"Bandit Chief"

In a week when Under Secretary of War Patterson declared that battered Tokyo was no longer a primary bombers' target, the War Department announced the name of the man who will run the heavy bombers' assault on Japan to war's end. To no one's surprise, he was 54-year-old General Carl Andrew Spaatz (TIME, July 2). "Tooey" Spaatz will be chief of a new U.S. Army Strategic Air Force of the Pacific.

On the record, no one was better qualified to direct the aerial destruction of Japan than the onetime fighter pilot who was chief of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe. German propagandists hated West Pointer Spaatz, called him the "aerial bandit." Japanese propagandists would soon have their own ideograph for the precise, mild-mannered Pennsylvania Dutchman who is impatient to get the war over so he can go sailboating.

The man who directed the operations of Flying Forts and Liberators over Europe will have mostly Superforts in his new command. His assistant destroyers will be rough, tough, morose Major General Curtis LeMay, who last week became boss of the Twentieth Air Force, now based on Guam, Tinian and Saipan; and rough, tough, merry Lieut. General James H. Doolittle, boss of the famed Eighth Air Force, which is being transferred to the Pacific from Europe. Jimmy Doolittle's base will probably be Okinawa, from which MacArthur's Far Eastern Air Force began operating last week. Tooey Spaatz will direct his giants from head quarters on Guam.

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