Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Planning the Defeat of Japan
General Thomas D. White Maj. Gen. James P. Hodges
(later to become Air Force Chief of Staff). White held the post for nine months,
from January 5 to September 4, 1944, during which he tried unsuccessfully to
get G-2 to relinquish the function of air intelligence to his office. Before
returning to the Pacific, White sent a memo to General McDonald in London,
at the bottom of which he wrote a postscript, “I have never had an unhappier job
tho’ few people know it; A-2 will forever suck hind tit in the AAF.”3 That
thought would have held cold comfort for White’s successor, Maj. Gen. James
P. Hodges, who got the job September 2, 1944, after his B-24s in France,
pressed into a tactical role to help the Allied breakout in Normandy, released
their bombs in confusion away from the bomb line, killing Lt. Gen. Leslie J.
McNair and a number of others. Hodges’s tenure lasted less than a year, and
when he left on June 1, 1945, Maj. Gen. Elwood R. Quesada returned from
Europe and command of the IX TAC to take the job.
The wartime incumbents of the A-2 office were not chosen at random, nor
were they without experience for the taxing job. Bissell, for all of his fusty
personality and the dislike he engendered in people like Kenney and Chennault
(see Chapters 5 and 6), was in Arnold’s eyes, “an excellent staff officer who
carefully worked out every operation before he undertook it, or said he could
not do it.”4 White, during the interwar years, had served as air attach6 to France
and the Soviet Union. His experience and judgment were so well regarded that
in August 1939 the chief of the Air Corps’ Plans Division requested he be
appointed to a board of officers to study “the scope and form of the military
intelligence required for the initial operations of Air Corps units; as to the
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