PDF transcript of recorded interview - The George C. Marshall ...

meetings with the British. I saw them at close range. I knew pretty much what they knew and
what they lacked in broad vision. The great difficulty, of course, was popular press pressure.
The self-appointed air experts who knew nothing, just the broad statement of having immediate
Air Corps equality, knew almost nothing what the difficulties would be of trying to staff manage
such a thing. When we got these temporary staffs in, they were mainly concerned about
promotion. They would add up the number of Judge Advocates and other such side issue
officers and try to work into them when already they had very advance promotions. But they
weren’t working on the broad proportion of the air. They were working on how it affected the
individual).
General Arnold was loyal throughout and my constant companion. I flew pretty much
everywhere with him in the U. S. and he flew pretty much everywhere with me abroad. When I
got the thing fixed as I described before in this speech to Congress by Mr. Roosevelt in which
Arnold automatically became a member of Chiefs of Staff, which I couldn’t arrange before
because the Navy wanted their Air in it and there was no way of compromising the situation.
There were very strong advocates for the Air Corps in Congress. There were very strong
advocates for the Air Corps in the press. And the Air Corps had been very much the underdog in
most of these things, which added to the effectiveness of these pressures. But we had to have
something that would work. To my mind it was utterly out of the question to organize a separate
Air Corps in the course of the war. Arnold felt the same way I did. We just didn’t have the
trained staffs to function them.
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