"The End Has Begun"

AIR

From the wreckage of a score of airfields scattered in the Pacific area rose an air force of 2,385,000 officers and enlisted men--a number still growing . . . Those men have already:

>Flown over a quarter of a million combat sorties;

>Expended in combat more than 40 million rounds of ammunition;

>Used up nearly two billion gallons of gasoline;

>Destroyed in aerial combat 8,478 enemy airplanes, probably destroyed 2,555 more and damaged another 2,834.

Thus General Henry Harley Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, reported to the U.S. public this week in the first official summary of Air Forces accomplishments since the U.S. entered the war. Since Pearl Harbor the Army Air Forces has grown to be the world's biggest air power. Said "Hap" Arnold of one of the most dramatic developments of fighting power in history: "It is now plain that for us the beginning has ended; for our enemies the end has begun."

Matter of Life or Death. It had been a miserable beginning. In 1938 the U.S. stood seventh among the nations of the world in military aircraft, had facilities for training fewer than 2,400 Army pilots a year. The U.S. could muster only 1,600 planes, about 1,300 officers and 18,000 men. During the first three years of the A.A.F.'s slow growth there was apathy among the public, suspicion in Congress.

When Arnold asked aviation manufacturers to expand in 1938, he could guarantee them no funds, offer them no contracts. Aviation research was costly. To design and build just one 8-ft. wheel on the experimental B-19 cost $40,000; the cost of developing the famed Lockheed Lightning (P-38) was $852,000.

Then came Dec. 7, 1941. After the Jap attack the Army was left with only 176 combat planes in the Hawaiian and Philippine theaters. The job of building the A.A.F. became a matter not of cost but of life or death.

"Hitler Would Not Wait." The U.S. had its assets, if they could be used in time--an aircraft industry already at work on French and English orders, a mechanically apt youth, a small backlog of trained personnel. And in spite of everything, nine types of combat plane were already in production: the Flying Fortress (B-17), Liberator (B-24), Mitchell (B-25), Marauder (B-26), Lightning (P-38), Airacobra (P-39), Warhawk (P-40), Thunderbolt (P-47) and Mustang (P-51).

For the building of a great striking force Hap Arnold gave first credit to production men like Lieut. General William Knudsen, air-minded men like Robert A. Lovett, Assistant Secretary of War for Air. He could also have added--the Army's professional airmen, like Hap Arnold himself.

Production of material was only part of the job; "the A.A.F. had to become the largest single educational organization in existence in a very short time."

Hotels, garages, warehouses, parking lots were leased for instruction centers. Qualified officers said it would take at least three months to set up an officers' candidate school, but "Hitler would not wait" that long. A conference was held on a Wednesday; the first classes were held, in leased hotels in Miami Beach, the following Monday.

Transport, supply, medical, engineering, weather branches had to be built up. In a few months the A.A.F. had to overtake an enemy who had been building a striking air force for more than a decade.

The Next 15 Months. U.S. industry met the cry for planes with a rocket-like answer: 117 aircraft were produced in September 1939; last September it was 7,598; in November the total was 8,800. Production measured on a weight basis (a better gauge of growth) swelled more incredibly in 1943 than in 1942. To the Allies the U.S. has already shipped 26,900 planes; 7,000 have gone to the U.S.S.R. alone. The rest, less losses, are the present sum of U.S. air power; 145,000 planes are scheduled for production in the next 15 months. Need for replacements will use up much of this new strength. In one theater a typical Flying Fortress is in operation only 231 days, will fly 21 combat missions.

Training went as rapidly. Men now in training every day number over 120,000. In 1943 the A.A.F. flew over 3,352,000,000 miles in the U.S. alone, which accounts for a seemingly alarming rate of A.A.F. accidents. Actually, reported Hap Arnold, the accident rate is lower than the average rate for the peacetime years 1931 40. The trend of accidents is now down.

Combat strength of the A.A.F. is a military secret, carefully kept by A.A.F.'s commander. But some idea of its power can be drawn from Arnold's report of the operations of noncombat branches:

>"Starting with only two officers and one clerk in a small room today's Army Transport Command totals over 85,000 officers and men." In a single day, recently, A.T.C. delivered 390 tons of material by air to one theater of operations.

>To service and supply the A.A.F., Air Serviee Command operates 300 warehouses containing half a million different items, ships out nine tons of aviation supplies (not including food) a month per pilot overseas. A.S.C.'s enterprises encircle the globe, are frequently masterpieces of improvisation. In New Guinea the "Thick & Thin Lumber Co.," created from a wrecked plane, two wrecked trucks, a worn-out tractor and machinery from an abandoned copper mine, turned out finished lumber by board-foot thousands.

>One of the biggest jobs of keeping pace with spreading air power fell to the Air Surgeon's office. The diseases of the world's far corners had suddenly become local menaces. Medical and dental supplies had to be shipped to jungles, deserts, frozen tundras. At home a vast system of convalescent and rehabilitation centers had to be set up (TIME, Nov. 8). Emergency medical service also had to be given by air to worldwide combat areas. Since Pearl Harbor the A.A.F. has flown out over 125,000 casualties. A soldier broke his back in Kunming, China. In 82 hours he was resting in Walter Reed Hospital, Washington, D.C. The Army hospital in Nome burned down. Six days later A.A.F. flew in a complete 25-bed hospital from a base 3,400 miles away.

>A.A.F. engineers have built airfields from Alaska to Africa to Asia. U.S. forces found only nine airdromes in North Africa from which they could operate. Within a few months there were a hundred.

>Air Weather Service, with a 9,000% expansion in personnel, today is forecasting weather conditions round the world. Typical of weather's farflung outposts is the one on the southern tip of Greenland, on Prince Christian Sound. On a narrow ledge eight men live in bleak isolation in buildings cabled to rocks, swept by winds which reach 175 m.p.h. velocity. "The weather reports radioed by the staff . . . have been an extremely important link in a vast network of A.A.F. reporting stations for aiding all North Atlantic plane, convoy and antisubmarine operations."

>By Jan. 1, Arnold predicted, some 1,000 WASPs (women pilots) will be on duty, training, ferrying planes, towing targets in gunnery schools, flying weather planes, releasing that many men for combat. Some 20,000 WACs now fill A.A.F. jobs; 100,000 more could be used at domestic airfields and overseas, says Arnold.

Hats Off. Hap Arnold is content to let historians assay the A.A.F.'s part in winning the war. He made no sweeping claims. Into their proper perspective as "gallant episodes in a holding war" he put Ralph Royce's raid on the Philippines, Jimmy Doolittle's raid on Tokyo.

But now A.A.F. operations are no longer episodes; they are full-dress war.

Our air superiority in the Southwest Pacific has since been definitely established. For this Arnold's hat is off to brisk Lieut. General George Kenney, commander of MacArthur's air forces, whose "surprise and shock tactics have shaken the Japs out of their groove; when their routine is disrupted the Japs are baffled and baffled Japs do not fight well."

The Old Man's hat is off also to the ingenious airmen in the Pacific who invented necessary new techniques of air combat: to Lieut. Colonel William Benn (missing in action) "who did so much to refine skip-bombing tactics"; to Lieut. Colonel Bill Gunn, "who crossed up the experts by packing eight 50-caliber machine guns into the rebuilt nose of the B-25." His hat is off to Major General Claire Chennault, "the master tactician."

The Bitter Men. By inference Hap Arnold admits the limits of air power. Despite overwhelming air superiority in Italy, the campaign has slowed to a crawl. The problem of supply which inhibits Chennault's Fourteenth Air Force has not been solved by air. A Liberator cargo craft can deliver four tons of 100-octane gas in a round-trip over the Hump between Assam and Kunming, but it eats up 3 1/2 tons of gasoline doing it. The blockaded island of Pantelleria was brought to surrender by air power. But "another kind of garrison could have continued to fight. The will to fight, however, had been destroyed." The wall to fight is one of the secondary objectives of the air offensive against Germany.

The Allies' primary concern now, says Arnold, "is to make the coming invasion of Germany as economical as possible by drastically reducing the war potential of the Third Reich." Measured by results, Arnold believes A.A.F. losses have been minuscule. "It is possible that the Schweinfurt mission in which we lost 60 of our bombers may prove to have been one of the decisive air actions of the war." The Schweinfurt plants produced over 50% of Germany's ball bearings. The Regensburg raid caused a loss in production of 500 ME-109s. Cost of that raid to the Eighth Bomber Command: 24 B-17s.

To all the 2,385,000 men in the A.A.F. Arnold pays tribute, saves his best for the men who fly and fight the planes. "Charts, graphs, strategy would mean nothing without the devotion, anger and bitter pride of our men. ... It is they who are fighting this war."

Hap Arnold made no promises, but it was plain that, even though he kept a tight grip on his irrepressible optimism, he did not think the end, already begun, was in any doubt.

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