Introduction

In October 1910, former president Theodore Roosevelt was in St. Louis campaigning for the Republican governor of Missouri, Herbert Hadley. Upon learning of an “International Aeronautic Tournament” outside the city, the energetic and always inquisitive Roosevelt demanded to see it. “TR” and Hadley arrived at Kin – loch Field on 10 October by an eighty-automobile motorcade— the largest such procession St. Louis had then seen—just as one of the Wright brothers’ six aircraft landed near the grandstand. The pilot of the fragile machine was Arch Hoxsey, a pince-nez- wearing aviator who earlier that year had made America’s first recorded night flight, and who had recently set an endurance rec­ord of 104 miles by flying non-stop to St. Louis from Springfield, Illinois. Hoxsey jumped out of the Model В biplane and walked to Roosevelt’s car through an array of Missouri National Guard troops surrounding the vehicle.

“I was hoping, Colonel, that I might have you for a passenger on one of my trips,” Hoxsey said to Roosevelt.[1]

“By George, I believe I will,” Roosevelt replied. He accompa­nied Hoxsey to the Model В and, to the surprise of those who had arrived with him at the air show, sat down in the passenger seat and said, “Let her go!”

After a four-minute spectacle above Kinloch Field that included a series of climbs and dives—punctuated by “oohs” and “ahhs” from the crowd below—Roosevelt became the nation’s first pres­ident to fly in an airplane. During the flight he pointed to a Sig­nal Corps building close by and had Hoxsey pretend to attack it. “War, army, aeroplane, bomb!” Roosevelt shouted as Hoxsey

flew back and forth above the installation. Onlookers mobbed TR once he landed, despite the best efforts of the Missouri guards­men to keep them away. When the crowd finally parted enough to give him a chance to speak, he triumphantly exclaimed, “By George, it was fine!”2

Roosevelt’s flight befitted the sense of American adventurism that he embodied, and it also befitted his role as a leader of the progressive movement in the United States. Indeed, as a standard – bearer of the progressives, Roosevelt was on the lookout for ways to improve the daily lives of American citizens, and the airplane offered to do just that. The “flying machine” portended revolu­tions in transportation and communications; commerce and trade would benefit enormously from its continued development. Yet as Roosevelt’s comment to Hoxsey above Kinloch Field indicated, the airplane also offered tremendous potential as an instrument of war. A generation of American airmen would view the airplane’s military promise in progressive terms—as the key to winning con­flicts quickly, cheaply, and efficiently.

For most Americans, though, progressivism had nothing to do with war. The movement, which spanned the nation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, affected many different groups and encompassed several disparate threads. All focused on progress and reform, and included efforts to reduce inefficiency and waste in manufacturing and business practices, eliminate corruption from government and business, increase the responsiveness of government institutions, promote fairness and equality for all social classes, improve working conditions and protect workers, and enhance the public’s general well-being. At its heart, progressivism promised change that was just, rational, positive, and efficient. Roosevelt emerged as a progressive leader of the Republican Party famous for his “trust busting” and would

later break away from the Republicans to form his own “Pro­gressive Party” in 1912. Democrat Woodrow Wilson, the winner of the 1912 election, also considered himself a progressive, and worked hard to assure the success of the “individual entrepre­neur” against the perceived evils of “big business.” The progres­sive movement’s span across political party lines demonstrated its wide national appeal.

The devastation and ugly realism of World War I ended the progressive era for most Americans; the repudiation of the Ver­sailles Treaty and Wilson’s League of Nations exemplified the pub­lic’s postwar rejection of the movement’s ideals. Yet for Army Air Service officers like Edgar Gorrell and William “Billy” Mitchell, the carnage and waste that they witnessed on the Western Front sparked the beginning of a progressive effort that was unique—an attempt to reform war by relying on its own destructive technol­ogy as the instrument of change. They were convinced that the air­plane—used as a bombing platform—offered the means to make wars much less lethal than conflicts waged by armies or navies.

The airmen contended that a clash of armies, with its subse­quent slaughter, was unnecessary to fight and win future conflicts. Instead, the truly vital ingredients of modern war—the essen­tial industries that produced weapons and fuel, key communica­tions centers, and lines of transportation—were vulnerable to at­tack from the air. The loss of those installations would not only wreck a nation’s ability to fight, it would also sap the will of the populace, because the same facilities needed to wage modern war were also those necessary to sustain normal, day-to-day life. Air­craft would destroy the vital centers through precision bombing— sophisticated technology would guarantee that bombs hit only the intended targets, and few lives would be lost in the process. The finite destruction would end wars quickly, without crippling [2]

manpower losses—maximum results with a minimum of death— and thus, bombing would actually serve as a beneficial instru­ment of war.

To assure the success of their ideas, the advocates of “progres­sive air power” also called for reforming America’s defense struc­ture, with the establishment of a separate air force as a new armed service. They set out to convince the nation of that perceived need, and along the way recruited a core of like-minded officers who took their ideas and further refined them. The conviction that the “strategic bombing” of vital centers offered the solution to fight­ing and winning future wars efficiently blended with the belief that service autonomy was essential to assure the bomber’s proper wartime use against industrial targets—not against armies or na­vies. Ultimately, the two notions became inseparable—the ability of air forces to fight and win wars independently of armies and navies justified an autonomous air force—and an autonomous air force was necessary to assure that air power could efficiently achieve victory on its own.

By the eve of Pearl Harbor, Mitchell disciples like Henry H. “Hap” Arnold and Frank Andrews, and a legion of officers in­culcated with Mitchell’s notions refined by the Air Corps Tacti­cal School, combined to produce a substantial coterie of airmen who subscribed to a belief in “progressive air power.” Most would not have used such a term to describe their convictions; Mitchell himself used the term rarely. Yet they were just as committed to reforming war as the muckrakers had been to reforming indus­trial working conditions.

Collectively, the airmen subscribed to the following central tenet: air power was a more efficient military instrument than land or sea power because it offered a way to fight and win wars more quickly and less expensively (in terms of lives lost on both sides) than did armies or navies. The plan devised by former Tac­tical School instructors in August 1941 for using American air power in the ongoing European war called for strategic bomb­ing to wreck Germany’s war-making ability to such a degree that an invasion of the continent might prove unnecessary. Arnold, by then Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, approved the plan, as did Army Chief of Staff George Marshall and Secre­tary of War Henry Stimson. The promise of progressive air power had broad appeal.

The reality of war—which revealed that American bombers and their crews were rarely capable of pinpoint destruction during com­bat conditions, and included an overarching political objective of “unconditional surrender” that allowed unlimited devastation— generated a momentum of its own that undermined several of the progressive notions that had guided American airmen before the conflict. By 1945, “progressive air power” meant quickly ending the war to reduce American casualties. Still, many air command­ers continued to believe that the destruction of vital centers— despite the accompanying death and desolation—not only has­tened the war’s end, but also ultimately saved lives on both sides. As a result, the progressive mindset that guided airmen on the eve of war never really disappeared during its conduct.

The progressive notions of beneficial bombing—germinated in World War I and tested in World War II—became the basis of doctrine for an independent Air Force in the immediate postwar era, and continue to guide Air Force thought today.