Hap Arnold: America's Forgotten General

From Grant to Patton, from Bradley to MacArthur, many of America's most celebrated generals had careers footnoted by controversies.

Meanwhile, many Americans and most history textbooks are unaware of one the most admired American general of recent times. It is hard to find anyone – at least since the days of George Washington and John Paul Jones – who's more universally admired, even revered, within his own service than Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold is within the U.S. Air Force. He’s also the man most responsible for America's aerial victory in World War II — he created the Air Force.

So it’s time for the history books to pay attention.

Having been taught to fly by the Wright brothers themselves, Arnold was one of America’s first military aviators. He grew up with U.S. Army aviation, and ultimately he became its leader. In 1938, he became chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

His boss, Army Chief of Staff General Malin Craig thought that the U.S. Army should not spend money on airplanes because they became obsolete too fast. Many of the “old cavalry officers” who dominated the Army officer corps at the time looked upon the Army’s “bird men” as effete posers who needed to find a real job. Meanwhile, tactical doctrine held that the only role for U.S. Army aviation was to support ground forces in the field.

In 1936, when Arnold was assistant chief of staff of the Air Corps, Congress authorized 2,230 aircraft as a “minimum safe peacetime strength” for the Air Corps. Two years later, when he became the chief, the service had been allowed by the U.S. Army General Staff to acquire only 1,792, and they were mainly obsolete. At the time, the Air Corps personnel strength was barely 20,000.

This was just a year before World War II began in Europe.

However this changed after the war began. Within three years, Hap Arnold had turned this fledgling stepchild of a land army into the autonomous U.S. Army Air Forces, and within the next three, he turned the USAAF into the largest air force in history, an immense war-winning air force exercising a strategic doctrine that systematically took apart the industrial capacity of the Axis powers.

Six years into Arnold’s tenure as the head of the U.S. Army’s air arm, it possessed 80,000 aircraft, virtually all of them state-of-the-art, and there were 2.4 million people in USAAF uniforms. The lion’s share of this growth had taken place in just the three years after the United States entered the war.

The role of Arnold’s USAAF in World War II cannot be underestimated. On the strategic side, the USAAF crushed the German and Japanese industrial economy. On the tactical side, the USAAF came to control the skies over every land battlefield where United States troops were engaged. Over the beaches of Normandy on D-Day in 1944, the Germans were able to put a mere handful of aircraft into the skies. The USAAF had thousands. Today, the U.S. Air Force is proud to point out that from 1944 to the present, United States ground troops have never had to operate under skies controlled by a hostile air force.

Meanwhile, the USAAF Air Transport Command, which was Arnold’s brainchild, grew into a global “airline” that routinely served six continents and had the broadest route structure of any airline the world had yet seen. It became the template for postwar international airlines.

Remember, Arnold was faced with building his USAAF from scratch, and practically overnight. This job, which was undertaken by Arnold and a hand-picked staff, incorporated a broad spectrum of complicated management challenges, not the least of which was the training of hundreds of thousands of raw recruits to be better-than-proficient pilots and navigators, and then deploying them to many hundreds of locations all over the globe.

What other manager, and what other organization in history have conquered such challenges within the space of less than three years?

In every sense, Arnold literally invented the modern U.S. Air Force. No other military leader from World War II has had such an important and long-lasting effect on the service which he led during the war. Arnold's vision, articulated more than half a century ago, remains as the cornerstone of the current U.S. Air Force doctrine of “Global Vigilance, Reach and Power.”