbanity and tact made him the perfect foil to Arnold’s bull-in-a-china-shop impulsiveness. But Lovett also possessed the understanding of air doctrine and skill at expounding it that enabled him to argue the merits of air power with Marshall, Stimson, and the President; and he further possessed the detailed familiarity with the aircraft industry, the feel for how it worked, that enabled him to organize the processes of procurement which alone could make air power a reality. To a degree unparalleled among other major actors in the American drama of World War II, he combined the functions of strategist and industrial czar in the same person. It was also said of Lovett (by Time magazine) that unlike Billy Mitchell, he “gets things done by pressing the right button instead of wrecking the keyboard.”³⁰

Lovett was a flier, a decorated Navy pilot in World War I (lieutenant commander and recipient of the Navy Cross). He belonged to a group of Yale undergraduates who had learned to fly on their own in aircraft provided by one of their number’s father, a Morgan partner; they had then been inducted into active service through the good offices of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt. (Another member of the group was Artemus Gates, who in World War II was to be Lovett’s opposite number in the Navy Department.) Lovett served for a time with a British unit based in France, flew bombing missions over Belgium and Germany, and was promoted to command of the Navy’s northern bombing group. (It was during this period that Assistant Secretary Roosevelt inspected his airfield and wrote home that Lovett was “the son of Judge Lovett” and “seems like an awfully nice boy.”) Lovett came away from his World War I experience persuaded of the offensive potentiality of bombers against enemy industry, an opinion on which he was later to act with some effect.

The fact that men like Lovett were welcomed into the wartime administrations, though this was an aggravation to pure-in-heart New Dealers, was not fortuitous. The President’s attitude toward free enterprise and a market economy had always been far more conventional than his political rhetoric might at times have implied. Patterson, Bundy, McCloy, Lovett, Forrestal, Gates (and, of course, Averell Harriman), were the kind of people he knew, and he knew he needed them. That they were willing to put aside their often considerable antipathies to the New Deal in order to serve the nation struck him as commendable, if not a prior condition of his appointing them to their jobs. As a group they formed “the essential link,” so writes Jonathan Fanton in a Yale Ph.D. thesis about Lovett’s war years, “between Roosevelt’s conception of the national interest in wartime and the many specific assignments and sacrifices imposed on American industry…. At the same time, their instinctive respect for business values and their restraint in exercising authority maintained the perception of the voluntary co-operation of business.”³¹

“Judge” Lovett was a self-made Texas lawyer who acquired the judicial honorific after a brief stint on a state bench. He represented a railroad that was bought out by E. H. Harriman and before long had become legal counsel for the Harriman interests in Texas. By 1906, he was vice-president of the Union Pacific, and on Harriman’s death, in 1909, he became its president. The family had moved to New York and young Lovett went the approved route: Hill, Yale (Elizabethan, Skull and Bones, but also Phi Beta Kappa). After the war he tried Harvard Law School but found it stifling; in 1919, he married the daughter of James Brown, senior partner of Brown Brothers, investment bankers, a neighbor and family friend. Brown, who had no sons, found one in his son-in-law. In 1921, he took Lovett into the firm that later became Brown Brothers Harriman, and by 1926, Lovett was a partner, “a lifetime association,” writes Fanton, “to which he would return after each tour of public service.” (The merger with the Harrimans took place in 1930; Lovett and the Harriman brothers, Roland and Averell, had been friends from boyhood.)

The business of Brown Brothers was international, as it had been from its beginnings in the importation of Irish linens to Baltimore toward the end of the eighteenth century. Four generations of the family had engaged in financing every aspect of the flourishing transatlantic trade, and so diversified were its activities that at the time of the merger The World’s Work could speak of Brown Brothers as “a venerable banking house whose history is closely linked with American history.”³²

His work required Lovett in the years between the wars to make two trips annually to Europe, visiting the bank’s correspondents in as many as twenty cities. He watched the coming of World War II and on his final trip in 1940 became more than ever aware of the resurgence of German air power. He returned home on a refugee ship, convinced that neutrality was a chimera and that America must rearm. In October 1940, he organized for himself a private inspection tour of manufacturing plants on the West Coast, most of whose managers he knew personally. They confirmed for him what he already suspected—that the American aircraft industry as then organized was incapable of meeting the demands war would impose upon it.

This conviction he imparted to his friend James Forrestal, recently appointed under secretary of the Navy, and Forrestal induced him to say the same to Assistant Secretary of War Robert Patterson, who asked him to put it in writing. Lovett’s report of November 22, 1940, tried to avoid undue criticism of the manufacturers (he said it should be read “with the same sympathy which would be extended to a hen if she were asked, on short notice, to produce an ostrich egg”), but he left no doubt where the difficulty lay.

“This is a quantitative war,” Lovett wrote. “The airplane industry has, so far, been qualitative.” He argued for better procurement procedures, greater geographic dispersal, stronger measures to meet the shortages of machine tools and skilled workers, closer attention to special military requirements, and above all, more standardization and mass production. Patterson showed the report to Secretary Stimson, who also knew Lovett and decided then and there to hire him as a special assistant. Two weeks later, President Roosevelt approved and Lovett reported for duty (“the more I see of him,” Stimson wrote in his diary, “the better I like him”³³). Four months later, Lovett was named assistant secretary of war for air.

Lovett said that air matters in the War Department as he found them were “a hell of a mess.”³⁴ Even making an allowance for New Broom Syndrome, it does not seem an unfair assessment. Lovett could scarcely believe the stacked-up hierarchies that seemed to surround every action, the rotation policies that snatched away officers as soon as they learned anything. “Private industry,” as he wrote to an air force commander some years later, “would curl up in the corner and die after such practices.” He was especially astonished at the absence of reliable data; he couldn’t understand how anyone was willing to arrive at decisions without trustworthy facts. He set up his own reporting system on the numbers of planes, pilots, ground crews, and bombs available each day. “Mr. Lovett has lost faith in our figures,” General Arnold reported to his staff in August 1942, admonishing them henceforward to “be accurate.”³⁵

Lovett’s primary and most exhausting task, one in which he never quite succeeded, was to persuade the President to be realistic. Roosevelt believed that people can always do more than they think or say they can. He liked to set ambitious goals, often by plucking figures out of the air, on the theory that this would ensure a maximum effort. Lovett did not think that in aircraft production the theory applied. He believed, as he wrote Arnold in October 1942, that an “extravagant target figure is likely to produce less planes than more.” The pushing of panic buttons diverted resources and upset the orderly development of increased capacity. It encouraged the continuation of obsolete models, tempting manufacturers (as Lovett had written Hopkins in January) “to fall into the trap of the old numbers racket and build the easy types and forget about the spares.” (Failure to make enough spare parts had for a time grounded part of the RAF.) It led to a concentration on fighters, which could be made more quickly, rather than on heavy bombers, which took more time. It invited a crisis in credibility if, as Lovett believed, the President’s goals could not be met.

Roosevelt had told Stimson within a month after Pearl Harbor that he wanted 60,000 aircraft (45,000 combat type) produced in 1942 and 125,000 (100,000 combat type) in 1943. Lovett pointed out to Hopkins that this was incapable of realization, if only because the lead time required for materials and machine tools meant that 1942 production was “largely past history already.”³⁶ He was still making the same point to Arnold later in the year, when accumulating evidence of shortfalls indicated how right Lovett was. In August, the President had gone to Arnold direct, asking (through Marshall) for his estimate, not of predicted production, but of how many aircraft should be produced in 1943 “in order to have complete air supremacy over the enemy,” a characteristic Rooseveltian device for avoiding unwelcome statistics. (When shown figures he did not like, the President was known to ask that he not be shown them again.) Arnold, sharing the same psychology of provocation and prodding as Roosevelt’s, was inclined to go along with him on the figure of 100,000 for combat aircraft alone, and it was this that produced Lovett’s two-and-a-half-page memorandum to Arnold of October 14, 1942, which reveals his intelligence and integrity (and fluency of expression) at their best.

What purported to be a schedule of 1943 aircraft production, wrote Lovett, was not a schedule at all: “It is a fantasy.” No responsible person in the Material Command, the Bureau of Aeronautics, or the War Production Board would consider it credible. “In giving currency to such a program we are kidding no one but ourselves, the public, and the President.” Ten months of 1942 had already passed. Material was already going into the forging, fabricating, and other primary processes that would determine the rate of production through at least the second quarter of 1943. An achievable total figure for all types, combat included, would be 100,000 overall and probably less. If there were delays in reaching decisions, that number would have to be reduced still further, to between 92,000 and 96,000. “I do not feel that I can have any part,” Lovett wrote, “in supporting a program which, in my opinion, … is likely to cause false hopes initially and bitter disappointment later. Therefore, I feel compelled to disassociate myself.”³⁷

Arnold was not deterred. He believed that his duty was to raise the banner and shout Onward!; to state the needs and make every effort to meet the President’s program. He replied that future possibilities should not be judged by past performance. “The negative assumption that requirements cannot be met,” he wrote Lovett on October 19, “supported by facts as they are and not as we are capable of making them, too often has characterized thinking on this entire subject.”

The Wright brothers lesson: Nothing is impossible.

But Lovett had by this time mastered the techniques of Washington maneuver and had mustered an imposing phalanx of allies: Stimson, Knox, Marshall, King, Forrestal, and—not least—Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, who had written Arnold on October 17 that the 100,000 combat total was “utterly unattainable” and that no informed person he knew had any confidence in it. Arnold finally retreated, and forwarded Patterson’s letter (in which he recommended a program of 82,000 combat and 25,000 training, for a total of 107,000) to the Joint Chiefs, who met on October 21 and approved it, as then and reluctantly did the President, though he continued to insist that this should not be regarded as “a goal to shoot at” but as a “program [to] be carried out in toto.”³⁸

There were delays, caused by an aluminum shortage and a decision to replace two obsolete models with improved designs, and by March 1943 Lovett was warning Hopkins that a total of 88,000 was now a more likely 1943 figure. The WPB supported him, but Arnold prevailed with the Joint Chiefs and they stuck with the 107,000 target. They were wrong and Lovett was more than right: Total U.S. aircraft production for 1943 turned out to be 85,898, of which about 60 percent were combat types, little more than half of what the President had begun by demanding.³⁹

♦

Arnold tended to go a bit overboard when he talked about air power; Lovett did not. The mission of the Air Forces, Arnold wrote in his reply to Lovett’s memo, was “to destroy the capacity and the will of the enemy for waging war.” He was confident that the mission could be carried out, and that “no other offensive effort open to us can bring us this success” (his emphasis). Lovett never went that distance; his position was strong but judicious. “While I don’t go so far as to claim that air power alone will win the war,” he had written to Hopkins in March 1941, “I do claim that the war will not be won without it.”⁴⁰ Lovett’s view had many merits, among them that of containing the truth, but it also was better calculated than Arnold’s to convince the skeptical.

When Lovett first arrived in the War Department, he found it still at odds with the President over quotas that allocated the planes we produced equally between ourselves and the British. Roosevelt had begun by thinking of aircraft manufacture largely as an aspect of Lend-Lease, appreciating as he did (and Arnold and Secretary Woodring did not) that foreign orders were a politically acceptable device for increasing American productive capacity, an appreciation Lovett as a civilian had shared. It took time for the President entirely to abandon this perspective, and in dealing with it, Arnold, Marshall, and Stimson had become entangled in a wearing fight. Lovett came to the fray afresh, and produced ingenious arguments to use with Roosevelt—e.g., that a shortage of training planes was crippling the expansion of our own forces, that there were three pilots for every available plane, so that the pilots were not gaining familiarity with up-to-date equipment. For the moment nothing happened, but Lovett was on the right track.

His central endeavor was to create a climate of informed opinion. He began with Secretary Stimson, giving him in February 1941 what amounted to a tutorial on how air power had been employed in the present war up to that time, with an emphasis on British experience with granting air a large measure of self-governance. Stimson, as was his practice, summarized in his diary what he had learned that day. “Air warfare involves not merely a new auxiliary weapon for the ground troops,” Lovett had convinced him, “but it is becoming clear now that it involves independent action quite divorced from both the land and the sea.” Lovett was no advocate of full independence for the airmen, but he impressed on Stimson that it would be the secretary’s responsibility to strike a balance in “just how far to go in freeing them.”⁴¹

Next came Marshall, who Stimson feared might be unreceptive, a needless worry; Marshall proved to be an almost ideal channel through which Lovett’s (and Arnold’s) ideas could enter the Army mind. Lovett at Stimson’s request made a presentation to Marshall, and Stimson could see that it made “a good and strong impression.” Marshall and Lovett between them achieved a compromise in which Marshall granted the Air Corps increased autonomy while Lovett opposed the public and congressional pressures that in 1940 began building up for a separate air force. Lovett drafted the letter for Stimson to send to the Senate Military Affairs Committee (with the President’s approval) in which this mutually acceptable position—autonomy but not independence—was set forth. Forrest Pogue said that Marshall “highly prized” Lovett’s calm appraisals, and that by the end Lovett was as close to Marshall as to Stimson.

“I tried to give Arnold all the power I could,” Marshall told his biographer after the war. “My main difficulties came from the fact that he had a very immature staff. They were not immature in years, because they were pretty old, but I used to … say [they were] antique staff officers or passé airmen—passé fliers, I guess—because they were not trained at that kind of staff work and they were busy taking stands … about promotions.” Marshall much preferred able young officers like Lauris Norstad and Laurence Kuter, and urged Arnold to promote them, but Arnold said that he couldn’t because if he did so the rest of his staff would quit; Marshall promoted them anyhow.⁴² Marshall’s and Lovett’s work came to a climax in June 1941 when the President approved the revision to Army Regulation 95-5 that established the Army Air Forces (formerly Corps), with its own air staff and with Arnold both as its chief and as Marshall’s deputy. It had been well done; the pieces were in place.

What Lovett had badly wanted the President to accept was the need for increased production of heavy bombers. “If there is one lesson this war has taught,” Lovett wrote Stimson in the period following Pearl Harbor, “it is that defensive weapons will not win the war.” Offensive weapons meant to Lovett, as for the most part they did to Arnold, heavy bombers. Stimson encouraged Lovett to take his case to Hopkins in the White House; on February 28, 1942, Lovett did so and Hopkins’s response was sympathetic. He took a memo of Lovett’s to the President, who found it persuasive and accepted a Lovett draft for a presidential directive. On May 4, Roosevelt wrote to Stimson establishing a monthly goal of 500 heavy bombers as opposed to 4,500 other types. It had been Lovett’s first great success in influencing overall policy.⁴³

Another subject much on his mind was personnel and pilot training. Initially Lovett had shared the elitism (for which read snobbery) of Air Corps recruitment procedures, in which, for example, only college graduates were accepted as prospective pilots. But by early 1941 Lovett had come to realize that this and other arbitrary requirements were going to produce a chronic shortage, both in air and ground crews. He secured copies of one of the entrance tests, and he and the president of MIT took it; both failed (high scorer among MIT students taking it was “a young girl from Flatbush whose family were a bunch of musicians”). Eventually Lovett favored dropping what was by then the minimum acceptable level for pilots of two years of college. His own experience, he wrote to Arnold in November 1941, was that “the gilded son who has spent two years in the ivy-clad halls of Yale, can come out at the end of that time uneducated, uncultured, and unintelligent…. In my short life, some of the worst boors and most complete stinkers I have met were college graduates.” The system was revised, and within a year air force enrollment had increased fivefold.⁴⁴

But Lovett’s most critical function was to rule over the aircraft industry like a sympathetic but demanding father confessor. He did not hesitate to intervene; as a banker he was accustomed to being listened to by management. If it performed poorly it was scolded or, in some cases, replaced. “The government always has to step in in some form or other,” he told a senator who wanted to investigate one company. Yet he was on a first-name basis with most of the executives and kept their confidence. His office, writes Fanton, “served as an informal court of appeals” for the industry. Lovett did not want it to suffer unfairly and did want it to emerge from the war healthy and competitive. Under his guidance it expanded five times in plant space and ten times in manpower; by V-J Day it had produced over three hundred thousand aircraft.⁴⁵

If Lovett had flaws, they were those of his time and place. Like Stimson, he never quite shed the antilabor bias of the prewar business community; working people were meant to work and be content with their lot, unrest was the work of agitators (if Stimson had had his way, labor would have been conscripted and strikers sent to jail). The President tended to see labor troubles in the light of labor-management relations, where for Lovett they were complicated by other factors, like declining unemployment, the lack of skilled workers, and geographic disparities in pay; he found the failure to arrive at a national manpower policy very annoying. During 1943, three million people were involved in strikes of one kind or another and yet Roosevelt, as so often where a “solution” would only have made the problem worse politically, was content to let things drift. Lovett was flexible enough to advocate an expanded role for women, yet on racial questions he remained indifferent, and the air force record in its treatment of qualified blacks continued to be disgraceful.⁴⁶

If Lovett had an influence on grand strategy, it was less in his own right than through others: Arnold, Marshall, Stimson, the President. Most of all this concerned heavy bombers (though Lovett later intervened decisively to increase the range of fighter planes). Roosevelt’s approval in May 1942 of increased production of the heavies had not settled the issue, for when the Navy found out what the implications were for their own programs, they carried their complaints to Congress, where the House Committee on Naval Affairs lent a sympathetic ear. Lovett wrote a letter for Stimson’s signature to committee chairman Carl Vinson, Stimson’s first systematic statement of the air force stand. Lovett got Air Chief Marshal Charles Portal to write a letter, intended for public consumption, stating that “the heavy bomber in the offensive sphere still transcends all other requirements in importance.” (Eventually Lovett worked out a deal with Forrestal in which the two of them jointly pressed OPM for critical items both services needed.) Marshall had come to rely on him for daily briefings, and Stimson’s trust in him was complete. “The next time anybody asks you … what your authority is,” Stimson said to Lovett, “you just tell them that whatever authority the Secretary of War has, you have.”⁴⁷

Gradually the struggle to prevent aircraft production from being swallowed up in Lend-Lease had been going Arnold’s and Lovett’s way. Force of circumstance, and the perilous straits Britain was in, brought it home to the President that we could not go on forever aiding our allies at the expense of weakening ourselves. At a White House meeting on September 27, 1940 (Arnold was still in disfavor for arguing the cause of the Air Corps too insistently and was not present), Roosevelt urged that our B-17s be made available to the British. Stimson let Marshall do the talking, and Marshall (well advised by Arnold) pointed out that, setting aside a few squadrons in Hawaii and the Philippines, the United States had presently available for its own defense the sum total of forty-nine bombers. Stimson said that “the President’s head went back as if someone had hit him in the chest.” Stimson thought that Roosevelt “finally saw the situation we were in.”⁴⁸

Arnold’s appointment as deputy chief of staff, the highest position any airman could have aspired to, followed in October. The absence of presidential objection to it has been variously explained by, among other contributing causes, the commissioning of Roosevelt’s son Elliott as an Air Corps captain in September. (Arnold maintained, in the face of public complaints, that Elliott Roosevelt was well qualified,⁴⁹ and whether or not such was the case, the President’s favor was not that easily purchased.) More likely Roosevelt now realized that Arnold and Lovett had been right, that we badly needed an effective air force and could not defer indefinitely the labor of assembling it.

A few weeks before Christmas 1940, Arnold was invited to a small dinner at the White House and arrived to discover that he was early and that the President awaited him with a tray of cocktail mixings set out. “Good evening, Hap,” said Roosevelt, as though there had never been the slightest difference between them. “How about my mixing you an Old Fashioned?”

To the extent that Arnold indulged, which was sparingly, Old Fashioneds were among his favorite drinks. Someone had gone to the trouble of finding this out. It also occurred to him that he had nearly been turned down for chief of the Air Corps in 1938 because of a rumor that he was a drunk. He decided to permit himself a slight exaggeration.

“Thanks, Mr. President,” said he. “I haven’t had one for about twenty years, but I assure you I will enjoy this one with you, tremendously.”⁵⁰

III

On October 8, 1938, less than two weeks after he became chief of the Air Corps, Arnold wrote a personal letter to Charles A. Lindbergh, who was then living with his family on the island of Illiec, off the coast of Brittany. Arnold explained that he felt the need, and felt that the U.S. government had a need, for an exact evaluation of the present and potential air power of other nations. “I realize,” Arnold wrote, “that you have had an opportunity which has been available to no one else to observe the aviation industry the world over…. I shall count it a great personal favor, and believe you will be performing a patriotic service, if you can supply me with any data on this subject.”⁵¹

Lindbergh replied on November 2: “This is the third consecutive year during which I have had the opportunity of watching the German aviation development…. Germany is undoubtedly the most powerful nation in the world in military aviation and her margin of leadership is increasing with each month that passes…. In a number of fields the Germans are already ahead of us and they are rapidly cutting down whatever lead we now hold in many others…. I wish that you yourself could make a trip to Germany in the near future to see what is being done in that country.”⁵²

Lindbergh had already been providing information on the German air force and its equipment for American military intelligence. His first visit to Germany, in July 1936, had been arranged by Major Truman Smith, military attaché in the Berlin embassy. Lindbergh was shown the Heinkel and Junkers factories; he piloted two German aircraft and inspected others, including the Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber. Smith said that Lindbergh’s visit vastly improved his own access to the Luftwaffe and the quality of his reports to Washington. In October 1937, Lindbergh and his wife were invited back to Germany. He was shown the Focke-Wulf, Henschel, and Daimler-Benz factories, and was permitted to examine closely the Dornier 17 twin-engine bomber and the Messerschmitt 109 fighter. (Later he was allowed to fly the Me 109 and to inspect their best and newest bomber, the Junkers 88.) Before leaving, he helped Smith prepare a “general estimate” of German air power, which went back to the War Department over Smith’s signature but contained data and ideas that were Lindbergh’s, often set forth in the latter’s language.⁵³

Arnold answered Lindbergh on November 17; he had indeed contemplated a German trip three months earlier, he said, but had canceled it “for diplomatic reasons.” (The annexation of Austria took place in March; the Czech crisis began in May, reaching its height in early September, and the Munich agreement was signed at the end of the month.) Arnold invited further comments on the “refinements” of German design and Lindbergh obliged. “It seems to me,” he wrote in part on November 29, “that we should be developing prototypes with a top speed in the vicinity of 500 miles per hour at altitude…. I have no way of checking [the] figures, but the trend over here seems to be toward very high speed, both for bombers and fighters. Apparently, range and bomb load are sacrificed considerably for speed.”⁵⁴

In April 1939, Lindbergh publicly returned to the United States for the first time since the kidnapping and death of his son, which had caused him so much pain and so heightened his already considerable antagonism to journalists. Lindbergh arrived on the Aquitania (his wife and family followed shortly) and had to be escorted by a flying wedge of police through the crowd of shouting newspapermen and photographers awaiting him. That evening he telephoned Arnold, as Arnold had asked him to do. To escape the ravening press, Arnold suggested that they meet in the Hotel Thayer at West Point, where the dining room was cleared for their use. Later they continued several hours of conversation in the grandstand on the Plain, where the Army baseball team was playing Syracuse, and were seated immediately behind a row of reporters who would have given much to know where Lindbergh was.

Lindbergh, Arnold later wrote, “gave me the most accurate picture of the Luftwaffe, its equipment, leaders, apparent plans, training methods, and present defects that I had so far received.”⁵⁵ Lindbergh was well aware that the most serious German deficiency lay in a shortage of trained personnel, but he missed (as did virtually everyone else) another defect that in the long run proved more debilitating—the failure to develop an effective capacity for strategic bombing. He had seen the factories and he had seen bombers with enough range to reach anywhere in Europe. He drew the seemingly logical conclusion that a potential capacity had in fact been realized. “If she wishes to do so,” Lindbergh told Ambassador Joseph Kennedy in London during September 1938 (and Kennedy reported to Washington), “Germany has now the means of destroying London, Paris, and Prague.” He believed that German factories were “capable” of producing 20,000 aircraft annually, though he admitted uncertainty as to what actual production was; he thought perhaps 500 to 800 a month. Others, more alarmist than he, gave higher numbers. (Average monthly output was in fact 691 for 1939, but the total for the year was only 8,295; given losses, attrition, and obsolescence, this was not enough to fight a major war; total Luftwaffe operational strength in September 1939 was only 4,204 planes, of which 3,609 were serviceable.⁵⁶)

Charles Lindbergh has not been dealt with charitably by time and reputation. He was a ploddingly rational and indefatigably earnest young man who was trying to remain true to his beliefs, while at the same time coping with the most punishing consequences of fame to have descended on any unfortunate in the twentieth century. An apostle of teamwork and technology, he had been idolized as the epitome of individualism and heroic adventure (when he titled his first book We, the point did not get across).⁵⁷ An admirer of German industriousness and technical competence, he was vilified for admiring (as he did not) everything else about Nazi Germany. For reporting truthfully on what he saw, he is now condemned for having sowed defeatism, as indeed he had done with isolationists like Ambassador Kennedy, whatever his intentions.

Lindbergh was himself an isolationist but no pacifist. “Of course,” as he wrote Arnold, “war can not, and should not, always be avoided.” Yet always in his mind was the image of those fleets of Ju 88s he envisaged (range 1,553 miles, maximum bomb load 5,510 pounds) flying over London, Paris, and Prague. Like so many others among his contemporaries (Arnold included), he exaggerated not only Luftwaffe actual strength but the effects of aerial bombardment as such; he thought of it in terms of total destruction. His attitude toward Germany—his desire to “understand” it—was based on a conviction that another general European war would be a disaster for mankind and, as he had written Arnold from Brittany, “might result in the loss of Western civilization as we know it.”⁵⁸

The odd thing is that Lindbergh’s carefully gathered figures and erroneous conclusions drawn therefrom had exactly the opposite effect on Hap Arnold from the one they had on an advocate of appeasement like Ambassador Kennedy; they only steeled Arnold’s resolve to accelerate the development of an American air force to match and overpower Germany’s. One could further indulge the irony and say that a significant motive force behind the creation of the USAAF was the misunderstanding of German mobilization that Lindbergh encouraged. He was not alone in it, but Arnold took his opinions very seriously, and it can be said with some justification that their interview on the playing fields of West Point was an important step in Arnold’s forward progress, that it earns Lindbergh more credit for his contribution to the American war effort than he usually receives. At conversation’s end, Arnold asked Lindbergh if he would be willing to serve on a board to review American wartime requirements, and Lindbergh said yes—a response with consequences that will appear when we come to consider LeMay and the B-29s in a later chapter.

When war in fact came, and Lindbergh’s strenuous efforts (through speeches for the America First Committee) to keep this country out of it were shown to be pointless, he offered Arnold his services. “I fully realize the complications created by the political stand I have taken …,” wrote Lindbergh on December 20, 1941. “However, I want you to know that if the opportunity should arise during this crisis, I am ready and anxious to be of service…. May God strengthen you for the ordeal ahead.” When rumors of this letter leaked out, and Arnold was asked by the INS wire service if they were true, he diplomatically replied that if Lindbergh had volunteered, then “it indicated that he had changed from a non-interventionist status to one in which he desired to participate in activities for which his years of experience had best qualified him.”⁵⁹

Arnold’s statement did not have the mollifying effect he had hoped for; it generated a substantial outcry. Arnold saved, and filed in his papers, all the letters he received about the possibility of Lindbergh’s recall to active duty (just as Marshall, probably for similar reasons, saved all the letters he received about George Patton), and what is remarkable about them is their venom. There were by this time many Americans who hated Hitler with a smoldering hatred, and it rubbed off on Lindbergh; a medal Goring had conferred on him, an incident magnified out of proportion, made him appear a conscious Nazi sympathizer. When Lindbergh in January 1942 sought a meeting with Arnold, Arnold’s aide advised him to go directly to the secretary of war, and there followed two sessions, first with Stimson and Lovett and then with Lovett and Arnold, in which they expressed doubt about his ability to serve “loyally”; Lindbergh got the impression they were under instruction from higher authority and not wholly comfortable about it. There is no direct evidence for the President’s hand in this but every reason to suspect it.

In political matters Franklin Roosevelt was not a forgiving man, and in matters of principle Charles Lindbergh was not a yielding one. Lindbergh had served since 1931 on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and in 1938, when the Civil Aeronautics Authority was set up, he was approached about becoming its chairman (he declined, and resigned from NACA in 1939). In September 1939 of that year, when he was preparing his first major noninterventionist radio address, an offer was made to him (through Arnold and Truman Smith) to the effect that if he would cancel his speech and not publicly oppose the President’s policies, a cabinet post, secretary of air, would be created for him.

Neither Arnold nor Smith thought that Lindbergh was the kind of man to be bought off so blatantly, and he was not. He again declined; if anything, the incident strengthened his mistrust of the administration. When he met with Arnold and Lovett in 1942, he told them that he had “very little confidence in the President,” that he had not changed his prewar views, but that if he returned to uniform he “would follow the President of the United States as Commander-in-Chief of the Army.” They did not feel that went far enough, and their response convinced him that further efforts to rejoin the Air Corps would be a mistake.⁶⁰ Millions of others (including many who were equally ardent America Firsters) took identical positions without having their loyalty questioned, and served without incident.

But Lindbergh was not an ordinary American.

The President’s attitude is unappealing but comprehensible. He had been trying to guide the nation on a course beset by real and menacing hazards, and to his mind the opposition of people so prominent as Lindbergh seriously compounded the danger we were in. He used—and, in judicious hindsight, abused—every instrumentality of his office to counter them. He authorized the attorney general to employ wiretapping and asked him to explore the possibility of a grand jury investigation into the America First Committee’s finances. He turned over to the FBI telegrams critical of his own position, and to the Secret Service letters supporting Lindbergh. Even if Lindbergh was a guileless innocent, he was aiding those the President considered to be subversive. And Roosevelt did not think Lindbergh to be innocent. “If I should die tomorrow,” he told Secretary Morgenthau, “I want you to know this. I am absolutely convinced that Lindbergh is a Nazi.”⁶¹

Lindbergh’s attempts to serve his country in a civilian capacity were at first frustrated. When he sounded out friends at Pan American and Curtiss-Wright about such a possibility, they told him there were objections from the White House. Four months passed before he received an offer from Henry Ford—who could not have cared less what the White House thought—to join him at the Willow Run plant, where Ford was building B-24 Liberator bombers (eventually 6,791 of them and 1,893 “knock-down” units for assembly elsewhere; Willow Run’s total output, after some teething troubles, was the largest of any aircraft plant in the country).⁶² Lindbergh accepted Ford’s invitation and bought a house in Bloomfield Hills. He made high-altitude flights in the P-47 Thunderbolt and worked to improve the engine in the Navy’s Corsair F4U. In April 1944 he went to the Pacific as a technical representative of United Aircraft and showed pilots how to get increased range out of the P-38 Lightning by using low revolutions per minute, high manifold pressure, and an auto-lean mixture-control setting. He flew the Corsair with heavy bomb loads, to prove it could be done. He flew fifty combat missions, on one of which he shot down a Japanese fighter.⁶³ Medals are given for less. That his President should have believed him a Nazi is a sad sidelight on the bitterness that political passion can arouse, and a reaffirmation of the rule that true tragedy should be inevitable, as this one was not.

Fortunately, it had no effect on Lindbergh’s friendship with Hap Arnold, which continued throughout and after the war. In 1945, Lindbergh went to Germany as a member of a technical mission to study advanced German aircraft, in particular those with jet or rocket propulsion. In 1949, after Arnold had retired and finished the manuscript of his book, Global Mission, Lindbergh one day encountered him in the Pentagon, and wrote him some days later: “I wish there had been more opportunity to talk. I have thought of you often as I traveled around the Air Force establishments you took such a large part in creating. It was a great privilege to serve under you and to know you. My best wishes always travel with you.”⁶⁴

♦

In 1941, Arnold was still having trouble persuading President Roosevelt that an air force in prospect was not the same thing as an air force in being, and that there was no point in sending everything we had to the British unless we knew exactly what they needed. In the spring he decided to go to London to see for himself (this Arnold did often, as in the trips he made to the Pacific in 1943 and 1945). He planned to meet with Air Marshal Portal (who headed the RAF) and with—he hoped—Lord Beaver-brook (who was in charge of aircraft production), but he still thought of himself as a minor league player in the major league of senior Allied commanders, and he had little expectation of anything special in the way of a reception. Here Arnold was mistaken; he was given a welcome of warmth and great regard. Every door was opened; there were dinners with the high brass and cabinet ministers, a weekend with Churchill and family at Dytchley Park, and—to top it off—an audience with the king.

Arnold found himself confronted with a basic disparity in scale; a number of his listeners seemed to have no clear picture of what American industry would be able to produce. When he told Portal that we would need bauxite for the aluminum in 75,000 airplanes, he realized that Portal was having difficulty with so large a figure, and when Arnold talked about storage for two million gallons of gasoline in Newfoundland, the idea was treated as “somewhat staggering.” Arnold’s aide, now-Major Elwood P. “Pete” Quesada, said that the British “would talk about squadrons whereas we would talk about groups” (a difference in terminology: RAF “squadron” meant U.S. “wing”). Both Arnold and Quesada thought that our future allies were setting their sights too low, and that in order to win the war they were going to have to do “a hell of a lot more” than they seemed to have in mind.⁶⁵

The evening of Arnold’s third day in London, he witnessed his first air raid; he and Quesada went up on the roof of the Dorchester to watch. Sirens began to wail, searchlights to probe the sky, and the antiaircraft guns to open fire. Arnold could hear the bomb bursts coming closer as the horizon reddened with burning buildings. Soon the German planes were directly overhead. “The noise was deafening,” wrote Arnold, “with the firing of the guns and the bombs dropping—and then, almost as quickly as the raid had started, the noise rapidly receded and all was silent again, leaving the sky bright from the fires.”

The scene made a profound impression on Arnold and Quesada, primarily because as air officers they thought the raid had been less than what the Luftwaffe was capable of delivering, “not—according to my mind—in any way a display of Air Power,” Arnold wrote. When he was surveying damage to London later in the week, the thought occurred to him that it had been caused by no more than five hundred bombers. What if (the terms in which Americans were thinking) there had been eight hundred or a thousand or more? “Air power,” wrote Arnold, “means employment of airplanes in numbers large enough to secure complete destruction.”

Quesada said that the two of them “came to a sort of opinion, an intuitive opinion, that the British didn’t know what they were in for. We sold them short, in other words.” If the Germans really turned loose the power Arnold thought they possessed, then there could only be one outcome. He believed “the British were actually in an awfully tight spot, and knew it.” He came home so discouraged about the chances for Britain’s survival that at the President’s request a speech he had intended to give to some of his officers was canceled, and he asked Quesada to speak in his place.⁶⁶

Why was Arnold so wrong on a subject of such importance for air warfare? This is another way of phrasing a related question, one of the seemingly simple yet in fact complex puzzles of the war—namely, why had the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain when by all rights it should have won? The Germans in 1940 possessed numerical superiority in aircraft and in bases that ringed Britain from the east and south. Had they achieved control of the air, nothing could have prevented their invasion of the British Isles. Had this succeeded, Europe and the Middle East would have been abandoned and America isolated, the undivided weight of Germany would have fallen upon Russia, and German and Japanese armies would have met on the borders of India. Yet the Luftwaffe failed, and none of the somber events noted above came to pass. Why? Those who have offered answers, from both the Allied and the enemy sides, are uncommonly united in agreeing that the Germans lost because they were stupid beyond belief, while the British won because they were unbelievably resolute—and not in the least bit stupid.

One reason for Arnold’s error was the American overestimation of German strength; he discovered in London that he had been crediting the Luftwaffe with 2,000 more aircraft than the British did, and they in turn (as was later learned) had the total too high—at the outbreak of war, 4,320 as opposed to the actual 3,647, and the error accumulated.⁶⁷ But another error lay in the fact that the picture of German air power as painted by someone of Lindbergh’s familiarity with it had a great deal of plausibility. When the Luftwaffe was unveiled before a startled world in 1935, it offered alarming evidence of the superiority Hitler and Goring claimed for it. The prohibitions of the Versailles Treaty against a German air force were shown to have been farcical. Planes built as transports reappeared as bombers, and “sport” aircraft as fighters; men appeared as pilots who had trained on gliders or in a secret school south of Moscow. With the success of the campaigns in Poland, Scandinavia, and the West in 1939–40, a theoretically overwhelming instrument of war, when put to the test, gave every appearance of being all that Lindbergh and others had said it was.

The evidence was misleading, however. The test had not been a genuine one; the Luftwaffe was riddled with weaknesses. There had been considerable bluff involved, and the bluff had not been called by air combat against opponents whose own air forces were weak or ineffectual. German air theory had been identical to that of the hidebound American Army General Staff in the between-wars years; the difference was that the Americans succeeded in disembarrassing themselves of it, while the Germans did not. The Luftwaffe was fully and consciously designed for ground support, and for ground support in a short, limited European war. When it had to face a broader and more extended challenge, its inner flaws were revealed. The Battle of Britain faced it with that challenge.

From the start, the German air force encountered serious shortages, especially in middle-grade staff, which meant that army and navy officers, who lacked air background, had to be brought in. There was a shortage of aluminum, which meant pressure to concentrate on light and medium bombers. (The Luftwaffe had once possessed a confirmed believer in long-range heavy bombers in the person of its chief of staff, Major General Walther Wever, but Wever died in a crash in 1936 and the four-engine prototypes he had been encouraging—the Dornier 19 and the Junkers 89—were abandoned.⁶⁸) There were not enough fighter planes, and the standard model, the Messerschmitt 109, had too short a range, which meant that it could not escort bombers over England much beyond London.

Germany’s true capability in the air resided in its scientists and technicians, who were justly well-regarded. Had their talents been properly employed, the end product would have been a powerful adversary. Fortunately for our side, their talents were not properly employed, but rather were dissipated in irrelevant projects or frustrated by feuding bureaucrats. A case in point was Professor Willy Messerschmitt himself, the gifted owner and chief designer of the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke near Augsburg, where postponed delivery dates seem to have been a permanent condition. No one had the authority, or tried hard enough, to get Messerschmitt to concentrate on standard and reliable lines. His designers were far more interested in brilliant innovation than in testing what came off the production line, and their wishes were indulged, with the result that during 1942 they were working on forty new models in addition to twenty-two prototypes with six variations, while Messerschmitt aircraft were still undergoing accidents from faulty landing gears.⁶⁹

Luftwaffe organization was top-heavy and sluggish. The enormous Air Ministry building in Berlin’s Leipzigerstrasse has been suggested as being one of the causes of Germany’s defeat, inasmuch as it filled with a steady stream of sections and bureaus in furious rivalry with one another, and with “engineer generals” absorbed in infighting and intrigue. When the Air Ministry was asked to choose between the Me 109 and the Heinkel 112 fighters, no one could agree, so they ordered both. “There was hardly a decision,” writes Luftwaffe bomber pilot Werner Baumbach, “that was not reversed several times and then finally restored.” A state of chronic indecisiveness ensured that the production of obsolete types continued and that the Luftwaffe entered the Battle of Britain with models that had essentially been in the advanced design stage in 1933.⁷⁰

At the top of this busy ant heap was a total incompetent. Hermann Goring was a World War I hero who had promoted all his former comrades and, at least until late 1941, enjoyed Hitler’s full confidence. He was monumentally uninterested in technical matters of any kind yet thoroughly persuaded of the Luftwaffe’s technical superiority. Confronted with the chaos of too many designs and too few effective aircraft, at a conference on February 7, 1940, which he chaired, he firmly settled the question in classic authoritarian style. “Only those projects will be considered absolutely essential,” reads the conference report, “which will be completed in 1940 or promise to be producing by 1941 at the latest.”⁷¹ This substantially set back the development of new prototypes, on the grounds that they would not be needed after a war soon to be over. It was among Göring’s most successful contributions to Allied victory. If the Me 262, a jet fighter of truly advanced design that was operational by October 1944 and took a worrisome toll of Allied bombers, had been available earlier in sufficient numbers, Allied mastery of the air over Europe would have been a doubtful prospect.⁷²

There could be no better illustration of the colossal inefficiency of Nazi Germany, or of the Nazis’ success in concealing it from others (and, at times, from themselves). Two myths coincided: Everyone knew that Germans are efficient and everyone knew that dictatorships are efficient; therefore, if Hitler says Germany is totally mobilized for war, Germany must be totally mobilized for war. Werner Baumbach saw something quite contrary. He remained a German patriot even in defeat, but experience had taught him that a totalitarian system, “thanks to the rigid dogmatic thinking of its leaders and the clumsiness of its organization,” is incapable of adapting to the volatile conditions of modern warfare. He knew what weakness the Nazi bombast concealed. “They knew abroad that we were not bluffing,” boasted Goring in 1939. “And yet how often we bluffed!” said Baumbach ten years later. At the time of the Rhineland reoccupation in 1936, they had only one Potemkin squadron of Arado biplane fighters, unarmed, which they moved from field to field, changing the insignia each time to reveal a “new” squadron to foreign observers.⁷³

I have dilated at this length on the inherent faults of the Luftwaffe, not because it was a less than formidable foe, but because they serve as a useful object lesson, because they help in part to explain much of what happened in 1940, and because they stand in such sharp contrast to the relative sanity and system with which the emergence of air power was managed from Washington. The matters Roosevelt, Arnold, and Lovett had to deal with may seem to the reader to have been theoretical and abstract when in fact they were not. High management, like high command, if well done will often be invisible; if badly done, its effects will litter the landscape and crop up underfoot at every turn.

Luftwaffe pilots like Werner Baumbach were able and dedicated men (he held the Oak Leaves with Swords to the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, highest decoration awarded to a bomber pilot), but they were helpless against the incompetence, corruption, and viciousness that flowed over their country from the top like a gray, molten, volcanic tide. Two of Göring’s most devoted generals, Ernst Udet and Hans Jeschonnek, committed suicide when he deceived and betrayed them. (“Iron Man, you deserted me!” Udet scrawled on the wall before he shot himself⁷⁴). Seeing how something was done wrong can be helpful in appreciating how it was done right.

The British did everything right—well, nearly everything.

The Battle of Britain was fought on their side by a singular concurrence of well-crafted solutions to the problem of how to defend an island. Out of disparate elements—thirty thousand ground observers in a thousand posts, clever Oxbridge dons who were reading German ciphers, countrywide communication lines operated and maintained by the Post Office, two excellent aircraft in steady production and several hundred high-spirited young men to fly them, a gadget of tall steel towers and dancing lights on a cathode-ray tube, and above all two commanders of genius—was spun a web in which the Luftwaffe ensnared itself in victories never quite attained and defeats not clearly acknowledged. Some Germans went on insisting after the war that there had never been any such thing as the Battle of Britain, but their pilots thought otherwise. Told again and again that RAF Fighter Command had statistically ceased to exist, the German fliers over England saw the swift formations rising up against them. “Here they come again,” said one, “the last fifty Spitfires.”⁷⁵

The RAF fighter pilots occupy center stage and deserve to, if only for their humor. (Listening on the radio to Churchill’s great tribute—“Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few”—one among them was heard to remark, “That must be a reference to mess bills.”) But in the wings was a multitude. When the German missions formed up over their bases, the low-grade radio traffic they generated was read and understood, so that their origin and composition—sometimes their destination—were known even before radar picked them up and the trim WAAF girls in the sector stations with their croupier rakes began moving colored counters on the plotting tables (for most of the battles they were never more than four minutes, or fifteen miles, behind the event⁷⁶).

Then the squadrons were “scrambled,” the whine of the engines began, and the gladiators of this incomparable struggle climbed into the sky. Radar lost the enemy when he crossed the coast, which was when the ground observers took over, but most vital of all was the command control by leaders who must husband every resource and spend it only where justified: Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, chief of Fighter Command, and Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, commander of 11th Group in southeast England, of whom it was justly said that he was the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon.⁷⁷

The Germans never quite took the measure of their opponent and the calculated economy of his tactics. They knew, vaguely, that the British had radar (the tall steel towers on the coast were visible for miles), but they disparaged it as ineffectual and Goring, after an attack on the towers more successful than he knew, called off any continuation. They could hear the ground-to-air conversations of RAF fighter control with the pilots, but this they interpreted as only a manifestation of British “rigidity.” Their invasion plans were impromptu and they seemed at times to think that the Luftwaffe could accomplish the defeat of Britain single-handed. Lacking any air staff that could plan or execute a strategic offensive, they wobbled about from one objective to another, abandoning one to take up something else just at the moment when the first of the two, if pursued with consistency, might have succeeded.

They began with attacks on coastal convoys in the Channel, and continued these well into mid-August, allowing their opponent a precious month in which to recuperate and prepare. (Can you fill “the unforgiving minute?” asked Kipling, a question George Patton often quoted to himself and others.) The next stage consisted of a major effort to destroy Fighter Command and achieve air supremacy over Britain, but they were ill prepared for this and there were those in the Luftwaffe high command who knew it. They did not know, except from pilots’ reports, which were the airfields the British fighters were flying from, and they did not know which were the all-important sector stations in the command net, nor that these—because of parsimony on the part of the Air Ministry—were located aboveground and highly vulnerable.

How close, how close the Germans came to winning! In the battle of fighter versus fighter, by early September the Luftwaffe seemed on every evidence to be ahead. Fighter Command was on the ropes. Pilot reserves were seriously depleted. Morale was beginning to show wear and tear; some squadrons avoided contact with the Germans and at one field (Mansion, in Kent, the most exposed and heavily bombed) men went into the air-raid shelters and refused to come out. By the beginning of September the defense of Great Britain depended essentially on two sector airfields, Tangmere near Portsmouth and Kenley near London, and if these had been attacked to the exclusion of all else, neither you nor I would be sitting where we are at this moment.⁷⁸ What it came down to was not a coterie of superheroes in Spitfires but the consummate maneuvering of Park and Dowding, and the average quality of the average pilots (many flying Hawker Hurricanes, with which the battles were mainly fought)—and even some of the Germans admitted that the British average was better than theirs.⁷⁹ What it came down to was who cracked first, and it was not RAF Fighter Command that cracked.

On September 7, Goring personally took charge of the campaign and made the decision that determined its subsequent course and outcome. He switched the attack from the airfields to London; Fighter Command was spared destruction and what Londoners called “the blitz” began. It was an impulsive and irrevocable blunder. In London that day, 306 died and 1,337 were seriously injured, but this was to be the last of the daylight raids; thenceforward the bombers came mostly by night and slowly the balance began to swing toward the defenders until September 15, the day so glowingly described by Churchill in his war history, when the Germans lost sixty bombers and the RAF lost only twenty-six fighters, thirteen of whose pilots were saved. On October 26, the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park decoded a Luftwaffe message indicating that a special administrative unit attached to the invasion forces had been disbanded.⁸⁰ The conquest of Great Britain had been indefinitely postponed.

Drew Middleton had been in the House of Commons in June when Churchill delivered his speech, with its matchless peroration, announcing that the Battle of Britain was about to begin. The words form ranks in the back of every mind in which they echo: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’” There was a moment of silence and then the cheering began. “Somehow from the recesses of the British spirit the challenge was going to be met, the duty done,” wrote Middleton. “Somehow these incredible people were going to do it.” He came out into a sunshine that seemed brighter than it had been before.⁸¹

From end to end that island burned with a white flame in those days, and it lit the world.

Coming as early in the war as it did, the Battle of Britain caused three nations to draw conclusions from it that were consequential in being both true and not true. The Americans concluded, since German bombers were too lightly armed (true), that therefore our own bombers, which were heavily armed (true), could with ease break through fighter defenses of the kind that had partially stopped the Germans (not true). The Germans concluded that bombers could be hurt by swarms of fighters (true), but neglected to notice, as they themselves had very nearly demonstrated, that swarms of fighters could be hurt by other swarms of fighters (also true, and later our salvation). Some but not all Germans concluded that they had delivered such a knockout blow (almost true) that the British were really defeated anyhow (not true) and merely didn’t know it (neither true nor relevant). Finally, in rhythm with their leader’s prose, the British concluded that in the skies over their green hills and valleys during the summer of 1940 had been fought the battle that saved everything.

True.

♦

Arnold’s realization that he had finally reached the major leagues came in August 1941, when he attended the meeting between Roosevelt and Churchill that produced the Atlantic Charter. At the time he had no notion why he had been invited, and only later did he discover that it had been Harry Hopkins’s idea, to match the British representation by all three services. Marshall had told him only to bring heavy clothing and expect to be away about ten days. At New York, Arnold was embarked aboard Tuscaloosa, Marshall and Stark in Admiral King’s flagship, Augusta. Screened by four destroyers, they proceeded eastward down Long Island Sound. Arnold was on the bridge when he noticed a burst of signal-flag activity from Augusta, two or three halyardsful. He asked a Navy friend what the message meant. The answer, after a pause: “That’s Admiral King asking the Captain of Tuscaloosa just what the hell he thinks he’s doing, anyway.”⁸²

They anchored off Martha’s Vineyard on the afternoon of the fourth. That night a blinking light appeared and a signalman on Augusta reported: “Tell the Admiral that the Potomac has just entered the anchorage with President Roosevelt aboard.” The President’s yacht had put out from South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where Roosevelt had been visibly vacationing with Princess Martha of Norway, her two daughters, and Prince Karl of Sweden. Never was Roosevelt’s delight in minor royalty and deception more evident. Early that morning he was transferred to Augusta and later that day Potomac passed through the Cape Cod Canal with persons vaguely resembling the President and his party waving at onlookers ashore. Augusta, Tuscaloosa, and the destroyers meanwhile steamed past Nantucket Shoals Lightship and headed north at a brisk twenty-two knots, through dense fog in heavily traveled fishing grounds and shipping lanes. “It was a serious misjudgment,” writes King’s biographer. Radar was not yet all that reliable and King was very lucky there were no collisions.⁸³

They reached Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, on August 7. Arnold was thoroughly enjoying himself, though one aspect of Tuscaloosa’s plumbing facilities puzzled him. “One starts to wash one’s face or hands in clear crystal water,” he wrote in his diary, “but when one uses soap—bingo the water turns blue. Investigation reveals that there are two ships in the Navy that have that particular peculiarity.” He wrote out a set of three principles he believed they should follow in the meetings he now knew to be forthcoming—(1) a plan to be made for developing U.S. Army and Navy strength; (2) aid to Britain and China only in items effectively usable and not needed for such a plan; and (3) no commitments to be made until our experts had studied them—and he was pleased when Marshall, Stark, and the President accepted these. On the basis of his London trip he anticipated that the British would be well prepared, while as far as he knew, “we were going into this one cold.”⁸⁴ We were not sufficiently ready for war and the men who would become the Joint Chiefs were not so far functioning as such.

Churchill had not yet arrived and the President went fishing. According to Arnold, he caught one toad fish, one dog fish, and one halibut; according to Elliott Roosevelt, he caught one what-is-it that nobody could identify and he suggested it be sent to the Smithsonian. (At the President’s request, Arnold had arranged for Captain Roosevelt, then stationed at Gander Bay, to join them; King, similarly, had ordered Lieutenant [jg] Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., from destroyer Mayrant to report to the “commander in chief,” which young Roosevelt thought meant King, and wondered what mistake he could have made that was that bad.⁸⁵) The President held a conference with his military leaders aboard Augusta and presented them with an overall statement of policy (Arnold afterward made notes).

Our line of responsibility ran east of Iceland and the Azores, the President said, and in this area we must ensure the safe passage of the goods we produce. Hostile craft entering it must be assumed to have hostile intent, and if they come within shooting distance, “we must start shooting first.” We must do everything possible to provide for delivery of aircraft to England: establish weather and radio stations, help train ferry pilots. We should put ten thousand soldiers into Iceland. We should put more forces into the Philippines, principally B-17s and P-40s, to give some “bite” to any ultimatum we might have to send Japan. If Japan goes into Thailand, “The United States will not be overly concerned,” but if she goes into the Dutch East Indies, “then we are vitally interested, and must do our utmost to get them out”⁸⁶—one of the best summations to be had of the American position in the summer of 1941, with war four months away.

On the morning of August 9, H.M.S. Prince of Wales broke through the mist into sunshine, the crew manning the rails and the Prime Minister standing on the bridge in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity House. After an exchange of ceremonies, there began four days of conferences (Arnold thought two days too many, in view of the live danger from German submarines) among the principals and their subordinates, in which no matters of great moment were resolved but much groundwork was built for the combined efforts that lay ahead. Marshall and Sir John Dill here discovered one another.

Arnold in retrospect believed the meetings “invaluable” in giving the two prospective partners a better understanding of each other’s problems, though what he chiefly came away with was a vivid impression of how much the British were willing to ask of us. His grandiose use of large numbers in London seemed to have backfired. They were asking for four thousand heavy bombers immediately when our total production had not yet reached five hundred a month. “All they want is our birthright,” said one American officer. Arnold was relieved that the Americans “were able to get away without promising or giving away everything we had,” and he thought that his opposite number, Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman, “accepted our refusals gracefully.”⁸⁷

The first evening had been spent in “a family dinner,” Roosevelt’s physician, Ross McIntire, called it, aboard Augusta: broiled chicken, spinach omelet, chocolate ice cream. “I have never seen a happier group,” McIntire said, “meeting on such a serious subject.” (British fare was more elegant: Arnold said that lunch aboard the Prince of Wales consisted of caviar, vodka, mock turtle soup, grouse, champagne, port, coffee, and brandy.) After dinner on Augusta that first day, Churchill, at Roosevelt’s invitation, gave one of his tour de force summations of the world situation. Elliott Roosevelt said that normally his father dominated every occasion as though that were his natural due. “But not tonight. Tonight Father listened. Somebody else was holding the audience, holding it with grand, rolling, periodic speeches.” Roosevelt listened, fiddled with his pince-nez eyeglasses, rubbed his eyes, doodled on the tablecloth with a burnt match. “But never an aye, nay, or maybe,” wrote young Elliott, “came from the Americans sitting around that smoke-filled saloon.”⁸⁸

They were not being persuaded. The British strategic plan “did not include our Army and Air Force playing more than a very secondary role,” Arnold wrote in his diary. “Hence, it did not mention nor did the British representatives bring up point of our building up our Army or Navy for active participation in the war.” This was of a piece with a British approach contrived to minimize the risks of American involvement and maximize American willingness to allocate the fruits of our industrial production to Britain. If the Americans needed aircraft, Arnold wrote, “then they said—we will give you planes to operate when you arrive.”

To this casual brush-off was coupled the idea that Germany could be defeated without an Allied landing on the Continent, or even if there was to be a land campaign, that it would be one of armored spearheads and armed resistance groups in which large infantry forces would be unnecessary. How much of this was meant to make intervention palatable to Americans, and how much was the consequence of British realistic appraisal of their inadequate resources, one cannot tell. At any event, it was absurd, and the Americans recognized its absurdity. Marshall knew that there would have to be large ground armies, and Arnold felt instinctively that an apparently hopeless set of circumstances was not to be accepted as long as the air power eventuality was open.⁸⁹

It was a confrontation that foreshadowed many of the Anglo-American conferences to come: British awareness of the deadly war they were in, American awareness of how much deadly force would be needed to win it. The Americans were sensitive to the fact that they were talking to people who had actually been doing the fighting (the Prince of Wales still bore the scars of its battle with the Bismarck), and to the symbolic significance of holding these conversations in the first place. To the President, the latter consideration was all-important, and therefore he devoted much of his time to working out the text of a declaration he and the Prime Minister could sign together, not least to protect himself against any accusation that some secret commitment had been made (“we wished to God there had been,” said one of the British officials later to Robert Sherwood⁹⁰).

The Americans were astonished at the speed and complexity of British communications. Churchill took no step without consulting the War Cabinet in London, with whom in three days he exchanged some thirty messages. Churchill sent a draft of the joint declaration at 1:50 P.M. (local time) on the eleventh and received an answer within twelve hours. The draft reached London around midnight, when many cabinet ministers were asleep, but they promptly convened, discussed it, and cabled their approval (plus a suggested additional point that Roosevelt readily accepted) at 4:10 A.M. (London time). “Please thank Cabinet for amazingly swift reply,” Churchill answered.⁹¹

If what Roosevelt wanted was a symbol, he surely got one at the Atlantic Charter meeting. The photographs of the religious services held on the Prince of Wales’s quarterdeck, the military of the two nations intermingled, the pulpit draped with their two flags, communicated more meaning than did the charter. The lesson was from the first chapter of Joshua: “There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, so will I be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. Be strong and of good courage.” Churchill had picked the hymns himself: “For Those in Peril on the Sea,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and “O God, Our Help in Ages Past,” of which he wrote in The Grand Alliance, “Macaulay reminds us the Ironsides had chanted as they bore John Hampden’s body to the grave.”⁹²

“We live by symbols and we can’t too often recall them,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote to the President some days later. “And you two in that ocean … in the setting of that Sunday service, gave meaning to the conflict between civilization and arrogant, brute challenge, and gave promise more powerful and binding than any formal treaty could, that civilization has brains and resources that tyranny will not be able to overcome.”⁹³

Footnote to the future: The President put ashore in Maine and to his train at Portland was delivered a message by a young special assistant to the secretary of the Navy identified in the naval log as “ Adelai Stevenson,” who at some risk had been chasing the train in a small aircraft. The message, deemed highly secret, was that a reliable source reported Stalin to be negotiating with Hitler. “Adlai, do you believe this?” said Roosevelt after he read Stevenson’s handwritten scrawl (here was the first and the last time two of the great Democrats of their age were to meet). Stevenson said he wasn’t sure. “I don’t believe it,” Roosevelt said. “I’m not worried at all. Are you worried, Adlai?” Stevenson said he guessed not, and on turning to leave, by his account, bumped into the door. Stevenson’s stories about himself tended to be self-deprecatory and to improve in the telling. Thus ended what he described to his wife as, with the exception of their marriage and the birth of their three sons, “the most exciting day of my life.”⁹⁴

IV

The first and severest test of American air power came in August 1943 with the raid on Ploesti, Rumania, by 178 B-24 Liberators based in North Africa. The Ploesti raid stands apart from the rest of the war in the air. The idea for it, and the unusual tactics involved, came from the top; it was conceived in Arnold’s headquarters and approved by the President. It was not an element in some other campaign but regarded as worthwhile in and of itself. It was thought through and planned in meticulous detail, to be executed by the best-prepared and most experienced force we then had available, and it was fought with incomparable bravery, the only single action of the war for which five Congressional Medals of Honor (three of them posthumous) were awarded. It was also the worst disaster in the history of the USAAF, and considered as a test, it brought in an inconclusive verdict.

Ploesti, a small town north of Bucharest, was the dream target of all time—fragile, concentrated, vital. It was the source of 60 percent of Germany’s crude oil supply. Hitler’s Chief of Staff, General Jodl, said that no success the Russians could achieve on the eastern front would be “directly disastrous” as long as they did not capture the Rumanian oil fields, and Hitler himself conceded that if the Ploesti refineries were destroyed, “the damage will be irreparable.”⁹⁵ Germany had little natural oil, but Rumania’s was plentiful and of high quality; it was piped or otherwise transported to the processing plants in or around Ploesti, for conversion there into fuel oil, lubricants, and high-octane gasoline, of which Ploesti produced the best the Germans had. Some forty refineries were located near Ploesti, among them the six catalytic crackers that made the aviation fuel, all netted together by pipelines and railroad yards, dotted with thousands of combustible storage tanks. Power plants, distilling units, and boiler houses were equally vulnerable—a total of delicate and complex units that were producing some 400,000 tons of refined petroleum a month for Hitler’s war machine. No wonder Allied air commanders looked at Ploesti and longed to destroy it.

The bombing of Ploesti had early on appealed to Franklin Roosevelt. In May 1942, he had approved the diversion to it of a project even more appealing to him, which was the bombing of Japan. In the hasty extemporization of the post-Pearl Harbor days, a scratch force of B-24s under Colonel Harry A. Halverson had been trained in great secrecy to attack Tokyo from bases in China, but by the time they reached Khartoum in the Sudan, the situation in Burma had deteriorated so badly that their original mission was canceled. General Marshall persuaded the President to send them instead against Ploesti, which twelve of them reached at dawn on June 12 and bombed through overcast at 10,000 feet. Though damage was negligible, no aircraft were lost to enemy action and no one was killed; four B-24s landed in Turkey, where they and their crews were interned (within a year all were released and rejoined their outfits). But the Germans had been alerted. Luftwaffe Colonel Alfred Gerstenberg, who was responsible for the defense of Ploesti, told his staff, “This is the beginning.”⁹⁶

The Russians had bombed Ploesti during the summer of 1941, with indifferent success. American studies of the feasibility of striking it had begun less than a month after war came, and in April 1943—with the ground campaign that would give us North Africa nearly completed—General Arnold had ordered the project revived (it was meaningful to him; he had relinquished for it officers and aircraft dearly needed elsewhere). Detailed planning was entrusted to Colonel Jacob E. Smart of Arnold’s staff, who flew to England for consultation with a British officer formerly the manager of the Ploesti plant. It appeared that most of the refineries were in a circle around Ploesti about six miles in diameter. Smart could not hope to have available more than two hundred bombers, and he therefore must not waste bombs. Somehow he would have to find a way of attacking only the outer ring. “It was like trying to bomb an atoll,” write James Dugan and Carroll Stewart in their book about Ploesti, “without dropping anything into the lagoon…. The Allied chiefs had given Jacob Smart a strategic mandate with no tactical solution.”

Then Colonel Smart had a smart idea. What if the B-24s went in low, very low, on the deck? This would permit the greatest possible selective targeting and the most accurate bombing. It would reduce civilian casualties. It would present the enemy antiaircraft gunners with only close-in and fleeting targets, and also would allow the B-24 gunners to fire back. It would deprive the enemy fighter planes of half their normal sphere of attack, and it would bring the mission in on Ploesti underneath the lowest level reached by German radar. B-24s that were hit would have a better chance of surviving a crash landing. Most of all, the Americans were well known to be wedded to the idea of flying heavy bombers at high altitude. For them to do the opposite would come as a complete surprise. The more he thought about it, the more it seemed to Colonel Smart the only sensible answer.⁹⁷

Arnold and his colleagues were convinced, and in May they presented Smart’s plan to Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs at the conference in Washington called Trident, which gave its approval. In June, a delegation was sent to Algiers for a meeting with Eisenhower, who commanded the theater from which the operation would be mounted and whose consent was desirable. Eisenhower wrote after the war that he had doubts. He mistrusted plans worked out (as he put it) on an “academic basis” of “mathematical possibilities.” He and his advisers (Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder) questioned the efficacy of a single strike; too often factories reported as destroyed had turned out to be back in operation after only weeks or even days.

Further, it was their understanding that the Germans had a surplus of refinery capacity (true, unfortunately) and could quickly expand production to make up for damage (which was what did happen at Ploesti). Tedder reckoned that there was a 10 percent chance of eliminating 50 percent of the plant and that they might suffer 40 percent losses (the former pessimistic, the latter only 10 percent too high). But such reservations were not decisive, Eisenhower wrote, “because the air units to be used were specially sent to us for the execution of this particular mission.”⁹⁸ If Ploesti was what the Air Forces and the Allied leadership at the highest level believed essential to hit, then hit it would be. The low-level attack was on.

Colonel Smart acknowledged a flaw in his reasoning in that the B-24 was only in part designed for this kind of task. It had high speed (315 mph), enormous range (then 3,500 miles, later more), a high ceiling (35,000 feet), and a relatively light bomb load (7,000 pounds). Bombers reflect national character and objectives. British bombers like the Halifax, Lancaster, or Stirling tended to have two thirds the range and two to three times the bomb load of the B-24 (they were intended to pulverize the Ruhr from British bases). American bombers were intended to deliver swift, sharp blows at great distance. (The differences in design reflected themselves in the controversy over British-night-area vs. American-daylight-precision bombing, which must wait for more extended treatment on a later page.)

A force of two hundred B-24s could not carry enough bombs to obliterate Ploesti from high altitude in one attack, and of all aircraft there was none less suited—in its big, boxcar-like configuration—to the low-level flight Smart’s plan required. The commander of Ninth Air Force, who would have to give the order, Major General Lewis Brereton, studied the target folders for two weeks before making up his mind that he had to go through with it. He wrote in his diary on July 26 that “best planning indicates that it will take a minimum of eight attacks with an average strength of 136 bombers to complete the job at high altitude.”⁹⁹

There were intangibles here specific to that time and stage of air force development. For years the believers in air power had been waiting for an opportunity to show in action what they could do (Brereton had been a distinguished combat pilot in World War I and an aide to Billy Mitchell). The USAAF, writes Leon Wolff in Low Level Mission, “was a muscular, energy-packed adolescent looking for trouble and confident that he could lick his weight in wildcats…. The youngster was spoiling for a fight, anxious to demonstrate his mocked-at theory that unescorted U.S. heavies were a match for any number of fighters, could go almost anywhere, could smash almost anything to smithereens.” The Ploesti assignment had magnetized the air force planners and high command. “Now they had a chance,” adds Wolff, “to prove their point by means of an episode of unparalleled glamour and high drama.” Brereton’s subordinate commanders, too, had doubts (several of them never believed until the last moment that the talk about going in at low altitude was serious), but they suppressed them and Brereton tolerated no discussion. “You should consider yourself lucky to be on this mission,” he told the crews, adding rather tactlessly that destruction of the target would be worth the loss of all 178 aircraft. Tact, as Wolff and others have noted, was never one of Brereton’s strong points.¹⁰⁰

He had five bombardment groups: the 376th (thirty B-24s under Colonel Keith K. Compton), the 98th (forty-six, Colonel John Kane), the 44th (thirty-six, Colonel Leon Johnson), the 93d (thirty-six, Lieutenant Colonel Addison Baker), and the 389th (thirty, Colonel Jack Wood). Colonel Compton’s and Colonel Kane’s groups had been based in Palestine and the Nile Delta to reinforce British Eighth Army by bombing shipping and harbors in the Mediterranean. Colonel Johnson’s and Colonel Baker’s groups had been the B-24 component of U.S. Eighth Air Force in Great Britain, heavily cannibalized to reinforce the invasion of North Africa.¹⁰¹ Colonel Wood’s group was newly arrived in Britain from the United States. In late June, they had all been assembled at fields near Benghazi and had been flying missions during July and August in support of the invasion of Sicily, 1,183 sorties (twice the normal) against seventeen targets. Then they were pulled off this duty and set to training for Ploesti.

The men lived under tents in the desert, with furniture made out of bomb-fin casings and oil drums; sand flies and scorpions shared their quarters. In the afternoon the wind came, blowing a reddish dust the consistency of talcum powder, which got into everything: food, clothing, and, worse, the aircraft guns and engines (each round of 50-cal ammunition in the machine-gun belts had to be wiped off individually to prevent jamming). Food was dreary and monotonous, no fresh vegetables or fruit, though Libyan locals found their way unescorted through the bases selling melons and grapes, which had to be carefully washed (in the weeks before the Ploesti mission, about a third of the combat crews were weak from dysentery and two extreme cases had been grounded). Drinking water was tepid and had a chlorine taste that the Army’s ubiquitous lemonade powder could only thinly disguise. Entertainment consisted of swimming in the Mediterranean or watching sixteen-millimeter movies that had known better days and many a previous showing.¹⁰²

Yet their spirits were not unduly low.

They were being well briefed; the intelligence they were getting was excellent in every respect but one. They had detailed maps of each of the refinery targets, accompanied by an oblique sketch of what it would look like to them as they made their final approach. (The sketches were the work of a former architect from Connecticut, discovered by their operations officer wandering around Eighth AF headquarters trying to sell the idea.) South of Benghazi in the desert, a full-scale plan of Ploesti was painted on the ground with whitewash and for two weeks they bombed it with practice bombs. (In the final dress rehearsal, with live bombs, they destroyed the desert Ploesti in less than two minutes.) A special training film had been made for them in England, the first of its kind, with an exact scale model and a sound track by newspaperman Tex McCrary, and it was at this point that the accuracy of the information being offered them broke down. McCrary’s text emphasized the weakness of Ploesti’s defenses—“nothing like as strong here as they are on the Western front”—many guns and aircraft believed to be manned by Rumanians lacking enthusiasm for the war.¹⁰³

It was not quite so. Luftwaffe Colonel Gerstenberg had done his work well; Ploesti was one of the most heavily defended targets in Europe. It lies in a shallow valley between two ridges, and along the ridges had been placed 237 flak (antiaircraft) guns, many of them heavy 88s and 80 percent of them manned by German crews; within the refinery areas were barrage balloons, light-flak towers, and hundreds of machine guns. The main German air base was twenty miles to the east at Mizil, where there were four wings of Messerschmitt 109s, of which almost half were flown by German pilots; another base nearby held night-fighting Me 110s. In addition, Gerstenberg could count on Luftwaffe bases in Greece and Italy, and various Rumanian and Bulgarian units spread out between Bucharest and Sofia. Most menacing of all, and unknown to the Americans, he had an efficient radar detection net, together with a Signals Interception Battalion near Athens which could read Ninth Air Force codes, all reporting to Luftwaffe Fighter Command five miles north of Bucharest, where flights of both friend and foe were plotted by Luftnachrichtenhelferinnen (Luftwaffe air women) on a huge glass map.¹⁰⁴

♦

The Ploesti mission took off at dawn on Sunday, August 1, Colonel Compton’s group in the lead, followed in order by Baker’s, Kane’s, Johnson’s, and Wood’s, all under the command of Brigadier General Uzal G. Ent, flying with Compton. (By General Arnold’s order, Brereton, Smart, and other high-ranking officers had been forbidden to accompany them, on the grounds of knowing too much.) Heavily laden, the B-24s seemed hardly able to get off the ground, yet they managed it and headed north over the blue Mediterranean toward Corfu. They flew in V’s, each successive group a little higher than the one ahead of it. Except for the newcomers from the States, these men had flown an average of fifteen raids over Western Europe; three hundred of them had done more than twenty-five missions and long since worn out their odds for survival. This was one mission it would be nice to be able to tell about someday.

The Germans picked them up almost immediately. An informational message to other Allied forces in North Africa announcing their departure from Benghazi was decoded in Athens and relayed to Luftwaffe Fighter Command, which assumed at first that this was a training exercise, to take advantage of the cool, early-morning hours. General Ent bore a German name, from the Palatinate (he was sometimes called “P.D.” for “Pennsylvania Dutch”), but the German in charge at Luftwaffe Fighter Command bore a thoroughly non-German one; he was an East Prussian pilot who had fought in Spain, in Russia, and in the Battle of Britain, and his name was Douglas Pitcairn (his family had migrated from Perthshire in 1830 after quarrels with Catholic neighbors). When a later report came in from Salonika that the Americans were still headed north at two to three thousand feet, Major Pitcairn concluded that prudent measures were called for. “All right, everyone,” he said to the Luftnachrichtenhelferinnen in his war room. “Let’s have a big breakfast. We may be here quite a while.” He ordered a first-stage alert.¹⁰⁵

The Americans were beginning to have mechanical difficulties. Planes would develop engine trouble, feather propellers, and abort—that is, return to base. In all, eleven B-24s aborted, which some thought too high a figure, especially since seven of these came from Colonel Kane’s group. He was not universally liked, a hulk of a Texan with a square jaw and cold eyes. He was known as “Killer Kane,” from the villain of the Buck Rogers comic strip (at least one naval pilot in the Pacific, though better beloved, bore the same nickname). “His desire for inflicting harm on an opponent was almost psychopathic,” writes Leon Wolff. Kane pressed his men to fly beyond their operational limit; he had delayed the stateside leave of crews who were entitled to it, which may further have lowered the pitch of their enthusiasm.¹⁰⁶ At any rate, as each B-24 dropped out, its place was filled by another and the groups remained intact. Then bad luck struck them, twice.

As Colonel Compton’s group came in toward Corfu, the lead plane began to stagger, nose rising in the air, until it slid over on its back and dove vertically into the sea, no one knows why. With it went the mission navigator, Lieutenant Robert W. Wilson, and when a second B-24 went down to investigate (contrary to orders), it found itself unable to regain altitude and had to turn back; with the second plane went the deputy mission navigator. Now lead navigator for the 165 B-24s, as Colonel Compton and General Ent moved up to lead position, was a relatively inexperienced second lieutenant named William Wright. Compton and Ent doubted Wright’s ability to handle the assignment, in which they were much mistaken; he did better at it than they did.¹⁰⁷

The mission swung northeastward across Albania and Jugoslavia, the groups already somewhat stretched out, and at a range of mountains they ran into a heavy bank of cumulus clouds. Four of the group commanders elected to fly over it, Kane to go under. When they came out on the other side, near the Bulgarian border, their sequence had been mixed up. Compton’s group was the first to break through, but Wood had overrun both Baker and Johnson, and Kane was far behind¹⁰⁸ (his B-24s were older, and needed to nurse fuel). Brereton thought a wise decision might have been to hold for a moment and reassemble at the Danube, before going on together as planned, but to do so would have required breaking radio silence and the theory still held that this would mean sacrificing surprise, which had of course long since been lost.

As the B-24s passed over the mountains between Jugoslavia and Bulgaria, German radar was tracking them and reporting: “Big wings! Zone Twenty-four East, Sector Twenty-two.” When they crossed the Danube and came down to five hundred feet the radar lost them—“The devils have vanished”—and Major Pitcairn was momentarily puzzled. He signaled “Stand by” to the fighter bases and told the Rumanian squadrons they were at liberty to defend Bucharest if they wished (the Germans did not have great respect for the Rumanians). Then he ordered a full alert and fifty-two Messerschmitts were airborne within five minutes. Lieutenant Werner Gerhartz closed his cockpit canopy, then on second thought opened it and handed out his dog, Peggi. (Aboard a B-24 in Colonel Johnson’s group was Lieutenant Robert Patterson’s dog, Rusty; his ship was called D for Dog and both Patterson and Rusty were to make it safely home that day to Benghazi.) Peggi died later of anoxia in a high-altitude battle over Italy; Lieutenant Gerhartz made a forced landing behind Soviet lines during the battle for Berlin and survived five years in Russian labor camps.¹⁰⁹

Inexperienced Lieutenant Wright led them straight and true down the flight path to the initial points at Pitesti, Targovisti, and Floresti, where (minus Colonel Wood’s group, gone north to Campina for a special target) they were supposed to turn to the southeast toward Ploesti. But at Targovisti, Colonel Compton and General Ent—over Wright’s objections and shouts of “not here!” and “mistake! mistake!” over the command channel from the other pilots—made the wrong turning and took two groups (Compton’s and Baker’s) in the wrong direction, not toward Ploesti but toward Bucharest, into the heart of Gerstenberg’s heaviest flak concentration.

When Pitcairn pressed the red button for full alert, an order went out to the heavy 88s: “They’re flying very low. Change your fuze settings for point-blank fire!” So, writes Wolff, “the worst of all possible nightmares was now a definite reality: surprise was lost, the defenders were 100 percent alert, the bombers were stranded twenty feet above ground without escort and were about to be hit by fighters … ‘flak, small arms, everything but slingshots.’”¹¹⁰ On they flew. Were it not for the photographs of those enormous B-24s almost literally scraping the cornstalks, one would not believe it.

We are shortly before noon Greenwich mean time (three o’clock Benghazi base time, two o’clock Rumanian time). What happened in the next hour does not lend itself to tidy summary. In the pages of their book, Ploesti, Dugan and Stewart have somehow managed to put together a convincing narrative of the battle from German, Rumanian, and surviving American accounts (A. J. Liebling in The New Yorker called it “the very model of a war book”¹¹¹), but only by treating the bomb run of each group as though it were almost a separate event.

Colonel Baker’s was the first to rectify the wrong turn; he saw the smoke of Ploesti to the left and swung his unit ninety degrees toward it, himself (as was his preference) in lead position. Haystacks and the roofs of cottages flew open, revealing flak guns. By the time they closed the target, several B-24s were trailing smoke from damaged engines; one plane took a direct hit and exploded; another snapped the cable of a barrage balloon, which drifted lazily upward, and still another grazed the tip of a church steeple. Colonel Baker’s plane caught fire; he pulled it up and held course, but then it faltered and he crashed and died. An oil storage tank exploded, the first of many; a B-24, both wings sheared off, was seen sliding down a street. Ribbons of tracer bullets seemed to form a curtain in front of them. A veteran copilot went berserk and the navigator had to sit on him. Of Colonel Baker’s group, thirty-nine planes left Benghazi that morning and thirty-four reached the target area; fifteen emerged from it, only five of them relatively undamaged, and the others carried dead and wounded. Then the Me 109s came after them.

Colonel Compton and General Ent corrected their mistake not long after Baker did, and approached Ploesti from the south, but the flak was so murderous they veered eastward to try a different tactic. General Ent gave an order to attack targets of opportunity, which was surely a mistake, since many of the pilots could see no targets; they turned north of Ploesti and jettisoned their bombs. Except, that is, for one section of five aircraft, led by Major Norman Appold, a chemical engineer from Michigan, whose short stature and collegiate style concealed his considerable abilities as a bomber pilot and his conviction that the way to save one’s life was to risk it at every opportunity. Appold spotted a refinery north of the town and headed his slender force in its direction. They flew in at ten feet and dropped three dozen 500-pounders fuzed at forty-five seconds. They had hit one of the major cracking plants and eliminated 40 percent of its capacity. But by this time some of the other groups were beginning to arrive from other points of the compass and their major problem was to avoid hitting each other. Ploesti, write Dugan and Stewart, “was roofed with three layers of interweaving Liberators.” Now-General Gerstenberg stood in the street below, “in awed admiration of the galaxy of bombers maneuvering precisely at top speed without colliding.” He had no idea that he was witnessing a monumental snafu.

Colonel Wood’s greenhorn group from the States delivered one of the best performances. At one point they, too, made a wrong turning but quickly discovered it and found their way down a valley toward Campina, their propellers chopping treetops like lawnmowers. As they went in, the flak opened up and one B-24 caught fire, crash-landing with wings aflame (the top turret gunner escaped); in another, the pilot’s head was blown off by a 20-mm shell. The plane piloted by Lloyd D. Hughes began to leak gasoline and then became a flying blowtorch as it first released its bombs and then tried for a belly landing in a dry riverbed; the aircraft cartwheeled and exploded, but two of the crew came out alive. Hughes’s posthumous citation for the Medal of Honor read: “Rather than jeopardize the formation or success of the attack, he unhesitatingly entered the blazing area, dropped his bombs with great precision, and only then did he undertake a forced landing.” The Wood group’s refinery targets were totally destroyed, not to be back in production for six years, and losses were only six planes out of twenty-nine, among the lightest of those that were attacking selected targets.¹¹²

Another precision demonstration was turned in by Colonel James T. Posey, commanding twenty-one B-24s of Colonel Johnson’s group of thirty-six. As Johnson and Kane (having avoided Compton’s and Baker’s error) wheeled southeast over their proper turning point at Floresti, Colonel Posey’s force was on the right. They had been assigned Blue Target, an isolated high-octane plant at Brazi, five miles north of Ploesti, which was the most modern of all. Though spared the worst agonies of Johnson’s and Kane’s men, they had to deal with flak towers as they came in (one of their number was D for Dog). Their orders were so precise that one aircraft was given as an aiming point “the near wall of Building G.” Another had been told to aim at the southwest corner of the boiler house; the plane’s three thousand pounders put it permanently out of business. They came out at low level. “People ask me what I mean by low level,” said one pilot. “I point out that on the antennas on the bottom of my airplane I brought back sunflowers and something that looked suspiciously like grass.” They lost two planes; their target was out of operation for the rest of the war.

Colonel Kane’s and the remainder of Colonel Johnson’s group were coming south abreast on either side of a railroad leading to Ploesti. As they did so they overtook what seemed to be a train of boxcars. It was not; it was one of General Gerstenberg’s most ingenious measures, a flak train. The tops and sides of the boxcars unfolded to reveal antiaircraft, perfectly sited to fire on both of the flights as they went down the track together to either side. B-24 gunners managed to shoot up the locomotive, but not before eight of the fifty-seven bombers had been hard hit.

Over Ploesti hung what seemed to Colonel Johnson to be a dark curtain of smog. As they came closer he saw that it was not smog at all but a billowing cloud of heavy black smoke lit by fires within it. This was when he realized that someone had already bombed his target. The success of Baker’s group in setting fire to storage tanks (which were trivial in importance compared to the refineries) now had a most adverse effect. Inside the smoke were balloon cables and towering smokestacks. Delayed-action bombs were still going off; updrafts from the fires would toss the heavy aircraft about like bits of paper. They plunged on in.

Some of the most dramatic photographs of the Ploesti mission come from this episode within it, B-24s silhouetted against openings in the smoke as they tried to find their way through. Many did not. Colonel Johnson lost five aircraft over the target area, Colonel Kane fifteen. “We had expected to take losses,” said Kane later, “but I never will forget those big Libs going down like flies.”¹¹³ His group was the largest to attack Ploesti; he was piloting its flagship, wearing a World War I helmet and a Colt automatic. (The Germans knew about him; the first question asked a pilot who survived the later crash of his B-24 was “Where is Killer Kane?”) He went into the black clouds so low that flames singed the hair off his left arm, and he came out of the smoke with one engine down and a maximum speed of 185 mph. But he and his men, while at appalling cost, had destroyed half the productive capacity of the largest oil refinery in Europe.

A happy combination of circumstances had so far spared the bombers the attention of enemy fighters. (The Messerschmitts had been waiting to the north, and the wrong turning they thought to be a clever feint at Bucharest.) But as the B-24s came away from Ploesti, the fighter planes swarmed above them. The bombers were scattered, nearly all were damaged, many contained dead or wounded gunners and had exhausted their ammunition. The marvel is that more of them were not shot down by the Me 109s. Partly it was the low altitude (as planned) that protected them; a fighter would make a dive, be unable to pull out, and plow into the ground (after this happened to a few, the others desisted). But the bombers were running a gauntlet of fire, anxious now to save every drop of fuel and lighten loads to get back over the mountains.

“The crews threw out everything that was loose or could be yanked loose,” said one of them, “and we left behind us a long, wobbling trail of seats, tanks, belts, shoes, boxes, and first-aid kits with gauze bandages unrolling in great circles, figure-eights, and curious, sometimes beautiful designs.”¹¹⁴ They took care, insofar as they could, of their wounded. It was going to be a long way home.

Eventually ninety-three of them reached Benghazi, nineteen landed at other Allied airfields, seven landed in Turkey, and three crashed at sea. The final figures showed that fifty-four planes had been lost, forty-one of them in action; of their crews (1,726 men), 532 were either dead, prisoners, missing, or interned.¹¹⁵ This was a high price to pay for a single mission. Was it worth it?

General Brereton attached to his diary a report, based on post-strike photographs, of the British officer who had been a prewar Ploesti plant manager. The latter concluded with careful conservatism that one of the targets would require at least six months’ work to resume operation, that another could be considered “immobilized” for six months or more, another cut by 30 percent of capacity, but still another likely to be repaired quickly and two untouched (some damage had of course been much greater).

The air force historians, many years later, concluded that Ploesti as a whole had lost 42 percent of total capacity, that cracking plant production had been cut by 40 percent, and that the production of lubricating oils had been “considerably reduced.” Sadly, none of this made very much difference. Ploesti had been running at only 60 percent of capacity, which meant that the effective long-term loss was not 42 but 2 percent. Idle plants were activated, others repaired, and within weeks Ploesti was producing at a higher rate than before the raid.¹¹⁶

Thus the verdict on the Ploesti raid has to be a mixed one, and it contained lessons not all of which could have been read at the time. If all its bomber missions had come in on schedule from the right direction, and had been accomplished with the same finesse as Colonel Wood’s, Colonel Posey’s, and Major Appold’s, then there is no question that fatal damage would have been done to Ploesti, which is to say that all (rather than only two) of its nine major refineries would have been largely incapacitated for some time (which is also to say that Smart’s plan had been theoretically sound). What was wrong with it was the burden of necessity it carried; it demanded too much: perfect timing, perfect coordination, perfect luck. The real world does not vouchsafe these bounties routinely, and this is not a matter for blame so much as for subdued reflection.

The lesson to be learned from Ploesti was that air power could be a potent weapon against precision targets, but that the idea it could guarantee to deliver single knockout blows was mistaken. (A veiled lesson that bombers without fighter escort were vulnerable was not yet visible to USAAF observers.) It would take the remainder of the air war, in 1944–45, for the dialectic between these several propositions to work itself out.

V

Hap Arnold was unusual among the Allied leaders in his absolutely open-ended attitude toward the future. Perhaps because he had witnessed so much technological change in his own lifetime, he was at ease with the certainty that more of it was to come. Unlike many air officers, even today, he was not wedded to the idea of manned flight as the sine qua non of air power. For many years he had known how simple it would be for the bomber to be replaced by a flying bomb, and after the war he wrote an article called “Our Power to Destroy War,” in which he argued that airmen must be prepared to give up the airplane. “We must bear in mind,” he wrote in Global Mission, “that air power itself can become obsolete.”¹¹⁷ When you think of it, coming from a man who never had or wanted any reputation as a great brain, this is quite remarkable for its freshness and flexibility of mind.

In 1917, Arnold had worked with Charles F. Kettering—“Boss Ket,” one of the great American technologists, inventor of the automobile self-starter and no-knock gasoline—on the development of a pilotless aircraft they called the Bug, theoretically capable of hitting within a hundred yards of its target after a forty-mile run. The project, twenty-five years ahead of its time, was well in process when the war ended. In 1941, they revived it, in a version controlled by radio, and flight-tested it at a range of two hundred miles. Arnold and Kettering reviewed every factor they could think of, and concluded that from bases in England they would only be able to reach northern France, Belgium, and Holland, and not the interior of Germany. They scrapped it. Arnold later reflected that if we had been on the Continent and the Germans in England, then Bugs by the thousands would have crossed the Channel long before the date when the Germans unleashed the V-1, their version of it, in 1944.¹¹⁸

Arnold insisted on staying in touch with scientists and engineers who could think far ahead of his own people. In 1939, he sent for Theodor von Kármán, a physicist and aeronautical engineer, and asked him what the Air Corps needed in the way of equipment for experimentation. Von Kármán said a forty-thousand-horse-power wind tunnel. Arnold said that was just what he wanted and they built it. Von Kármán thought that Arnold was “the greatest example of the American military man—a combination of complete logic, mingled with far-sightedness and superb dedication.” (In 1944, Arnold engaged von Kármán to come to the Pentagon and head a committee to examine air force research needs for the next fifty years.) But this side of Arnold came as a surprise to many who knew him. One day Arnold invited George Marshall to lunch with a number of his scientist acquaintances. “What on earth are you doing with people like that?” asked Marshall. “Using their brains,” said Arnold.¹¹⁹

Arnold was one of the very few for whom Marshall had, and was willing to show, real affection. General Kuter, who saw them together often, said that the way they treated one another “defied description by usual categories.” There was none of the “banter or chit-chat that you’d expect between old pals.” He could not remember their using first names or nicknames. “They were simply two senior officers who had known each other for thirty years with mutual friendship.” Marshall was the senior, but Kuter never saw him pull rank. “Arnold was free to announce his plans or intentions,” said Kuter. “I never heard of him asking Marshall’s permission. Theirs was a unique top-side relationship.”¹²⁰

Actually, in correspondence, it was sometimes “Hap” and “George,” sometimes “Arnold” and “General Marshall,” as though neither of them thought it important enough to be consistent. In December 1942, Marshall writes “My dear Hap” to express his “deep appreciation for the splendid support you have given me during the past year,” and for the “magnificent job” Arnold had done in coping with rapid expansion and with “air operations in various corners of the world.” Marshall adds: “… you have taken these colossal problems in your stride but still have managed to retain some remnants of a golden disposition.” And further adds: “P.S. Incidentally, Merry Christmas.”¹²¹ Many of the Arnold files in the Marshall papers, however, show nothing so much as Marshall’s concern with Arnold’s health and his unsuccessful efforts to get Arnold to slow down and take it easy.

Arnold routinely worked a seven-to-seven day. “He was always a step ahead of everybody,” said one aircraft manufacturer. He would come into a plant, summon all the designers and engineers, and say, “I want four hundred miles an hour. Why in hell can’t somebody give it to me?” and they would go away wondering why somebody couldn’t. Arnold’s pilot, Gene Beebe, said of him that his idea of a good time was “to work all day, then go to Bolling Field, fly all night to Los Angeles [in a DC-3], arrive in the morning, visit about five aircraft plants, and then go to someone’s house for dinner that night.”¹²²

Eventually all this caught up with him and he was hauled off to Walter Reed Hospital, from which (on May 10, 1943) he sent the Chief of Staff a handwritten note (addressed “Marshall” and signed “Arnold”): “This is one Hell of a time for this to happen. My engine [pulse rate] started turning over at 160 when it should have been doing 74 to 76. For this I am sorry. Back to normal now….” (There follow suggestions on who should take over what duties in his absence.) “Maybe within a day or two the medicos will be able to keep the R.P.M. under control.”

Marshall’s reply, only slightly delayed, gives details on various affairs he had been immersed in and adjures Arnold, firmly, not to cut short his Oregon vacation in order to make a speech Arnold had planned to give at West Point. “Your Army future is at stake,” wrote Marshall, “and I don’t think you should hazard it with a matter of such trivial importance…. It is vastly important to you, and it certainly is to me, and to the Air Force, that you make a full recovery….” He advised Arnold not to fly west and put him on orders, “so that you can avoid the expense of a rail journey,” something officers of their generation always thought about. Marshall ended: “Please be careful,” and signed himself: “Affectionately.”¹²³

Arnold was not corrigible. In May 1944, he had his third heart attack in fourteen months but bounced back, and in June, four days after D-Day, took off with Marshall for a meeting of the Combined Chiefs in London and followed it with a visit to the Normandy beachhead and a tour of the front in Italy. His fourth attack came in January 1945, but in February he improved and by March was plotting another trip to Europe. In April, a cable from Marshall found him in Paris: “I read of your presence and statements with various active commands. Where is the Bermuda rest, the lazy days at Cannes, the period of retirement at Capri? You are riding for a fall, doctor or no doctor.” Arnold countered with a suggestion that he “continue leisurely and restfully” to visit Switzerland, Italy, the CBI, MacArthur and Nimitz, and return to Washington by way of San Francisco.

Marshall responded: “The crux of your message is in the third paragraph. I quote: ‘or if I continue leisurely and restfully.’ Each statement you have given me regarding leisurely and restful movements has not been in accord with your subsequent movements and I assume that the same will happen in this case…. I am rather depressed at seeing you start on another of your strenuous trips, this time carrying you around the world. It may demonstrate to the Army and the public that you certainly are not on the retired list but also it may result in your landing there.”¹²⁴ This time the message sunk in, a little, and Arnold cut short his itinerary in Italy. Not for long; in June he flew to Hawaii, Guam, Iwo Jima, the Philippines, and Okinawa, and he attended the Potsdam Conference after victory had been won in Europe.

On V-J Day, the Arnolds were giving a reception for Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, and after dinner, when the news was official, friends began to drop by. One of them was George Marshall, whose quarters were only a few doors away. He thanked the officers present for their help and then he and Arnold solemnly shook hands. Robert Lovett said that he thought Marshall recognized in Arnold “this warm-hearted, loyal, mercurial, flamboyant belligerent fellow who didn’t care who he took on in battle.” Arnold once told Ira Eaker: “If George Marshall ever took a position contrary to mine, I would know I was wrong.”¹²⁵

In January 1948, at the Valley of the Moon, his retirement home in Sonoma, California, Arnold had still another heart attack, and Marshall wrote him: “I have just heard that you are temporarily laid up, but according to my informants, and I quote directly from a message I received, you are ‘threatening to get up and cursing and swearing at everyone.’ There is the clear implication that there really was nothing wrong with you except that you are getting too much care and attention.” And again, “Affectionately.” In the fall of the following year Lovett came to visit and found Arnold noticeably thinner and “slowed up.”¹²⁶ He died on January 15, 1950.

Arnold’s part in the formulation of Allied strategy was determined by his service interests, which were precise but limited. He opposed the North African invasion, and he opposed Marshall and King in the summer of 1942 when they seemed to be serious about turning to the Pacific—in both cases because he saw a threat to his European air offensive. (He thought the Navy was not strong enough for the Guadalcanal campaign, in which he was of course partly right.¹²⁷) He supported the invasion of the Marianas because they would provide him with bases for the B-29s.

But his straightforward and uncompromising desire was that air power in its fullest form be visited upon Germany and Japan, and how this was done in detail turned out to be more of a tactical than a strategic question, one over which he did not have a great deal of direct influence; his role was to set the goals and demand their accomplishment. No one could have done this better than he, but someone else could have done it, and in that sense he was not central and essential to the war in the way King and Marshall were. So much having been granted, he gave the President the air force Roosevelt wanted and had to have, and he fitted to perfection his niche in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, neither trying to stretch its limits nor trying to expand it into something it was not and did not need to be.

Air Marshal Sir John Slessor wrote of him: “He was an intensely likeable person was ‘Hap’ Arnold, transparently honest, terrifically energetic, given to unorthodox methods and, though shrewd and without many illusions, always with something of a schoolboy naïveté about him…. No one could accuse him of being brilliantly clever but he was wise, and had the big man’s flair for putting his finger on the really important point.”¹²⁸

Let that stand beside his name.