Books: Pilot’s Brass

GENERAL KENNEY REPORTS (594 pp.)−George C. Kenney — Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($4.50).

If ever a general had his work cut out him, it was George Churchill Kenney he reported for duty to Douglas MacArthur in Australia. The Allied Air he was to command in the South Pacific seemed hopelessly outnum by the Japanese. MacArthur told flatly that his new command was in combat and that he had no for its top officers. It looked as if MacArthur was right. The next day at noon, Kenney looking on, 27 Jap planes attacked a U.S. airdrome near Port Mores New Guinea. The Japs got away without being touched by U.S. fighters. Even the antiaircraft shooting was wretchedly ineffective . 150 to 0. General Kenney Reports is Kenney’s brash, galloping and long-winded explanation of how he all that. Short (5 ft. 6 in.), bristle-haired and scar-cheeked, Kenney ruthlessly rid himself of incompetent brass, re-trained his flyers and lifted them from lethargy to lethal effectiveness in a few short weeks. To replace plane losses, they built spare-parts crates from wrecked machines. Kenney himself invented the low-level parachute-fragmentation bomb and adopted skip bombing as a standard technique against Japanese ships. Once plane and personnel replacements began roll in, the Jap air forces didn’t have a chance. One year after his arrival in the Pacific, Kenney gave them a session which they themselves referred to as the “Black Day.” On Aug. 17, 1943, over New Guinea, his “kids” destroyed 150 enemy planes one loss. Long before that, MacArthur had made his air chief a lieutenant general and given him a free hand.

Readers looking for high-level inside stuff on the war in the Pacific will not it here. General Kenney Reports is essentially a fighting man’s story, the day-to-day record of jobs to be done, the planes sent up to do them, U.S. and enemy losses. But in at least one respect, brusque George Kenney is more forthright than any of the high brass have been in books far. Those he considered incompetent he calls by name, and some of them were generals.

Let’s See MacArthur. Hardest hit by Kenney’s free-swinging, almost casual criticism is General Richard K. Sutherland, Arthur’s wartime chief of staff (since retired). Admitting that Sutherland was “smart,” Kenney also says that “an unfortunate bit of arrogance, combined with his egotism, had made him almost universally disliked . . . Sutherland was inclined to overemphasize his smattering of knowledge of aviation.” The showdown came during the very first week, when Sutherland tried to write the orders for Kenney’s first big show. Writes Kenney: “I told him that I was running the Air Force because I was the most competent airman in the Pacific and that, if that statement was not true, I recommended that he find somebody that was more competent. . . When Sutherland seemed to be getting a little antagonistic, I said, ‘Let’s go in the next room, see General MacArthur . . .’ Sutherland immediately calmed down and rescinded the orders that I had objected to.”

Among others banged by Brass Knocker Kenney:

Lieut. General George H. Brett (now retired), who, says George Kenney, didn’t even know how many planes he had in his command when Kenney came to succeed him.

Brigadier General “Mike” Scanlon (also now retired), Air Forces commander in New Guinea: “I don’t know why they sent him up to New Guinea; he was not an operator and everyone from the kids on up knew it.”

Kenney also has some hard things to say about U.S. infantry in New Guinea, and he names units. His regard for MacArthur approaches near-worship, but MacArthur’s whole staff is flayed repeatedly. Kenney, who lost his job as chief of the Strategic Air Command last year (he now heads the Air University at Maxwell Field, Ala.), may be too impolitic for peacetime Washington, but as a wartime trouble-shooter he ranks at the top. General Kenney Reports shows why.