Independence: The National Security Act and the U.S. Air Force, 1947

On the afternoon of 26 July 1947 President Harry S. Truman sat aboard his aircraft, a four-engine Douglas VC-54C that the press called the Sacred Cow, on the ramp at Washington National Airport. His mother was dying in Grandview, Missouri, and he was anxious to leave; he waited until a courier brought him the National Security Act of 1947, passed by Congress that day, and signed it before the aircraft took off. The act created a new executive department and a new armed service. On 18 September 1947 the Army Air Forces, which in four years of war had grown to more than two and a third million men and women and nearly 80,000 aircraft, became the United States Air Force, forty years after the Signal Corps had set up a three-man Aeronautical Division to take charge of “all matters pertaining to military ballooning, air machines and all kindred subjects.”

Why it mattered

The creation of the U.S. Air Force settled the question that had divided the Army since Billy Mitchell (Chapter 3): whether military aviation was an arm of the ground forces, best commanded by soldiers for the support of soldiers, or a separate form of warfare that needed its own service. The war had answered it in practice. The Army Air Forces of 1942 to 1945 ran its own training, procurement, personnel and operations, and its commander sat with the Army and Navy chiefs on the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Chapter 5). The National Security Act turned that wartime autonomy into law, and it did so as part of a larger reorganization that also created the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, the structure within which the United States fought the Cold War.

The new service was born in the middle of the largest demobilization in American history and in a bitter quarrel with the Navy over roles, missions and money. Within a year of its birth it was asked to feed a city of more than two million people by air. This final chapter follows the Army Air Forces from victory to independence and the U.S. Air Force through its first test, and then looks at where the history of the Army’s airmen can be seen today, including in North Carolina.

Forty years to independence

The Army’s air arm changed its name and status six times between 1907 and 1947, and each change reflected a step in the argument. The Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps, set up on 1 August 1907, bought the Army’s first airplane from the Wright brothers in 1909 (Chapter 1). Congress created the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps on 18 July 1914, and in May 1918 aviation was taken out of the Signal Corps altogether as the Air Service (Chapter 2), made a combatant arm of the Army by the National Defense Act of 4 June 1920. The fight over Mitchell and the Morrow Board produced the Air Corps Act of 2 July 1926 (Chapter 3), and the creation of a General Headquarters Air Force on 1 March 1935 gave the Army a single striking force under an airman (Chapter 4). The Army Air Forces followed on 20 June 1941, and the War Department reorganization of 9 March 1942 made it one of the Army’s three coequal commands (Chapter 5).

During the war Gen. George C. Marshall, the Army’s chief of staff, had accepted that the air arm would become independent once the fighting ended, and he supported a single department of national defense with separate land, sea and air forces. Arnold’s staff planned for that day from 1943. The Navy did not share the view: it feared that a separate air force would absorb naval aviation and that a single department would be dominated by the Army and the airmen, and it fought unification through 1945 and 1946.

Demobilization, 1945–1947

The Army Air Forces reached its peak strength of 2,411,294 men and women on 31 March 1944 and its peak aircraft inventory of 79,908 in July 1944. On 31 August 1945, two weeks after Japan’s surrender, it still had 2,253,182 people and 63,715 aircraft (AAF Statistical Digest). Then it came apart. Under the point system that released men by length of service, overseas time, decorations and dependents, and under heavy pressure from Congress and from soldiers and their families to “bring the boys home,” the AAF fell to about 485,000 people by April 1946 and to about 304,000 a year later. Many of the people who left were the skilled mechanics and specialists who kept aircraft flying, and by early 1946 the AAF judged that only a handful of its groups were fit for combat. Its aircraft inventory fell below 30,000. Thousands of combat aircraft were flown to storage depots in the Southwest, at Kingman, Arizona, Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, and other fields, and sold for scrap by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

By the numbers

The rise and fall of the Army Air Forces: personnel strength, 1941–1947

Military personnel of the Army Air Forces at selected dates. Bar lengths are proportional to the peak of 31 March 1944.

31 Dec 1941354,161

31 Dec 19421,597,049

31 Dec 19432,373,882

31 Mar 1944 (peak)2,411,294

31 Dec 19442,359,456

31 Aug 19452,253,182

April 1946c. 485,000

Spring 1947c. 304,000

Arnold, worn out by several heart attacks during the war, retired in February 1946, and Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, who had commanded the strategic air forces against Germany and then Japan, succeeded him. Spaatz reorganized what was left around three combat commands, created on 21 March 1946: the Strategic Air Command, first under Gen. George C. Kenney, for long-range bombing and the atomic mission; the Tactical Air Command, to work with the ground forces; and the Air Defense Command. The AAF set itself a goal of 70 groups as the minimum peacetime force, a figure it would fight for in Congress for years. In 1946 the only unit able to deliver atomic bombs was the 509th Composite Group, now at Roswell, New Mexico.

What the war had cost, and what it left

The force that was being dismantled had been built at great cost. By the AAF’s own statistical digest, 88,119 of its men died in service between December 1941 and August 1945, 45,520 of them killed in action; the rest died in training and operational accidents, of disease and in captivity. It lost 65,164 aircraft in the same period, nearly 23,000 of them on combat missions overseas and most of the rest in accidents at home and abroad. At its peak, in February 1945, it had 243 combat groups in 16 numbered air forces, from the First Air Force on the East Coast to the Twentieth on Guam (AAF Statistical Digest, as compiled in “United States Army Air Forces,” Wikipedia). Behind the combat groups stood an enormous training establishment that had produced, by the AAF’s count, some 193,000 pilots during the war, and a home front of airfields: North Carolina alone had Pope Field at Fort Bragg, Morris Field at Charlotte, Seymour Johnson Field at Goldsboro, Camp Mackall’s glider fields and the antiaircraft training center at Camp Davis, among others (Chapter 5).

Most of those fields closed or returned to civilian use within a year or two of the war. Morris Field went back to the City of Charlotte and became the basis of today’s Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Seymour Johnson Field was inactivated in 1946 and stood empty for a decade. Pope Field, which served the airborne divisions at Fort Bragg, remained, and in 1947 it passed with the rest of the AAF to the new Air Force. What the war left behind, besides its veterans and their memories, was a nationwide network of long concrete runways that served American civil aviation for a generation, a body of trained pilots and mechanics who staffed the postwar airlines, and an aircraft industry that would build the jet age.

The atomic bomb changed what the surviving force was for. In 1946 the Army Air Forces had a handful of specially modified B-29s and the trained crews of the 509th Composite Group, and the Manhattan Project’s stockpile of weapons was tiny and in civilian hands after the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created the Atomic Energy Commission. The Strategic Air Command was built around that mission. In its first years, under Kenney and then from October 1948 under LeMay, it was neither large nor ready; LeMay’s first inspection exercises found crews unable to bomb their practice targets. Rebuilding it into the nuclear striking force of the 1950s was the work of the new service’s first decade, and it is beyond the scope of this collection.

Unification: the fight in Washington, 1945–1947

Truman, a former Army artillery officer who as a senator had investigated wartime waste, wanted a single department of national defense. In a special message to Congress on 19 December 1945 he proposed one, with a single civilian secretary and separate land, naval and air forces. The Navy, led by Secretary James Forrestal, opposed it, and the Navy’s alternative, worked out by Forrestal’s friend Ferdinand Eberstadt in 1945, proposed coordination through committees instead of a single department. The argument ran through 1946 in Congress and in the press. The compromise was worked out by two officers: Maj. Gen. Lauris Norstad for the War Department and Vice Adm. Forrest P. Sherman for the Navy, who in January 1947 agreed on a plan that Truman accepted. There would be a single “National Military Establishment” under a Secretary of Defense with limited powers; the Army, Navy and Air Force would each be an executive department with its own secretary; the Navy would keep its aviation and the Marine Corps; and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a wartime creation, would be written into law.

Congress passed the National Security Act on 26 July 1947, and Truman signed it that day aboard the Sacred Cow before flying to Missouri. With it he issued Executive Order 9877, which set out the functions of each of the three services. The act also created the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Resources Board. Most of its provisions took effect on 18 September 1947, the day after the Senate confirmed Forrestal, who had fought the idea, as the first Secretary of Defense. That day W. Stuart Symington, who had been Assistant Secretary of War for Air since 1946, was sworn in as the first Secretary of the Air Force, and the Air Force was established. Spaatz became its first chief of staff later in September. Transfer Order 1 of 26 September 1947 began moving the AAF’s people, units, bases and property to the new service, a process that took about two years to complete (Wolk; Air Force Historical Support Division).

In their words

It shall be organized, trained, and equipped primarily for prompt and sustained offensive and defensive air operations.

Roles and missions: Key West and the quarrel over the bomber

The act did not end the argument between the services; it moved it inside the new National Military Establishment. The central issue was the atomic bomb. The Air Force held that strategic air warfare, including atomic attack, was its mission; the Navy wanted large carriers able to launch atomic-capable bombers of its own. In March 1948 Forrestal took the Joint Chiefs to the naval base at Key West, Florida, and on 11–14 March they agreed on a statement of the functions of each service, which Truman approved on 21 April 1948. The Key West agreement gave the Air Force primary responsibility for strategic air warfare and air defense, the Navy for control of the sea, including its own aviation, and the Army for land combat, and it allowed each service to support the others in collateral roles. A further conference at Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1948 refined the arrangement.

The truce did not hold through the budget cuts of 1949. The Air Force staked its future on the Convair B-36, a huge intercontinental bomber with six piston engines, later supplemented by four jets, that first flew on 8 August 1946; the Navy wanted its new “supercarrier,” USS United States. When Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson canceled the carrier on 23 April 1949, days after her keel was laid, and the Secretary of the Navy resigned in protest, senior admirals took their case against the B-36 and the strategy of atomic bombing to Congress in the hearings of October 1949 known as the “Revolt of the Admirals.” Meanwhile the amendments of 10 August 1949 to the National Security Act turned the National Military Establishment into the Department of Defense, made the three service departments subordinate to it, created the post of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and strengthened the Secretary of Defense (Wolk; Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals).

The first test: the Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949

On 24 June 1948, in response to the Western allies’ introduction of a new currency in their zones of Germany, the Soviet Union cut the rail, road and canal routes across its zone into the western sectors of Berlin, which held about two million people and stocks of food for about a month. Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor, asked LeMay, now commanding U.S. Air Forces in Europe, whether his aircraft could carry supplies into the city. On 26 June 1948 the first C-47s landed at Tempelhof. The Americans called the operation Vittles; the British, who began their own airlift two days later, called theirs Plainfare. At first it was an improvised effort with the twin-engine C-47s in Germany. It became a system when the Air Force brought in four-engine C-54 Skymasters from around the world and sent Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, who had run the Hump airlift (Chapter 8), to command it; he arrived at Wiesbaden on 28 July 1948.

Tunner ran the airlift as a conveyor belt. Aircraft flew in three narrow air corridors, at fixed altitudes and fixed intervals of three minutes; a pilot who missed his landing at Tempelhof or Gatow did not go around but flew back to West Germany with his load, so that the stream was never broken. After the chaos of 13 August 1948, “Black Friday,” when bad weather stacked aircraft over Tempelhof, he insisted on instrument procedures in all weather. Crews were kept by their aircraft while trucks were unloaded alongside; Berliners, among them many women, worked as laborers, and a third airfield, Tegel, was built in the French sector in under three months. On 15–16 April 1949, in the “Easter Parade,” the combined airlift delivered 12,941 tons in 1,383 flights in 24 hours without an accident. The Soviets lifted the blockade at one minute past midnight on 12 May 1949, and the airlift continued to build up stocks until 30 September 1949 (Wikipedia, “Berlin Blockade,” citing Tunner, Miller and Air Force histories).

In fifteen months the airlift made 278,228 flights to Berlin and delivered about 2.3 million tons, some two-thirds of it coal; the U.S. Air Force carried about 1.78 million tons and the Royal Air Force and British civil aircraft about 542,000. The cost was 101 lives, among them 31 Americans and 40 Britons, most of them in flying accidents, and German civilians killed on the ground (Wikipedia, “Berlin Blockade”). The airlift kept West Berlin free without a shot fired, and it showed what an independent air force with a transport arm, the Military Air Transport Service, could do. It was also a turning point for Germans’ view of the Americans and British, whose bombers had destroyed much of the city three years before.

Timeline

From the Army Air Forces to the U.S. Air Force, 1945–1949

1. 31 Aug 1945The AAF has 2,253,182 people and 63,715 aircraft; demobilization is under way.
2. 19 Dec 1945Truman asks Congress for a single department of national defense with a separate air force.
3. Feb 1946Arnold retires; Spaatz becomes commanding general of the AAF.
4. 21 Mar 1946Strategic Air Command, Tactical Air Command and Air Defense Command are established.
5. Apr 1946AAF strength falls to about 485,000.
6. 8 Aug 1946First flight of the Convair B-36.
7. Jan 1947Norstad and Sherman agree on the unification compromise.
8. 26 Jul 1947Truman signs the National Security Act aboard the Sacred Cow, and Executive Order 9877.
9. 17 Sep 1947Senate confirms James Forrestal as the first Secretary of Defense.
10. 18 Sep 1947The Department of the Air Force and the U.S. Air Force are established; Symington sworn in as Secretary; the Air National Guard becomes an Air Force reserve component.
11. 26 Sep 1947Transfer Order 1 begins moving AAF functions to the Air Force; Spaatz takes office as the first chief of staff.
12. 14 Oct 1947Capt. Charles Yeager flies the Bell XS-1 faster than sound.
13. 11–14 Mar 1948The Joint Chiefs agree on service functions at Key West; Truman approves them on 21 April.
14. 30 Apr 1948Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg becomes the second chief of staff.
15. 1 Jun 1948The Military Air Transport Service is formed.
16. 12 Jun 1948The Women’s Armed Services Integration Act creates the WAF.
17. 24–26 Jun 1948The Soviets blockade West Berlin; the airlift begins.
18. 26 Jul 1948Executive Order 9981 on equality in the armed forces.
19. 28 Jul 1948Tunner arrives to command the airlift.
20. 13 Aug 1948“Black Friday” at Tempelhof.
21. 19 Oct 1948LeMay takes command of the Strategic Air Command.
22. 15–16 Apr 1949The Easter Parade: 12,941 tons in a day.
23. 23 Apr 1949The supercarrier United States is canceled.
24. 12 May 1949The Soviet blockade of Berlin is lifted.
25. 1 Jul 1949The Air Force inactivates its segregated units at Lockbourne.
26. 10 Aug 1949The National Security Act amendments create the Department of Defense.
27. 30 Sep 1949The Berlin Airlift officially ends.
28. Oct 1949The “Revolt of the Admirals” hearings in Congress.

Legacy

The Air Force of 1947 was, in its people and ideas, the Army Air Forces of 1945. Its first generation of leaders had learned to fly in the Signal Corps or the Air Service, had argued for independence in the Air Corps of the 1920s and 1930s, and had commanded the numbered air forces of the war. Its doctrine of strategic bombing came from the Air Corps Tactical School and the experience of the Eighth and Twentieth Air Forces; its reliance on airlift came from the Hump and Berlin; its integration came from the record of the Tuskegee Airmen; and its first women pilots, when it finally trained them in the 1970s, followed the WASP. Its frictions with the Army over close air support, and with the Navy over who would carry the nuclear mission, also began in these years.

For the Army the separation was a loss and a relief. It lost the largest part of its wartime strength and much of its budget; it gained a partner service and, in time, rebuilt its own aviation around the helicopter. The Army’s airmen of 1907 to 1947, the balloonists and the Wright pilots at Fort Myer and College Park, the Air Service of the Western Front, the Air Corps of the interwar years and the millions of the Army Air Forces, were soldiers before they were anything else, and that is how this collection has told their story.

Questions readers ask

What is the Air Force’s official birthday?

18 September 1947, the date the Department of the Air Force and the U.S. Air Force were established under the National Security Act. The Air Force also counts its lineage back through the Army Air Forces, Air Corps and Air Service to the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps of 1 August 1907, and the Air National Guard celebrates the same September date.

Why didn’t naval aviation go to the Air Force?

The Navy insisted that aviation was an integral part of fleet operations, as the carrier war in the Pacific had shown, and it refused any plan that would transfer its aircraft or the Marine Corps’ aviation. The Norstad-Sherman compromise of January 1947 and the act itself left the Navy and Marine Corps their own air arms. The Key West agreement of 1948 confirmed it.

How big was the new Air Force?

About 305,000 military personnel in 1947, roughly an eighth of the AAF at its peak, organized in groups few of which were fully manned, with fewer than 30,000 aircraft, many in storage. It grew quickly with the Berlin crisis and especially the Korean War, which began in June 1950.

Did the Army Air Forces still exist after September 1947?

The AAF was abolished when the Air Force was established on 18 September 1947, but the transfer of its units, bases and functions under Transfer Order 1 and later orders took about two years. During that time many units and people were still formally Army, and some Army regulations still applied to the Air Force until it wrote its own.

What happened to North Carolina’s Army airfields?

Pope Field at Fort Bragg became Pope Air Force Base and for decades flew the troop carriers and airlifters that dropped the Army’s paratroopers; in 2011 it returned to the Army as Pope Army Airfield. Seymour Johnson Field at Goldsboro closed after the war and reopened as Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in 1956, home of the 4th Fighter Wing. Morris Field, the wartime Charlotte Army Air Base, returned to the city and is now Charlotte Douglas International Airport, where the North Carolina Air National Guard, organized there in 1948, flies C-17s as the 145th Airlift Wing.

How it connects

This is the last chapter of The Army Air Forces. It follows The Air War against Japan, whose commanders, Spaatz, Kenney, LeMay and Tunner, reappear here, and it closes the line that began with the Aeronautical Division and the Wright brothers’ airplane at Fort Myer and ran through Billy Mitchell’s fight for independence, the Air Corps and the B-17, Hap Arnold’s expansion, the Mighty Eighth and the Tuskegee Airmen and the WASP. The National Security Act also created the structure under which the atomic weapons described in the Manhattan Project collection passed from the Manhattan District to the new Atomic Energy Commission and the Air Force’s Strategic Air Command.

Readers who want the wider war can start from the World War II hub, with collections on Pearl Harbor, the Battle of the Atlantic, Kasserine Pass, Iwo Jima, the submarine war and the special units, and with the collection’s own questions and answers.

Seeing it today

The National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, the world’s largest military aviation museum, covers the whole story of this collection, from a 1909 Wright Military Flyer replica to the Sacred Cow, the B-29 Bockscar, the Doolittle Raiders’ goblets and a B-17 of the Eighth Air Force, the Memphis Belle; admission is free. The National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler, Georgia, near Savannah, where the Eighth Air Force was activated in January 1942, opened in 1996. The U.S. Air Force Memorial, three stainless-steel spires on a hill above the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, was dedicated on 14 October 2006. In Berlin, Tempelhof airport closed in 2008 and is now a public park, and the Luftbrückendenkmal, the airlift memorial at its entrance, unveiled in 1951, bears the names of those who died in the airlift.

In North Carolina the story begins at the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills, where the first powered flights were made on 17 December 1903. Billy Mitchell’s bombers sank the old battleships Virginia and New Jersey off Cape Hatteras on 5 September 1923, and their wrecks lie on Diamond Shoals. Pope Army Airfield and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base still fly; at Seymour Johnson, F-15E Strike Eagles of the 4th Fighter Wing carry the lineage of the Eagle Squadrons and the 4th Fighter Group of the Eighth Air Force. The site of Morris Field lies within Charlotte Douglas International Airport, home of the Carolinas Aviation Museum (now the Sullenberger Aviation Museum). The North Carolina Air National Guard’s 145th Airlift Wing flies from Charlotte, and several of its support units are at Stanly County Airport near Albemarle. Camp Mackall, where the Army’s airborne and glider troops trained in the war, is still in use by Army special operations forces.

Sources

• Wolk, Herman S. Planning and Organizing the Postwar Air Force, 1943–1947. Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1984; and Toward Independence: The Emergence of the U.S. Air Force, 1945–1947. Washington: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1996.
• Craven, Wesley Frank, and James Lea Cate, eds. The Army Air Forces in World War II. Vol. 6, Men and Planes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955; reprinted Office of Air Force History, 1983.
• Army Air Forces, Office of Statistical Control. Army Air Forces Statistical Digest, World War II. Washington, December 1945 (figures as compiled in “United States Army Air Forces,” Wikipedia).
• Nalty, Bernard C., ed. Winged Shield, Winged Sword: A History of the United States Air Force. 2 vols. Washington: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1997.
• Hennessy, Juliette A. The United States Army Air Arm, April 1861 to April 1917. USAF Historical Study No. 98. Maxwell AFB, 1958; reprinted Office of Air Force History, 1985.
• Maurer, Maurer. Aviation in the U.S. Army, 1919–1939. Washington: Office of Air Force History, 1987.
• National Security Act of 1947, Public Law 80-253, 61 Stat. 495; “National Security Act of 1947,” Wikipedia, and the sources it cites.
• Barlow, Jeffrey G. Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950. Washington: Naval Historical Center, 1994.
• Tunner, William H. Over the Hump. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1964; reprinted Office of Air Force History, 1985.
• Miller, Roger G. To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949. Washington: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998.
• “Berlin Blockade,” Wikipedia, and the sources it cites.
• Halvorsen, Gail S. The Berlin Candy Bomber. Bountiful, Utah: Horizon, 1990.
• “Carl Spaatz,” Wikipedia, and Davis, Richard G., Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe. Washington: Center for Air Force History, 1993.
• “North Carolina Air National Guard,” Wikipedia.
• National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, fact sheets on the VC-54C Sacred Cow and the Berlin Airlift; nationalmuseum.af.mil.

Photographs: U.S. Army Air Forces and U.S. Air Force photographs, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photograph of the Berlin Airlift, an official Air Force portrait, and a NASA photograph, all public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The photograph of Gail Halvorsen was taken for the Department of Defense in 2009, and the portrait of Spaatz is from the Harry S. Truman Library. Unit insignia drawn for this collection are illustrations, not official emblems.