American Airpower Comes of Age

AMERICAN AIRPOWER COMES OF AGE
had been constituted six days earlier on 4 April 1944. 8 In his
memoirs, Arnold expressed his reluctance at taking command,
writing “there was nothing else I could do, with no unity of
command in the Pacific.” It was “something I did not want to
do.” 9 On the other hand, the official history, written in 1952
two years after Arnold’s death, provided different speculation.
In World War I, in spite of strenuous efforts to get an overseas assignment,
Arnold had been held to an administrative post in Washington.
Now, in the second war, he had seen contemporaries and the younger
men he had raised go out to combat commands, and he would have
been unlike his kind if he had no regrets in commanding the world’s
largest air force without being able to direct a single bomber mission.
A headquarters air force would give him at least a role comparable to
that of his British opposite number, Portal, and one might suspect that
his reluctance was tempered with some satisfaction. At any rate, the
formal papers of the Twentieth Air Force bear no trace of demur on
Arnold’s part. 10
Whatever satisfaction may have come from this command,
it was further evidence of the continuing confidence that the
president now had in Arnold, a far cry from the low esteem in
which he had been held when seriously threatened with forced
retirement just prior to his trip abroad in April 1941. It also
represented recognition of the de facto if not de jure independence
of the AAF, since the operation of the Twentieth Air
Force would parallel the freedom of action that the RAF
Bomber Command was now exercising and the Independent
Force RAF had operated under in World War I. It seems curious
that Admiral King, who detested Arnold and disliked the
Army air arm and what he viewed as their ambitions, does not
seem to have protested this organization. AAF success in this
endeavor could further enhance the Army aviators’ claims for
legitimacy if not independence in the future, to be gained in
many ways at the expense of the Navy. 11
With creation of the organization that he could control from
Washington, along with more difficult operational and maintenance
problems than had existed for any other World War II AAF
airplane, Arnold increasingly felt the need to view in person the
operations as well as the bases, leaders, and crews under his
command. In the minds of many army aviators, the bulk of the
difficulties with the B-29 in the theater were thought attributa-
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