Henry Hartley Arnold

Born June 25, 1886, in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, Arnold was the son of a strong-willed physician who also served in the Pennsylvania National Guard and was a member of the prominent political and military Arnold Family. Henry Arnold was Baptist in religious belief, but had strong Anglican ties through his father's family. Arnold attended Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, graduating in the class of 1903. The Athletic fields at Lower Merion are now named after him. Arnold took the competitive examination for entrance into West Point after his brother Thomas (already a student at Pennsylvania State University) refused to do so, but placed second on the list. He received a delayed appointment when the nominated cadet confessed to being married, which was against academy regulations. With U.S. participation in the Second World War inevitable, the division of authority between the Air Corps and General Headquarters Air Force was removed with a revision of Army Regulation 95-5 that created the United States Army Air Forces on June 20, 1941. Arnold was made Chief of the Army Air Forces and acting Deputy Chief of Staff for Air with command authority over both the Air Corps and Air Force Combat Command (successor to GHQ Air Force). This also provided the air arm with a staff of its own, brought the entire organization under the command of one general (Arnold), and granted it near autonomy. It also by consensus postponed debate on separation of the Air Force into a service co-equal with the Army and Navy until after the war. Arnold gave the new Air Staff as its first assignment the development of a war plan for fighting both Germany and Japan, and it produced "Air War Plans Division — Plan 1" (AWPD-1), which became the basis for air strategy during the war. AWPD-1 defined four tasks for the USAAF: defense of the Western Hemisphere, an initial defensive strategy against Japan, a strategic air offensive against Germany, and a later strategic air offensive against Japan in prelude of invasion. It also planned for an expansion of the USAAF to 60,000 aircraft and 2.1 million men. AWPD-1 called for 24 groups (approximately 750 airplanes) of B-29 very heavy bombers to be based in Northern Ireland and Egypt for use against Nazi Germany, and for production of sufficient Consolidated B-36s for intercontinental bombing missions of Germany. Even before then he had pushed for aid to Great Britain; with U.S. entry into the war, Arnold, a strong supporter of strategic bombing, closely supervised the creation of the Eighth Air Force in England to limit the diversion of Army bombers to anti-submarine patrol and to the Pacific Theater, and thwart British lobbying to have U.S. bombers sent as individual replacements for the Royal Air Force. In the wake of U.S. entry in the war, Arnold was promoted to lieutenant general on December 15, 1941. On March 9, 1942, the issuance of War Department Circular 59 granted the USAAF full autonomy, equal to and entirely separate from the Army Ground Forces and Services of Supply. The office of the Chief of the Air Corps and the Air Forces Combat Command were eliminated entirely, and Arnold became Commanding General of the USAAF and a member of both the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Combined Chiefs of Staff. In response to an inquiry from the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Arnold directed the Air War Plans Division in August 1942, to revise its estimates and AWPD-42 was issued, calling for 75,000 aircraft and 2.7 million men, but also adding a call for 8,000 gliders and the production of 8,000 aircraft for use by other allies. AWPD-42 reaffirmed earlier strategic priorities, but increased the list of industrial targets from 23 to 177, ranking the German Luftwaffe first and its submarine force second in importance of destruction. It also directed that the B-29 bomber not be employed in Europe because of problems in its development, but instead that the B-29 program's deployment be concentrated in the Far East to destroy the Japanese military power. Immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor Arnold began to carry out AWPD-1. The primary strategic bombing force against Nazi Germany would be the Eighth Air Force, and he named General Spaatz to command it and General Eaker to head its Bomber Command. (Arnold and Eaker had written three books together.) Other Arnold protégés eventually filled key positions in the strategic bombing forces, including Generals Frank A. Armstrong, Newton Longfellow, Haywood S. Hansell, Laurence S. Kuter, Laverne Saunders, Emmitt O'Donnell and James H. Doolittle. Despite protecting his strategic bombing force from demands of other services and allies, Arnold was forced to divert resources from the Eighth to support operations in North Africa, crippling the Eighth in its infancy and nearly killing it. Eaker (now Eighth Air Force commander) found from experience that the pre-war doctrine of daylight precision bombing, developed at the Air Corps Tactical School as a foundation for separating the Air Force from the Army as an equal service, had erred in its tenet that heavily-armed bombers could penetrate all defenses to reach any target without the support of long-range escort fighters. Early in 1943 he began requesting more fighters and jettisonable fuel tanks to increase their range, in addition to repeated requests to increase the size of his small bombing force. Eaker was resisted not only by opponents of strategic daylight bombing but by his fighter commanders as well, who argued that the use of drop tanks would endanger their aircraft. Heavy losses in the summer and fall of 1943 on deep penetration missions increased Eaker's requests. Arnold, under pressure and impatient for results, ignored Eaker's findings and placed the blame on a lack of aggressiveness by bomber commanders. This came at a time when General Dwight D. Eisenhower was putting together his command group for the invasion of Europe, and Arnold approved Eisenhower's request to replace Eaker with his own commanders, Spaatz and Doolittle. Ironically, the very items Eaker requested — more airplanes, drop tanks, and P-51 fighters — accompanied the change of command and made the Eighth Air Force decisive in defeating Germany using the daylight bombing doctrine. With the strategic bombing crisis resolved in Europe, Arnold placed full emphasis on completion of the development and deployment of the B-29 to attack Japan. The B-29 program had been plagued with a seemingly unending series of development problems, subjecting it and Arnold to much criticism in the press and from skeptical field commanders. The B-29 was the key component of the AAF's fourth strategic priority, since no other land-based bomber was capable of reaching the Japanese homeland, but by February 1944, the XX Bomber Command, slated to begin Operation Matterhorn on June 1, had virtually no flight time yet above an altitude of 20,000 feet (6,100 m). With a designated overseas deployment date of April 15, 1944, Arnold intervened in the situation personally by flying to Kansas on March 8. For three days he toured training bases involved in the modification program, distressed at his findings of shortages and work failures, and on the spot made a military procurement officer accompanying him, Maj.Gen. Bennett E. Meyers, coordinator of the program. Meyers (who would after the war be investigated by Congress in a procurement scandal in which Arnold was compelled to testify), succeeded in the "Battle of Kansas": despite labour problems and blizzard weather a complete bomb group was ready for deployment by April 9. The mechanical problems of the B-29, however, had not been resolved, and combat operations identified many new ones. Arnold felt the pressure of not only achieving the goals of AWPD-1, but of justifying by results a very expensive technological project in the B-29, and also the highly-classified knowledge that the B-29 would be called upon to deliver the atomic bomb, if the Manhattan Project succeeded. Operations against Japanese targets in China and Southeast Asia began in June, 1944 and from the outset produced far less positive results than expected. In many ways the difficulties of the Twentieth Air Force's campaign against Japan mirrored those of the Eighth Air Force's against Germany. With characteristic impatience, Arnold quickly relieved Brig. Gen. Kenneth Wolfe, the B-29 commander in China, and replaced him with Maj.Gen. Curtis LeMay. A second B-29 bomber command began operations from bases in the Mariana Islands in November. Brig. Gen. Haywood S. Hansell, one of the architects of AWPD-1 and AWPD-42, commanded XXI Bomber Command but encountered even more command problems than had Wolfe or LeMay. After two months of poor results, and because he resisted a campaign of firebombing attacks against Japanese population favored by Arnold and his chief of staff, Lauris Norstad, Arnold decided he too needed replacing. He shut down operations from China, consolidated all the B-29s in the Marianas, and replaced Hansell with LeMay in January 1945. Arnold made himself commanding general of the Twentieth Air Force, for which he is sometimes criticized for failure to delegate. This unique command arrangement may also have contributed to his health problems (see below), but after the negative experience of building an effective bombing force against Germany, and realizing the consequences of failure against Japan, Arnold may have considered that administrative decisions regarding command could best be handled personally. However, theater commanders Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Chester Nimitz, and Joseph Stillwell all coveted the B-29s for tactical operations, to which Arnold was adamantly opposed as a diversion from strategic policy. He convinced not only Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, but also Chief of Naval Operations Ernest J. King, that the Twentieth was unique in that its operations cut across the jurisdiction of all three theaters, and thus should report directly to the Joint Chiefs with Arnold acting as their executive agent. Between 1943 and 1945 Arnold experienced four heart attacks severe enough to require hospitalization. In addition to being by nature intensely impatient, Arnold considered that his personal presence was required wherever a crisis might be, and as a result he traveled extensively and for long hours under great stress during the War, aggravating what may have been a pre-existing coronary condition. A lesser but more frequent factor may have been his difficulty in handling inter-service politics, particularly with the Navy, which steadfastly refused to recognize him as a Chief of Staff. Arnold's first heart attack occurred February 28, 1943, just after his return from a lengthy and exhausting trip to the Casablanca Conference in Africa and to China. He was hospitalized at Walter Reed Army Hospital for several days, then took three weeks leave at the Coral Gables Biltmore Hotel in Florida, which had been converted into a convalescent hospital. U.S. Army regulations then required that he leave the service, but President Roosevelt waived the requirement in April after he demonstrated his recovery, and on the condition that the President be provided with monthly updates on Arnold's health. Arnold's second heart attack occurred just a month later, on May 10, 1943, and resulted in a 10-day stay in the Walter Reed Hospital. His third heart attack, less severe than the first two, occurred exactly a year later, on May 10, 1944, under the strain of the B-29 problems. Arnold took a month's leave, returning to duty in flying to London for a conference on June 7, 1944. Arnold's last wartime heart attack came on January 17, 1945, just days after he had replaced Gen. Hansell with Gen. LeMay. Arnold had not gone into his office for three days, and he refused to admit the Air Force's chief flight surgeon to his quarters to be checked up on. The flight surgeon enlisted an Army General and a personal friend of Arnold's to inquire on his condition, after which Arnold was again flown to Coral Gables, Florida, and placed under 24-hour care for nine days. Arnold again was allowed to remain in the service, but under conditions which amounted to light duty. This included a tour of European air bases. Arnold was visiting the 456th Bomb Group in Italy when he received the news of the German surrender on 7–8 May 1945. On March 19, 1943, Arnold was promoted to a full General in the USAAF, and on December 21, 1944, he was appointed as a five-star General of the Army, placing him fourth in the U.S. Army rank structure, just behind Generals George C. Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, and Eisenhower. Becoming a five-star General or Admiral is a lifetime appointment in the American military services, and thus, there is never an official retirement from this position. Among other things, the officer draws his full salary and benefits for life and is given a small staff of officers and enlisted men as his aides. In 1945, Arnold founded the Project RAND, which later became the non-profit think tank the RAND Corporation, with $10,000,000 of funding leftover from World War II. Initially tasked with studying military strategy, RAND has since been widely expanded in its scope beyond its original mission. After a trip to South America in January 1946, in which he developed a heart arrhythmia severe enough to cancel the remainder of the trip, General Arnold left active duty in the USAAF on February 28, 1946, (his official date of his departure from active duty was 30 June 1946). He was succeeded by General Carl Spaatz, who also became first Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force when the US Air Force became a separate service on September 18, 1947. Arnold retired to a 40-acre (160,000 m2) ranch near Sonoma, California, and he signed a contract with Harper & Brothers to write his memoirs. Unlike Gen. George S. Patton, an independently well-to-do officer in the U.S. Army, and his colleagues who had taken other positions (e.g., George C. Marshall was appointed as the Secretary of State by President Harry S Truman), Arnold was not healthy enough to do so and he had no source of income other than his military pension and, later, his full salary. (When promoted to the rank of General of the Air Force he received his full pay and benefits, since all five-star Generals and Admirals are on a lifetime appointment.) Arnold's autobiography was an attempt to provide financial security for his wife after his death—much like the former General and President Ulysses S. Grant who also wrote his memoirs while suffering from a fatal illness. Arnold was in the midst of writing the book when he suffered his fifth serious heart attack in January 1948, hospitalizing him for three months. However, he did later complete the book, entitled Global Mission, before his death in 1950. On May 7, 1949, Arnold was honored by being made the first—and to date, only--General of the Air Force. He is also the only American to serve in five-star rank in two military services. He died on January 15, 1950, at his home in Sonoma. He was given a state funeral in Washington, D.C. that included rare services held in Arlington Memorial Amphitheater, and he was buried in Section 34 of Arlington National Cemetery.