To Kingdom Come (2 page)

His first accident occurred in an early-model floatplane that crashed into the ocean off Plymouth, Massachusetts. Severely injured, he had been rescued by the coast guard while clinging to wreckage that was floating out to sea.

An even more harrowing incident left him unnerved, and he refused to fly again, deciding to transfer to the infantry instead. Four years later, he was able to conquer his fear of flying through sheer willpower because of his fervent desire to return to military aviation.

A disciple of the legendary airpower advocate General Billy Mitchell, Arnold devoted twenty-seven years of his life to helping build a modern air arm; he was intimately involved at every level with the development of faster aircraft, bombers with greater load capacity, up-to-date air facilities, and improved training methods.

Few of his contemporaries ever dreamed that he would one day command the army air forces. A maverick from the start, Arnold made a habit of leaving outraged superior officers in his wake. Contemptuous of the army bureaucracy, and unyielding in his pursuit of his objectives, he often risked his career by criticizing and opposing his more senior officers when he thought they were wrong. On more than one occasion he narrowly avoided court-martial proceedings.

In spite of his headstrong personality, he rose steadily through the officer ranks for one simple reason. He was a man who made things happen in an organization filled with officers who avoided risk. He thought faster and he acted faster. With his single-minded focus, he could always be counted on to get things done. Above all else, he became known in the air service as a doer, an achiever, always working toward meeting his next goal. A day that passed without advancing one of them was a wasted day.

Occasionally, he could be cajoled into playing golf or going fishing, but it was almost impossible for him to relax. One of his aides said, “His idea of a good time was to work all day, then fly all night to California, and visit five aircraft plants, telling the chief executives, ‘I need another hundred miles an hour out of your plane.’ ”

He was a man who placed duty above all things, including family. In the summer of 1923, his two-year-old son, John, died of a ruptured appendix, leaving his wife bereft. Arnold’s other son, Bruce, lay in critical condition at the base hospital with scarlet fever.

On that same morning, General John Pershing, the army’s chief of staff, was due to arrive for an inspection tour of Arnold’s San Diego military base. Arnold spent the day escorting Pershing around the installation.

Wealth meant nothing to him. After twenty-seven years of military service, he couldn’t afford the down payment on a $5,000 house. Years earlier, he had turned down the presidency of Pan American Airways.

He lived for the air force, and in 1938 he was finally given its top command, which then consisted of several hundred outmoded aircraft and a complement of less than twenty thousand men.

With war on the horizon, his real work was about to begin.

Arnold’s days were soon filled with a dizzying array of command responsibilities: hectoring congressional committees for larger allocations, developing new prototype aircraft, improving the existing planes, pushing the aircraft manufacturers to speed up their assembly lines, meeting new recruitment goals, building airfields all over the world, setting up training regimens and flight schools, and selecting the best officers for promotion.

“He had enthusiasm,” said Robert Lovett, the assistant secretary of war for air. “To him, there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be done.”

The same impatience that had served as a blessing in his professional career proved to be a curse to his physical health and his marriage, contributing to his burgeoning stomach problems and his two heart attacks.

His legendary impatience had also led to the bitter estrangement from his wife. If he came home from work in time for dinner, the phone would begin ringing as soon as he arrived. He was impervious to her pleadings to cut back on his workload. Finally, she left.

On the night of August 31, Arnold’s C-54 Skymaster took off from Gander, Newfoundland, at 2130 in a heavy rainstorm. The flight plan called for them to fly twenty-one hundred miles across the Atlantic before making landfall over Northern Ireland. As the big plane sped across the dark ocean, the generals smoked and chatted.

Part of the time, Arnold worked on the speech he was planning to deliver in London on September 4. It would mark the recent launching of his new heavy bomber air offensive against Germany. It was the culmination of everything he had worked for in building a modern air force.

Hap Arnold ardently believed that the quickest way to defeat Germany was to annihilate its capacity to wage war. In his mind’s eye, he could envision thirty-mile-long armadas of his heavy bombers, a thousand or more blotting out the sky, thundering across Europe to reach their military targets in Germany, where the lead bombardiers would use their top secret Norden bombsights to drop payloads with pinpoint accuracy on the enemy’s most important industrial targets, destroying the manufacturing plants that produced Germany’s planes, tanks, and heavy guns. If given a free hand, he was confident that the Allies would never have to invade Europe.

The weapon of Germany’s destruction would be the Boeing B-17, the heavy bomber that had become known as the Flying Fortress. It was big, handsome, and lethal, the first long-range bomber with the load capacity to fully deliver on Arnold’s cherished doctrine.

With a crew of ten men, the plane bristled with Browning .50-caliber machine guns, and Arnold was convinced that the Fortresses could protect themselves from enemy fighters by flying in tight formations that gave the machine gunners in each “combat box” interlocking fields of fire.

In the draft of the speech he would be delivering in London, he had written, “I do not envy the prospects of a German fighter pilot these days. Say he chooses to attack the lead squadron to break up the whole group. The forward firing guns of every fort in the lead squadron, 8 guns to a fort, 48 in all, are bearing down on him—if he zooms over the flight, some 50 top turret, waist, and radio hatch guns of that flight, plus the ball turret, waist and tail guns of the high squadron get a crack at him.... The life of a young German in the Luftwaffe will not be a happy one from now on for of only one thing can he be certain—death.”

With enough Fortresses, he was sure that the Eighth Air Force could bring Germany to its knees. And that was the problem. So far, he hadn’t been permitted to put together the critical mass of bombers he needed to prove his case.

After almost two years of war, he was deeply weary of the Washington infighting with his fellow chiefs, as well as the concessions he was being forced to make to the British. Now that the bombers were finally coming off the assembly lines in sufficient numbers to carry out their planned purpose, the other chiefs were trying to take them away from him like a pack of carnivores, devouring his air force limb by limb.

The British were the worst. At the beginning of the war, they had tried daylight bombing and failed. Now they bombed only at night, setting German cities on fire under the cloak of darkness, waging war on civilians. Terror bombing would never break the will of the Germans, Arnold concluded, just as it hadn’t worked when the Germans blitzed London every night for months. It had only strengthened the will of the British people.

The British, led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, had strongly opposed Arnold’s plan for the daylight precision bombing campaign against Germany, telling Roosevelt and the other American war chiefs that it would only lead to disastrous losses of planes and crews. If the British couldn’t do it, how could the Americans succeed?

Churchill had assured Roosevelt that the British could put Arnold’s B-17s to far better use, and requested five thousand of them for the Royal Air Force. After Arnold successfully rebuffed this demand, Churchill asked Roosevelt to give him two hundred fifty Fortresses to use as U-boat killers in the North Atlantic. With deft stalling tactics, Arnold parried this move as well.

It wasn’t just the British. The American war chiefs were almost as bad. Admiral Ernest King, the chief of naval operations, was requesting that Arnold send hundreds of heavy bombers to the Pacific for the war against Japan. The navy planned to use many of them for long-range patrolling flights. It was ridiculous. Even General Douglas MacArthur, who commanded U.S. forces in the Southwest Pacific, had gotten into the act. He was demanding hundreds of B-17s, too.

Arnold fought them every step of the way. He had learned to play the Washington game as well as he knew how to fly, and was ready to undertake any step to advance the cause. At one point he received a handwritten note from President Roosevelt concerning his son, Elliott, who had joined the army air forces.

“I am a bit concerned because Elliot has a rather bad chronic case of haemoroids (sic) that need to be operated on,” wrote the president. “He rightly insists on going through with his new assignment ... but I hope you can give him enough time off in Texas to have them taken out.” Arnold made sure it happened.

By April 1943, Arnold had expected to have three thousand bombers and fighters in England for his Eighth Air Force to conduct its daylight bombing campaign against Germany. Instead, a third of them had been sent to the Pacific for the war on Japan, and another third had been diverted to other theaters.

Utilizing all his political and organizational gifts, Arnold had managed to slowly build up the Eighth Air Force in England, bomb group by bomb group, against the ongoing opposition of Churchill and the others.

He had promoted General Ira Eaker, one of his most trusted subordinates, to command the Eighth’s bomber force. In 1942, Eaker began the first daylight bombing raids against targets in France with his new and untested crews. They did well.

However, when President Roosevelt made the decision to invade North Africa in November 1942, the majority of the bombers, maintenance crews, and experienced flight crews were transferred to the Twelfth Air Force in Algeria.

In April 1943, Arnold was able to send four new bomb groups to England, bringing Eaker’s B-17 strength back to more than four hundred combat crews. Over the summer, the buildup continued.

Arnold’s new goal was to have at least a thousand heavy bombers attacking Germany every day that the weather cooperated, deploying fleets so huge that the Luftwaffe would be engulfed, overwhelmed, and given no chance to recover.

But time was running out to prove his case. With the recent Allied invasion of Sicily in July, and the continuing demands of King and MacArthur in the Pacific, there was ever-growing pressure on him to divert his air resources from the Eighth Air Force to other commands and combat theaters. It was now or never.

The early morning of September 1 was black with rain as Arnold’s C-54 Skymaster finally reached landfall over the Irish coast after flying more than two thousand miles. His navigator established their position, and Captain Niswander turned onto the compass heading for Prestwick, Scotland, which was thirty miles southwest of Glasgow along the Firth of Clyde.

When the weather worsened, Niswander was forced to fly solely on instruments. As they approached Prestwick, he contacted ground control and was told that due to heavy rain and fog, the ceiling was less than two hundred feet.

A waiting line of military aircraft was stacked up and circling the fog-bound field at different altitudes, including more than fifty B-17s and B-24s that had flown out of Gander ahead of Arnold’s Skymaster. Many of the pilots and crews were new, and they were running out of fuel.

With its four-thousand-mile range, the Skymaster had enough gas to circle the field for hours. This was one of the rare occasions when Arnold’s impatience was tempered by the knowledge that men’s lives were at stake. He ordered Niswander to wait until all the Fortresses had landed before attempting his approach.

A ground control officer at Prestwick radioed Niswander to urge him to divert to another airfield, but Lieutenant Fisher, the plane’s navigator, couldn’t locate the airfield on his map, and the ground control officer couldn’t tell him where it was.

Arnold asked Captain Niswander to set the Skymaster’s radio to the frequency being used by the B-17 and B-24 pilots, and to pipe the feed into his compartment. One after another, he heard the pilots calling in.

“Number twenty-six ... one hundred eighty gallons of gas left,” radioed one officer as Arnold recorded his words in his diary. “Number thirty-two . . . sixty gallons left.”

The planes were being brought down by the controllers one by one.

As the C-54 continued to circle in the dense fog, several of Arnold’s staff officers became visibly nervous. He set them at ease by casually regaling them with stories of his own past crashes.

Minutes later, one of the B-17s crashed trying to land. All aboard were killed, and the runway needed to be cleared before the controllers could resume landings. Soon after, a second B-17 went down after running out of fuel. Its crew was lost as well.

Then Arnold heard another pilot over the radio.

“This is number sixty-two,” came the laconic voice. “You won’t have to worry about us anymore. I’m plumb out of gas. So long.”

At 0930, with the rest of the bombers safely on the ground, Captain Niswander brought the Skymaster in for his landing. They had been in the air more than twelve hours.

Arnold was deeply angered by the communications and radio control failures that had led to the loss of the bomber crews before they ever flew a combat mission. He was convinced that it was just one of many systemic problems in the Eighth Air Force, and he was ready to shake things up at the highest level, if necessary.

At the highest level was its commander. Major General Ira Eaker.