The Army Air Forces, 1907–1947: Questions and Answers

The Air Force counts its lineage from 1 August 1907, when Brig. Gen. James Allen, the Chief Signal Officer, issued Office Memorandum No. 6 creating an Aeronautical Division in his office. Every later name, from the Aviation Section and Air Service to the Air Corps and the Army Air Forces, descends from that memorandum. That is why the Air Force celebrated its centennial in 2007, sixty years after it became a separate service in 1947.

Yes. In January and again in October 1905 the Wrights offered the War Department a flying machine for scouting. The Board of Ordnance and Fortification, which had been embarrassed by funding Samuel Langley’s failed aerodrome in 1903, answered both letters with form replies saying it would not consider a machine until one had been brought to practical operation. The Wrights turned to European buyers and did not fly at all from October 1905 to May 1908.

Signal Corps Specification No. 486, issued 23 December 1907, asked for a machine that could carry two people weighing about 350 pounds in all with fuel for 125 miles, fly at least 40 miles an hour, stay up for an hour, be steered in any direction, land undamaged, and be packed in Army wagons and reassembled in about an hour. Forty-one bids came in; the Wrights’ bid of $25,000 was one of three accepted, and the only one that delivered.

Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge, a 26-year-old artillery officer, was Orville Wright’s passenger at Fort Myer on 17 September 1908 when a propeller split, tore a bracing wire loose and sent the airplane into the ground. He died that evening. He was the first person killed in the crash of a powered airplane, not the first to die in flight: balloonists had died since 1785 and the glider pioneer Otto Lilienthal in 1896. Selfridge is buried at Arlington.

The Army paid $30,000 for the 1909 Wright Military Flyer, which included a $5,000 bonus for beating the required 40 miles an hour. On the speed trial of 30 July 1909, with Lt. Benjamin Foulois as passenger, Orville Wright averaged 42.583 mph over about ten miles to Shuter’s Hill in Alexandria and back. The Army accepted it on 2 August 1909 as Signal Corps Airplane No. 1, the first military airplane in the world. It is now in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

It depends on the question. Lt. Thomas Selfridge piloted the Aerial Experiment Association’s White Wing on 19 May 1908. Lt. Frank P. Lahm was the first Army officer to fly in an airplane at Fort Myer, as Orville Wright’s passenger on 9 September 1908. Lts. Frederic E. Humphreys and Lahm, trained by Wilbur Wright at College Park, were the first to solo in an Army airplane, on 26 October 1909; Humphreys went first.

Partly. In 1910 Foulois was sent to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, with Airplane No. 1, eight mechanics and, as he remembered it, $150, and told to teach himself to fly. He wrote to the Wrights about each problem and followed their advice, calling himself the first correspondence-school pilot. But he had flown as a passenger in 1909 and had roughly an hour of dual instruction from Wilbur Wright. “Self-taught, with help from Dayton by mail” is the accurate version.

Not until the act of 3 March 1911, which gave the Army $125,000 and the Navy $25,000 for aviation. Until then the Aeronautical Division had no appropriation of its own; the Wright airplane was paid for from the Board of Ordnance and Fortification’s budget. From 1908 to mid-1914 the Signal Corps spent about $430,000 on aeronautics and bought about 30 airplanes, while France, Russia and Germany each had about 500.

Early airplanes were fragile and the pusher designs, with the engine behind the pilot, were especially deadly: in a crash the engine tore loose and crushed the men in front of it, and the Wright C tended to stall and dive. The Aeronautical Division lost thirteen men killed in seven years. After Lt. Henry B. Post died on 9 February 1914, the Army grounded all its pushers and switched to tractor airplanes with the engine in front.

The Army’s first tactical aviation unit, formed as the 1st Aero Squadron (Provisional) at Texas City on 5 March 1913 with nine airplanes and eight pilots, during tension with revolutionary Mexico. It was made permanent in December 1913 and went to Mexico under Foulois in 1916. Its descendant, the 1st Reconnaissance Squadron, is the oldest flying unit in the U.S. Air Force.

Read Chapter 1: The Aeronautical Division, 1907–1913 →

After Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, the squadron under Capt. Benjamin Foulois joined Pershing’s expedition with eight Curtiss JN-3 trainers. On 16 March 1916 it made the first American military airplane flight on a combat operation. The JN-3s could not climb over the Chihuahua mountains or fly against desert winds, and by 20 April only two were left, both condemned. Between March and August it made 540 flights and covered 19,553 miles, but found no Villistas.

No. Escadrille N.124, formed 18 April 1916, was a French squadron under French officers, with French airplanes, mechanics and pay; its American pilots were volunteers in French service while the United States was neutral. Only 38 Americans flew with it, claiming 39 official victories, and nine died in combat. Another 269 flew in other French squadrons as the Lafayette Flying Corps. The escadrille became American only on 18 February 1918, as the 103rd Aero Squadron.

Two of its seven founding pilots. Kiffin Yates Rockwell, raised in Asheville, scored the squadron’s first victory on 18 May 1916 and was killed over Alsace on 23 September 1916. James Rogers McConnell of Carthage, in Moore County, a University of North Carolina student, was shot down and killed on 19 March 1917, weeks before the U.S. declared war. His statue, “The Aviator,” still stands in Chapel Hill.

Eugene Jacques Bullard, born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1894, was the first African American military pilot. Wounded at Verdun with the French Foreign Legion, he earned his wings in the French air service in May 1917 and flew combat patrols that autumn; the Air Force museum credits him with one German airplane, though other accounts say it was never confirmed. When he applied to the U.S. Air Service he was refused, because it accepted no Black pilots. In 1994 the Air Force commissioned him posthumously a second lieutenant.

A water-cooled V-12 of about 1,650 cubic inches, laid out by Jesse G. Vincent of Packard and Elbert J. Hall of Hall-Scott starting 31 May 1917 and designed so automobile factories could build it fast with interchangeable parts. Packard, Lincoln, Ford, Buick, Cadillac and Nordyke & Marmon built it; about 13,500 were finished by the armistice and 20,478 by early 1919. It gave 400 to 420 horsepower and cost under $6,000 apiece.

Mostly not. About four of every five airplanes the Air Service flew at the front were French, chiefly SPAD XIII and Nieuport 28 fighters and Salmson and Breguet two-seaters. The only American-built combat airplane at the front was the DH-4, a British design fitted with the Liberty engine. Of 4,346 American DH-4s built, 1,213 reached France and 696 reached the front; pilots called it the “Flaming Coffin” because its fuel tank sat between pilot and observer.

The 94th’s insignia, Uncle Sam’s stars-and-stripes top hat tossed through a ring, from the expression for entering a contest. Organized at Kelly Field on 20 August 1917, the 94th reached the Toul sector in April 1918 as the first trained American pursuit squadron at the front, and on 14 April Lts. Douglas Campbell and Alan Winslow scored the first victories by an American-trained squadron. Eight of its pilots became aces. Today it is the 94th Fighter Squadron, flying F-22s at Langley.

Rickenbacker, a prewar racing driver, was credited with 26 victories between 29 April and 30 October 1918, making him the leading American ace of the war. He took command of the 94th on 25 September 1918 and that day attacked seven German airplanes alone, the action for which he received the Medal of Honor in 1930. He did go to France as a driver with Pershing’s headquarters, but the popular story that he was Pershing’s personal chauffeur is an exaggeration.

For the first American offensive, which began 12 September 1918, Billy Mitchell assembled the largest air concentration of the war: 1,481 airplanes, 609 of them American, with French, British and Italian units. American airmen flew about 3,300 sorties over four days, about a third of them in direct support of the infantry. Mitchell drew lessons that shaped his later campaign: win air superiority by massed offensive action, bomb far behind the lines, and put air units under a single airman’s command.

Second Lt. Frank Luke Jr. of the 27th Aero Squadron, the “balloon buster,” was credited with 18 victories in eight days. On 29 September 1918 he shot down three balloons, was mortally wounded and landed near Murvaux behind German lines. His citation says he died fighting with his pistol, but it was written from villagers’ affidavits gathered months later; no American saw him die and no published German record confirms a gunfight. What he did in his last minutes remains unsettled.

At the armistice it had 45 squadrons and 740 airplanes at the front, about a tenth of Allied air strength. It was credited with 781 enemy airplanes and 73 balloons (another official tally says 756 and 76) for the loss of 289 airplanes and 48 balloons; 237 airmen were killed in action. Correll counts 654 deaths from accident and illness, more than were killed or wounded in combat. Four airmen received the Medal of Honor.

Read Chapter 2: The Aviation Section and the Air Service, 1914–1919 →

William “Billy” Mitchell (1879–1936), born in Nice to a wealthy Milwaukee family, enlisted in 1898, served in the Signal Corps, learned to fly at his own expense in 1916 and ended World War I as a brigadier general and the most celebrated American air commander. As Assistant Chief of Air Service from 1921 to 1925 he campaigned for an independent air force equal to the Army and Navy under a single department of national defense, through the press, Congress and books such as Winged Defense (1925).

On 21 July 1921, about 50 miles east of Cape Henry, seven Martin MB-2 bombers came over the anchored former German dreadnought with 2,000-pound bombs and dropped six. None hit the ship. They burst in the water alongside, and the pressure opened her hull below the armor belt. The 22,800-ton Jutland veteran sank by the stern about twenty minutes later. Navy observers recorded no direct hits by the big bombs; the near misses did the work.

Not in the eyes of the time. The ship was anchored, unmanned, without guns, fighters or damage-control parties, and attacked in good weather from low altitude, and the Navy protested that Mitchell broke the agreed rules. The Joint Army and Navy Board, in a report signed by Pershing, concluded the battleship remained the backbone of the fleet. The story of weeping admirals appears only in later retellings. The test did show that heavy bombs bursting alongside could sink a capital ship.

Martin NBS-1 bombers of the 2nd Bombardment Group sank the old battleships Virginia and New Jersey, anchored off Diamond Shoals about 18 to 20 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras. The first attacks on the New Jersey came from 10,000 feet with 600-pound bombs and damaged her. The Virginia, attacked from 3,000 feet with 1,100-pound bombs, sank in about half an hour; accounts disagree on how many hits she took. The New Jersey was sunk that afternoon. Pershing watched and was not persuaded.

Langley Field was about 175 miles from the targets, so Mitchell asked for a landing field on Hatteras Island. The people of Hatteras village built it in days, leveling sand with shovels, hoes, horse-drawn carts and a tractor dragging a weighted pallet. A state historical marker, B-32, on N.C. 12 in Hatteras village marks the site. The present Billy Mitchell Airstrip near Frisco is named for him, but the Park Service does not say it occupies the same ground.

In part. His roughly 525-page report after a 1923–24 Pacific tour foresaw a Japanese surprise air attack on Oahu, beginning with Ford Island at 7:30 in the morning. But his imagined attack used submarines carrying small fighters and transports carrying bombers staged through Midway, not aircraft carriers, and the published excerpt gives no date or day of the week. American Heritage called the details fantastic and the overall concept alarmingly accurate.

No. He was tried under the 96th Article of War for conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline, for publicly accusing his superiors of near-treason. Many officers who shared his views and testified for him, including Arnold and Spaatz, were never charged. On 17 December 1925 the court found him guilty on all specifications and suspended him for five years; Coolidge halved the pay forfeiture, and Mitchell resigned on 1 February 1926. He was right about a great deal and convicted for insubordination; both are true.

That is often said, but it has never been confirmed. Maj. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, a boyhood acquaintance of Mitchell’s from Milwaukee, was the youngest member of the court, which Maj. Gen. Robert L. Howze presided over. The vote was secret, so how MacArthur or any other member voted is not on record.

No to both. In 1958 the Air Force correction board voted 4 to 1 to set aside the verdict, but the Secretary of the Air Force declined, and the conviction stands. The fiscal 2005 defense act authorized a posthumous promotion to major general, but none has been made. In 1946 Congress awarded him a unique special gold medal, sometimes loosely called a Medal of Honor, now at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force. The B-25 bomber was named the Mitchell in 1941.

Instead of an independent air force, Congress followed the Morrow Board. The act of 2 July 1926 renamed the Air Service the Air Corps, created an Assistant Secretary of War for Air, gave aviation sections on the General Staff, required rated officers to command flying units, continued flight pay and authorized a five-year expansion to 1,800 airplanes, 1,650 officers and 15,000 enlisted men. The program began only in July 1927, and none of its goals was fully reached before Depression budgets cut it short.

Read Chapter 3: Billy Mitchell’s War, 1919–1926 →

An Air Corps endurance flight from Van Nuys, near Los Angeles, from 1 to 7 January 1929. An Atlantic-Fokker C-2A named the Question Mark, crewed by Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker, Elwood Quesada, Harry Halverson and Roy Hooe, stayed aloft 150 hours, 40 minutes and 14 seconds, refueled by hose from two Douglas C-1 tankers in 42 contacts. It set a world record, though the Air Corps did not adopt air refueling as a military technique for almost twenty years.

The school, which moved from Langley to Maxwell Field, Alabama, in 1931, graduated 1,091 officers before suspending classes in 1940; 261 of the 320 Army Air Forces generals on duty at war’s end were graduates. Instructors later called the bomber mafia, among them Harold George, Kenneth Walker, Haywood Hansell and Laurence Kuter, taught the “industrial web” theory: high-flying daylight bombers in close formation could destroy a few vital economic targets without fighter escort.

After contracts were annulled over a scandal, Roosevelt ordered the Air Corps to carry the mail from 19 February 1934. Most of its roughly 250 pilots were inexperienced, only 31 had more than 50 hours of night flying, and its open-cockpit airplanes lacked proper blind-flying instruments and radios, in one of the worst winters on record. Correll counts 12 dead and 66 crashes; other counts give 13 in ten fatal accidents. Only five died on flights actually carrying mail. The Army flew its last mail on 1 June.

A single striking force of the Air Corps’ combat units under one airman, created on 1 March 1935 at Langley Field under Frank M. Andrews, who was jumped from lieutenant colonel to temporary brigadier general. It had three wings, at March Field, Langley and Barksdale, and took about 40 percent of the Air Corps, while the Chief of the Air Corps kept training and supply. On 20 June 1941 it became Air Force Combat Command under the new Army Air Forces.

On 30 October 1935 at Wright Field, the four-engine prototype took off with its internal gust locks still holding the elevator and rudder. It climbed steeply, stalled and crashed; Maj. Ployer Hill and Boeing’s Leslie Tower died. An experienced pilot had simply forgotten a step. Wright Field test pilots responded with written checklists for takeoff, flight and landing, read aloud item by item. Every military and airline crew today works from descendants of those cards.

From Richard L. Williams, a Seattle Times reporter who saw the Model 299’s gun positions in 1935 and called it a “flying fortress.” Boeing registered the name. It suited the Air Corps’ presentation of the bomber as a coast-defense weapon, the only mission the General Staff would accept, but the airmen always intended it as an offensive weapon.

The Model 299’s crash ended its part in the competition, so the Douglas DB-1 won and the Army ordered 133 as the B-18. The General Staff also saw no need for a long-range bomber: policy was defensive, distant coast defense was the Navy’s job, and a Fortress cost nearly twice as much. A provision for experimental purchases let the Air Corps order 13 service-test Fortresses in January 1936. In 1938 the Army had 13 B-17s; by December 1941 it had 198.

On 12 May 1938 three Y1B-17s of the 2nd Bombardment Group flew from Mitchel Field, Long Island, to find the Italian liner Rex at sea as if she were an approaching enemy fleet. Through rain and low cloud, Lt. Curtis LeMay’s navigation brought them over her around 12:25, and NBC broadcast it live. Accounts put the distance at roughly 610 to 800 miles from New York. The Navy protested, and the Army limited Air Corps flights to 100 miles offshore.

No. The pickle-barrel claim was promotion. The Norden, a gyro-stabilized analog computer, was kept secret, though a Norden employee passed drawings to Germany in 1938. In 1940 the average Air Corps bombardier missed by about 400 feet from 15,000 feet on a clear, undefended range. In 1943 the Eighth Air Force’s average error was 1,200 feet, and only 16 percent of bombs fell within 1,000 feet of the aiming point. By 1945 good conditions brought that to as much as 60 percent.

It grew fast after Munich. On 1 July 1939 it had 20,503 officers and men; by mid-1941 it had 152,569 and 6,777 aircraft, fewer than half of them combat types. Roosevelt’s November 1938 White House meeting set planning for 10,000 airplanes, and in May 1940 he called for 50,000 a year. By 7 December 1941, 70 combat groups had been activated, many at cadre strength, and the pilot training goal had risen to 30,000 a year.

Read Chapter 4: The Air Corps, 1926–1941 →

The Air Corps, created in 1926, was a branch of the Army, like the Infantry. The Army Air Forces, created on 20 June 1941, was a command that from March 1942 contained all Army aviation. The Air Corps survived in law as the branch to which most AAF officers belonged, which is why many veterans and families still say they served in the “Army Air Corps” during the war. Both terms are correct, in different senses.

The air plan written in nine days, 4 to 12 August 1941, by Harold George, Kenneth Walker, Haywood Hansell and Laurence Kuter of the Air War Plans Division. Assuming Germany was the main enemy, it proposed an air offensive against 154 targets, chiefly electric power, transportation and synthetic oil, after first beating the Luftwaffe. It called for more than 63,000 aircraft and about 2.1 million men. Its totals proved close; its assumptions about bombing accuracy and unescorted bombers did not.

Not for lack of warning. MacArthur’s headquarters had official word of Pearl Harbor by about 03:30 on 8 December 1941, and Gen. Lewis Brereton wanted to bomb Formosa at dawn but was kept from MacArthur by his chief of staff, Richard Sutherland. Attack authority came only about 10:14, as the B-17s were landing to refuel. Japanese aircraft, delayed by fog on Formosa, struck about 12:35; twelve of seventeen B-17s on the ground were destroyed. Historians still disagree on how to divide the blame.

From about 354,000 people at Pearl Harbor, the AAF reached 2,411,294 officers and enlisted men and women in March 1944, close to a third of the Army. Its aircraft inventory peaked at 79,908 in July 1944, and it fielded a peak of 243 combat groups in early 1945, most of them overseas. In September 1939 the Air Corps had had about 26,000 men, roughly 2,000 of them pilots.

In stages: preflight ground school; primary, about 65 hours in a light trainer such as the Stearman PT-17 at civilian contract schools; basic, about 75 hours in a trainer such as the Vultee BT-13; and advanced, about 75 more hours in the AT-6 for fighter pilots or twin-engine trainers for bomber pilots. Each phase shrank from three months to nine weeks. About 193,000 men graduated, though the Air Force museum gives about 250,000, and some 124,000 candidates washed out or were killed in training.

American factories accepted 299,230 military aircraft from January 1940 to August 1945 for the AAF, the Navy and the Allies; 230,287 of them were Army-type aircraft. Output rose from 6,028 in 1940 to a peak of 95,272 in 1944. Ford’s Willow Run plant near Detroit, mocked as “Willit Run” during its slow start, eventually built more B-24s than any other plant, and the B-24, at more than 18,000, was built in greater numbers than any other American military aircraft.

Pierced steel planking: interlocking steel panels 10 feet long and 15 inches wide, about 66 pounds each, that let engineers lay a runway in days instead of weeks. Its first large field trial came during the Carolina Maneuvers of November 1941, when engineers laid a 3,000-by-150-foot strip at Marston, beside the future Camp Mackall, in 11 days; soldiers called it “Marston mat” ever after. Arnold called it the year’s greatest achievement in aviation warfare. About two million tons were made.

Charlotte’s municipal airport became the Charlotte Air Base in 1941 and Morris Field soon after Pearl Harbor, used by the Third Air Force for training and antisubmarine patrols; it is now Charlotte Douglas International Airport. Pope Field at Fort Bragg trained troop carrier crews with the airborne divisions, Laurinburg-Maxton trained C-47 glider-tow crews, and Seymour Johnson Field at Goldsboro opened in 1942 as a technical training school. Southern weather and cheap, flat land drew training fields across the region.

Henry H. “Hap” Arnold (1886–1950), trained by the Wright brothers in 1911, became Chief of the Air Corps in 1938 and led the Army Air Forces through the war, sitting on the Joint and Combined Chiefs of Staff. He backed the B-29, jet engines and Theodore von Kármán’s scientific planning, and kept working through four heart attacks between 1943 and 1945. He became a five-star General of the Army in 1944 and, in 1949, General of the Air Force, the only officer to hold five-star rank in two services.

The AAF Statistical Digest records 52,173 battle deaths, including 45,520 killed in action, plus 18,364 wounded and 41,057 taken prisoner. Counting accidents and other causes, about 88,119 AAF men died in service, many in training in the United States. The AAF lost 65,164 aircraft from December 1941 to August 1945, 22,948 of them in combat. The Eighth Air Force alone accounted for about half the AAF’s battle casualties.

Read Chapter 5: The Army Air Forces Is Born, 1941–1945 →

The Eighth was activated at Savannah, Georgia, in January 1942. On 4 July 1942 six American crews flew RAF Bostons with six RAF crews against Dutch airfields, the first American bomber mission from England. On 17 August 1942 twelve B-17Es of the 97th Bombardment Group, with Paul Tibbets flying the lead airplane and Ira Eaker aboard another, bombed the Rouen-Sotteville marshalling yards and all came home. The first raid on Germany came on 27 January 1943, at Wilhelmshaven.

American doctrine, the Norden bombsight and the B-17 had been built for precision attacks on specific targets, which could only be seen in daylight. RAF Bomber Command had lost heavily by day in 1939–40 and turned to night attacks on cities. At Casablanca in January 1943 Eaker persuaded Churchill that the two were complementary, promising to bomb “round the clock.” In practice, American bombers bombing by radar through cloud in 1944–45 often hit areas rather than points.

No. The B-24D Hot Stuff of the 93rd Bombardment Group flew its 25th mission on 7 February 1943, more than three months earlier, and Delta Rebel No. 2 and Hell’s Angels also got there first in Europe. Capt. Robert Morgan’s crew finished the Belle’s tour in May 1943, just when the AAF wanted a symbol for a war bond tour. Hot Stuff could not be chosen: it crashed in Iceland on 3 May 1943, killing Lt. Gen. Frank Andrews.

In Operation Tidal Wave, 177 B-24s of the Ninth Air Force, with three groups lent by the Eighth, flew more than 1,000 miles from Benghazi to attack Romania’s oil refineries at rooftop height. Navigation errors split the formation and alerted the defenses. Fifty-three B-24s were lost and only 88 returned to Libya; about 310 airmen were killed or missing. Five men received the Medal of Honor, three posthumously. Much of the damage was repaired within weeks.

On 17 August 1943 Curtis LeMay led 146 B-17s against the Messerschmitt works at Regensburg and flew on to North Africa, losing 24, while a second force of 230 B-17s, delayed more than three hours by fog, hit the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plants and lost 36. Sixty bombers and about 550 airmen were lost. Gunners claimed 288 German fighters; German records show 25 to 27. Bearing output fell by about a third for a time, but Germany drew on stocks and imports.

Thursday, 14 October 1943, the second Schweinfurt raid. Of 291 B-17s dispatched, about 229 bombed; German fighters attacked in waves, using rockets as well as cannon, once the escorting P-47s turned back at the German border. Sixty B-17s were lost and about 650 of the 2,900 men who set out did not return. The plants were back at work within about six weeks, and deep unescorted raids into Germany were halted until long-range fighters were available.

Because its losses came in bunches on the days the whole Eighth remembered. Flying from Thorpe Abbotts, Norfolk, it lost nine of 21 B-17s on the Regensburg mission; over Münster on 10 October 1943, twelve of the thirteen bombers that reached the target were shot down, and only Lt. Robert Rosenthal’s Royal Flush returned; over Berlin on 6 March 1944 it lost 15. Its losses were not the worst in the Eighth over the whole war, but the name stuck.

The Merlin-engined P-51B, with drop tanks, could escort bombers to Berlin and beyond, and began long-range escort in December 1943. Doolittle, who took command of the Eighth on 6 January 1944, released the fighters from close escort to hunt German fighters wherever they could be found, a decision he called his most important of the war. In Big Week, 20–25 February 1944, the Luftwaffe lost 262 fighters and nearly 100 pilots. By the end of May its day fighter force was beaten.

No. Production fell sharply for a time after each raid, but Germany drew on stocks, bought bearings from Sweden and Switzerland, dispersed its factories and redesigned equipment to use fewer bearings; no German weapon program was stopped for lack of them. After the war the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey judged that the attacks on oil, begun in May 1944, and on transportation did more to bring down the German economy than any other part of the air offensive.

The Eighth suffered more than 47,000 casualties, more than 26,000 of them killed, about half of all the Army Air Forces’ battle casualties in the war, and its men earned 17 Medals of Honor. Its heaviest single-day loss was 69 bombers over Berlin on 6 March 1944. The Cambridge American Cemetery at Madingley holds 3,812 American dead, many of them Eighth Air Force airmen, and lists 5,127 missing on its Wall of the Missing.

Read Chapter 6: The Mighty Eighth and the Bomber War over Europe →

Everyone in the Army Air Forces program for Black airmen centered on Tuskegee, Alabama: the 992 pilots trained there from 1942 to 1946, the navigators and bombardiers trained elsewhere for the 477th Bombardment Group, and the mechanics, armorers, radio operators, medical staff, clerks and instructors, Black and white, who supported them. By that definition there were more than 14,000. Before 1941 the Air Corps accepted no Black officers or enlisted men at all.

Through civil aviation and politics. The Civilian Pilot Training Program of 1939 came to include Black colleges such as Tuskegee Institute, which hired C. Alfred “Chief” Anderson as chief instructor. The 1940 draft law forbade discrimination in selection and training, Howard student Yancey Williams sued with NAACP support, and on 16 January 1941 the War Department announced a Black pursuit squadron to be trained at Tuskegee. The 99th Pursuit Squadron was activated on 22 March 1941. Many Black leaders objected to the arrangement as segregation by another name.

Flying P-40s, it flew its first combat mission on 2 June 1943 against Pantelleria, and 1st Lt. Charles B. Hall scored its first aerial victory over Sicily on 2 July 1943. After senior officers criticized it in September 1943, an AAF study found its performance not significantly different from other P-40 squadrons. Over the Anzio beachhead on 27–28 January 1944 it claimed 13 German aircraft, more than any other squadron there. It earned three Distinguished Unit Citations.

Fifteenth Air Force fighter groups painted distinctive tail and nose markings so bomber crews could tell their escorts apart. The 332nd Fighter Group was assigned red when it converted to P-47s and P-51s in 1944, flying from Ramitelli on Italy’s Adriatic coast. The marking became the group’s identity, and bomber crews came to know the “Red Tails” as an escort that stayed with them.

No, that claim is a myth. Daniel Haulman of the Air Force Historical Research Agency checked mission reports against bomber records and found that bombers escorted by the 332nd were shot down by enemy fighters on seven of its 179 escort missions, 27 bombers in all. That compares with an average of 46 for each of the other Fifteenth Air Force fighter groups, a much better record and the true basis of the group’s reputation. The documented record needs no embroidery.

Seventy-two Tuskegee pilots were credited with 112 aerial victories, from Hall’s on 2 July 1943 to 31 March 1945, the group’s best day, with 13. On 24 March 1945, escorting the Fifteenth Air Force’s only raid on Berlin, Charles Brantley, Roscoe Brown and Earl Lane each shot down an Me 262 jet. No Tuskegee pilot became an ace; the top scorers had four each, partly because Davis made close escort the group’s rule. Members earned 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses.

Born in 1912, the son of the Army’s first Black general, Davis was “silenced” by classmates for four years at West Point and graduated in 1936. The Air Corps rejected him for flight training because it had no Black units. He graduated in Tuskegee’s first class, commanded the 99th Fighter Squadron and, from October 1943, the 332nd Fighter Group. He became the Air Force’s first Black general in 1954 and was advanced to four stars on the retired list in 1998.

In April 1945 officers of the 477th Bombardment Group at Freeman Field, Indiana, protested a segregated officers’ club. On 5 and 6 April, 61 Black officers entered the white club and were arrested; 101 more were arrested for refusing to sign a regulation defining the segregation. The 101 were released with reprimands, and at a court-martial with lawyers directed by Thurgood Marshall only Lt. Roger C. Terry was convicted, of jostling an officer. The Air Force set aside his conviction in 1995.

The Women Airforce Service Pilots, formed on 5 August 1943 by merging Nancy Love’s Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron and Jacqueline Cochran’s Women’s Flying Training Detachment, with Cochran as director. About 25,000 women applied, 1,830 were accepted and 1,074 earned their wings at Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas. They served at 126 bases, ferrying more than 12,000 aircraft, towing targets and test-flying. Thirty-eight died. They were civil service employees, never members of the armed forces.

No WASP flew in combat; they served in the continental United States. The House defeated a bill to militarize them on 21 June 1944, and they were disbanded as civilians on 20 December 1944, with no rank, military funerals or veterans’ benefits. Surviving WASP, backed by Senator Barry Goldwater, won veteran status through Public Law 95-202, signed by President Carter on 23 November 1977. They received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2010, three years after the Tuskegee Airmen did in 2007.

Camp Davis, the antiaircraft training center at Holly Ridge in Onslow County, was one of the first bases to use WASP as target-tow pilots. Fifty-two served there in 1943–44, flying worn A-24 and A-25 dive bombers; the detachment recorded 14 accidents. Mabel Rawlinson was killed on 23 August 1943 and Betty Taylor Wood on 23 September. State highway historical marker C-88 on U.S. 17 at Holly Ridge commemorates them.

Read Chapter 7: The Tuskegee Airmen and the WASP →

On 18 April 1942, Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle led sixteen Army B-25B bombers off the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. A Japanese picket boat spotted the task force, so they launched a day early, roughly 650 nautical miles from Japan. They hit military and industrial targets around noon and lost no aircraft over Japan, but all sixteen were lost: fifteen crews bailed out or crash-landed in China, and one landed near Vladivostok and was interned.

Of the eighty men, sixty-nine came home. Three died on the raid itself. Eight were captured; after a show trial, Lt. Dean Hallmark, Lt. William Farrow and Sgt. Harold Spatz were executed on 15 October 1942, Lt. Robert Meder died in captivity in 1943, and four survived to be freed in August 1945. Chinese civilians sheltered the rest, and Japan’s Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign in reprisal killed somewhere between about 10,000 and 250,000 Chinese, depending on the estimate. The last raider, Richard Cole, died in 2019.

The physical damage was small, but the strategic effect was large. It showed Japan’s home islands could be reached, and the embarrassed Imperial Japanese Navy settled its internal argument in favor of Admiral Yamamoto’s plan to seize Midway; the Battle of Midway followed seven weeks later. Japan also kept fighter units at home and launched a campaign to destroy eastern China’s airfields. Most historians accept the raid’s role in the Midway decision, though some argue Yamamoto’s plan would have gone ahead anyway.

Gen. George C. Kenney took command of the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific on 4 August 1942 and rebuilt the Fifth Air Force under MacArthur. His crews packed bomber noses with machine guns to make low-level strafers and practiced skip bombing: releasing a delay-fuzed bomb from mast height so it skipped across the water like a flat stone into a ship’s side. It was far more accurate than high-altitude bombing against ships, but exposed the aircraft to the ships’ guns.

On 2–4 March 1943, the Fifth Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force attacked a Japanese convoy of eight transports and eight destroyers carrying about 6,900 troops from Rabaul to Lae. All eight transports and four destroyers were sunk, and some 2,890 men died, for 13 Allied aircrew killed. MacArthur’s communique claimed 22 ships and 12,792 troops, figures his headquarters never corrected. Allied aircraft and PT boats also attacked survivors in the water for three days afterward.

The air route over the eastern Himalayas from Assam in India to Kunming in China, about 550 miles over mountains rising to 15,000 feet and more, flown after Japan cut the Burma Road in 1942. From 1943 to 1945 the Air Transport Command delivered 685,304 tons in 456,977 flights, nearly 60 percent of it gasoline. More than 500 aircraft crashed and more than 1,300 crewmen were lost. William Tunner, who ran it from late 1944, later applied its lessons in the Berlin Airlift.

About three billion dollars for design and production, more than the Manhattan Project’s roughly two billion. It was the first Allied production bomber with pressurized crew compartments, and its central fire control system let gunners aim four remote turrets through analog computers. Its Wright R-3350 engines were prone to overheating and fires, a problem never fully solved in the war. Four main plants built 3,970 B-29s, including Martin’s at Bellevue, Nebraska, which built the Enola Gay and Bockscar.

The AAF’s B-29 force against Japan, established on 4 April 1944 under the Joint Chiefs, with Hap Arnold personally in command from Washington, the only numbered air force run by the AAF’s commanding general. Arnold feared theater commanders would use the B-29s tactically. Its XX Bomber Command flew from India and China in 1944, defeated by the logistics of flying everything over the Hump, and its XXI Bomber Command flew from the Marianas from November 1944.

Hansell, a believer in daylight precision bombing, began B-29 raids from the Marianas on 24 November 1944. Over Japan at 30,000 feet his crews met the jet stream, winds of well over a hundred miles an hour that blew bombs off target, and cloud usually hid the aircraft plants. Through December and January the raids did little damage while engine failures and ditchings cost crews. Under pressure from the most expensive program of the war, Arnold gave LeMay the command on 20 January 1945.

The exact number will never be known. On the night of 9–10 March 1945, 279 B-29s flying low at night dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries, mostly M-69 napalm bomblets, and a 45 mph wind drove the fires into a conflagration that burned out 15.8 square miles. Counts range from 79,466 bodies recorded to at least 105,400 victims honored at the Tokyo Memorial Hall; most historians put the toll at 90,000 to 100,000. It was the most destructive single air raid in history.

By August 1945 the AAF had firebombed 66 Japanese cities, destroying on average about 40 percent of their built-up area. B-29s also laid some 12,000 mines in Operation Starvation, closing much of Japan’s remaining shipping. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that nine months of air attack, the atomic bombs included, caused about 806,000 civilian casualties, of whom about 330,000 died. The moral argument over the campaign has never closed.

Read Chapter 8: The Air War against Japan →

President Truman signed the National Security Act on 26 July 1947 aboard his aircraft, the Sacred Cow, at Washington National Airport, waiting for the courier before flying to his dying mother in Missouri. Most of the act took effect on 18 September 1947, when the Department of the Air Force and the U.S. Air Force were established. The act also created the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.

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 National Guard celebrates the same date. 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, created on 1 August 1907.

W. Stuart Symington, a St. Louis businessman who had run Emerson Electric during the war and been Assistant Secretary of War for Air since 1946, was sworn in as the first Secretary of the Air Force on 18 September 1947. Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, who had succeeded Hap Arnold as commanding general of the AAF in February 1946, became the first Chief of Staff later that month. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg succeeded Spaatz in April 1948.

Very fast. On 31 August 1945 the AAF still had 2,253,182 people and 63,715 aircraft. Under the point system and public pressure to “bring the boys home,” it fell to about 485,000 by April 1946 and about 304,000 a year later, losing many of the skilled mechanics who kept aircraft flying. Its inventory fell below 30,000 aircraft, and thousands of combat planes were flown to depots such as Kingman, Arizona, and sold for scrap.

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 compromise worked out in January 1947 by Maj. Gen. Lauris Norstad and Vice Adm. Forrest Sherman, and the act itself, left the Navy and Marine Corps their own air arms. The Key West agreement of 1948 confirmed it.

No. The Army kept its organic light aviation: since 1942 field artillery and other ground units had flown their own light liaison and observation aircraft, such as the Piper L-4 Grasshopper, with Army pilots. The Key West agreement of 1948 confirmed the Army’s right to aircraft for reconnaissance, observation, liaison and battlefield transport. Army helicopters later served in Korea and Vietnam, and Army Aviation became a separate branch in 1983.

The 1947 act moved the interservice quarrel inside the new defense establishment. At Key West on 11–14 March 1948 the Joint Chiefs gave the Air Force primary responsibility for strategic air warfare and air defense, the Navy control of the sea with its own aviation, and the Army land combat. When the Navy’s supercarrier United States was canceled in April 1949, admirals attacked the Air Force’s B-36 bomber and atomic strategy before Congress in the October 1949 hearings called the Revolt of the Admirals.

When the Soviet Union cut the land routes into West Berlin on 24 June 1948, the U.S. and British air forces supplied the city of about two million by air from 26 June 1948 to 30 September 1949. Under Maj. Gen. William Tunner, who had run the Hump, aircraft flew three corridors at three-minute intervals. In 278,228 flights they delivered about 2.3 million tons, some two-thirds of it coal. The blockade was lifted on 12 May 1949. The airlift cost 101 lives.

Lt. Gail S. Halvorsen, a C-54 pilot from Utah. In July 1948 he talked with children at the fence at the end of the Tempelhof runway, gave them two sticks of gum, and promised to drop more, wiggling his wings so they would know his aircraft. He and his crew began dropping candy on handkerchief parachutes, at first without permission. Tunner made it official as Operation Little Vittles, and children called him “Uncle Wiggly Wings.” He later commanded Tempelhof Air Base and died in 2022.

No. The Royal Air Force began its own airlift, Operation Plainfare, on 28 June 1948, two days after the Americans, and British military and civil aircraft carried about 542,000 tons, nearly a quarter of the total; the U.S. Air Force carried about 1.78 million. Crews from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa flew with the RAF, the French built Tegel airfield, and from October 1948 the two efforts ran as one Combined Airlift Task Force. Forty Britons died, more than the 31 Americans.

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

Read Chapter 9: Independence: The U.S. Air Force, 1947 →