American Airpower Comes of Age

AMERICAN AIRPOWER COMES OF AGE
Bougainville. Elsewhere, AAF attacks on the Ploesti oil fields
and the German ball-bearing and aircraft plants at
Schweinfurt and Regensburg showed the increasing range and
strength of US strategic airpower. But these raids also produced
heavy casualties and some doubts. The struggle for
control of the Atlantic turned in favor of the Allies 10 days
after Arnold had returned home. The Royal Navy’s battleship
Duke of York sunk the German battleship Scharnhorst in the
Battle of North Cape, removing a major threat to Allied convoys
to Russia. In the 10 months following Arnold’s strategy
conference at Casablanca, Allied forces continued to prosper.
Arnold’s odyssey, chronicled in his diary, started with 10 days
aboard the Navy’s newest battleship, the USS Iowa. Neither
Arnold nor his companions commented that the day of their
departure marked the 25th anniversary of the Armistice ending
World War I. Greeted with generally tolerable November weather
while at sea, their leisure was disturbed only by occasional strategy
sessions with the commander in chief, which provided a rare
but welcome respite from the demands of the Pentagon. One
result was that the American delegation, given their access to
FDR and opportunities to plan while on the Iowa, began these
meetings better prepared than at any other wartime conference
thus far. Their routine at sea was dominated by long restful days,
followed by a motion picture and the rare opportunity for pleasure
reading. This routine allowed Arnold to include seemingly
irrelevant data in the diary. He confided there that he was “having
a grand rest, not a worry in the world.” Nevertheless, Hap
used the meetings with the JCS and the commander in chief to
promote an important change in the command and organizational
structure of the AAF; he called for a single Allied strategic
air force commander in Europe.
Hap’s interest in this arrangement had existed almost from the
beginning of United States entry into the war. Increasingly in
1942, as US aircraft production and deployment of units to
Europe and the Mediterranean area increased, Arnold desired a
single commander for all bombers. Free of control by a nonaviator
theater commander and operating “directly under the
Combined Chiefs of Staff,” the strategic bomber commander
could coordinate the bomber operations against Germany and
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