Piercing the Fog - Air Force Historical Studies Office

Early Intelligence Organization
and firing machine guns. . . . These not by the wildest stretches of the
imagination are air force operations.”” Rebutting the Jones lecture, two Air
Corps officers assigned to the G-3 WDGS prepared a paper pointing out that
Jones was inconsistent with approved Army doctrine laid out in TR 440-15.
Maj. Gen. Stanley D. Embick, the G-3, refused the finding. “Aviation,” Embick
wrote in October 1937, “is a new arm. Our present War Department doctrine
has had to be based necessarily on theory and assumption rather than on factual
evidence. Now we are getting evidence of that character. No doctrine is sacro-
sanct, and of all military doctrines that of our Air Corps should be the last to be
so regarded.””
General Arnold became Chief of the Army Air Corps in late 1938, and he
later recalled that the U.S. military attach6 reports from Spain “were not only
weak but ~nimaginative.”~~ In 1938, however, Maj. Gen. Malin Craig, Army
Chief of Staff, accepted the arguments of those who believed that operations in
Spain and China illustrated the fact that new defensive weapons-particularly
AA armaments and antitank weapons-had met the challenge of the notable
innovations in offensive weapons-the airplane and the tank. The greatly
increased power of the new defensive weapons, Craig noted, had “restored to
the defense the superiority it seemed to lose with the advent of the new
offensive arms. . . . It is largely because of these new defensive weapons that we
find current operations confirming anew the testimony of history that the
Infantry is the core and the essential substance of an army. It alone of all the
arms approximates a military entity. It alone can win a decision. Each of the
other arms is but an auxiliary-its utility measured by the aid that it can bring
to the 1nfant1-y.”~~ In the summer of 1938, General Craig indicated that he
wanted to turn over the coastal defense role for long-range bombers to the Navy
by refusing to authorize the purchase of additional B-17s. On August 6, 1938,
the Chief of Air Corps was informed that developmental expenditures for fiscal
years 1939 and 1940 would be “restricted to that class of aviation designed for
the close support of ground troops and the protection of that type of aircraft.””
Despite the intelligence indications that Germany was building a tactical air
force, both the U.S. Army Air Corps and the RAF appeared reluctant to accept
the fact that any emerging air force would deviate from the strategic bombing
doctrine of Giulio Douhet. In the case of Great Britain, Maj. Gen. Kenneth
Strong, who would later become General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s A-2 at
Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, would remember that in
Imperial Defense College lectures he had described the GAF as “basically
ancillary arms” to the operations of the German Army. It seemed to him this
description did not suit those who were concerned with strategic air operations
and an independent mission for the RAF. In any event, he was forbidden to
include in his lectures any comments on the employment of the Lufiuffe in
war.“
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