Army Opposition

The Air Corps’ emphasis on the bomber’s independent mission continued despite the Army’s growing opposition to it. In the early 1930s, the Air Corps received some promising signals that the Army might support long range bomber operations. In 1931 Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur obtained from his naval counterpart, Admiral William V. Pratt, an agreement that the Air Corps would conduct the air defense of the United States and its possessions. Two years later, following Lieutenant Colo­nel Hap Arnold’s nonstop flight of five b-ios from Alaska to Se­attle, the War Department endorsed an Air Corps request for a bomber with a five-thousand-mile range, two-hundred-mile-per – hour speed, and two-thousand-pound bomb load that could take off from American soil to defend Hawaii, Alaska, and Panama.10 In 1936 the War Department also approved a request for a bomber with an eight-thousand-mile range.11

The War Department’s failure to sanction the в-17, however, indicated that the Army’s fundamental view of air power had changed little from the Mitchell era. The Air Corps received a har­binger of Army sentiments in late December 1934, when Brigadier General Charles Kilbourne, chief of the General Staff’s War Plans Division, sent a proposed Air Corps doctrinal manual to General

Foulois. Drafted by General Staff officers, the manual stated that success on the battlefield was the decisive factor in war and chal­lenged the notion that air power could win an independent vic­tory. “The effectiveness of aviation to break the will of a well – organized nation is claimed by some,” the manual observed, “but this has never been demonstrated and is not accepted by mem­bers of the armed services of our nation. So far, well-organized na­tions have surrendered only when occupied by the enemy’s army or when such occupation could no longer be opposed.”12

Foulois sent the document to Maxwell for comment by the Tac­tical School. Its faculty responded that the proposed doctrine was neither “reasonable” nor “progressive,” and returned aphorisms of industrial web theory to the War Department.13 Most General Staff officers dismissed such maxims, but when word reached them in 1936 that the school advocated strategic bombing free from ground commanders’ control, an Army team came to Maxwell to investigate. Led by Brigadier General Lesley J. McNair, the offi­cers received detailed briefings from Harold George, Larry Kuter, and other instructors on the Tactical School approach to proper bomber employment. McNair concluded that the presentations went far beyond the scope of instruction at other Army schools but refused to revamp Maxwell’s curriculum.14

Rather than trying to curb the airmen’s desire for independent operations, War Department officers restricted the airmen’s ca­pability to conduct missions other than Army support. Between October 1935 and June 1939, the Air Corps requested 206 B-17S. Only 14—one more than the original number approved by the War Department in 1935—were in service when Hitler’s Ger­many attacked Poland on 1 September 1939.13 Major General Hugh Drum, the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff in 1934, reflected the views of many Army senior officers by stating that he saw no reason why an airplane’s range should exceed “three days’ march by the Infantry.”16 Drum’s successor, Major General Stanley D. Embick, was even more vocal in his opposition to heavy bombers such as the в-17. Together with his like-minded Assistant Chief of Staff, Brigadier General George R. Spaulding, Embick in October 1937 persuaded Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring to prohibit further procurement of four-engine bombers. Spaulding decreed that the Army would purchase only equipment that supported a current Army mission, and the в-17—which could be used defen­sively against a naval force, or offensively against an enemy’s vital centers—did not fit that criterion. He dubbed the proposed eight – thousand-mile-range bomber “a weapon of aggression.”17