White Star over the World

It was the season for reports. This week, in the wake of Secretary Forrestal's report on the greatest navy in the world (TIME, Feb. 26), General Henry Arnold came out with a report on the world's greatest air force.

It was "Hap" Arnold's second; his first, a year ago, told the fabulous story of how the U.S.A.A.F. grew from a force of 21,125 men in 1938 to 2,385,000 men by the end of 1943. This was the fabulous account of the U.S.A.A.F.'s combat record since that time--the months when air warfare reached a terrifying climax.

The highlight was the Normandy invasion. Hap Arnold answered the question: Where was the Luftwaffe on Dday? "The A.A.F. and the R.A.F. had made it impossible" for the Luftwaffe to appear.

Five Days in History. More than three months before the invasion fleet hit the Normandy beaches, Allied air forces had started their offensive. Under cover of a long spell of bad weather, German war plants had bounded back into high production, and a battered Luftwaffe was not only recovering but expanding fast when, on Feb. 20, Allied airmen struck. For five days bombers pounded Leipzig, Bernburg, Brunswick, Oschersleben, Regensburg, Augsburg, Furth, Stuttgart. "We lost 244 heavy bombers and 33 fighting planes." But--'"those five days changed the history of the air war." German aircraft plants never recovered from the aerial onslaught.

A month before Dday, flying over 1,000 sorties a day, Allied air forces began to prepare the invasion ground--smashing enemy airfields, railroad yards, transport, coastal gun positions, communications and bridges from The Netherlands to the Pyrenees.

On D-day they began a great campaign of interdiction--sealing off the battle area bounded by the Seine and the Loire. Arnold tells how successfully they carried out that mission. It took an SS Panzer division ten days to get from the Ghent area to the front lines over the tortured, twisted wreckage left by the bombers. It took another Panzer division 19 days to move from central Galicia to the front.

On the eve of the St. Lo breakthrough, "the Germans could hardly move 25 miles in any direction on any railroad without meeting a block."

Surrender to Air. The next day interdiction became close tactical support. Fighters swooped on German armor trying to stop the Allied drive. Pilots, discovering that enemy tanks were vulnerable in the rear, dived on them and shot them up with machine-gun bullets through air vents and exhaust pipes.

One of the most remarkable feats of tactical support was accomplished by flyers of Brigadier General Otto P. Weyland's Nineteenth Tactical Air Command. Patton had told Weyland his right flank would be exposed and he wanted "Opie" Weyland to cover it. Weyland did. For three weeks his aircraft kept some 30,000 Germans pinned down south of the Loire, while Patton drove on. The hopeless German commander finally surrendered. When he gave up his sword to a Ninth Army commander, says the report, he "asked, to maintain German honor, that General Weyland's aircraft, which had conquered his units, should fly over his men before they laid down their arms."

Ferry to France. To the Normandy story Arnold's report added other records of air power's greatest year so far in this war.

Bombers reduced production at the vast Renault auto works in Paris to one-fourth of capacity; drove the Ivry-sur-Seine ball-bearing, plant into the mushroom caves near Taverny; ruined the foundry at the Hispano-Suiza plant in Bois Colombes so that castings had to be shipped from a foundry in the Pyrenees; reduced flying-bomb attacks on England by an estimated 75%. As a result of four months of attacks by Allied bombers, "the production of German oil was reduced 75% for September." Arnold gave no final figures on oil-plant destruction, but "we feel confident the results will measure well when laid against the final yardstick . . . the battle of Germany."

To fast-moving ground troops, Army air transports carried thousands of tons of critical supplies. From battlefields, transports evacuated thousands of wounded: 26,347 in less than four months of the Battle of France. (Since September 1942, U.S.A.A.F. has evacuated 700,000 sick and wounded from all fronts.)

Eighth Air Force bombers kept French Maquis supplied. Arnold told for the first time one of the strangest exploits of the war. One day a C-47 landed in a French wheatfield and taxied to a grove of trees. French Maquis immediately set up saplings around it to hide it. The C-47 was the pioneer in a transport service which carried secret agents and supplies in & out of France, operating on regular schedule from then on until the area was freed.

Pacific Housekeeping. In his report on the A.A.F. in the Pacific, Arnold told some new facts about the B29. One of the most impressive is the number of men required to keep one of the monsters in combat: 14 air crewmen, 18 operations men, 20 maintenance men, eight transportation men, 13 administration men, twelve "housekeeping" men (i.e., cooks, etc.)--a total of 85. Included among the pictures in the slick, 95-page report was one awesome one of a B-29 demolished by Jap aircraft in a raid on Saipan--a vast ruin of such unthought-of things as 15,000 feet of electric wiring, 129 electric motors, 26 motor generators, 55,000 numbered parts, which had required 57,000 man-hours to construct, at a cost of at least $600,000.

Touching on the wide, mostly censored field of air research, Arnold lifted the lid on one new gadget: the frangible bullet, a plastic 30-cal. cartridge which flies into harmless pieces on contact. Airmen can shoot at one another in practice without doing any harm.

Defense for the Future. There was no modesty in the report. Although Hap Arnold declared in a foreword: "The A.A.F. does not for a moment forget that the A.A.F. is one part of a well-balanced team," other branches may suspect that the writer of the report sometimes forgot.

The report made no mention of any black marks on the record--how Lieut. General Lesley James McNair, for instance, was killed by friendly bombers giving too-close tactical support.

Able, congenitally optimistic Hap Arnold may also be charged by ground and sea fighters with occasionally overestimating air power's power. The report, written before the landing on Iwo Jima, contained one line to which marines could add a sour postscript: "Other enemy bases in the Carolines . . . have been bombed into impotence. In the Bonins, Chichi Jima and Haha Jima, and in the Volcanic group, Iwo Jima, are now under the same systematic bombing."

Nevertheless, the U.S.A.A.F., which has crossed the enemy lines 6,500,000 times to carry the fight to the enemy, has clearly demonstrated the dominant part air power has played in Allied victories. Secretary Forrestal ended his report with a warning that the nation's security depends on a big navy. Hap Arnold, predicting that the U.S. will be the first target of any future aggressors, warned: "We can only dimly visualize the possibilities of such sudden action. . . . Our first line of defense must be in the air."

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