National Affairs: Airborne’s Air Force

In age, the Army’s airborne branch (organized 1940) is only an infant. But in battle experience the airborne is a seasoned veteran with a gruff enough voice to demand its place in the sun. Last week the airborne’s demands were beginning to produce results. The Air Force announced that it is setting up a new command at Greenville, S.C.—the Eighteenth Air Force—whose sole job will be carrying troopers and equipment to the battlefield.

Although the new command (along with the Ninth Air Force) will be under the administration of the Tactical Air Command, it will, in effect, give airborne outfits a separate air force of their own for the first time. Pilots and crews of the Eighteenth will train and work hand in glove with the Sand Airborne Division at nearby Fort Bragg, N.C. on the highly complex problems of airloading men and equipment and dropping them on a pinpoint target on split-second schedules.

As a starter, the Eighteenth will have about 60 load-lugging C-828, plus the obsolescent C-468 and C-478 in the reserve troop carrier groups that the Air Force has recently mobilized. Eventually, when the two modern troop carrier wings (flying some C-1198) now in Korea return to the U.S., they will be placed in the Eighteenth.

The one point still to be settled: the Eighteenth’s commander. The airborne’s greatest fear is that the job may go to an Air Force general who would insist on treating an airborne operation like an airlift, shuttling planeloads of men and equipment to an airhead on a commuter-train timetable. Airborne officers insist that the intricate job of establishing an airhead in enemy territory requires newer techniques-which must still be developed. Their candidate for the command: Major General Robert W. Douglass, former chief of staff of Air Forces in Europe.