The Bombers are Growing

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The world has not yet seen, felt nor imagined the full and awful might of air power. When the Nazi flattened Warsaw with his bombers while his Stukas were ripping the bewildered 1918-model Polish Army to bloody shreds, the world thought it was hearing air power's last word. When the air-powered Blitzkrieg snatched Norway and plowed through the Low Countries and France, laymen and many ground soldiers thought they had seen the military Apocalypse.

Airmen who looked ahead knew better. They knew that Hitler's terrifying show, well-done as it was, could be nothing more than a foretaste of a greater power to come. Some, who knew what designers were busy with on their drawing boards, knew that the future was close at hand. One of them was a practical dreamer, Major Alexander P. de Seversky, who wrote (in The Atlantic, October 1941) of the day after tomorrow when horsepower in aircraft engines will pass its present operating top--2,200 h.p.

"I am disclosing no secret," said he, "in asserting that research is proceeding successfully on airplane engines that develop as much as 8,000 horsepower! Imagine a plane like the B19* equipped with four such engines . . . plus other vital improvements already available and you grasp the emerging revolutionary possibility of ranges circling the entire globe (25,000 miles) with ample margins for tactical operations.

"To savor the strategic implications of these facts recall that a 15,000-mile absolute range--representing a 6,000-mile striking range--puts the United States within practical bombing distance of the capitals of every great military power, including Russia and Japan. . .

"One thousand such bombers, which would cost no more than about ten first-line modern battleships, in the hands of an enemy would put the United States as fully at its mercy as though there was nothing but a ditch between us, if we had no adequate Air Force. And naturally the reverse is true. . . .

"The superbombers of tomorrow will fly from 50 to 100 tons of explosive. . . . A thousand such craft will accomplish as much destruction in a single action as Germany has been able to score in six months of continuous bombing ... at least 200 Coventries could be destroyed."

Major de Seversky's vision gives a better idea of the future than the tame record (considered astonishing) of Hitler's triumphs in the air. It is no longer possible to print the specific facts about the U.S. air force which is building. But, without figures, the fact is no less true that the bomber of 1943 will show tremendous increases in speed, bomb-load and range over the fanciest models of 1941. And it is equally a fact, as De Seversky asserted, that, of all the world's nations, the U.S. is best equipped to create and exercise this new air power.

It has already been established that in building the heavy bombers--with which air power strikes--the U.S. is far & away ahead of the rest of the world. Token proofs are the Flying Fortresses now in Europe; a bigger token, the handful of Flying Fortresses in The Netherlands East Indies, which slashed with grim effectiveness at Japanese naval units, fought off Jap fighter planes, ranged far & wide through the South China Seas--on missions which cannot yet be fully described in print.

There will be more than token proof. U.S. production today is heavily weighted with four-motored bombers--Flying For tresses and swift Consolidated B-24s. In the 185,000-plane goal for 1942-43 set by President Roosevelt there will be a greater proportion of heavy bombers--more heavy bombers than any nation ever built before.

Sponsor of this striking power, in being and to be, is a man the U. S. scarcely knows: lean, articulate Robert Abercrombie Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air. To say that Bob Lovett is most responsible for the Army Air Forces of today and the hopeful tomorrow would be an oversimplification. That credit would have to be divided among apostolic zealots like the late, great Brigadier General William Mitchell and many an airman still on the job--among builders, designers and a President who saw the lesson of World War II.

Bob Lovett's service is that he picked up all the pieces--the hopes and dreams of airmen, the tactical lessons of fact and theory, the wealth of U.S. design and production, its great reserve of manpower--and got something done about putting these ingredients effectively together. It is a service still being performed, but its value is far greater because he began performing it long before Pearl Harbor, so that the results are already being felt.

If there is one single achievement that must be credited mostly to him, it is the overwhelming weight of striking power that the Army Air Forces is getting. The theme song of his year in Washington has been bombers, bombers, bombers. Happily for the world, he put the song over.

For Country & For Yale. Bob Lovett, Wall Streeter (partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.), director in half-a-dozen railroads, banks and insurance companies, went to Washington in December 1940 as an assistant to Secretary of War Stimson (whom he reveres as a great and effective official). He was no tyro at the flying game, as Army men speedily discovered when they looked up his record.

His first job when he left Yale was flying. A bomber pilot for the U.S. Navy in World War I, he came back from overseas with the rank of Lieut. Commander and the Navy Cross to wear on his blouse. He had been one of the sparkplugs of that amazing aggregation of young men known as the Yale Unit, who trained for naval flying service near his home in Locust Valley, L.I.

He sees walking reminders of the old outfit daily. F. Trubee Davison, one of the pilots of the Yale Unit, is a Colonel on the Army Air Staff.* Another, Artemus L. ("Di") Gates, next door, in the Navy Building, is Lovett's opposite number: Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Air.

Like many another World War airman, Bob Lovett kept up with flying after he had left the service. Until the pressure of life in Wall Street got too strong, he flew his own plane, still gets his hands on a stick occasionally. As a director of Union Pacific Railroad he made a thorough study of air transportation. As a faithful traveler to Europe (two months each year on business trips) he satisfied his airman's curiosity by seeing all that was to be seen. What he saw in Germany froze him to the marrow.

When he took up quarters in the Army's Munitions Building, airmen eyed him narrowly. His expression told them nothing. They saw a slim, bald man with a brooding, priestlike face distinguished by a finely chiseled nose, a determined chin. But Army airmen, a friendly lot, were bowled over when they were called to Bob Lovett's office and asked to help him to find out the score of the grim game he had entered.

His somber mien was a mask that broke awrinkle in a quick smile. His facile, orderly discussion of military flying impressed them. Smooth and suave, he clinched their approval when they first heard his rather rare but richly accented and discriminating profanity illuminate a point.

They soon observed that Bob Lovett stood on the same general ground as Billy Mitchell, was just as apostolic in his devotion to the thesis that air power is the decisive power. But there the likeness ended. General Mitchell, extrovert and highly explosive, barged into obstacles with his head down. Introversive, highly diplomatic Air Secretary Lovett considers his adversaries carefully, always "pushing and squeezing," like a pilot flying a tight formation. Result is that he gets things done by pushing the right button instead of wrecking the keyboard.

Lovett pleaded, cajoled---and reasoned--for more bombers. He got all the help he needed out of his Air Corps officers, from veteran Lieut. General "Hap" Arnold down. His arguments were the stuff that many a sound airman had been talking for a long time, without knowing how to make them effective. He was articulate, and persuasive. In the midst of argument his orderly mind ticked off "a," "b," "c," on his fingers--the points as cogent as a lawyer's brief. After Lovett came, the bombers were ordered.

From the time he got his sub-cabinet appointment last May, he was up to his neck in Air Corps affairs. He led the job of wheedling manufacturers into forgetting company pride, building the other fellow's planes (e.g., Douglas builds Boeing bombers).

Independence or Autonomy? But the best job that Lovett did. to the airman's way of thinking, was to get the Air Corps at least a start toward autonomy within the framework of the War Department. How he did it, Bob Lovett will not say. It was probably done by peaceful argument in the many conferences with War Department top men, from Secretary Stimson and Chief of Staff George Marshall down through the General Staff. However he did it, he did it. Lovett's hand did not show, but the results did.

Under this reorganization, the air arm became the Army Air Forces. It is divided into two parts: Air Corps, which does the housekeeping (training, maintenance, etc.) and Combat Command, which does the fighting. There were many other innovations--a Ferrying Command, Air Service Command, etc. After years of an amorphous existence, the Air Corps was organized for war.

The Air Forces also got its own general staff. In organization, at least, the air arm is now an air army, comparable to the ground army. To head his staff, "Hap" Arnold, the Chief of the Army, picked Brigadier General Carl M. Spaatz, who last week was upped to two stars and command of the Combat Command. "Tooey" Spaatz's successor as Chief of Air Staff, appointed last week, is Major General Millard F. Harmon, studious, West Point-trained onetime-cavalryman and pursuit pilot.

P:Head of the Personnel Section (A-1)* is Colonel Davison of the old Yale Unit, only reserve officer of his rank in the Air Forces.

P: A-2 (Intelligence Section) is Brigadier General Martin F. ("Mike") Scanlon, eupeptic, worldly, who has served two tours of duty at the Embassy in London, one in Rome, has long been famed as the best-dressed officer in the flying service.

P:Operations (A-3), most important section of the staff war-wise, is bossed by another West Pointer, sleek-haired youngish Brigadier General Earl Naiden, 48, whose fellows account him one of the most knowledgeable officers of the service in tactics and strategy.

P:Supply (A4) is bossed by Colonel Thomas J. Hanley, a West Pointer who understands the wondrously complicated administration of air supply.

P:Boss of the War Plans Division is short, grey-pompadoured Colonel Harold L. ("Bombardment") George./-

In the expanding air arm, the accent is heavily on youth.** Its generals and the Air Staff are markedly younger than equivalent members of the ground army. This is one explanation for the rumblings still heard from younger officers that what the country needs is not autonomy for the Air Forces but a separate Air Force. Some of the older airmen recoil from the complications involved in making such a change in wartime. They still have hope that Bob Lovett will get the Air Forces autonomy in fact as well as in organization.

That autonomy is not here yet. Air Forces personnel transfers, for example, still have to go through the War Department's Adjutant General. And while Army red tape has been shaved, delays are irksome--often take weeks instead of hours.

So, for this war at least, many an Air Forces officer hopes that Bob Lovett will be able to get self-rule for the air arm. They know what will happen if he does not. The hue & cry for a separate arm, stilled by request of the War Department General Staff few weeks ago (while two bills for separation lay in Congress) will go up again, louder and clearer than ever before.

*Big experimental Douglas bomber with a bomb capacity of 18 tons and 7,750 mile range (TIME, April 28). *Davison was Lovett's predecessor as the War Department's air assistant-secretary; his appointment ended in the Hoover Administration in 1932, and until Lovett was appointed the vital job was vacant. *Corresponding to G-I on the War Department General Staff. /-Not to be confused with Colonel Harold H. ('"Pursuit") George, who last week was made a Brigadier General for gallantry in Luzon. **This week the Army got its youngest general: 36-year-old Brigadier General Laurence S. Kuter of the Air Forces, graduate of West Point in the class of 1927.

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