The creation of the USAAF

On Friday 20 June 1941 the United States War Department issued a new version of Army Regulation AR 95-5, which laid down the organisation of military aviation. Under it the United States Army Air Forces (AAF or USAAF) came into being. Their chief was Major General Henry H. Arnold, Chief of the Air Corps since 1938 and, since the autumn of 1940, also Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army for Air. For the first time in the history of the American army all its aviation at home was subordinated to a single airman, who was given a staff of his own. The new organisation consisted of three parts: AAF Headquarters; the Air Force Combat Command, the renamed GHQ Air Force, which brought together the combat units; and the old Air Corps, which was henceforth responsible for training, supply and the procurement of equipment. This happened two days before the German attack on the Soviet Union, at a time when the United States, still formally neutral, had for several months been arming both itself and Britain on a vast scale.

An air arm with two heads

From the beginning the aviation of the American army had struggled over what exactly it was. During the First World War it was separated from the Signal Corps as the Air Service, and an act of 2 July 1926 renamed it the Air Corps. The name was a compromise: the airmen wanted an independent air force equal to the army and navy, like the British, who in 1918 had created the RAF, while the army’s General Staff regarded aviation as one arm of the service, like the infantry or the artillery, whose task was to support the ground forces. The most outspoken advocate of an independent air force, Billy Mitchell, was court-martialled in 1925 for publicly accusing his superiors of negligence and left the army. His supporters, among them Major Henry Arnold, paid for that loyalty with their careers.

In the 1930s the Air Corps Tactical School in Alabama developed the doctrine of strategic bombing: heavy, well-armed long-range bombers, such as the Boeing B-17, first flown in 1935, were to destroy the enemy’s industry by precise daylight raids. Such a war had no need of ground forces, and that is precisely why the General Staff viewed it with suspicion. In 1935 a half-measure was found. On 1 March the General Headquarters Air Force (GHQ Air Force) was activated, and all the combat units at home, previously scattered among the commanders of the corps areas, were placed under it. GHQ Air Force, however, commanded only the operations of its units; doctrine, aircraft and training remained the responsibility of the Chief of the Air Corps, who was not its superior, while airfields and personnel were managed by the corps area commanders. For six years American military aviation thus had two heads, which often quarrelled. One congressman called it a “many-headed hydra”.

The great expansion

From 1939 the organisational disputes collided with rapid expansion. In January 1939 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Congress for money to enlarge the Army’s aviation, and in April a programme of 25 groups and 50,000 men was adopted. In September 1939, when war broke out in Europe, the Air Corps still had only about 800 first-line combat aircraft, inferior to the British and German ones, and little more than 20,000 men. After the fall of France Roosevelt asked Congress for an industry capable of building 50,000 aircraft a year, and the air arm’s plans grew from month to month, up to 84 combat groups and almost 7,800 combat aircraft. When the AAF was created in June 1941 it had more than 152,000 men, over seven times as many as two years earlier, at 156 airfields.

From Arnold’s proposal to the regulation

The Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, asked Arnold for a plan for a new organisation of the air arm. On 5 October 1940 Arnold presented it: aviation was to have its own staff, a single commander and a position equal to the ground forces and the supply services. The General Staff rejected the plan outright, repeating that in the event of war aviation would have no tasks other than supporting the ground forces. Marshall chose a compromise that satisfied no one. At the end of October he appointed Arnold acting Deputy Chief of Staff for Air, but placed GHQ Air Force under the General Headquarters of the Army (GHQ), created in the summer, which dealt with the training of the field forces. The dispute over the air defence of the country ended in March 1941 with the creation of four air forces, which were also subordinate to GHQ Air Force and not to the defence commands. Responsibilities overlapped more and more.

By the spring of 1941 everything argued for change. The successes of the Luftwaffe in Europe and the RAF’s defence of Britain showed what air power could achieve under unified command. In secret staff talks with the British, concluded in March with the ABC-1 agreement, it was accepted that in a war with Germany American aviation would take part in an air offensive against the Reich, which demolished the argument that the air arm had no missions of its own. Bills for an independent air force reappeared in Congress. Marshall, who over time had become a supporter of air power, concluded that it needed a “simpler system” and a single command, but he did not want to break up the army on the eve of war.

A civilian played an important part. In December 1940 the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, took on as his special adviser on aviation Robert A. Lovett, a New York banker and a naval aviator in the First World War, and in April 1941 Lovett became Assistant Secretary of War for Air, a post that had been vacant since 1933. Stimson also defended Arnold himself, who had earlier fallen foul of Roosevelt. In March 1940 Arnold had complained publicly that deliveries of aircraft to the British and French were delaying the Air Corps’ rearmament, and the President warned him that officers who did not “play ball” might find themselves sent to Guam. As late as March 1941 Roosevelt was holding up his promotion, and Stimson and Marshall feared that Arnold would be retired. His fortunes were transformed by a three-week visit to Britain in April 1941, after which he gave the President a factual and optimistic report. From then on his standing in the White House was strong.

Marshall, Arnold and Lovett agreed that broad autonomy for the air arm within the army would be better than immediate separation. The solution had the further advantage of requiring no legislation: it was enough to amend an army regulation, which pre-empted any initiatives in Congress.

What the regulation changed

The new version of AR 95-5 of 20 June 1941 gave Arnold the title of Chief of the Army Air Forces. Both of the former rivals were placed under him: the commander of the Air Force Combat Command, Lieutenant General Delos C. Emmons, who had commanded GHQ Air Force since 1939 and kept that post, and the Chief of the Air Corps, Major General George Brett, who had taken over that office in May 1941. Arnold also retained the post of Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army for Air and received his own Air Staff, which the General Staff had denied the airmen for years. The commander of the combat units gained authority over his airfields and disciplinary jurisdiction over his men, both taken away from the corps area commanders.

The reform nevertheless had clear limits. The Army Air Forces did not become equal to the ground forces. Army GHQ could still detach air units from the Combat Command and form them into task forces for special missions, the General Staff still controlled the air budget, and units, bases and personnel outside the continental United States – in Hawaii, the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone – were subordinate to the commanders of the army departments there. Air units continued to report through two channels of command. Marshall and Arnold also came to an informal understanding: the air arm was to enjoy autonomy within the army, much as the Marine Corps did within the navy, and in return its leaders were not to press for full independence until the end of the war. Marshall understood that independence would come after the war in any case.

The names completed the confusion. Formally, officers and men still belonged to the Air Corps as an arm of the service, while the “Army Air Forces” was the organisation in which they served. The public, and often the airmen themselves, went on speaking of the Air Corps, while at the same time the words “Air Force” in the singular, which in themselves foreshadowed future independence, appeared more and more often on recruiting posters and in the name of the Combat Command.

Its place in the war

From its first days the new air force had to face tasks that American aviation had never known. Two days after its creation Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Washington soon began helping Moscow too, from the autumn under the Lend-Lease Act. Aircraft for which Britain and China were already waiting now had to be shared with yet another recipient, at the expense of the AAF’s own units. Men came from peacetime conscription, and the air arm attracted so many volunteers that reserves of aviation cadets were later created for them so as not to lose them to the ground forces. Black volunteers, such as the cadets of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, were allowed by the AAF to serve only in separate units.

In the summer of 1941, in response to the President’s request for an assessment of production requirements in the event of war, the new Air War Plans Division on Arnold’s staff drew up in a few days the AWPD-1 plan, completed on 13 August. It provided for the defence of the Western Hemisphere, a strategic defensive against Japan and a great bombing offensive against Germany, together with an expansion of the AAF to more than 2 million men and some 60,000 aircraft. In September the plan was approved by Marshall and Stimson. In August Arnold accompanied Roosevelt at his meeting with Winston Churchill off the coast of Newfoundland.

The arrangement of June 1941 lasted less than nine months. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Arnold received his third star, and under an executive order issued by Roosevelt on the strength of his war powers, on 9 March 1942 the army was divided into three coequal forces: the Army Ground Forces, the Services of Supply and the Army Air Forces. Arnold became Commanding General of the AAF; the Air Force Combat Command and the office of Chief of the Air Corps were abolished, and their tasks were taken over by the numbered air forces and support commands. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Arnold sat at the same table as Marshall and the head of the navy, which in practice made aviation a third armed service.

At their peak, in 1944, the AAF numbered more than 2.4 million men and almost 80,000 aircraft, and their B-17 and B-24 bombers from England and Italy and B-29s from China and the Marianas destroyed the industry and cities of Germany and Japan. Marshall’s bargain with Arnold was kept. After the war the National Security Act of 1947 created the independent United States Air Force, and on 18 September 1947 both the Army Air Forces and the Air Corps ceased to exist.