Books: Crate to Superfort

GLOBAL MISSION (626 pp.)—H. H. Arnold—Harper ($5).

One day in June 1912, at a little airbase near Washington, D.C., 2nd Lieut. Henry Harley (“Hap”) Arnold had a conversation that five-star General Arnold still likes to remember. Infantry Captain Billy Mitchell, 32, had just come back from Japan where he had had a look at the Japanese army. Did Lieut. Arnold know that the Japs had a bigger air force than the U.S.—ten planes to the U.S.’s total of four? Captain Mitchell was writing a paper for the War College on the future of military aviation, but since he had not yet learned to fly he needed to pump one of the handful of U.S. officers—like Hap Arnold—who had. Thirty-three years and endless air power controversies later, Hap Arnold had fully vindicated Billy Mitchell’s impassioned predictions, commanded enough air power to have wiped Japan oft the map.

From the retirement of his California ranch, the former commander of the world’s greatest air force has told his story in Global Mission. Readers had better not look for the overall grasp of high-level problems that marked Robert Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins or for the tersely marshaled facts and concise, West Point English of General Dwight Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe. But Hap Arnold’s military life spans the whole life of military aviation, and no one now living can speak with more authority about the growth of air power. Global Mission is a big, gabby book, easygoing and easy to read. For any reader trying to assemble the rounded story of World War II, it is one of the very few essential books written so far. For any student of aviation it is a clear must.

Invitation to Suicide. Pennsylvania-born Hap Arnold hadn’t planned to go to West Point in the first place. His older brother had the appointment and ditched it, but small-town Dr. Arnold was determined that one of his sons should become an officer. Hap was persuaded to pinch-hit, was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant of infantry in 1907. When he saw Louis Bleriot’s English Channel-hopping monoplane on exhibition in Paris in 1909, he didn’t even know what the freakish contraption was. When he figured it out, his first.thought forecast the futures of both Hap Arnold and air power. “If one man could do it once, what if a lot of men did it together at the same time?” Two years later, in answer to a War Department call, he volunteered to learn to fly at the Wright Brothers’ field in Dayton. Said his disapproving commanding officer: “Young man, I know of no better way for a person to commit suicide!” In that year, 1911, Hap Arnold became one of the first two qualified airplane pilots in the U.S. Army.

Arnold never flew a plane to combat. In World War I he became the youngest colonel in the U.S. Army and the second-ranking air officer, but he was kept in Washington. His account of those years is the familiar one of War Department myopia, never enough and that too late. Billy Mitchell wanted to bomb Germany, but the U.S. hadn’t a single bomber. When Mitchell was court-martialed in 1925 for his obstreperous advocacy of air power, his friend & follower Hap Arnold was sent off to rusticate at Fort Riley. Determined not to quit under fire, Arnold passed up the job as president and general manager of Pan American Airways.

Out of the Doghouse. The day before Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement, Arnold was appointed chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps. F.D.R., who had heard a rumor that Arnold drank too hard, had held up the appointment for eight days. Later, after Arnold had clashed with Treasury Secretary Morgenthau over the release to the French of information on a new U.S. bomber, F.D.R. angrily threatened to ship Hap to Guam. Within a year, F.D.R. was mixing his air chief an old-fashioned (Arnold’s first drink in 20 years) and letting him know he was out of the doghouse. Global Mission is loaded with Arnold’s assurances that F.D.R., Harry Hopkins and War Secretary Stimson were the best friends U.S. air power ever had.

Much of Global Mission is written in the aggrieved tone of the well-meaning man hemmed in by selfish partners. According to Arnold, Navy Secretary Knox wouldn’t brook honest criticism of Navy mistakes; both Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur were willing to sacrifice greater effectiveness in the Pacific in order to maintain their separate spheres of power; Secretary Morgenthau kept officiously butting into Air Forces business; the British kept trying to belittle his daylight bombing program in Europe and convert the U.S. to their night-bombing tactics; in the Pacific, the Navy tried to sabotage his bombing program for Japan, then tried to get control of the bombers away from the Air Forces.

No Bombs for Washington. Whatever readers may think of these charges, few will doubt the correctness of Arnold’s double thesis: that the air forces of Germany and Japan had to be destroyed in combat while strategic bombing was paralyzing enemy capacity to resist. Goring was testifying on Arnold’s side in 1943 when he ordered: “The Fortresses must be destroyed, regardless of everything else.” After the Tokyo fire raid, no further testimony was needed.

On V-J day, Hap Arnold was the commander of 2,300,000 men and 72,000 planes. Like the other service heads working against time and critics, he had made mistakes that were gradually swaHowed by the magnificent overall performance. In 1942 he had bet British Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal that before the war was over an enemy bomb would land on Washington. After reading Global Mission, most readers will agree that Hap Arnold was the man responsible for making sure that he lost his own bet.