“Nevers”44 pages
- p. 43 …cavalry mounted on gas driven flying horses” never arrived to
“sweep the Germans from the sky…
- p. 46 …Mitchell never received an American air force commensurate with
the ambitious idens of air power which…
- p. 49 …This project, like so many others, had lagged, and the Air Service was
never equipped during…
- p. 50 …the Army or the Air Corps?” but never, “Are
you in the Army or the Corps…
- p. 55 …any Air Service officers, and I have never heard
anybody yet-any Air Service officer-against…
- p. 69 …But one axiom,
with its corollaries, never varied. T o him the airplane was first and…
- p. 75 …Powerful air attacks resolutely pressed home could never be
completely stopped, but their effects could best…
- p. 94 …rate for the time being, the decision never-
theless left an open question as to how…
- p. 121 …large-scale warfare; production of combat types never exceeded 300
aircraft a month. The pattern of…
- p. 122 …the German Air Force, the
Regia Aeronautica never exhibited sufficient power to be decisive in
the…
- p. 133 …Except for a few raids against French
factories, the force had never been employed in a…
- p. 140 …into
a complete war economy production was never equal to the demands
of our own forces…
- p. 150 …Long-term needs
of the Air Corps and the sudden availability of funds in quantities
never…
- p. 181 …Actually, the Air Staff had
never approved of the method followed in RAINBOW No. 5 . l…
- p. 217 …Members of the Hawaiian Air Force, who had never flown
heavy bombers, began to receive intensive…
- p. 219 …were not then satisfactory for permanent garrisons. Never-
theless, the commander of the Hawaiian Department, Lt…
- p. 227 …T h e planes never reached their destination. Other
bombardment units were being prepared for transfer…
- p. 241 …responsible officers, a few crucial points
have never been satisfactorily explained.
T h e general pattern…
- p. 277 …motors, sole-
noids, and gun mounts-were never found. After many hours of fruit-
less search…
- p. 288 …planners and
from which AAF Headquarters was never to deviate.
The translation of the accepted grand…
- p. 303 …the principal features of the plan
were never challenged, it was subsequently revised in a draft…
- p. 309 …W a r Plans Division was
never incorporated into GHQ and remained a potential rival to…
- p. 336 …the shooting and wrote that they were never
able to make out an airplane.g6It is…
- p. 412 …As it happened, the B-24's never
returned to India, but, instead, remained in the…
- p. 457 …Meanwhile the Edsall with the remaining
pilots had headed for Java, never to be heard from…
- p. 492 …Squadron was assigned, but which it would never reach, going from
Australia to Tongatabu; ( 3 ) Christmas…
- p. 500 …deck of a carrier presented a problem never
before challenged by Army planes. Hence an accelerated…
- p. 502 …the bows and wetting the flight deck. Never before had this been
accomplished, yet now it…
- p. 509 …Island, in the
Louisiade Archipelago.” They were never needed, for on 7-8 May
the two…
- p. 513 …exist, it was at a point which never reached the
aircrews, for on the operational level…
- p. 524 …handicaps under which
AAF planes had operated. Never were more than fourteen B- I 7’s…
- p. 527 …AAF planners clung firmly to their belief that
proper observance of economy of force would never…
- p. 531 …Crews which had
previously never loaded torpedoes now for the first time fitted these
weapons into…
- p. 544 …But the Japanese never at
any time based their bombers in appreciable numbers a t either…
- p. 548 …26's in torpedo-dropping, but they never would be put into
All told, the record…
- p. 556 …until it had been thoroughly trained and never to com-
mit it piecemeal. General Magruder had…
- p. 560 …pressed into service against the Germans," and never reached the
CBI." Colonel Haynes had reached India…
- p. 606 …reason that the Antilles Air Task Force
never evolved, as did I Bomber Command, into an…
- p. 614 …that reason deserving a high
priority, could never dispose of the U-boat menace but must…
- p. 635 …In Washington the Munitions Assign-
ments Board t had never considered this schedule as more than…
- p. 670 …they bombed from 39,200 feet, and never
below 30,000. By AAF standards they had…
- p. 672 …Goering had never put enough bombers over England,
nor had he concentrated his forces on the…
- p. 690 …of co-operation and combined action probably never
before equaled by the military forces of two…
- p. 729 …shoot at aerial targets, and several
had never operated a turret in the air. This deficiency…
T H E A R M Y A I R A R M B E T W E E N T W O WARS
a congressional committee showed I O I members of the staff opposed
to a Department of National Defense with coequal subdepartments
for Army, Navy, and Air, and only one who favored it.’ In spite of
disingenuous statements to the contrary, the General Staff commonly
dictated War Department policies.5 In 1919General Foulois testified:
T h e General Staff of the Army is the policy-making body of the Army and,
either through lack of vision, lack of practical knowledge, or deliberate in-
tention to subordinate the Air Service needs to the needs of the other combat
arms, it has utterly failed to appreciate the full military value of this military
weapon and, in my opinion, has utterly failed to accord it its just place in our
military family.6
This attitude toward the General Staff was shared by other advocates
of air autonomy, whether officers or civilians, at that time and later.
Sometimes their language was less temperate than that of Foulois.
Representative Fiorello H. La Guardia, an aviator in World War I
and an ardent supporter of the independent air force, testified in 1926:
“There is one obstacle in the way of new legislation, Mr. Chairman.
That is the General Staff. If this committee does not lock the doors to
the General Staff, you will not get a bill through.. . . T h e General
Staff are either hopelessly stupid or unpardonably guilty in refusing to
recognize the necessity of making a change in aviation.” Even today
it is difficult for interested parties to view the controversy dispas-
sionately. In behalf of the General Staff it should be pointed out that its
members were responsible for the current as well as the future defense
of the United States and that they were therefore prone to evalu-
ate the potentialities of the airplane in terms of its known accomplish-
ments in the recent war. If this tendency at times injected a certain
degree of realism into considerations of immediate defense measures,
it also acted as a deterrent to future development of a weapon still in
its infancy. Because for many years the Air Service was denied mem-
bership in the General Staff and thus any real opportunity to affect
policies a t the highest level, it was natural that many airmen should
look on that agency as a stronghold of bureaucratic conservatism.
T h e chief impetus for change came from returning officers of the
Air Service, AEF. They were backed by Air Service officers who had
remained in the States. No accurate poll of opinion was taken, but in
192s a congressional committee found that an overwhelming majority
of aviators favored an independent organization. As a typical response
to the committee’s standard question in that respect one might cite the
2 1