The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

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
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