United States Army Air Forces

• 1. Introduction

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  The United States Army Air Forces came into existence on the 20th of June 1941, born out of years of bureaucratic struggle, doctrinal argument, and a fundamental question that nobody in Washington could quite agree on: what was air power actually for? Was it a tool of the ground forces, or something else entirely? By the time the war ended, that question had an answer nobody could ignore. At its peak in March 1944, the AAF had grown to more than 2.4 million men and women in uniform. It operated from more than 1,600 airfields worldwide. It had built itself into something that looked, for all practical purposes, like an independent military service, even though no law said it was. How did a branch that couldn't even control its own airfields in 1935 become the force that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That story runs through court-martials and congressional hearings, through resort hotels turned into barracks and the training fields of Tuskegee, Alabama, through a plan written in nine days that came within two percent of predicting the entire mobilization.

• 2. The Bureaucratic Battle

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  Billy Mitchell's arguments for an independent air force, which led to his court-martial, planted the seed of a conflict that would take decades to resolve. The tension was structural. After 1920, aviation units fell under corps area commanders following the model General John J. Pershing had used in World War I, and ground force commanders were not inclined to hand that authority to airmen. A partial answer came in March 1935, when all combat air units within the continental United States were gathered under a single organization, the General Headquarters Air Force. But the fix was incomplete. The GHQ Air Force controlled operations of its combat units while the Air Corps remained responsible for doctrine, aircraft acquisition, and training. Corps area commanders still held authority over airfields and personnel administration. The two main air commanders between 1935 and 1938, Major Generals Frank M. Andrews and Oscar Westover, clashed philosophically over the direction of the air arm, deepening the confusion rather than resolving it. In October 1940, Chief of the Air Corps Major General Henry H. Arnold proposed a unified air staff, a single commander over all aviation, and equality with ground and supply forces. The General Staff rejected every point, falling back on the argument that the Air Corps would have no mission in wartime except to support ground forces. A joint U.S.-British planning agreement called ABC-1 effectively demolished that argument, since it described a wartime role for American air power that had nothing to do with directly supporting infantry. The bureaucratic stalemate was coming to an end, but it would take the shock of Pearl Harbor to finish the job.

• 3. Building the Force

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  Robert A. Lovett, a lawyer and banker who had prior experience in the aviation industry, was appointed to the long-vacant position of Assistant Secretary of War for Air and became, for practical purposes, the secretary of an air force that did not yet officially exist. He initially believed President Roosevelt's demand for 60,000 airplanes in 1942 and 125,000 in 1943 was far too ambitious. Working with General Arnold and drawing on the capacity of the American automotive industry, the AAF produced almost 100,000 aircraft in 1944 alone. The AAF reached its wartime inventory peak of nearly 80,000 aircraft in July 1944, with 41 percent of them first-line combat aircraft. That armada required a global logistics network assembled from scratch: a service command to maintain depots across the United States, a materiel command elevated to full status to develop and procure aircraft and parts, and an Air Transport Command that delivered almost 270,000 aircraft worldwide while losing only 1,013 in the process. More than 300,000 civilian maintenance employees, many of them women, ran the stateside depots, freeing a comparable number of Air Forces mechanics for overseas duty. In all, more than 420,000 civilian personnel worked for the AAF. Pilot training was equally vast. Some 193,000 new pilots entered the AAF during the war, while 124,000 other candidates failed at some point or were killed in accidents. The training of 43,000 bombardiers, 49,000 navigators, and 309,000 flexible gunners ran alongside that pilot pipeline. To handle all those specialists, the AAF opened an Officer Candidate School in Miami Beach, Florida, and directly commissioned thousands of professionals who had no military background at all.

• 4. Race, Gender, and Service

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  African-Americans made up approximately six percent of the AAF's force, or 145,242 personnel, in June 1944. In 1940, pressed by Eleanor Roosevelt and members of Congress from Northern states, General Arnold agreed to accept Black men for pilot training, though on a segregated basis. A flight training center was established at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Despite the disadvantage of operating without an experienced training cadre, the Tuskegee Airmen distinguished themselves in combat with the 332nd Fighter Group. The training program produced 673 Black fighter pilots, 253 B-26 Marauder pilots, and 132 navigators. The majority of African-American airmen, however, were draftees who did not fly or maintain aircraft. Menial duties, indifferent or hostile leadership, and poor morale produced serious dissatisfaction and several violent incidents. Women's experience was markedly different. The AAF became an early and determined supporter of full military status for women in the Army and accepted women from both the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and the later Women's Army Corps with unusual enthusiasm. Women who served in the AAF became so accepted that they earned the unofficial designation of "Air WACs." Nearly 40,000 women served in the WAACs and WACs as AAF personnel, more than 1,000 as Women Airforce Service Pilots, and 6,500 as nurses, including 500 flight nurses. By April 1945, 7,601 Air WACs were serving overseas, performing duties across more than 200 job categories.

• 5. The War Plan Written in Nine Days

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  On the 13th of August 1941, the Air War Plans Division produced AWPD/1, a global air strategy prepared in nine days that became the foundation for aircraft production and training requirements throughout the war. The plan called for an air defense of the Western hemisphere, a strategic defense against Japan in the Pacific, and a strategic bombing campaign against Germany using 6,800 bombers aimed at 154 key targets in the German economic infrastructure. Despite planning errors caused by incomplete information about weather and the German economy, the forecast figures came within two percent of the units and 5.5 percent of the personnel ultimately mobilized, and it accurately predicted when the Allied invasion of Europe would occur. A revised plan, AWPD/42, was presented on the 6th of September 1942, more than doubling production requirements to nearly 150,000 aircraft of all types including Navy aircraft and exports to allies. Both plans shared a significant blind spot: they called for daylight bombing by unescorted heavy bombers and gave insufficient weight to the need for long-range fighter escorts. Both plans also prioritized the destruction of the German Air Force as a precondition for attacking economic targets. Arnold directly controlled the Twentieth Air Force, which flew the B-29 Superfortress missions against Japan's home islands, first from China and then from the Marianas. By August 1945, Arnold believed Japan was so weakened by fire-raids that neither the atomic bomb nor a planned ground invasion would be necessary to end the war. The B-29s that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were AAF aircraft.

• 6. The Human Cost

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  The AAF incurred 12 percent of the Army's 936,000 battle casualties in World War II. In total, 88,119 airmen died in service. Of the battle casualty deaths, 45,520 were killed in action, 1,140 died of wounds, 3,603 were missing in action and declared dead, and 1,910 were non-hostile battle deaths. Among all United States military and naval services, only the Army Ground Forces suffered more battle deaths. Non-battle deaths numbered 35,946, and more than half of those came from aircraft accidents within the continental United States. Another 41,057 AAF members became prisoners of war. Total aircraft losses from December 1941 through August 1945 were 65,164, with 43,581 lost overseas and 21,583 within the United States. Combat losses of aircraft totaled 22,948 worldwide. Against those losses, the AAF credited its forces with destroying 40,259 aircraft of opposing nations, including 29,916 against Germany and its allies. The total cost to the AAF was approximately $50 billion, or about 30 percent of the War Department's total expenditures. Thirty-six members of the AAF received the Medal of Honor for actions during air missions; 22 of those awards were posthumous. Managing the human cost meant managing crew fatigue under constant pressure. The War Department first set a one-year tour of duty in July 1942 but it was never uniformly applied. Field commanders set their own tour criteria, often based on numbers of missions, and were forced to lengthen those tours as replacement shortfalls worsened. Arnold eventually ordered in February 1944 that the impression of a guaranteed single combat tour be corrected, insisting no airman was permanently exempt from further service.

• 7. Independence at Last

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  Between August 1945 and April 1946, AAF strength fell from 2.25 million to just 485,000, and a year after that to 304,000. Permanent installations dropped from 783 to 177, only 21 more than before the war. By July 1946 the AAF had just two combat-ready groups out of 52 on the active list. In February 1946, illness forced Arnold to retire before he could see his principal goal realized. Carl Spaatz replaced him as commanding general and oversaw both the demobilization and the political campaign for independence. On the 19th of December 1945, President Harry S. Truman came out strongly for an air force equal in standing to the Army and Navy, reminding Congress that the coordination failures between independent Army and Navy departments before the war had nearly proven fatal. A Joint Chiefs of Staff committee that had spent ten months visiting every major theater and interviewing 80 key military and naval personnel concluded that a statutory Air Force would simply recognize what had already happened in practice. The National Security Act of 1947, enacted on the 26th of July 1947, created the Department of the Air Force and abolished both the Army Air Forces and the Air Corps, effective the 18th of September 1947. The personnel and asset transfer was made official by Transfer Order 1 from the Office of the Secretary of Defense on the 26th of September 1947. Spaatz had already reorganized the AAF into major commands, including the Strategic Air Command, Tactical Air Command, and Air Defense Command, specifically so that the new service would not need a second restructuring the moment it became independent. Among those whose careers began under the old system and carried forward into the new Air Force were James Robinson Risner and Charles E. Yeager, two fighter pilots who had qualified under the AAF's wartime decision to lower the minimum pilot age from 20 to 18.