Andrews’s Advocacy with ghq Air Force

Brigadier General Frank Andrews, the newly minted commander of the ghq Air Force, had no intention of allowing the attitude of Embick and Spaulding to prevail. Handsome, athletic, and artic­ulate, Andrews graduated from West Point in 1906, served in the cavalry for eleven years before transferring to the Air Service, and directed the Air Service’s postwar European contingent for his fa- ther-in-law, General Henry Allen, who commanded American oc­cupation troops in Germany. The Allen connection gave Andrews an inside track into Washington DC social circles, and he used it to further his advocacy of an independent air force. After com­pleting the Air Corps Tactical School in 1928, he served in Wash­ington dc as Air Corps Chief of Training and Operations, where he befriended Florida Congressman Mark Wilcox, a fellow sup­porter of air force autonomy. Andrews then attended the Army War College and commanded the First Pursuit Group at Selfridge Field, Michigan. While at Selfridge he was a ghostwriter for Wil­cox, producing a pro-air power op-ed for the congressman that appeared in the Washington Star. n In 1934 Andrews returned to Washington DC to help draft plans for the ghq Air Force. Douglas MacArthur liked his work and selected him to command the new force that would contain all of the Air Corps’ combat aircraft— with a jump in grade from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. General Drum concurred with the appointment. Ironically, he de­scribed Andrews as an efficient flyer who “has been in harmony with all the War Department has been trying to do.”19

In many respects, Andrews’s fight for air force autonomy par­alleled Billy Mitchell’s. Andrews had not been in Mitchell’s inner circle, but after Mitchell left the service Andrews became one of his closest confidants.20 Both men believed that the bomber was the key to obtaining service independence, and both jumped the chain of command and appealed directly to the public to secure a bomber-oriented air force. Andrews was perhaps the more re­strained of the two. Initially, he refused to proclaim his ideas too loudly, and he also developed contacts who helped him convey his message. In December 1936 he told General Embick that the heavy bombers under development were for defensive purposes only and that it was “utterly absurd to consider them as anything else.”21 One month later he provided Army Chief of Staff Gen­eral Malin Craig with a poker-faced endorsement of Representa­tive Wilcox’s bill advocating an autonomous air force—when in fact Andrews had drafted the proposal himself.22

The ghq Air Force Commander possessed ties to the govern­ment’s executive branch as well as its legislative. In late 1937 An­drews sent copies of confidential Navy reports complimenting в-17 bombing accuracy to Colonel Edwin M. “Pa” Watson, military aide to President Franklin Roosevelt. Andrews pleaded to Watson for additional B-17S, noting that the two engine b-i8s lacked suf­ficient range for coast defense.23 Ultimately, Andrews’s zeal for the в-17 resulted in a Mitchell-like banishment to an obscure Texas assignment. But unlike Mitchell, Andrews found support for his beliefs from among the Army hierarchy, and that backing rekin­dled his air power crusade.

Shortly after taking charge of the ghq Air Force at Langley

Field, Virginia, Andrews told his staff that unified Air Corps ac­tion was essential to convince the public that his new organiza­tion was viable; he desired “publicity that can’t be beat.”24 The creation of the ghq Air Force severed the Air Corps into two dis­tinctive units, with reduced authority for each air commander. The Chief of the Air Corps was now responsible only for supply and procurement, and developing doctrine. Meanwhile, Andrews reported directly to the Army Chief of Staff (or the theater com­mander in time of war), commanded all Air Corps combat air­craft in the United States, and assumed responsibility for training his forces. Those forces consisted of three wings: the First, com­manded by Brigadier General Hap Arnold at March Field, Cali­fornia; the Second, commanded by Brigadier General Conger Pratt at Langley; and the Third, commanded by Colonel Gerald Bryant at Barksdale Field, Louisiana. Each wing contained a mixture of bomber, fighter, and ground attack aircraft; observation units re­mained assigned to ground commanders.

Yet establishing a new command did not mean that it possessed its full complement of airplanes. The authorized strength of ghq Air Force was 980 aircraft, but Andrews complained to newsman Lowell Thomas in a 1936 national radio broadcast that his com­mand had only 350 combat airplanes, of which 190 were obsolete. The aircraft that Andrews desperately wanted were в-17s. After the crash of the хв-17 prototype in October 1935, he persuaded Brigadier General Augustine W. Robins, Chief of the Army’s Ma­terial Division, and Major General Oscar Westover, Chief of the Air Corps, to secure War Department approval to buy thirteen B-17S on an experimental basis. Andrews viewed the в-17 as the epitome of American air power, and on radio he voiced views on bomber invincibility that parroted those of the Tactical School. “I do not believe that air attacks can be stopped by any means known,” he told an nbc audience in May 1937. “The best defense is a strong offense. We must have an air force capable of going out and meeting an enemy before he can get under way.”25

Like Mitchell, Andrews stressed the bomber’s ability to de­fend America against a seaborne invasion, and he also revealed a progressive mindset regarding the bomber’s capacity to trans­form war. “The four-engined bombardment airplane, as a coast defense weapon, is one of the greatest steps forward in our air­plane development in recent years,” he told Air Corps Tactical School students in September 1937.26 One month later at the Army War College, he elaborated on how air power could best accomplish coast defense—by attacking the enemy “as far from our shores as we can reach him.” Only bombers such as the в-17 could accomplish that goal. “Bombardment aviation is, and will always be, the principal force employed in independent air opera­tions,” he remarked. “The measure of air power of a nation is re­ally that of its bombardment. It is the striking arm—the arm with punch.” Andrews then noted that the application of air power “was a new and entirely different mode of warfare” that sought the same objective as land or sea power—“the destruction of the enemy’s will to fight.” Given his audience, he avoided saying that bombers could independently achieve victory by destroying en­emy morale. Instead, Andrews observed that they could attack enemy will directly, without having to tackle austere terrain or enemy surface forces.27

Andrews repeated this mantra to Secretary of War Woodring soon after the start of the new year. He further told Woodring that the Army and Navy “have an important requirement for auxil­iary aviation to complete their combat teams, but… it must be remembered that the airplane is more than just another support­ing weapon.” Andrews called for the development of additional bombers as well as auxiliary aircraft for the Army and Navy. “Bombardment is the basic element of air power,” he insisted.

“Air power is as vital a requirement to the military efficiency of a great nation as land power and sea power, and there is no hope for victory in a war for a nation in which it is lacking.” He con­cluded by observing: “I cannot escape the conviction that the pro­gram I have proposed as a compromise to expediency, instead of being too progressive, is really not progressive enough.”28

Besides preaching the Tactical School’s gospel of air power, An­drews displayed his faith through flying demonstrations. He sent part of his fledgling в-17 force to the West Coast to participate in an August 1937 Army-Navy exercise simulating a seaborne in­vasion of the United States. In it, seven of his bombers success­fully attacked the battleship Utah by flying underneath a thick fog. When Navy umpires complained that the overcast prevented sailors from seeing the в-17s and taking evasive action, the bomb­ers attacked in clear weather at altitudes between eight and eigh­teen thousand feet. They scored hits with 12 percent of the bombs dropped—a higher percentage than Navy aircraft had scored in tests from lower altitudes.29

Andrews also used his bombers to convey political messages. In February 1938 Lieutenant Colonel Robert Olds led six B-17S to Buenos Aires for the inauguration of Argentine President Rob­ert Ortiz. The flight demonstrated America’s resolve to uphold the Monroe Doctrine in light of fascist encroachment in the area. De­spite strong General Staff opposition, Andrews secured the mission by having a journalist friend recommend it to Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson, а в-17 proponent. Afterward, the General Staff reiterated its opposition to further long-distance в-17 flights, and General Craig vetoed a request from the Army commander on Hawaii to fly bombers there from the West Coast.30

Such resistance did not keep Andrews from striking a blow for air power if the opportunity arose, and the Rex intercept in May Г938 was a notable opportunity. The morning after the flight, he received a telephone call from Craig, who told him that future flights over water by the ghq Air Force would not exceed a dis­tance of one hundred miles from land. The spark for Craig’s ac­tion perhaps emanated from Navy Secretary Claude Swanson. The Navy had downplayed the success of Andrews’s bombers in attacking the Utah, and the final report of those maneuvers drafted by Swanson and Secretary of War Woodring discounted the B-i7’s ability to navigate in clouds or accurately bomb a tar­get.31 The Rex intercept portrayed—for the whole world to see— a surface fleet at the mercy of long-range bombers despite das­tardly weather. That vision might cause the American public to question—as had Mitchell seventeen years earlier—the Navy’s viability as a first line of defense. If such logic produced an inde­pendent air force, the sea service could expect to lose not only its foremost mission, but also a large chunk of its budget.

Such rationale might also cause the Army to lose its air support for ground troops. An autonomous air force founded on strate­gic bombing as a war-winning instrument would provide little in­centive to devote money to ground support. Soon after the Rex incident, Secretary Woodring directed that no B-17S in produc­tion would be procured during fiscal year 1940. Instead, the Air Corps would confine its 1940 projections to light, medium, and attack bombers. General Embick barked that “our national pol­icy contemplates preparation for defense, not aggression…. The military superiority of… а в-17 over the two or three smaller planes that could be procured with the same funds remains to be established.”32 Embick asked for a joint Army-Navy board to study the whole issue of heavy bombers and to recommend lim­its “beyond which Army planes should not be developed.”33 In the spring of 1938, with the Great Depression continuing to rav­age America, neither the Navy nor the Army could be complacent about any issue that might affect service budgets. Thus, the im-

petus for Craig’s directive to Andrews may have stemmed solely from within the General Staff.