A Concise History 

of the 

U.S. Air Force 

Stephen L. McFarland 

Air Force History and Museums Program 

1997 
Contents 

The Genesis of American Air Power ..................... 1 

Trial and Error in World War I .......................... 4 

Interwar Doctrine. Organization. and Technology ........... 11 

World War II-Global Conflict ......................... 21 

Air Power in the Nuclear Age .......................... 40 

Limited War in Korea ................................ 45 

The “New Look” Air Force ............................ 51 

Flexible Response and Vietnam ......................... 57 

The Cold War Concluded ............................. 69 

Air Power Triumphant-The Gulf War ................... 75 

TheFuture ........................................ 81 

Suggested Readings ................................. 83 

iii 
They shall mount up with wings as eagles. 

-Isaiah 40:3 1 

The Genesis of American Air Power 

Americans took to the skies at an early date. Benjamin Franklin 

considered the possibility of using balloons in warfare in 1783, only days 

after the first successful hot-air balloon flights in France. John Sherburne, 

frustrated by the Army’s ineffectiveness during the Seminole War of 

1840, proposed using balloons for observation above the wilderness that 

hid the adversary. John Wise, dismayed by the prospects of a long and 

costly siege of Veracruz during the Mexican War, suggested using balloons in 1846 for bombing defending forces, three years before Austria 

actually did so against Venice. 

John LaMountain and Thaddeus Lowe successfully launched 

manned reconnaissance balloons in support of Union operations during 

the American Civil War. In late June 1861 Lowe’s map of Confederate 

positions in Falls Church, Virginia, was the first significant contribution 

of manned flight to American warfare, although the Union lost the battle 

at Bull Run in July. The map allowed Lowe to report after the battle that 

the Confederates were not advancing on Washington. He was thus able to 

help prevent panic following the defeat. In September he demonstrated 

the balloon’s potential when he directed artillery fire at Confederate posiBy means of such balloons as the Intrepid, shown being inflated during 

the Civil War battle at Fair Oaks outside Richmond, Virginia, in the spring 

of 1862, the Union Army conducted reconnaissance missions over enemy territory in America’s first use of air power. 

1 
The Wright Military Flyer during flight tests held at Fort Myer in northern 

Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., 1908. Orville Wright 

was at the controls. The Flyer is shown over a gate and wall of nearby Arlington 

National Cemetery. 

This was America’s air force until Congress approved $125,000 

in 191 1 for its expansion, despite the objection of one member: “Why all 

this fuss about airplanes for the Army? I thought we already had one.” In 

Wright and Curtiss aircraft early Army flyers began stretching aviation’s 

limits with bomb-dropping, photography, and strafing while forming their 

first unit, the 1st Aero Squadron, on December 8, 1913. These achievements convinced Congress to give the Army’s air force official status on 

July 18, 1914 as the Aviation Section, Signal Corps, which absorbed the 

Aeronautical Division and its 19 officers, 101 enlisted men, 1 squadron, 

and 6 combat aircraft. 

Orville Wright’s first flight in 1903 had lasted twelve seconds; by 

1916 flights of four-hours duration had become possible. This progress 

was soon tested. Brigadier General John Pershing pursued Pancho Villa 

in Mexico from 1916 to 1917 to bring the Mexican revolutionary tojustice for attacking an American border town, Columbus, New Mexico. 

Captain Benjamin Foulois, with ten pilots and eight aircraft of the 1st 

Aero Squadron, struggled against winds, storms, and high mountains to 

locate Villa; but a series of disasters, some comic, some tragic, stood in 

3 
vivid contrast to aerial achievements on the Western Front of the Great 

War in Europe that had begun two years earlier. 

’Ilia1 and Error in World War I 

The potential of the airplane was proved in World War I when its 

use in critical reconnaissance halted the initial German offensive against 

Paris. It was not used to harass troops or drop bombs until two months 

into the war. On the basis of an aviator’s report that the German army had 

a large gap in its lines and was attempting to swing wide and west around 

the British army, British commander Sir John French refused requests 

from the French to link up his army with their forces to the east. At the 

resulting battle of Mons southwest of Brussels on August 23, 1914, the 

British slowed the overall German advance, forcing it to swing east of 

Paris. The Allies, on the basis of a British aviator’s report of the move, 

stopped the Germans at the battle of the Marne from September 6 to 9. 

The Germans, on the basis of one of their aviator’s observation of the 

Allies’ concentration, retreated behind the Aisne River. These actions, 

spurred by aerial observation, forced the combatants into fixed positions 

and initiated four years of trench warfare. 

When American aircrews arrived in France three years later to 

join the conflict, they found mile after mile of fetid trenches protected by 

machine guns, barbed wire, and massed artillery. The airplane’s primary 

roles remained reconnaissance and observation over the trenches of both 

sides, into which were poured men, supplies, and equipment in huge 

quantities easily seen from the air. Thousands of aviators fought and died 

for control of the skies above armies locked in death struggles below. 

In 1914 the U.S. Army’s Aviation Section of the Signal Corps 

had five air squadrons and three being formed. By April 6, 1917, when 

the United States declared war on Germany, it had 56 pilots and fewer 

than 250 aircraft, all obsolete. Congress appropriated $54.25 million in 

May and June 1917 for “military aeronautics” to create a total of 13 

American squadrons for the war effort. However, French Premier 

Alexandre Ribot’s telegraphed message to President Woodrow Wilson in 

late May revealed that the United States did not yet comprehend the scale 

of the war. Ribot recommended that the Allies would need an American 

air force of 4,500 aircraft, 5,000 pilots, and 50,000 mechanics by 1918 to 

achieve victory. Trainer aircraft and spare parts would increase America’s 

contribution to over 40,000 aircraft-this from a country that had produced only a few hundred, both civilian and military, from 1903 to 1916. 

4 
tions. He went on to establish the first U.S. 

air force, the Balloon 

Service of the Army of the Potomac, although weather, technological limitations, bungling, and military opposition prevented further development 

and exploitation. 

His Civil War experience convinced Brigadier General Adolphus 

Greely of the Army Signal Corps that the balloon’s capabilities had been 

unrealized. As part of a special section formed in 1892, his one balloon 

directed artillery fire during the Battle of San Juan Hill in the SpanishAmerican War and reported the presence of the Spanish fleet at Santiago 

de Cuba Harbor. This limited success with lighter-than-air balloons 

(enemy ground fire destroyed the section’s balloon in Cuba) encouraged 

Greely and the Army to give Samuel Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, $50,000 in 1898 to build a powered heavier-than-air 

flying machine. The spectacular failures of Langley’s Aerodrome 

launched over the Potomac River on October 7 and December 8, 1903, 

soured Army opinions on the practicality of flight for several years. When 

Orville and Wilbur Wright succeeded in the world’s first powered, heavier-than-air, controlled flight on December 17, 1903, the Signal Corps 

expressed no interest. Establishing the Aeronautical Division of the 

Signal Corps on August 1, 1907, the Army ignored the Wrights and their 

achievement. It preferred experimenting with the steerable airship or dirigible, then being perfected in Europe. The desertion of a private cost the 

Aeronautical Division half of its enlisted strength, but did not prevent the 

Army from ordering its first nontethered airship, Dirigible No. 1, for 

$6,750 in 1908. 

The Wrights’ successes came to the attention of others, however, 

and President Theodore Roosevelt directed the Army to entertain bids for 

an aircraft in late 1907. Meanwhile, intrepid airmen pressed on. Lieutenant Frank Lahm became the first officer to fly in an aircraft in early 

September 1908. Not even the death of Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, 

America’s first military aviation fatality, killed in what the New York 

Times called a “wreck of bloodstained wood, wire, and canvas,” could 

stop the advance of military aviation. On August 2, 1909, the Army 

awarded the Wrights $30,000 for delivering Aeroplane No. 1, and a 

$5,000 bonus for exceeding specifications. The Aeronautical Division 

now had one aircraft, but no pilots, ground crews, or training establishment. Wilbur Wright taught Lieutenants Frank Lahm, Benjamin Foulois, 

and Frederic Humphreys to fly. (He included Humphreys as a passenger 

on the world’s first night flight.) Penury soon reduced America’s air force 

to one pilot (Foulois) flying one much-damaged, much-repaired aircraft. 

2 
~~ 

For sale by the US. Government Printing office 

Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, LX 20402-9328 

ISBN 0-16-049208-4 
A Concise History 

of the 

U.S. Air Force 

Except in a few instances, since World War I1 no American soldier or 

sailor has been attacked by enemy air power. Conversely, no enemy soldier or 

sailor has acted in combat without being attacked or at least threatened by 

American air power. Aviators have brought the air weapon to bear against enemies while denying them the same prerogative. This is the legacy of the U.S. Air 

Force, purchased at great cost in both human and material resources. 

More often than not, aerial pioneers had to fight technological ignorance, bureaucratic opposition, public apathy, and disagreement over purpose. 

Every step in the evolution of air power led into new and untrodden territory, driven by humanitarian impulses; by the search for higher, faster, and farther flight; 

or by the conviction that the air way was the best way. Warriors have always coveted the high ground. If technology permitted them to reach it, men, women and 

an air force held and exploited it-from Thomas Selfridge, first among so many 

who gave that “last full measure of devotion”; to Women’s Airforce Service Pilot 

Ann Baumgartner, who broke social barriers to become the first American 

woman to pilot a jet; to Benjamin Davis, who broke racial barriers to become the 

first African American to command a flying group; to Chuck Yeager, a one-time 

non-commissioned flight officer who was the first to exceed the speed of sound; 

to John Levitow, who earned the Medal of Honor by throwing himself over a live 

flare to save his gunship crew; to John Warden, who began a revolution in air 

power thought and strategy that was put to spectacular use in the Gulf War. 

Industrialization has brought total war and air power has brought the 

means to overfly an enemy’s defenses and attack its sources of power directly. 

Americans have perceived air power from the start as a more efficient means of 

waging war and as a symbol of the nation’s commitment to technology to master challenges, minimize casualties, and defeat adversaries. 
In the United States an outpouring of patriotism accompanied the 

declaration of war. Talk of “darkening the skies over Germany with 

clouds of U.S. aircraft” stiffened Allied resolve. It also appealed to the 

American people. Congress supported their sentiments when it approved 

$640 million on July 24, 1917, the largest lump sum ever appropriated by 

that body to that time, for a program to raise 354 combat squadrons. 

President Wilson immediately created the Aircraft Production 

Board under Howard Coffin to administer an expansion, but the United 

States had no aircraft industry, only several shops that hand-built an occasional aircraft, and no body of trained workers. The spruce industry, critical to aircraft construction, attempted to meet the enormous demand 

under government supervision. A production record that approached a 

national disaster forced Wilson on May 21, 1918, to establish a Bureau of 

Aircraft Production under John Ryan and a separate Division of Military 

Aeronautics under Major General William Kenly. The division would be 

responsible for training and operations and would replace the Aviation 

Section of the Signal Corps. Perhaps as an indication of the Army’s attitude toward the new air weapon, the two agencies remained without a single overall chief. Not until four months before the end of the war did 

Wilson appoint Ryan Director of the Air Service and Second Assistant 

Secretary of War in a late attempt to coordinate the two agencies. 

Despite President Wilson’s initiatives American aircraft production fell far short of its goals. In June 1917 a mission led by Major Raynal 

Bolling to investigate conditions on the Western Front, decided that America’s greatest contribution to the war besides its airmen would be its raw 

materials from which the Allies could produce the necessary aircraft in 

Europe, rather than in the United States. This time-saving approach was 

not particularly popular, given American chauvinism at the time. The 

United States would build engines, trainer aircraft, and British-designed 

DH-4 bombers. It would buy combat aircraft from France (4,881), 

Britain (258), and Italy (59). 

American industry managed to turn out 1 1,754 aircraft, mostly 

trainers, before the end of the war-a significant accomplishment. Detroit 

produced 1 5,572 Liberty engines, big 12-cylinder in-line liquid-cooled 

power plants of 400 horsepower that were more efficient than other 

wartime engines. The Army set up ground schools at 8 universities, 27 

primary flying schools in the United States, and 16 advanced training 

schools in Europe. On Armistice Day the Air Service had 19,189 officers 

and 178,149 enlisted men filling 185 squadrons. 

One of the first American airmen to reach France was Major 

William “Billy” Mitchell, who studied British and French aerial tech5 
A formation of De Havilland DH-~s, British-designed, Americanbuilt bombers of World War I. 

The most efficient aircraft engine of the war, the American 

12-cylinder, 400-horsepower, liquid-cooled Liberty. Standing 

beside it is Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, future Commanding 

General, U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF). 

niques and recommended the establishment of two air forces, one to support ground forces and another to launch independent strategic attacks 

against the sources of German strength. A dearth of aircraft and aircrews 

prevented the development of the latter effort, and the 1917 Bolling mission had given the idea lowest priority. American Expeditionary Force 

6 
force, with, first, Brigadier General William Kenly, then Benjamin 

Foulois, and, finally, Mason Patrick as Chief of Air Service, American 

Expeditionary Force, and Mitchell as Air Commander, Zone of Advance. 

A less-than-clear chain of command insured a collision between Foulois 

and Mitchell, but Pershing wanted Mitchell in charge of combat operations. 

Some Americans had already acquired combat experience in 

France, serving with French and British squadrons before the United 

States entered the war. Among the most famous were members of the 

Lafayette Escadrille, including Norman Prince (five victories) and Raoul 

Lufbery (seventeen victories). These veterans transferred to the Air 

Service and provided the cadre for new squadrons arriving from the 

United States. After advanced training, American squadrons joined 

French and British units for combat experience. Only when American 

ground units were ready for combat did Air Service squadrons join 

American armies. Flying French SPAD and Nieuport fighters and French 

Breguet and British DH-4 bombers, all-American units under American 

command began operations in March and April 1918. Lieutenants Alan 

Winslow and Douglas Campbell gained America’s first aerial victories on 

April 14, 1918, in French Nieuport fighters armed with British Vickers 

machine guns. 

The United States may have been slow in developing aerial 

weapons, but its ground commanders quickly put them to use. Airmen 

flew infantry contact patrols, attempting to find isolated units and reporting their location and needs to higher headquarters. Of these missions, the 

50th Aero Squadron’s search for the “Lost Battalion” in the MeuseArgonne during the offensive of September and October 1918 is perhaps 

the most famous. Two airmen, pilot Harold Goettler and observer Erwin 

Bleckley flew several missions at low altitude, purposely attracting 

German fire to find out at least where the “Lost Battalion” was not. They 

paid with their lives but helped their squadron narrow its search. For their 

heroism, Goettler and Bleckley won two of the four Medals of Honor 

awarded to American airmen during the war. The other two went to Eddie 

Rickenbacker and Frank Luke for aerial combat. 

Reconnaissance missions to determine the disposition and makeup of enemy forces were critical and were usually carried out by aircraft 

flying east at low altitude until shot at. Allied ground troops, for example, 

needed to know about German activity at the Valleroy railroad yard during the battle of St. Mihiel or, best of all, that the “convoy of enemy 

horse-drawn vehicles [was] in retreat along the road to Thiaucourt.” 

7 
World War I Aviation Heroes 

Three heroes of World War I: Captain Eddie Rickenbacker; top, left, 

Lieutenant Frank Luke, top, right, both recipients of the Congressional 

Medal of Honor; and the forceful and controversial advocate of air power 

and service autonomy, Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, center, Assistant 

Chief of Air Service, American Expeditionary Force (AEF). 
Early Military Aviation Leaders 

The three Chiefs of Air Service, AEF: Major Generals William Kenly, fop, lef, 

Benjamin Foulois, top, righr, and Mason Patrick, bottom, lef. Major General Charles 

Menoher, botrom, right, Chief of Air Service after World War I, set up tactical, training, and engineering centers at Langley, Brooks, Kelly, and McCook Fields. 
py g 

lines: 

Pilots get the credit 

But the gunner rings the bell 

When we go to bomb the columns 

On the road to Aix-la-Pelle! 

The pilots of each side, attempting to prevent their counterparts 

from conducting tactical reconnaissance, encountered fierce air-to-air 

combat in aerial “dogfights” that evoked images of medieval warfare and 

its code of chivalry. The men in the trenches welcomed these solitary 

knights of the skies who were willing to take on the heavily-defended 

German observation balloons and their artillery fire aimed at everything 

that moved. More often than not, life was short in World War I and 

American aviators lived it valiantly. Frank Luke spent only seventeen 

days in combat and claimed four aircraft and fourteen balloons, the most 

dangerous of all aerial targets. Shot down at age 21, he died resisting capture behind German lines. The United States awarded him a Medal of 

Honor and named an air base after him. Raoul Lufbery claimed seventeen 

victories before jumping from his own burning aircraft without a parachute. But more died in crashes brought on by malfunctioning aircraft 

than in combat. 

Low-level flight in close support of the infantry was exceedingly 

dangerous as it involved strafing and bombing over enemy positions. The 

96th Aero Squadron flew twelve day bombardment aircraft in three mis- . 

sions against ground targets the first day of the St. Mihiel offensive on 

September 12, 1918. The next day it mustered only four aircraft ready for 

duty. Casualty rates of 50 percent or higher were not unusual. When 

Brigadier General Billy Mitchell had his way, targets were farther to the 

rear and included rail centers and bridges. One of his officers, Lieutenant 

Colonel Edgar Gorrell, developed a plan to bomb Germany’s “manufacturing centers, commercial centers, and lines of communication.” General 

Pershing approved the plan, but opposition from other ground commanders and insufficient aircraft thwarted America’s nascent testing of strategic bombing. 

As an American air force, the First Air Brigade (strengthened by 

French units) in June 1918 fought superior German forces during the battle of Chgteau-Thierry, a bloody initiation to full-scale combat for most 

American pilots. Mitchell, however, learned the lessons of massing air 

power in the battle area and of seizing the offensive. This experience 

10 
served him well at St. Mihiel in September. With nearly 100 squadrons 

amounting to 1,500 aircraft under his control, Mitchell organized two 

forces, one to provide escorted reconnaissance and the other to serve as 

an independent striking force. With superior numbers, mostly French, 

Mitchell’s airmen seized the initiative, gained air superiority, attacked 

enemy ground forces, and interdicted supplies flowing to the German 

front lines. In the final action of the war, during the Meuse-Argonne 

offensive in September and October, Mitchell concentrated a largely 

American force to establish air superiority in support of American ground 

operations. 

By Armistice Day on November 11, 1918, the Air Service had 

prepared and sent 45 squadrons to fight under Mitchell, with 140 more 

organizing in the United States. In supporting the war the Air Service had 

about 750 American-piloted aircraft in France, or about 10 percent of all 

Allied forces. Seventy-one Americans became aces, downing 5 or more 

enemy aircraft, led by Eddie Rickenbacker with 26 victories. His success 

paled compared with Manfred von Richthofen’s (German) with 80 kills, 

Rend Fonck’s (French) with 75, and Edward Mannock’s (British) with 73, 

but few claimed as many as quickly as the American. The launching of 

150 bombing attacks and the claiming of 756 enemy aircraft and 76 balloons in 7 months of combat and the losses of 289 aircraft, 48 balloons, 

and 237 crewmen did not turn the tide of war but were portentous of 

things to come. The airplane had entered combat, and by eliminating the 

element of surprise through observation and reconnaissance, it had helped 

Allied forces to victory on the Western Front. 

Interwar Doctrine, Organization, and Technology 

The scale of destruction and bloodshed in World War I was truly 

shocking. No one could have imagined 10 million dead and 21 million 

wounded soldiers or 9 million dead civilians. A generation had been 

slaughtered in the trenches, the events witnessed by 2 million American 

servicemen who went home from “over there,” convinced that such a war 

should never be fought again. In its aftermath, diplomats pursued collective security through the League of Nations; the Kellogg-Briand Pact 

renouncing war as an instrument of national policy; the Locarno Pact recognizing the inviolability of European borders; and the Washington, 

London, and Geneva disarmament treaties and talks. In Germany airmen 

sought to restore mobility to the battlefield, joining aircraft and tanks to 

create blitzkrieg warfare. In America airmen strove for the coup de 

11 
g

gg y g

war-making capability. 

American airmen came back from France with a unique perspective on modem war. Josiah Rowe, of the 147th Aero Squadron, wrote of 

the World War I battlefield as “a barren waste, broken only by shell holes, 

trenches and barbed wire, with not one living thing in sight.” He was 

“glad to get away from such gruesome scenes” by climbing into the sky 

in his airplane. Billy Mitchell wrote that the Allies could cross the front 

lines “in a few minutes” in their aircraft, whereas “the armies were locked 

in the struggle, immovable, powerless to advance, for three years . . . . It 

looked as though the war would go on indefinitely until either the airplanes brought [it to an end] or the contending nations dropped from 

sheer exhaustion.” 

American airmen knew that aircraft lacked the range, speed, and 

reliability for strategic bombing, but they had faith that technology could 

overcome any restrictions. They also knew the importance of concentrating on basic objectives such as winning air superiority or interdicting the 

front, both of which, they believed, required an independent air force. 

They had caught tantalizing glimpses of what strategic bombing could do 

to an enemy’s industrial centers. They saw the effectiveness of offense 

and the futility of defense against a determined aerial assault. 

For these and other servicemen, aircraft seemed the answer to the 

slaughter of trench warfare. German airmen soon envisioned air power as 

mobile artillery accompanying fast-moving armored units (blitzkrieg 

warfare). American airmen, however, saw air power as an independent 

strategic force that could bring an enemy nation to its knees. Throughout 

history, an attacking army fought its way through a defending army to get 

to its enemy’s vital centers. Strategic bombers would fly over the army to 

strike at the enemy’s heart. Air leaders such as Billy Mitchell believed 

that with aircraft future wars would be shorter and less bloody. 

During World War I America’s air force had not coalesced. 

Afterwards it had to be built in an atmosphere of antiwar fervor and congressional stinginess. In addition, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy, viewing 

the air force as their auxiliary arms and a supporting weapon, placed 

obstacles in the way of its further development. The President’s Aircraft 

Board, better known as the Morrow Board for its chairman, the banker 

Dwight Morrow, called by President Calvin Coolidge in 1925 to evaluate 

the Air Service’s call for independence, reinforced this view: “The next 

war may well start in the air but in all probability will wind up, as the last 

war did, in the mud.” Evolving technology and irrepressible flyers, however, drove the Air Service in a different direction. 

12 
No one in the Air Service was particularly keen on flying close 

air support in trench warfare. Most airmen thought it unglamorous, marginally effective, and dangerous. What then could air power do, especially with advanced technology? The War Department General Staff already 

knew what it wanted from its airmen-close air support, reconnaissance, 

interdiction, and air superiority over the battlefield. The Dickman Board, 

named for its chairman, Major General Joseph Dickman, appointed in 

1919 by General Pershing to evaluate the lessons of the war, concluded: 

“Nothing so far brought out in the war shows that aerial activities can be 

carried on, independently of ground forces, to such an extent as to affect 

materially the conduct of the war as a whole.” 

‘She Air Service could hardly contradict this judgment. Its heavy 

bomber at the time was the French-built Breguet. A veteran of the Great 

War with a range of 300 miles and a top speed of 100 miles per hour, it 

could only carry a 500-pound bomb load. In the postwar demobilization, 

by 1920 the Air Service was reduced to fewer than 2,200 officers and 

8,500 enlisted men. To formulate basic doctrine for the fledgling air force 

and train officers, Air Service Chief Major General Charles Menoher 

established the Air Service Tactical School at Langley Field in Virginia, 

later to become the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in 

Alabama. He made Brooks and Kelly Fields in Texas responsible for 

flight training and the Engineering Division at McCook Field in Ohio, 

later to become the Materiel Division at nearby Wright Field, responsible 

for flight technology. Congress provided the Air Service a measure of 

independence, changing it from an auxiliary force to an offensive force 

equal to the artillery and infantry, by creating the U.S. Army Air Corps 

on July 2, 1926. 

Other aerial pioneers sought to test the versatility of aircraft 

through aerial exploration and discovery in a succession of record-setting 

flights. In 1921 Lieutenant John Macready climbed to 35,409 feet, higher than anyone before. In 1923 Macready and Lieutenant Oakley Kelly 

flew a Fokker T-2 nonstop across the width of the United States. In 1924 

several Air Service crews led by Major Frederick Martin took 175 days 

to fly around the world. In 1925 Lieutenants Jimmy Doolittle and Cy 

Bettis won the Pulitzer and Schneider Cup speed races for the Air 

Service. Major Carl Spatz (later spelled Spaatz), Captain Ira Eaker, 

Lieutenant Elwood Quesada, and Sergeant Roy Hooe flew the Fokker trimotor Question Mark to a record duration of 150 hours in 1929, displaying the great promise of inflight refueling. Doolittle and Lieutenant 

Albert Hegenberger achieved what the New York Times called the “greatest single step forward in [aerial] safety”-a series of blind flights from 

13 
1929 to 1932 that opened the night and clouded skies to flying. Only the 

Air Corps’ assignment to deliver air mail in the first half of 1934, called 

“legalized murder” by Eddie Rickenbacker because of the 12 lives it 

claimed, detracted from the image that these aerial pioneers were helping 

to create. 

Record-breaking military flights, alongside trailblazing civilian 

achievements by Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, represented the 

public side of a revolution in aviation technology. The staff at the 

Engineering Division, and later the Materiel Division, worked with 

American industry and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics 

(predecessor of the National Air and Space Administration) to develop 

essential technologies such as sodium-cooled engine valves, high octane 

gasoline, tetraethyl lead knock suppressants, stressed duraluminum aircraft structures, cantilevered wings, superchargers, turbosuperchargers, 

retractable landing gear, engine cowlings, radial engines, variable pitch 

constant speed propellers, and automatic pilots. The two-engine Keystone 

bomber of the 1920s, a biplane constructed of steel tubes and wires and 

fabric surfaces, with an open cockpit and fixed landing gear, could fly 98 

miles per hour for 350 miles with one ton of bombs. A decade later 

Boeing’s four-engine B-17 bomber could fly nearly 300 miles per hour 

for 800 miles with over two tons of bombs. 

How would America’s military aviators use this technology in 

war? The Army General Staff wanted to employ tactical air power “in 

The Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Alabama. 

Air officer training was first established in 1922 at Langley 

Field in Virginia under the Air Service Field Officers School, 

later redesignated the Air Service Tactical School. 

14 
direct or indirect support of other components of the Nation

s armed forces.” It believed the primary target was the adversary’s army. The most 

vocal opponent of this view was Assistant Chief of the Air Service, 

Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, who saw in strategic bombing the proper use of air power. Close air support and interdiction, he asserted, only 

perpetuated trench warfare and the horrors of World-War I-like slaughter. 

He argued for a force that could strike directly at an enemy’s vitals, “centers of production of all kinds, means of transportation, agricultural areas, 

ports and shipping,” forcing “a decision before the ground troops or sea 

forces could join in battle.” 

Mitchell’s actions created opponents as well as adherents. A 

series of highly publicized ship-bombing tests begun in 1921 overshadowed the ideas he had espoused in books such as Winged Defense: The 

Development and Possibilities of Modem Air Power-Economic and 

Military. Air Service bombers sank several unmanned, anchored ships, 

including battleships. Mitchell’s apparent success, despite poor bombing 

accuracy, diverted both the public’s and the Congress’s attention from 

more critical aerial achievements and issues of the period. Mitchell’s 

troubles with Army and Navy leaders eventually led to his court martial 

after he spoke intemperately about the crash of the airship Shenandoah in 

1925. (He blamed the loss on “incompetency, criminal negligence, and 

almost treasonable administration.”) President Coolidge, famous for his 

reticence and nicknamed “Silent Cal,” expressed a widely-held view 

when he contended, “General Mitchell [has] talked more in the last three 

months than I [have] in my whole life.” 

Behind such scenes, Chief of the Air Corps Major General James 

Fechet urged his officers in 1928 to look beyond the battlefield, beyond 

close air support, and find a way for the Air Corps to win a war independently. He imposed only three limitations: First, the Air Corps had to get 

the most for any money available. Second, civilians could not be targets 

of aerial attack. Secretary of War Newton Baker had ruled earlier that 

doing so “constituted an abandonment of the time-honored practice 

among civilized people of restricting bombardment to fortified places or 

to places from which the civilian population had an opportunity to be 

removed.” Americans would not undertake terror raids, he said, “on the 

most elemental ethical and humanitarian grounds.” Third, anything the 

Air Corps did would have to solve or avoid the evils of trench warfare. 

One officer who answered Fechet’s challenge was Lieutenant 

Kenneth Walker. Conventional wisdom taught that while airmen achieved 

high accuracy when they 

selves to deadly ground 

bombed from high altitudes, they exposed themfire. Walker showed that daylight high-altitude 

15 
Interwar Air Service Pioneers 

Top to bottom: Suited for extreme cold, 

Lieutenant John Macready with the Packard LePere aircraft in which he set the 

American altitude record of 34,508 feet in 

1921; Sergeant Roy Hooe, Lieutenant 

jor Carl Spatz (later spelled Spaatz), and 

Lieutenant Elwood Quesada after their 

record-setting endurance flight in the 

Fokker Trimotor Question Murk in 1929; 

the Question Murk being refueled on its 

famous flight; Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle 

in the Consolidated NY-2 he piloted during blind flying tests in 1929. The enclosing 

hood is folded around the cockpit. 
Interwar Aircraft 

In amazing technological leaps, 

interwar military aircraft evolved significantly from, top to bottom, biplanes 

such as the Keystone B-4 bomber and 

Boeing P-12 fighter, to some of the 

first all-metal American monoplanes 

such as the Boeing P-26 fighter and 

the Martin B-10 bomber. 
p

g pg p

greater survivability, explosive force, and, ironically, accuracy. (Bombs 

released at low altitudes tumbled and ricocheted when they hit the 

ground.) He wrote, “Bombardment missions are carried out at high altitudes, to reduce the possibilities of interception by hostile pursuit and the 

effectiveness of anti-aircraft gun fire and to increase the explosive effect 

of the bombs.” The keys to attaining accuracy from high altitudes were 

Carl Norden’s new M-series bombsights, designed under Navy contract, 

but destined to equip Air Corps bombers beginning in 1933. 

At Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, Major Donald 

Wilson and the faculty of the Air Corps Tactical School proposed in the 

early 1930s to destroy an enemy’s ability to resist by bombing what 

Wilson called the “vital objects of a nation’s economic structure that tend 

to paralyze the nation’s ability to wage war and . . . the hostile will to 

resist.’’ Because of America’s opposition to attacking civilians or nonmilitary targets, this bombing would be aimed not directly at an enemy’s 

will, but at the machines and industries that supported that will and its 

military defenses. The destruction of an enemy’s vital industries would 

destroy its ability to continue to wage war. Wilson viewed high-altitude 

precision bombing as “an instrument which could cause the collapse of 

this industrial fabric by depriving the web of certain essential elementsas few as three main systems such as transportation, electrical power, and 

steel manufacture would suffice.” 

The technological innovations of the 1930s, which so profoundly inspired the ideas of Walker and Wilson among others, were applied in 

particular to the large aircraft demanded by America’s airlines, and they 

created a curious situation-large bombers flew faster than small fighters. 

Thus was born the conviction among airmen, as expressed by Brigadier 

General Oscar Westover: “No known agency can frustrate the accomplishment of a bombardment mission.” The B-17 of 1935 could reach 

252 miles per hour at high altitudes, compared with the P-26 front-line 

fighter, which could not exceed 234. Because speed would allow a 

bomber to overcome enemy aerial defenses, strategic bombing became 

the focus of air power development for Mitchell, Walker, Wilson, Wright 

Field’s engineers, and such Air Corps leaders as Brigadier General Henry 

“Hap” Arnold, commanding the 1st Bombardment Wing, who labored to 

create the tactical formations, flying techniques, and organization needed 

for this new kind of warfare. 

Upon the recommendation of a War Department committee, 

known as the Baker Board (named for former Secretary of War, Newton 

Baker), Congress established the General Headquarters Air Force (GHQ 

18 
AF) on March 1, 1935. This first American “named” air force, under the 

command of Brigadier General Frank Andrews and headquartered at 

Langley Field in Virginia, controlled all offensive aviation in the nine 

corps areas of the United States, including organization, training, and 

operations. Powerful opponents in the Army separated the GHQAF from 

the Air Corps under Major General Westover, in charge of individual 

training, procurement, doctrine, and supply. The Air Corps remained a 

combatant arm of the Army, while the GHQAF came under the Chief of 

Staff in peacetime and the commander of field forces in wartime. The two 

air components remained divided until March 1, 1939, when the GHQAF 

came under the control of the Chief of Air Corps. 

The MacArthur-Pratt agreement of 1931 made the Air Corps 

responsible for short-range coastal defense and Army operations on land, 

but left the Navy as America’s offensive force on the sea. Two developments changed this division of responsibility. First, advances in aviation 

technology made restrictions to short-range operations nonsensical, as 

when three B-17s intercepted the Italian liner Rex in the Atlantic over 

700 miles from America’s shores in 1937. Still, the Army continued buying, for the most part, short-range tactical aircraft, including the twinengine B-18, to support ground operations. Second, Adolf Hitler’s successful use of air power as a threat in the Sudetenland-Czechoslovakia 

crisis of 1938 convinced President Franklin Roosevelt that the United 

States needed a large air force “with which to impress Germany,” and 

ordered the acquisition of 10,000 aircraft (later 5,500) when Congress 

appropriated $300 million for the buildup. 

Brigadier General Frank Andrews with his staff at 

ceremonies inaugurating his leadership of the new General Headquarters Air Force’s (GHQAF’s) command. 

19 
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the Air 

Corps had 26,000 officers and airmen and a heavy bomber force of only 

23 B-17s. Chief of Air Corps Arnold had used President Roosevelt’s support and British and French orders for 10,OOO additional aircraft to launch 

a huge expansion of the aviation industry. With the fall of France in June 

1940, Roosevelt ordered an Air Corps of 50,000 aircraft and 54 combat 

groups. Congress appropriated $2 billion, eventually, to insure funding 

for both strategic and tactical air forces. In March 1941 the Air Corps 

expanded to 84 groups. These actions and events presaged what would 

become the largest air force in the world equipped with the most modem 

aircraft available. By December 1941, however, the Army’s air force still 

had only 3,304 combat aircraft, but World War I1 mainstays such as P-51 

Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters and the B-29 Superfortress 

bomber still were not operational. All would become part of the U.S. 

Army Air Forces (USAAF) led by Major General Hap Arnold, established under Army Regulation 95-5 on June 20, 1941, with the Air Corps 

and the Air Force Combat Command (formerly the GHQAF) as subordinate arms. Less than a year later, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall 

made the USAAF coequal to the Ground Forces and Services of Supply. 

In August 1941, at the behest of the War Department, USAAF 

Chief Arnold directed four former faculty members of the Air Corps 

Tactical School to devise an air plan against America’s potential adversaries. Lieutenant Colonels Kenneth Walker and Harold George and 

Majors Haywood Hansel1 and Laurence Kuter of the newly-formed Air 

War Plans Division (AWPD) identified in their plan 154 “chokepoint” 

targets in the German industrial fabric, the destruction of which, they 

held, would render Germany “incapable of continuing to fight a war.” A 

lack of intelligence prevented the design of a similar plan against Japan. 

The four planners calculated that the desired air campaign would require 

98 bomber groups-a force of over 6,800 aircraft. From their recommendation General Arnold determined the number of supporting units, aircraft, pilots, mechanics, and all other skills and equipment the USAAF 

would need to fight what became World War 11. The 239 groups estimated came close to the 243 combat groups representing 80,OOO aircraft and 

2.4 million personnel that actually formed the USAAF in 1944 at its 

wartime peak. The planners had also assumed that they would not have to 

initiate their air plan, known as AWPD/l, with a complete 98-group force 

until April 1944. However, they were not allowed the luxury of time. 

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor four months after the air plan’s 

submission to the War Department, an ill-equipped USAAF found itself 

thrust into the greatest war in human history. 

20 
World War 11-Global Conflict 

Despite the heroics of such airmen as Lieutenant George Welch, who 

was credited with having downed 4 enemy aircraft, the surprise strike on 

Pearl Harbor showed the limitations of the USAAF’s preparations for 

war. The Hawaiian Air Force lost 66 percent of its strength on December 

7, 1941, while the Japanese lost only 29 pilots. Across the International 

Dateline, Lieutenant Joseph Moore claimed 2 Japanese aircraft the next 

day in the skies over Clark Field in the Philippines, but General Douglas 

MacArthur’s air force of 277 aircraft, including 2 squadrons of B-17s (35 

aircraft in all), was destroyed. These greatest concentrations of American 

air power at the time had failed to deter or hinder the Japanese. 

At the start of World War I a solid industrial infrastructure on 

which to construct the world’s greatest air force had not existed in the 

United States. At the start of World War I1 this was not the case. The aircraft manufacturing sector was large and growing daily. Before the war, 

General Arnold had established nine civilian primary flight training 

schools, two Air Corps basic flight training schools, and two Air Corps 

advanced flight training schools. The number of trained pilots had jumped from 300 in 1938 to 30,000 in 1941 (plus 110,OOO mechanics). On 

December 7,1941, the USAAF had a running start and was in the war for 

the duration. 

Arnold planned first for vastly expanded production, training, 

and resedch, with the long-term military interests of the nation in mind. 

While German factories maintained a one-shift peacetime work week 

until 1943, American plants ran around the clock. Swelled by hundreds of 

thousands of women, more than two million American workers built 

nearly 160,000 aircraft of all kinds for the Army and 140,000 for the 

Navy and Allied nations during the war. America’s aircraft production 

overwhelmed that of every other nation in the world. Altogether, its factories turned out 324,750 aircraft for the war effort; Germany’s factories 

turned out 11 1,077 and Japan’s 79,123. Where other nations stopped production lines to make modifications, or manufactured models long obsolescent, the United States, according to Arnold’s orders, left its factories 

alone to insure high production levels and established separate depots to 

modify and modernize older models. Until the German Me 262 jet, American aircraft set the standard for performance and combat success with 

their ruggedness (the B-17 Flying Fortress, B-24 Liberator, and P-47 

Thunderbolt); their range and bomb load (the B-29 Superfortress); their 

range, speed, and agility (the P-51 Mustang); and their utility (the C-47 

Skytrain). Eventually, they were to equip 243 groups, consuming about 

21 
Devastation and Renewal 

Pearl Harbor, December 7,1941. Japan’s surprise attack against 

American naval and air forces, above, at installations on the 

Hawaiian island of Oahu, precipitated the entry of a shocked United 

States into World War 11. It also set into motion an unprecedented 

arms buildup as America’s factories, below, churned out weapons of 

war such as these Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation B-24 

Liberator bombers on an around-the-clock basis. 
35 percent of America

s total investment in equipment and munitions for 

the war. They were supported and flown by two and a half million men 

and women, nearly a third of the U.S. Army’s total strength. 

As important as production to Arnold was training. The demands 

of flight required the best from the brightest. Voluntary enlistments 

swelled the USAAF initially, supplemented by a pool of deferred flyers 

previously enrolled in the Air Corps Enlisted Reserve. Flying Training 

Command prepared nearly 200,000 pilots, nearly 100,OOO navigators and 

bombardiers, and many hundreds of thousands of gunners and other specialists. American pilots received more uninterrupted training than those 

of any other nation, again because of Arnold’s strategic vision and America’s bountiful resources. Primary, basic, and advanced training were for 

individual flyers, brought together at operational training units under the 

First, Second, Third, and Fourth Air Forces and I Troop Carrier Command for forming into new units. Technical Training Command prepared 

over two million others, mostly mechanics and specialists to keep aircraft 

airworthy. Arnold and others labored to insure that the equipment these 

legions employed was the most advanced available. Research centers and 

test facilities sprang up all over the United States, dedicated to stretching 

aviation performance to the limit-and beyond. High octane aviation gasolines, radars, jets, rockets, radios, and special bombs were all products 

of the USAAF’s commitment to basic and applied research and development. 

This enormous aerial force was wielded by General Arnold, who 

assumed control over all USAAF units, with the War Department reorganization of March 1942. He quickly agreed with General George 

Marshall to postpone any discussion of an independent air force until 

after the war. However, Arnold was a member of both the American Joint 

Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the joint American and British Combined 

Chiefs of Staff. The March 1942 reorganization and Amold’s position on 

the Combined Chiefs of Staff, nevertheless, gave the USAAF a large 

measure of autonomy, which was subsequently enhanced with the formation of the Twentieth Air Force (responsible for the B-29 campaign 

against Japan and under Arnold’s direct command). A tireless commander, Arnold sacrificed his health building a winning air force. 

Before the United States entered the war, American and British 

officials met from January to March 1941 for the ABC-1 talks and agreed 

on a strategy for defeating the Axis nations. They decided that because 

Germany represented the stronger enemy, British forces in the Mediterranean would hold their positions. In the Pacific, American forces would 

go on the strategic defensive, while Allied armies in Europe built up for 

23 
g y 

Berlin. After December 1941, however, events worked to modify this 

strategy. First, the U.S. Navy successfully bid for higher priority in the 

Pacific in an early two-pronged assault on Japan, one from Australia and 

New Guinea through the Philippines, the other through the islands of the 

South and Central Pacific. Second, in Europe, British demands for action 

in the Mediterranean and the immediate need for a reduction of German 

pressure on the Soviet Union diverted British and American forces to 

fight in North Africa. These developments left only the England-based 

Allied air forces to attack the German homeland through a strategic 

bombing campaign. 

On June 12, 1942, the USAAF inaugurated operations in the 

Mediterranean, striking against the Ploesti, Romania, oil fields, a target 

American airmen would come to know well. Large-scale action began 

with Operation TORCH-the invasion of North Africa-six months later 

on November 8. American doctrinal and organizational problems allowed 

the German Lufmufle to achieve early domination in the air. Allied 

ground commanders demanded that air units maintain continuous air 

cover over Army formations. Their firepower thus diluted, “penny packets” patrolled the skies constantly, rarely finding the enemy, and were 

therefore not available in sufficient numbers when the Lujhafle made 

concentrated attacks. German pilots achieved a three-to-one advantage in 

aerial victories. At the Casablanca Conference, in late January 1943, the 

United States adopted a tactical doctrine formulated by British commanders Arthur Coningham and Bernard Montgomery after bloody fighting 

against Germany’s Afrika Korps. Air superiority became their first objective for the air arm, including deep sweeps against enemy airfields, followed by interdiction to isolate battlefields, and then close air support to 

assist ground units in their movements against the enemy. Air and ground 

commanders would work together, neither auxiliary to the other. 

Codified as Field Manual 31-35, this new doctrine of tactical 

warfare served the USAAF well. With their air forces organized into an 

independent Northwestern African Air Forces under General Carl Spaatz, 

including a Strategic Air Force under General Jimmy Doolittle and a 

Tactical Air Force under Coningham, the Allies achieved air superiority 

in the spring of 1943 and cut the flow of supplies and reinforcements to 

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s army in North Africa. Allied commanders had the assistance of ULTRA intercepts, the top secret code-breaking operation, that provided detailed information about German ship and 

aircraft schedules. Axis armies in Tunisia, numbering 270,000 men, surrendered in May. 

24 
Principal American participants at the Casablanca 

Conference in French Morocco. Planning meetings on 

Allied war strategy between President Roosevelt, Prime 

Minister Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff 

in January 1943 included Lieutenant General Henry 

Arnold, Commanding General, USAAF. Seated, leji to 

right, General George Marshall, President Roosevelt, 

and Admiral Ernest King. Standing, left to right, Harry 

Hopkins, General Arnold, General Brehon Somervell, 

and Averell Harriman. 

These initial steps toward organizing air power as an independent, unified force also led Army Chief of Staff George Marshall to issue 

Field Manual 100-20 in 1943. This document, the USAAF’s “declaration 

of independence,” recognized “land power and air power” to be “coequal 

and interdependent forces.” In the Mediterranean, the Twelfth Air Force 

neutralized the Lufcwaffe when Allied forces invaded Sicily in July and 

the Italian peninsula in September. Tough fighting slowed Lieutenant 

General Mark Clark’s forces as they pushed northward, forcing him to 

rely increasingly on US AAF assistance to break through German lines. 

Since the bombing of the abbey at Monte Cassino failed to break the 

stalemate on the ground, US AAF units focused their attention on interdiction. Operation STRANGLE hoped to cut the flow of supplies to 

German defenders in Italy. The Twelfth Air Force learned how difficult 

that could be. Downing bridges, strafing trains and trucks, and bombing 

supply dumps contributed to eventual victory in 1945, but the protection 

of darkness gave the enemy opportunities to supply its forces. 

25 
gg pgg

sources of Germany’s power as the most efficient and effective means of 

achieving victory. With the United States on the defensive in the Pacific 

and Allied units bogged down in North Africa, the Eighth Air Force in 

England joined the Royal Air Force (RAF) in the largest strategic bombing campaign ever attempted. Progress was slow through 1943. Airfields 

had to be built, crews trained, aircraft modified. Circumstances diverted 

Eighth Air Force units to pressing needs elsewhere in the world. The first 

official bombing mission did not come until August 17, 1942, when 

twelve B-17s of the 97th Bomb Group, accompanied by Eighth Air Force 

commander Ira Eaker, attacked a marshalling yard in France. The Eighth 

Air Force, along with the RAF and the Italy-based Fifteenth Air Force 

(beginning in late 1943), would be the only Allied forces attacking targets 

inside Germany’s borders until late 1944. 

Missions through the summer of 1943 were trial and error, as the 

Eighth Air Force slowly pushed deeper into German-occupied territory. 

Prewar doctrine dictated that unescorted self-defending bombers could 

fight their way through air defenses to destroy targets in an enemy’s 

heartland. Attacking in small numbers (AWPD/l had called for a force of 

6,834 bombers), the US AAF was severely tested by poor weather, bombing inaccuracy, diversions of bombers to North Africa and against submarine pens, and stiff enemy defenses as it attempted to get at Germany’s 

industrial web. 

While the Eighth Air Force labored to overcome these challenges, the Air Staff, the AWPD, and the Committee of Operations 

Analysts worked to identify for destruction chokepoints in the German 

war economy. Although RAF Bomber Command’s Arthur Harris wanted 

the USAAF to join him in a night campaign of area bombing to destroy 

Germany’s cities, the Combined Chiefs of Staff at the Casablanca Conference gave its support for daylight precision strategic bombing. 

AWPD/I had identified 154 targets. A new plan, AWPDf42 found 177. In 

late April 1943 at the Trident Conference, the Combined Chiefs approved 

a list of 76 targets as Eighth Air Force objectives. The Eighth Air Force, 

with the RAF, was to win air superiority, an “intermediate objective second to none in priority,” and weaken Germany enough to allow an invasion. Its undertaking was to be known as Operation POINTBLANK, the 

Combined Bomber Offensive. 

The pace of operations intensified for the 17 groups General 

Eaker had available in July 1943. Brigadier General Laurence Kuter and 

Colonel Curtis LeMay worked out combat formations at the wing and 

group levels to maximize the number of defensive machine guns to be 

26 
ggg gy yp

ting, the Eighth Air Force struck at German airfields, aircraft depots, and 

aircraft industry, hoping to win air superiority by bombing the Lufiuffe 

on the ground; in late July alone it lost 10 percent of its attacking 

bombers, In August it struck at ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt and 

the Messerschmitt aircraft factory at Regensburg while the Twelfth Air 

Force hit oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania, and aircraft factories in 

Wiener Neustadt. Eighth Air Force P-47 Thunderbolt fighters were soon 

outfitted with drop tanks, which extended their range and were intended 

to reduce losses as they escorted the bombers, but the Lufiuffe simply 

withheld attacking until they ran short of fuel and had to return to 

England. 

The second week of October 1943 marked the high point in the 

Eighth Air Force’s initial campaign. Scoring some bombing successes, 

General Eaker’s command lost 8 percent of its bombers over Bremen, 8 

percent over Anklam-Marienburg, I3 percent over Munster, and 26 percent in a return trip to Schweinfurt. The loss of over 1,OOO crewmen and 

nearly 150 bombers forced a change in American strategy. First, Arnold 

ordered a11 long-range P-38 Lightning and P-51 Mustang groups completing training in the United States to England to provide escort for the 

bombers for the duration of the war. Second, he created a new strategic 

air force in Italy, the Fifteenth, to attack Germany from the south. Third, 

he revised the command structure of the strategic bombing effort, moving General Spaatz to England as head of United States Strategic Air 

Forces in Europe (USSTAF) to command the bombing campaign against 

Germany, assisted by Fred Anderson and Jimmy Doolittle as operational 

commanders and William Kepner as fighter commander. Eaker went to 

command the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, including the Fifteenth 

and Twelfth Air Forces. 

Change came quickly. Kepner revised fighter tactics to include 

phased and relay escort to extend the range of the fighters accompanying 

the bombers deep into Germany, especially when P-51 groups began 

arriving in December 1943. Doolittle ordered Kepner to unleash his fighters, assigned not just to escort bombers, but to go out, find, and destroy 

Lufiuffe aircraft. Kepner told his pilots to strafe German fighters on the 

ground if necessary. On February 20, 1944, Spaatz and Anderson began 

an all-out bombing offensive against German aircraft production. Five 

days of bombing, nineteen thousand tons worth, impaired some production; but the key to Big Week’s effectiveness was the Luftwaffe’s loss of 

one-third of its strength through aerial combat, and the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces growth in theirs. 

27 
To keep up the pressure, Spaatz and Anderson resolved to bomb 

industrial targets in Berlin, under the assumption that the Luftwuffe would 

make an all-out effort to defend its capital. Their assumption was correct. 

Two days of the heaviest fighting yet seen in the skies over Germany so 

depleted the defender’s forces that on the third day, March 9, 1944, the 

Luftwuffe failed to rise and give battle. Anderson relished reports that 

Berlin radio was “squealing like a stuck pig.” The Luftwufle grew weaker and the USAAF grew stronger as new groups, both fighter and bomber, 

arrived from the United States. A flood of men and materiel bespoke 

Arnold’s 1941 commitment to prepare for a long war. Further attrition of 

the German defenders would be necessary in future months, but air superiority was now firmly in American hands. 

To Arnold and Spaatz, this hard-won victory finally opened 

German industries to destruction from the air. Two conditions affected the 

strategic bombing effort and delayed the final bombing campaign. The 

pending V-weapon assault by Germany on England forced a massive 

preemptive Allied bombing campaign against it, diverting 6,100 sorties 

from POINTBLANK strategic targets. The cross-channel invasion, 

American air leaders in Europe. Center, Carl Spaatz, Commanding 

General, United States Strategic Air Forces (USSTAF), in the top command 

position over America’s air chiefs; left, Ira Eaker, Commanding General, 

Mediterranean Allied Air Forces (MAAF); right, Frederick Anderson, 

Deputy for Operations, USSTAF; and, below, William Kepner, Commanding 

General, Eighth Fighter Command, and Jimmy Doolittle, Commanding 

General, Eighth Air Force. 

28 
scheduled by the Allies for late spring, diverted Eighth Air Force 

bombers against transportation targets in France to isolate the invasion 

area. In support of the invasion, Spaatz wanted to go after German oil targets to ground the Lufhyuffe and force the German army to park its vehicles. Invasion commander General Dwight Eisenhower overruled him on 

March 25, assigning USSTAF to interdict the landing area. VIII Fighter 

Command under Kepner continued to strafe German airfields and other 

ground targets through June. 

When eight Allied divisions landed in Normandy on June 6, 

1944, they did so under conditions of near total Allied control of the air, 

courtesy of USSTAF-only two Lufhyuffe fighters appeared in the area 

that day. In late July USSTAF bombers again proved critical to the ground 

campaign as they blasted a hole through German lines at St. L6 for 

Lieutenant General George Patton’s Third Army. Allied tactical air forces, which included Major General Elwood Quesada’s IX Tactical Air 

Command for the First Army and Major General Otto Weyland’s XIX 

Tactical Air Command for the Third Army, provided protective cover and 

close air support, in line with procedures established in North Africa, for 

Allied armies sweeping across France toward Germany. At ArgentanFalaise in August air power plugged the gap between encircling American anid Canadian armies, destroying hundreds of German armored 

vehicles and aiding in the capture of fifty thousand German troops. 

During the Battle of the Bulge in December, airlift, aerial interdiction, 

and close air support helped turn a near-disaster into an Allied victory. 

Eighth and Fifteenth Air Force attacks on Germany’s fuel industry provided immeasurable help to the ground offensives, restricting 

severely the ability of German ground forces to maneuver their armored 

and mechanized units. Allied air superiority, a product of the Eighth Air 

Force’s aerial campaign, had permitted the landings in Europe, the Allied 

armies freedom of maneuver, and resupply without concern for the 

Lufhyufs.. Germany had shown the world in 1939 and 1940 what close 

coordination between tactical air power and ground armies could accomplish. The USAAF repaid the favor with a vengeance in the drive from 

Normandy into Germany in 1944 and early 1945. 

Eisenhower held first call on Spaatz’s strategic bombing force 

through the summer of 1944, but allowed it to return to POINTBLANK 

objectives with an assault on Germany’s oil production when it was not 

bombing targets in France in support of ground units. ULTRA intercepts 

confirmed that the USAAF had finally found a true chokepoint in the 

German industrial economy. German armaments minister Albert Speer 

predicted that continued attacks on it would have “tragic consequences.” 

29 
America’s Air War in Europe 

The formidable aerial armada unleashed by the USAAF’s victorious Eighth, 

Ninth, Twelfth, and Fifteenth Air Forces against enemy targets in Europe during 

World War I1 included, top to bottom, Consolidated B-24 Liberator and Boeing 

B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, and, performing fighter, escort, and close air support duties, North American P-51 Mustangs and Republic P-47 Thunderbolts. 

Despite heroic efforts to restore production, Germany found its tanks and 

aircraft immobilized because of growing fuel shortages. The entrance of 

the Me 262 jet fighter into combat inflicted occasional heavy losses on 

USSTAE, including thirty -three of the 445th Bombardment Group’s thirty-seven bombers on September 27, 1944, but it could not change the 

war’s outcome. 

Adding Germany’s railroad network to its priority target list in 

the autumn of 1944, USSTAF brought Germany’s economy to the point 

of collapse by February 1945. Responding to temporary German successes during the Battle of the Bulge, Soviet requests, and a desire to hasten the enemy’s surrender, USSTAF joined with the RAF in area-bombing Berlin, Dresden, and other German cities in February. Assigned targets remained industrial and transportation chokepoints in keeping with 

precision strategic bombing doctrine, but clouds and other factors made 

these missions, in effect, terror bombings. Spaatz declared an end to the 

strategic bombing campaign on April 16, 1945. 

American airmen had decided that they could defeat the enemy 

most efficiently by destroying its industrial web through precision strategic bombing. In so doing they hoped to prevent a repeat of World War 1’s 

trench warfare. Ironically, the contest they found in the skies over Europe 

from 1942 to 1945 was in many ways just as bloody as the earlier war’s 

contest on the ground. Medal of Honor recipient Lieutenant William 

Lawley of the 305th Bombardment Group flew a B-17 back from 

Heiterblick, over 550 miles, with a face full of broken glass and shrapnel, 

a dead copilot draped over the controls, wounded crewmen, and only one 

engine running. The numbers associated with the USAAF’s tactical and 

strategic campaigns against Germany reveal the ferocity of the air war: 

1.6 million tons of bombs dropped on Europe, 765,000 bomber sorties, 

929,000 fighter sorties, 31,914 airmen dead (by combat and accident), 

and 27,694 aircraft lost (by combat and accident). 

In the waning days of the war against Germany, Arnold ordered 

an independent team to evaluate air power’s accomplishments and failures. Their product, called the United States Strategic Bombing Survey 

(USSBS) and supported by 216 volumes of analysis and documentation 

on the European war (another 109 covered the war against Japan), concluded “that even a first-class military power-rugged and resilient as 

Germany was-cannot live long under full-scale and free exploitation of 

air weapons over the heart of its territory.” The USSBS admitted that a 

slow buildup of aerial forces and inaccurate bombing had kept air power 

from reaching its potential, but judged as “decisive” the diversion of 

Germany’s capabilities from the supporting of armies to the defending of 

32 
its own skies, the attrition of enemy air forces, and the destruction of 

enemy oil supplies and transportation networks. The strategic bombing 

campaign forced Germany to divert 40 percent of its industry to aerial 

defense, 2 million of its workers to manufacturing supplies and equipment for air defense, 2 million of its soldiers to manning ground defenses, and 2.5 million of its laborers to cleaning up the damage. Victory in 

the air was “complete,” and air power had helped “turn the tide overwhelmingly in favor of Allied ground forces.” 

Despite Europe’s priority in Allied planning, America’s first strategic bombing effort of the war began against Japan, when sixteen B-25 

Mitchell bombers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy 

Doolittle and launched from the USS Hornet attacked targets on the 

Japanese home island of Honshu in mid-April 1942. Although militarily 

insignificant, the Doolittle raid embarrassed and infuriated Japanese military leaders and raised Allied morale. It was an omen of what Japan 

could expect from America’s air power. 

All the while, the Pacific war was more than just half-a-world 

away. In Europe the United States had powerful allies to consult and support at every turn. Except for the British Empire’s forces in India, Burma, 

and Australia, the war against Japan was an American show. Europe had 

Eisenhower to unite British and American armies, navies, and air forces. 

In the Pacific, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy competed in the drive 

toward the Japanese homeland. In General Douglas MacArthur ’s 

Southwest Pacific Area, the U.S. Army fought from Australia through 

New Guinea to Leyte and Luzon in the Philippines. In Admiral Chester 

Nimitz’s Pacific Ocean Areas, the U.S. Navy moved among the islands 

from the Solomons and Gilberts through the Marshalls, Carolines, and 

Marianas to Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Combined with a lesser American 

effort to support China’s war against Japan, the distances involved 

insured a major role for the USAAF. 

In the Army’s initial fighting on Papua New Guinea, thick jungles, rugged terrain, and inadequate forces restricted the help the US AAF 

could provide for MacArthur’s hard-pressed command. By December 

I942 the Fifth Air Force under Major General George Kenney had sufficient numbers of P-38s to seize air superiority over the island, allowing 

its B-17, B-24, B-25, and A-20 bombers to cut the flow of Japanese 

reinforcements and supplies. Kenney proved the master tactical innovator, developing skip bombing to sink enemy ships and arming his medium bombers with extra nose-mounted machine guns and even 75-mm 

cannon to improve their firepower. Kenney took a “seamless” approach 

to air power that had, in Carl Spaatz’s words, “no line of cleavage 

33 
Molding the Line in the Pacific 

Top, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his Tokyo Raiders on board the USS 

Hornet, from whose deck they flew a formation of North American B-25 Mitchell 

bombers to attack the home of the Japanese empire and raise the spirits of discouraged Americans in 1942. Captain Marc Mitscher, the Hornet’s skipper, stands at 

Doolittle’s left; center; lef, Major General Claire Chennault, leader of the legendary 

Flying Tigers and, bottom, lefr, Major General George Kenney, Commanding 

General, Fifth Air Force, fought the conquest-hungry Japanese valiantly while 

Allied resources were directed to “Europe first”; center; right, the Douglas C-47 

Skytrain transport, an indispensable workhorse in Asia. C-47 “Hump” flights from 

the U.S. Tenth Air Force’s hastily-built base in Assam, India, over the Himalayas 

relieved the beleaguered Allies fighting in China after the Japanese cut off their 

overland supply route; bottom, right, Brigadier Generals Heywood Hansel1 and 

Curtis LeMay, first and second leaders of XXI Bomber Command of the Twentieth 

Air Force. LeMay employed the command’s B-29s, prone to engine fires and imprecise targeting at high altitudes, as successful medium-altitude bombers in indendiary 

raids over much of Japan. 
between strategic and tactical air forces.

 One day his heavy bombers 

would attack enemy troop formations hundreds of feet from American 

lines; the next, they pursued enemy shipping hundreds of miles behind 

enemy lines. 

General MacArthur adopted an island-hopping strategy, skipping 

over large enemy forces in the American drive northward, and, because 

of the Fifth Air Force’s command of the air, leaving isolated Japanese 

garrisons to starve, cut off from resupply and rescue. The range of 

General Kenney’s aircraft determined the distance to the next objective. 

By October 1944 MacArthur’s army was ready to leap from New Guinea 

to Leyte in the Philippines, a target beyond the range of land-based air 

power. Admiral William Halsey’s carriers provided air cover until 

Kenney’s Far East Air Forces (FEAF), which combined the Fifth and 

Thirteenth Air Forces, could move to the Philippines. There, FEAF 

became engaged in the Army’s longest Pacific land campaign, which continued until the end of the war. 

$’he USAAF also became involved in the frustrating and costly 

effort to keep Chiang Kai-shek‘s China in the war, tying down dozens of 

Japanese divisions. Initially this involved Claire Chennault’s small mercenary force of private American pilots in China’s pay, the Flying Tigers, 

who captured headlines in the United States when victories of any kind 

were few in number. With their occupation of Siam and Burma by mid1942 the Japanese had isolated China, blockading it by sea and cutting 

supply roads. The USAAF had little choice but to launch a resupply effort 

into China over the “Hump”-the Himalaya Mountains-from India. The 

route took American crews above some of the most dangerous terrain in 

the world in overloaded C-46 and (2-47 transports not designed for the 

weather and high altitudes the missions required. By war’s end Hump 

pilots had ferried 1.18 million tons of supplies from India into China for 

the fight against Japan. 

Although America’s original Pacific strategy sought to choke the 

enemy through a naval blockade, after three years of war Japan remained 

unwilling to surrender. For Hap Arnold, a strategic bombing campaign 

employing B-29s would force it to capitulate, obviate the need for an 

Allied land invasion, and present an opportunity to prove the war-winning potemtial of an independent air force. The JCS had approved Arnold, 

as their executive agent, to command the Superfortresses of the Twentieth 

Air Force. They could strike from fifteen hundred miles, but even their 

great range left few options for bases from which to launch the air assault. 

Nimitz’s drive through the Marianas in the summer of 1944 freed Tinian, 

Guam, and Saipan to base the B-29s of Brigadier General Haywood 

35 
America’s Air War in Asia 

Left, the mainstay of Allied victory in Asia, the rapidly-developed 

Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, 

not deployed in Europe, but saved to 

surprise the Japanese. It had both 

the longer range and the capacity to 

carry the atomic bomb to the heart 

of Japan itself from bases on formerly enemy-held southern Pacific 

islands. 

Right, the North American B-25 Mitchell 

bomber, strengthened with more firepower 

by General Kenney’s great innovator, Major 

Paul “Pappy” Gunn, and used as a highly 

effective ship buster and skip bomber. 

Lef, the sturdy Douglas A-20 Havoc. 

More A-20s were procured by the USAAF 

than any other attack-type aircraft. They 

saw service in Europe and North Africa but 

played a vital role in the Pacific dropping 

“parafrags” (fragmentation bombs attached to parachutes) from low altitude. 

Right, the distinctively silhouetted, 

long-range, twin-engine Lockheed P-38 

Lightning fighter. In mass production 

before the United States entered the 

war, it served escort duty in Europe, 

North Africa, and, as early as 1942, in 

the Southwest Pacific. 

I!.& the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter, associated with the exploits of the 

American Volunteer Group’s (AVG’s) 

famous Flying Tigers The AVG began 

operating from bases in western China 

against the Japanese before the United 

States entered the war. The aircraft’s decorative shark’s teeth are recognized the 

world over. 
Hard-won victory. Top to bottom: USAAF airmen of the Fifth, Seventh, Thirteenth, and Wentieth Air Forces helped American soldiers and seamen achieve a 

stunning Allied triumph in World War 11’s Asian theaters. Facing the vastness of the 

Pacific, they fought grueling and costly island-hopping battles to gain forward bases 

from which they could launch aerial attacks against a seemingly implacable enemy, 

and time and again they sought out jungle-shrouded coastal and mountain strongholds, airfields, and well-armed, heavily escorted ship convoys. Atomic bombs over 

Nagasaki and Hiroshima finally ended the war and saved the lives of thousands of 

Americans who would have perished invading the Japanese home islands. 
based Twentieth Air Force. Iwo Jima, conquered after heavy fighting in 

February 1945, provided an emergency landing field for damaged B-29s 

and a base for P-51 fighter escorts. After a largely futile strategic bombing effort from India and China in 1944, XX Bomber Command joined 

Hansell’s growing force in the Marianas early in 1945 for the final strikes 

against Japan. 

Hansell, an author of AWPD/l, stayed true to high-altitude daylight precision strategic bombing doctrine, beginning with XXI Bomber 

Command’s first mission against the Japanese home islands on 

November 24, 1944. His assignment was to “achieve the earliest possible 

progressive dislocation of the Japanese military, industrial, and economic systems and to undermine the morale of the Japanese people to a point 

where their capacity and will to wage war was decisively weakened.” He 

faced technical problems (including B-29 engines that tended to burst 

into flames), unanticipated 200 mile-per-hour winds of the jet stream over 

the home islands, and bad weather when striking mainly at Japan’s aviation industries. At high altitude bombing accuracy was minimal; only 10 

percent of bombs dropped fell within 1,000 feet of a target. Twenty-two 

missions disabled only one factory. 

Arnold replaced Hansell with Major General Curtis LeMay in 

January 1945, with orders to achieve immediate results. During January 

and February 1945, LeMay’s results were no better than Hansell’s. He 

then surmised that Japanese industry was too dispersed and bombing 

accuracy too poor for a precision campaign from high altitude in daylight. 

Recognizing that Japanese air defenses were far weaker than those he had 

encountered in Germany, but still taking a great gamble to produce immediate results, he ordered his crews to remove their defensive guns and fly 

low (at seven thousand feet) by night to carry heavier bomb loads, and 

bum down Japan’s cities with incendiaries. The initial raid against Tokyo 

on March 10, 1945, burned 15.8 square miles of urban area, killed almost 

85,000, wounded almost 45,000, made almost 1 million homeless, and 

became the most deadly air attack in history. By August LeMay’s air 

force had burned 150 square miles in 68 Japanese cities-few of significant size remained undamaged. Faced with an implacable enemy unwilling to surrender and the prospect of a costly invasion, but equipped with 

a new weapon of tremendous destructive capability, President Harry 

Truman ordered the first atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 

6 and a second on Nagasaki three days later. Japan surrendered on August 

14 after strategic bombing had levelled all of its major cities and killed or 

injured 800,000 of its people. 

38 
Given the great flying distances over open sea, the Pacific war 

cost the United States over 13,000 aircraft. Most were lost in transit, to 

battle damage, and through general wear-out. At war’s end, the USAAF 

claimed 9,100 Japanese aircraft destroyed in combat. America’s top ranking ace of all time, Medal of Honor recipient Major Richard Bong, 

became one of the war’s last statistics when he crashed in California, testflying a jet. The Allies used 502,781 tons of bombs against Japan, 

160,800 of which were dropped on the home islands. The the B-29 mining campaign and the naval blockade had destroyed Japan’s economy, but 

only a strategic bombing campaign convinced its leaders to surrender. 

From 1939 to 1945 the USAAF’s personnel strength grew from 

24,000 to 2,253,000; its aircraft inventory from 2,400 to 63,715. It 

dropped 2.05 million tons of bombs in World War 11, flying and fighting 

over every ocean and six continents. Strategic bombing and air power did 

not live up to doctrinal expectations and win the war independently, but 

the USAAF forced enemy nations to divert enormous resources and effort 

toward defending their skies against it. If the USAAF did not make the 

Army and Navy obsolete, it insured that they rarely had to face the full 

force of enemy counterparts. Generals learned that air superiority and 

close air support were essential to the success of any ground campaign 

and that battlefield air interdiction was perhaps the most difficult of air 

power functions. North African operations proved that air power worked 

best when its forces were concentrated and directed as an independent or 

at least autonomous arm to achieve wartime objectives-coequal to the 

ground forces, auxiliary to neither. Finally, and to Arnold perhaps most 

important, the USAAF learned that air power meant planning, organization, training, and harnessing technology and science to produce new ordCommanding General, US. Army 

Air Forces, Henry “Hap” Arnold. 

Under his leadership and fresh from 

victory in World War 11, the USAAF 

was well-positioned for separation 

from and equality with the Army as a 

fully independent service. 

39 
, , j, , y 

success in combat. 

Air Power in the Nuclear Age 

After the war the U.S. Army Air Forces established a number of 

major Commands-Strategic Air Command (SAC), Air Defense Command (ADC), Tactical Air Command (TAC), Air Materiel Command 

(AMC), and Air Transport Command (ATC, which later became Military 

Air Transport Service [MATS] and then Military Airlift Command 

[MAC]), among others. Before his retirement, Hap Arnold, working to 

insure that America’s air force remained at the forefront of science and 

technology, established a civilian Scientific Advisory Group (now the 

Scientific Advisory Board), the RAND Corporation “think tank,” and 

several flight testing and engineering centers. Arnold proclaimed “the 

first essential” of air power to be “preeminence in research.” He and 

General Spaatz proclaimed the second to be education, establishing Air 

University as a major command. 

If the USAAF remained subordinate to the Army, its wartime 

record and the atomic bomb guaranteed that its status would change. The 

atomic bomb had altered the nature of warfare. The organization that delivered it, the Twentieth Air Force, was the predecessor of SAC, soon to 

become the world’s dominant military force and responsible for conducting long-range combat and reconnaissance operations anywhere in the 

world. The USSBS had concluded from World War I1 that “the best way 

to win a war is to prevent it from occurring.” A Strategic Air Command, 

properly equipped and trained, also would help deter any adversary state 

from starting a global nuclear war and would thereby ensure international peace. 

At war’s end the USAAF continued its quest for an American 

military establishment composed of three coequal and separate military 

departments. The Navy Department opposed unification and the formation of a separate air force, but the War Department, led by General of the 

Army Dwight Eisenhower, supported the drive for a separate air component. The National Security Act of July 26,1947, was a compromise, creating a National Military Establishment under a civilian Secretary of 

National Defense, with three coequal services that preserved the air arms 

for the Navy and Marines. President Truman’s first choice for Secretary 

of National Defense, Robert Patterson, turned down the job and James 

Forrestal, then serving as Secretary of the Navy, was appointed. The U.S. 

40 
the Department of the Air Force, headed by Secretary of the Air Force 

Stuart Symington. General Carl Spaatz was named the first Air Force 

Chief of Staff. 

At a time of demobilization, the National Security Act only postponed a confrontation between the Navy and Air Force over roles and 

missions in an era of declining defense dollars. For over a century, the 

Navy had been America’s first line of defense and its offensive arm overseas until the era of the long-range bomber and the atomic bomb. Air 

power appealed to an American love of technology, a desire to avoid 

heavy casualties, and to austerity-minded presidents like Harry Truman 

and especially Dwight Eisenhower. The atomic bomb made air power the 

preeminent force in the postwar world. Giant six- and later ten-engine 

B-36 Peacemakers seemed to eclipse the Navy’s expensive and vulnerable aircraft carriers in the nuclear world. A group of naval officers, led by 

Admirals Louis Denfeld, Chief of Naval Operations, and Arthur Radford, 

protested when budget restraints forced a Navy cutback from eight to four 

carriers and the cancellation of a planned supercarrier, the USS United 

States, large enough to launch atom bomb-carrying aircraft. The outbreak 

of war in Korea in June 1950 ensured higher defense budgets and limited 

further interservice contention. 

Among the changes wrought by World War I1 for the U.S. Air 

Force was that affecting its basic composition. What had been a predominantly white male force became over time more representative of American diversity. African Americans had served in many roles during 

World War 11, most visibly as fighter pilots in the 332d Fighter Group in 

Italy. Their combat record helped pave the way for the full racial integration of the armed forces under President Truman’s July 1948 Executive 

Order 9981 which stated: “There shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the Armed Services without regard to race.” The 

Air Force achieved racial integration quickly and smoothly, eliminating 

its last segregated unit (the 332d Wing) in June 1949. American airmen 

first fought together without racial separation during the Korean WarCaptain Daniel “Chappie” James, Jr., an African-American recognized 

and decorated for his performance as a reconnaissance pilot, came out of 

that experience. Equal opportunities and promotions for African 

Americans came more slowly, however, causing several riots at Air Force 

installations in the 1970s; but the service’s commitment to a strong equal 

opportunity program erased remaining racial barriers. The armed services 

in general were ahead of the rest of American society on this issue. 

41 
The newly independent U.S. Air Force’s (USAF’s) 

first Secretary, Stuart Symington, and its first Chief of 

Staff, General Carl Spaatz. 

Similarly, the Air Force helped lead the nation in the struggle to 

extend equal opportunities to women; 29,323 women served in the Army 

Air Forces in World War I1 as part of the Women’s Army Corps (established on July 1, 1943); another 1,074 served as civilian Women’s Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS). Under the leadership of Nancy Love and 

Jacqueline Cochran, WASPs ferried aircraft and trained male airmen. 

President Truman signed the Women’s Armed Services Act on June 12, 

1948, establishing the WAFS (Women in the Air Force). Another barrier 

to professional advancement was removed in 1976 when women entered 

Air Force non-combat pilot training programs for the first time. 

Atomic bombs carried by strategic bombers eventually ruled 

postwar Air Force and Department of Defense (DOD) war planning. Only 

aircraft such as the B-29 Superfortress, the B-36 Peacemaker, and the 

WASPs (Women’s Airforce Service Pilots) 

and Martin B-26 Marauders. 

42 
all-jet B-47 Stratojet, could carry atomic bombs that weighed upwards of 

10,000 pounds (the Mark 11-IV series). The Atomic Energy Commission 

(AEC), formed in 1946 to replace the wartime Manhattan Engineering 

District, succeeded in reducing the size of the bomb (the Mark 7 weighed 

1,680 pounds) but did not change the basic atomic equation. A handful of 

Air Force bombers carried more power than all of history’s armies and 

navies combined. 

Under postwar demobilization, which affected the AEC just as 

much as the armed services, the nation’s stockpile of atomic weapons 

rose to only nine in 1946. In 1947 the commission took over weaponsbuilding programs and the stockpile reached thirteen as the Truman 

administration and the JCS discussed the level of production necessary to 

maintain an effective deterrent. In December 1947 the JCS approved a 

The enormous ten-engine Convair bomber, the B-36 Peacemaker, the largest aircraft ever to serve with the USAF. With 

atomic bomb-carrying capacity and intercontinental range, 

the B-36 was ordered in 1941 and debuted in 1946. When its J 

variant was retired in 1959 Strategic Air Command (SAC) 

became an all-jet force. 

goal of 400 weapons for the AEC. At the same time, while SAC began to 

recover from the chaos of demobilization, its state of readiness remained 

low. Under General George C. Kenney and his deputy, Major General 

Clements McMullen, it assigned high priority to establishing a rigorous 

aircrew training program. This program, the secrecy that shrouded atomic weapons jealously guarded by the AEC, and the lack of information 

available to operational forces limited SAC’S potential as an atomic strike 

force. 

43 
In addition, vast distances to targets challenged the skill and endurance of its aircrews. Although SAC operated the B-36 intercontinental bomber to strike anywhere in the world, it initiated the development 

of an aerial refueling capability in fall 1947. In 1948 it adopted the British 

hose method, converting some piston-engine B-29s to tankers, and formed two aerial refueling squadrons in June 1948. SAC later adopted the 

Boeing flying boom method of refueling, made standard in 1958. Using 

four aerial refuelings, the B-50 Lucky Lady ZZ flew nonstop around the 

world between February 26 and March 2, 1949, to demonstrate the technique’s global strike potential. Destined to serve Air Force jet bombers 

and fighters for the next four decades and beyond, the jet turbine-powered 

KC-135 Stratotanker, became operational in 1957. 

The crisis that precipitated the Berlin Airlift began on June 24, 

1948. It revolved around American plans for rebuilding a separate West 

German State and led the Soviet Union to initiate a ground blockade of 

the Western-controlled zones of Berlin, 90 miles inside Soviet-controlled 

East Germany. Forcing the blockade would have required the West to 

launch a general mobilization, fire fiist shots, and possibly set off another global war. Although the United States had deployed the conventional 

B-29 to Europe, perhaps in a calculated bluff that relied on the aircraft’s 

reputation as an atomic delivery vehicle, the crisis continued. The Allies 

saw an apportunity to resupply Berlin and feed its 2.5 million beleaguered inhabitants by air through three air corridors guaranteed by agreement with the Soviet Union. Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay, then commanding U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), pieced together an airlift 

force of C-47 Skytrains left over from World War 11, but the 80 tons per 

day they supplied were not enough. On July 30, 1948, Major General 

William Tunner, who had run the Himalayan “Hump” airlift during the 

war, replaced LeMay, the combat leader. Reinforced with four-engine 

C-54 Skymasters and C-74 Globe-masters, Tunner initiated around-theclock flights guided by ground control approach radar. His aircraft landed every three minutes, carrying a record capacity of 5,620 tons per day. 

When the airlift appeared to succeed, the Soviet Union threatened to 

interfere with it. 

President Truman responded by sending a wing of B-29s, widely described in the world press at the time as “atomic” bombers, to England. They were not, but the Soviet Union apparently believed they were 

and made no move to interrupt the airlift. In May 1949 it provided the 

United States with the first victory of the Cold War (without a shot being 

fired) when, after eleven months, 277,000 flights, and 2.3 million tons of 

life-sustaining supplies, it opened Berlin to surface traffic. A few months 

44 
Aerial refueling. A Boeing KC-97 Stratofreighter 

nourishes a Boeing B-47 Stratojet, the USAF’s first 

swept-wing jet bomber. The B-47, as capable as the 

B-29 and the B-36 of carrying atomic weapons, played 

important roles in SAC and the Cold War. Eighteen 

solid rockets mounted at the rear of its fuselage, which 

was dedicated almost completely to bomb and fuel containment, maximized takeoff performance. The B-47 

served with the USAF from 1947 to 1969. 

later in late August, it exploded an atomic bomb of its own, causing 

Americans grave national security concerns. Almost before the Truman 

administration could respond, it faced a new crisis in Korea. 

Limited War In Korea 

When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 

1950, in a surprise attack, they awakened the United States to the dangers 

of brushfire war in the nuclear age. The earlier crisis of 1948 in Berlin, 

Communist successes in Czechoslovakia in 1948 and China in 1949, and 

news of the Soviet explosion of an atomic device in 1949, had prompted 

the National Security Council (NSC) to issue a secret directive, NSC-68, 

in April 1950. It judged the Soviet Union to be bent on world domination. 

NSC-68 called for a massive increase in defense spending of 20 percent 

of the gross national product if necessary, the development of a hydrogen 

bomb, and the containment of Communism. The sustained American-led 

buildup of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe was 

unmistakable evidence of containment, but Korea would be the first test 

of revitalized American resolve. 

45 
Principal American air commanders at the outset 

of the Korean War, Major General Earle Partridge, 

lef, Fifth Air Force, and Lieutenant General George 

Stratemeyer, right, Far Eastern Air Forces (FEAF). 

A heavy reliance on the nuclear strike force left the Air Force illprepared to deal with a conventional war on the other side of the globe. 

Moreover, when Congress approved the use of force to repel the North 

Korean invasion on June 30, 1950, the absence of a formal declaration of 

war introduced the Air Force to the new tribulations of limited war. The 

few air combat units of Major General Earle Partridge’s Fifth Air Force, 

the main combat force of Lieutenant General George Stratemeyer’s Far 

Eastern Air Forces (FEAF), launched interdiction raids against advancing 

North Korean units from bases in Japan in an attempt to slow their headlong rush down the Korean peninsula. Armed reconnaissance by fighters 

against targets of opportunity increased their effectiveness. 

The United Nations (U.N.) Security Council had called on member nations to aid South Korea on June 27, but for a time, the U.S. Air 

Force’s thin aluminum line was the only help harassed American and 

Republic of Korean ground forces could expect. B-26s of the 3d Bombardment Wing from Johnson Air Base in Japan put the interdiction effort 

on an around-the-clock basis with night intruder operations beginning on 

the night of June 27. B-29s of the 19th Bombardment Group, based at 

Kadena, Okinawa, added heavy bombs the next day. Continuing interdiction strikes (40 percent of all missions) against overextended North 

Korean supply lines and desperate ground action supported by air strikes 

(60 percent of all missions) saved U.N. forces trapped in the Pusan Perimeter. This success in direct support of U.N. troops freed Air Force units 

for strikes against strategic targets in North Korea. Accurate bombing in 

all weather conditions and North Korea’s small size allowed the B-29s to 

all but eliminate its industrial base by September 1950. 

General Douglas MacArthur, named Commander in Chief of the 

U.N. Command in Korea on July 8, launched a surprise amphibious land46 
Pusan Perimeter, clearing South Korea of North Korean forces. In early 

October the U.N. changed its objective from saving South Korea to unifying all of Korea under a pro-Westem government. Before the end of the 

month, as MacArthur’s army approached the Yalu River separating China 

from North Korea, signs pointed to probable Communist Chinese intervention. The Air Force switched to interdicting the flow of men and 

materiel across the Yalu bridges. The freezing of the Yalu River in 

January 195 1, and rules of engagement that forbade American overflights 

of Chinese territory on the north end of the bridges, condemned the effort 

to failure. B-29s had to fly above 20,000 feet to escape antiaircraft 

artillery fire from the Chinese side of the Yalu, but they could not fire 

back. That altitude and bombs errantly falling on Chinese temtory 

insured little success. Bombing became even more difficult when China 

escalated the conflict in November 1950 by sending Soviet-provided 

MiG-15 jet fighters, launched from safe sanctuary on lightning attacks 

against American aircraft, especially FEAF B-29s. The airspace just 

south of the Yalu River in northwestern Korea became known as “MiG 

Alley.” The performance advantages of the MiG-15 in speed and altitude 

initially held sway over propeller-driven P-5 1 Mustangs (pursuit aircraft 

redesignated by the Air Force as fighters in June 1948), jet-powered F-80 

Shooting Stars, and even newer F-84 Thunderjets. 

Chinese Communist forces counterattacked on November 26, 

driving U.N. units back toward South Korea. For the U.S. Air Force, this 

meant a genewed concentration on interdiction, combined with a campaign to maintain air superiority against the MiG-15s. Air Force airlift 

brought 1,600 tons of supplies to Marines cut off at Changjin (more widely known by its Japanese name, Chosin) Reservoir and evacuated 5,000 

wounded. After retreating, U.N. forces stabilized along the 38th parallel 

in early 1951 and the war deteriorated into a series of small, bloody battles, with no significant movement by either side. War objectives changed 

again. Peace talks opened in July 1951. They were backed by a new American strategy to force high rates of attrition on the enemy. It would be up 

to FEAF, now under Lieutenant General Otto Weyland, and U.S. naval 

aviation to carry the war beyond the front, to pressure North Korea and 

China into a ceasefire, substituting air power whenever possible for 

ground operations that inevitably resulted in high casualties. 

This strategy presented new threats and complications for the Air 

Force. Doctrine dictated strikes against the enemy’s industrial fabric, but 

the bombing operations of 1950 had destroyed these limited North Korean targets. Industries supporting the Communist war effort, located in 

47 
Korean War fighters. North American F-86 Sabres, top, and 

Republic F-84 Thunderjets, center, challenged Soviet MiG-15, bottom, sent into “MiG Alley” in northwestern Korea by Red China, to 

menace FEAF B-29s. Rules of engagement forbade the fighters from 

pursuing the MiGs across the border. 

China and the Soviet Union, were off limits to aerial attack. The Air 

Force had to operate under the rules and restrictions of limited war and 

could not bring SAC’S massive nuclear power to bear. FEAF B-29 

Superfortresses, supported by tactical aircraft, bombed targets all over 

North Korea with conventional weapons, including radar-directed highaltitude strikes against enemy troops forming for attack. They blurred the 

lines between tactical and strategic air power, proving the value of 

George Kenney ’s “seamless” approach. 

After China’s intervention, both the United States and the U.N. 

sought a more limited objective, that of a negotiated truce. Dissatisfied, 

48 
MacArthur advised Congress that 

there was no substitute for victory, 

and contradicted national policy. On April 11, 1951, President Truman 

fired MacArthur, replaced him with Matthew Ridgway, and in the process 

changed the nature of air warfare in Korea. The Air Force would still 

interdict the flow of supplies to Chinese units along the 38th Parallel and 

provide close air support to U.N. forces opposing them, but it would now 

also pressure the enemy into a settlement by inflicting maximum losses 

of men and materiel. The “police action” had become a war of attrition. 

The Fifth Air Force’s new commander, Lieutenant General Frank 

Everest, believed that interdiction was key to reducing the impact of 

Chinese offensives and U.N. ground losses. MiG-I 5s outnumbered F-86 

Sabres over North Korea by five-to-one in 1951. Thus the Air Force’s 

losses climbed as B-29s operated mainly at night. Complicating its air 

superiority campaign were air bases which the Chinese tried to build in 

North Korea to support their own forces and which FEW was compelled 

to target. F-86s engaged MiGs in air-to-air combat and B-29s cratered 

the air bases’ runways, forcing Communist jets to continue flying out of 

China and limiting their ability to challenge because of their short range. 

However, any bomb damage was quickly repaired by enemy labor units 

and necessitated continuous return missions. Interdiction, although costly, racked up long lists of destroyed trucks, trains, rail lines, and bridges, 

including the heavily-defended Yalu crossings. Nonetheless, supplies still 

reached Communist front lines in quantity by night. Medal of Honor 

recipient Captain John Walmsley, Jr., of the 8th Bombardment Squadron 

gave his life using his searchlight-equipped B-26 as a beacon to direct 

other B-26s while they bombed an enemy supply train on September 14, 

1951. As it had in Operation STRANGLE in Italy during World War 11, 

the Air Force learned that no air campaign was tougher than interdiction. 

By the spring of 1952 the Chinese had won the battle of interdiction and the Americans had failed in their attrition strategy along the 38th 

Parallel. Communist representatives, first at Kaesong and then at Panmunjon, stalled peace talks and demanded mandatory repatriation for 

prisoners-of-war. General Weyland proposed to break the impasse by 

expanding the air war against North Korea. As U.N. casualties climbed 

and negotiations dragged on, the new American commander in Korea, 

General Mark Clark, accepted Weyland’s proposal. In June 1952 he 

ordered the bombing of the Suiho Hydroelectric Complex, previously 

“off limits” and one of the largest facilities of its type in the world. It was 

a major exporter of electricity to Chinese industries across the border. A 

four-day onslaught over Suiho and other hydroelectric plants cost North 

Korea 90 percent of its power system. Through the remainder of 1952, the 

49 
Air Force attacked 78 cities and towns identified as supportive of a number of military functions, chiefly supply; however, to limit civilian casualties and weaken morale it alerted their inhabitants. 

In Korea, as in World War 11, the bombing of critical targets attracted the enemy’s air force into the sky, where it could be engaged. 

Intelligence revealed that China had a thousand MiGs ready for combat 

and Fifth Air Force fighter squadrons, for the first time in the war, did not 

have to go hunting-the “game” came to them. A new version of the 

F-86, the F model, gave Air Force pilots superior performance to go 

along with their better training and tactics. In May and June 1953 the 

F-86Fs achieved a 133-to-1 advantage in combat kills over the MiGs. 

Individual scores rose, with Air Force Captain Joseph McConnell, a B-24 

navigator in World War 11, topping all pilots with 16 confirmed victories 

in only four months. 

Three developments in 1953 brought peace to Korea. In March 

Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, a major obstacle, died. In May, Air Force 

bombers increased the frequency of their attacks again, striking North 

Korean irrigation dams that, when breached, washed away railroads and 

highways and threatened the nation’s rice crop. At the direction of President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Dulles asked Indian 

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to warn China that the United States 

intended to use tactical and strategic nuclear weapons and might unleash 

SAC against Chinese cities if a settlement was not forthcoming. On May 

27, 1953, China agreed to an armistice in Korea. It went into effect on 

July 27. 

The Korean War should have taught the United States that 

nuclear weapons had limited use in conventional wars, but the appeal of 

the new hydrogen bomb, first tested in November 1952, and plans for a 

new all-jet intercontinental bomber, the B-52, continued to dominate 

strategic thinking. TAC sought a new generation of fighters (the “century 

series,” including the F-100 Super Sabre, F-101 Voodoo, F-102 Delta 

Dagger, F-104 Starfighter, F-105 Thunderchief, and F-106 Delta Dart) 

with supersonic speeds, but also adapted them to cany tactical nuclear 

weapons. The Air Force realized that while turbojet technology was the 

future, it alone was no substitute for good training, tactics, and aggressiveness. Military casualties in Korea of over two million for both sides, 

including more than 54,000 dead Americans, belied the judgment that 

this was a “limited” war-Americans learned firsthand the costs of war 

in Asia. Air Force aircraft had dropped 476,000 tons of explosives to 

achieve a standoff. Korea exposed the Air Force to the reality of post50 
World War I1 warfare, where conventional (non

nuclear) air power would 

be used to “influence” an enemy, not to destroy it. 

The “New Look” Air Force 

After Korea, President Eisenhower told the JCS that the next war 

they planned would be nuclear. Conventional capabilities paled before 

super liquid deuterium bombs such as the Mark 17 (a 41,400-pound thermonuclear device). Only the Air Force B-36 Peacemaker and B-52 

Stratofortress could carry the weapon. How to defend America against 

the Soviet Union’s nuclear threat was the question of the day. Brushfire 

wars would be addressed when they arose, but, so the argument went, 

they should not occur under the threat of American nuclear retaliation. In 

January 1954, Secretary of State Dulles unveiled America’s new defense 

strategy-the “New Look.” The United States would deter any Soviet 

attack by threatening to destroy Soviet cities. Commanded by General 

Curtis LeMay, SAC would expand from 19 to 51 wings, armed with a 

new genleration of smaller, but enormously destructive high-yield thermonuclear weapons. These wings would be placed on constant alert, 

based around the world, and eventually augmented by KC-135 turbojet 

Stratotankers to extend their aircrafts’ range. In the mid-1950s the major 

portion of budgetary allocations to the Air Force went to SAC. This specified command, responsible for intercontinental nuclear retaliation, had 

become “an Air Force within an Air Force.” 

Besides acquiring such bomber aircraft as the B-52 Stratofortress 

and B-58 Hustler, the Air Force pursued missile development to support 

the “New Look.” Beginning in 1946, Project MX-774 investigated the 

development of a 5,000-mile ballistic missile, however, the Scientific 

Advisory Group, formed by General Arnold, cautioned that atomic 

bombs were too large for any such delivery system and directed its efforts 

toward large, unmanned cruise missiles like the Snark. Ballistic missile 

development lagged until the test of the hydrogen thermonuclear bomb in 

November 1952 offered prospects of smaller warheads with greater 

power. Intensive research began in 1954, accelerating in 1956 when the 

DOD assigned the Air Force responsibility for all ground-launched missiles with ranges of more than 200 miles (later changed to 500 miles). 

Success with the liquid-propellant Thor and Jupiter intermediate range 

ballistic missiles (IRBMs, operational in June 1960 and April 1961, 

respectively) and Atlas and Titan I intercontinental ballistic missiles 

(ICBMs, deployed from September 1960 to December 1962 and April to 

51 
Atlas, lef, and Titan I, right, intercontinental ballistic missiles were 

among several types that entered SAC’s defensive inventory after the 

Korean War. 

August 1962 respectively) came in time to carry a whole new generation 

of miniature nuclear and thermonuclear warheads. The solid-propellant 

Minuteman ICBM series followed, beginning in October 1962, and 

became the mainstay of SAC’s missile retaliatory force. The U.S. Air 

Force was becoming an aerospace force. 

Before ICBMs, manned bombers formed the strength behind the 

“New Look.” Airmen had argued since World War I that air power was 

essentially offensive, but they were compelled to view it as defensive in 

light of the damage that resulted from the explosion of even one nuclear 

weapon. To detect incoming attacks, President Truman approved the Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar line which, with Canada’s assent, was 

built across its northern territory beginning in 1954. To operate the line 

and coordinate their defensive forces, both the United States and Canada 

established on September 12, 1957, the binational North American Air 

Defense Command (NORAD). A generation of interceptor aircraft began 

service, beginning with the F-89 and F-100, succeeded by the F-102, 

F-106, and F-15. For a time anti-air defenses included surface-to-air missiles such as the Nike Ajax system. The development of several followup designs occurred, but none was deployed. In the early 1960s the Air 

Force reinforced NORAD with the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Sys52 
tem (BMEWS) and, later, the Perimeter Acquisition Radar Characterization System (PARCS). An Air Force general officer historically has 

served as NORAD commander, operating from a command center inside 

Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

Because of its experience of World War I1 in Europe, the Air 

Force expressed little faith in the ability of America’s defenses to stop a 

determined air attack, nuclear or otherwise. The only defense was deterrence, made possible by a protected force of bombers and missiles. Any 

strike at the United States would result in immediate, overwhelming retaliation and a smoking, radioactive wasteland. This “countervalue” strategy targeted cities. Because accuracy was limited, especially with early 

model ICBMs, and thermonuclear warheads were few, the Air Force targeted large, easy-to-hit cities to inflict the greatest possible damage. A 

countervalue strategy was at odds with the Air Force’s traditional commitment to precision bombing, but consistent with Dulles’s doctrine. 

Reliance on it and massive retaliation created three problems for the Air 

Force and the DOD. 

The first problem had to do with the increasing vulnerability of 

manned bombers to improved enemy ground defenses when airborne and, 

when not, to a surprise nuclear first strike. The Air Force’s solution to 

ground defenses was the production of standoff weapons (including the 

Hound Dog and eventually the SRAM short-range attack missile and 

ALCM air-launched cruise missile) to keep bombers at a distance from 

their targets. “Airborne alert” helped offset the threat of a surprise first 

strike against the United States. Beginning in 1957, part of SAC’S bomber 

force always remained on ready alert, its crews on standby, poised to take 

North American Air Defense (NORAD) command center inside Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado 

Springs, Colorado. 

53 
off at a moment’s notice; another was dispersed to satellite bases around 

the world, complicating Soviet targeting; while a smaller was actually airborne. The DOD’s ultimate solution was the Triad, maintaining three primary nuclear forces, each with special advantages. The first element of 

the Triad was the manned bomber, important for its load-carrying and 

ability to be recalled once launched. ICBMs formed the second component. They were important for their speed, size, and, eventually, accuracy. Early ICBMs, the Atlas and Titan I, burned cryogenic liquid propellant and required extended launch preparations which rendered them vulnerable to a first strike. In the 1960s later model Titans 11s employed storable propellants and, joined by the solid-propellant Minuteman, were 

placed in protective silos and capable of near-instantaneous launch. 

Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), including the Polaris, 

Poseidon, and Trident, comprised the third component of the Triad. Able 

to roam the world’s oceans, missile submarines represented the most survivable of the three legs. Although the sub-launched solid-propellant ballistic missiles at first lacked range and accuracy, technology soon 

removed these drawbacks. 

The second problem created by a countervalue strategy and massive retaliation had to do with the control and integration of diverse 

weapon systems into a single American war plan. In 1959 President 

Eisenhower ordered that a single integrated operational plan (SIOP) be 

adopted, which required coordination by the Army, Navy, and Air Force. 

The need for SIOP became apparent when in the late 1950s an investigation revealed that the military services had targeted Moscow with fewer 

than 170 nuclear bombs and warheads in case of all-out war. 

The third problem had to do with intelligence. America’s first 

steps into space, the “ultimate high ground,” were associated with intelligence, surprise attack prevention, and nuclear war planning. The Air 

Force also sought to exploit space for communications, navigation, and 

weather forecasting. 

Chuck Yeager and the XS-1 rocket aircraft, the first to break the 

sound barrier, began pushing back the aerospace frontier in 1947, as did 

other experimental aircraft that flew over 301,000 acres of desert testing 

ground in California at Edwards Air Force Base’s Air Force Flight Test 

Center. The X-15 rocket airplane flew nearly seven times the speed of 

sound and seventy miles high in the mid-1960s-records that still stand 

for winged aircraft. In 1957 the Air Force began the Dyna-Soar program, 

later designated the X-20, to build a manned space boost glider/aerospace 

plane. Dyna-Soar was cancelled in 1963 in favor of a Manned Orbital 

Labor-atory, itself scrapped in 1969 because automated satellites could 

54 
Chuck Yeager and the Bell XS-1 rocket aircraft, 

Glamorous Glennis, in which he became the first man 

to break the sound barrier in 1947. 

perform the same missions. The flights of the X-aircraft, however, provided critical knowledge for manned space travel and for the special 

materials used in a new generation of aircraft, starting with the SR-71 

Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft. 

Strategic reconnaissance became the primary goal of space 

exploration. Fears of a surprise nuclear attack, based largely on the memory of Pearl Harbor, and the secrecy of events behind the Iron Curtain 

forced every administration after 1945 to seek information on the status 

and disposition of military forces inside the Soviet Union. Initially, U.S. 

Air Force and U.S. Navy aircraft were deployed along its vast periphery 

to take photographs and intercept radio and radar signals. In early 1956 

the Air Force launched 448 unmanned camera-carrying balloons from 

western Europe propelled eastward by prevailing winds. Although inherently random in their coverage, 44 were recovered and provided tantalizing glimpses of some 10 percent of the Soviet Union’s land area. At the 

direction of President Eisenhower, the Air Force, with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation developed 

the U-2, a single-engine glider aircraft capable of flying above 70,000 

feet and beyond the range of Soviet air defenses. Eisenhower authorized 

U-2 overflights across the Soviet Union beginning on July 4, 1956, but, 

fearing that they might become a cusus belli, he limited their number. 

Fewer than 25 missions occurred before a Soviet surface-to-air missile 

downed a U-2 flown by Francis Powers on May 1, 1960. The resulting 

diplomatic crisis ended aerial reconnaissance flights over the Soviet 

55 
Union. A more capable SR-71 Blackbird was soon available to replace 

the U-2, but by then safer “national technical means” were available for 

intelligence-gathering . In part because of the Soviet Union’s success with Sputnik in 

October 1957, President Eisenhower in early 1958 established within the 

DOD the Advanced Research Projects Agency, accelerating efforts to 

exploit space for reconnaissance purposes. The Air Force had begun 

investigating the use of satellites for this purpose as early as 1946, beginning actual development in October 1956 with a contract to Lockheed for 

the WS-117L (SAMOS) reconnaissance satellite. Dissatisfied with the 

technical prospects of the SAMOS, which transmitted images to Earth 

from space, in February 1958 Eisenhower approved Project CORONA, a 

CIA-Air Force effort to put into outer space a spy satellite capable of 

ejecting film capsules for retrieval on earth. The first CORONA satellite, 

known publicly as Discoverer, went into space on February 28, 1959, 

atop a modified Air Force Thor IRBM. After twelve consecutive failures, 

complete success came with number 14 on August 18, 1960. It provided 

analysts with film coverage of more of the Soviet Union than all of the 

U-2 flights combined. This first successful CORONA satellite ended the 

“missile gap” controversy, revealing that the Soviet Union possessed 

fewer IRBMs than the United States. Only a few SAMOS satellites were 

launched in the early 1960s. Designed to scan images in space and broadcast them as radio signals to receivers on the ground, SAMOS failed to 

return one usable photograph of the Soviet Union. Before leaving office 

America’s need for vital strategic reconnaissance increased in the Cold War period. 

The single-engine Lockheed U-2 glider aircraft was developed to overfly and gather 

information on the Soviet Union, principally. 

It attained altitudes above 70,000 feet. To 

mask the U-2’s true purpose, the USAF at first 

designated it a “utility” vehicle. 

56 
in 1961, President Eisenhower established the National Reconnaissance 

Office to direct all U.S. reconnaissance efforts, with the Air Force and 

CIA participating. To provide satellite early warning of a nuclear attack, 

the Air Force also developed the Missile Defense Alarm System 

(MID AS) and its operational successor, the Defense Support Program 

(DSP), that detected missiles within moments of their launch. DSP would 

later play a key role in detecting the launch of Scuds during the Gulf War. 

After the discontinuence of the space reconnaissance mission, on 

March 28, 1961, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara assigned the 

Air Force responsibility for other DOD military space operations such as 

the worldwide Defense Satellite Communications System I (DSCS I). 

Twenty-six system satellites were launched from 1966 to 1968. Beginning in 1972, larger geosynchronous communications satellites reinforced the original DSCS I, followed in the 1980s by a third generation of 

DSCS and in the 1990s by the Military Strategic Tactical and Relay 

Program (MILSTAR) system. Another key space flight project was the 

Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) for monitoring weather conditions around the globe, with information transmitted to the Air 

Force’s Global Weather Center at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. The 

Air Force tracked and identified space debris produced by space missions 

through the Space Detection and Tracking System (SPADATS). The service also held primary responsibility for launching all DOD satellites at 

Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida (into low inclination equatorial orbits) and at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California (into polar 

orbits). 

Flexible Response and Vietnam 

President John Kennedy initiated a more activist, interventionist 

national strategy in 1961, one that brought profound changes to the overwhelmingly nuclear-strike Air Force. The Kennedy administration authorized the expansion of the Air Force’s ICBM arsenal to 1 ,OOO Minuteman 

and 54 Titan IIs, deployed mainly at isolated bases in the north-central 

United States. The Navy nuclear component grew to 41 Polaris submarines, while the Army field forces eventually increased from 12 to 16 

divisions and included a counterinsurgency capability. This expansion 

was intended to give the President increased flexibility in ordering a military response to international crises. In the Cuban missile crisis of 

October 1962, enormous American offensive power forced the Soviet 

Union to back down and prompted Secretary of State Dean Rusk to con57 
clude, “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and the other fellow just blinked.” 

Kennedy had immense nuclear power at his disposal in confronting the 

Soviet Union over its nuclear missiles stationed in Cuba, but at the time 

he had few conventional options. His military choices were an invasion 

of Cuba, with no guarantees of success, or an all-out countervalue thermonuclear war. After the crisis, won through a third alternative, a naval 

blockade referred to as a “quarantine,” Kennedy hastened to adopt the 

“flexible response” as America’s new war-planning doctrine. SIOP-63 

introduced the potential for limited nuclear war, while preserving the possibility of an all-out countervalue strike. 

Even while the SAC-dominated Air Force eagerly adopted the 

Eisenhower administration’s New Look structure, it also maintained forward-based units in Japan, Korea, Guam, the Philippines, and elsewhere 

on the Pacific rim. With almost 1,OOO aircraft in place, these units came 

under the command of the Hawaii-headquartered Pacific Air Forces 

(PACAF), which replaced FEAF as the air component of the Navy-led 

Pacific Command in 1957. 

By 1957 the U.S. Air Forces in Europe (USAFE) had built up an 

even larger forward presence to bolster NATO. With more than 2,000 

assigned aircraft of all types (not including SAC bombers also deployed 

in theater), USAFE’s network of 32 primary installations stretched from 

England to Saudi Arabia. Reflecting NATO’s “sword and shield” policy, 

USAFE focused on nuclear strike and air defense roles. By the time of 

the Berlin crisis of 1961, the command had shrunk in size, but it was 

quickly reinforced by the largest deployment of tactical aircraft since 

World War 11. After the crisis eased, USAFE began a 20-year effort to 

improve its conventional capabilities in line with the flexible response 

strategy, which NATO officially adopted in 1967. 

This flexibility increased the Air Force’s responsibilities, which 

now ranged from waging all-out nuclear war to supporting the Army in 

limited conflicts. Tragically, the lessons of Korea had to be relearned in 

the skies over Vietnam. During the French Indochina War, as early as 

1954, the JCS considered Operation VULTURE, in which the U.S. Air 

Force would be deployed to save the French army at Dien Bien Phu. The 

operation would involve nuclear and conventional bombing around the 

isolated French garrison. President Eisenhower vetoed this proposal, concerned, like General Omar Bradley during the Korean War, that this was 

“the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong 

enemy.” The Geneva Agreement of 1955 left Vietnam divided at the 17th 

Parallel into the Communist north under Ho Chi Minh, and the proWestern south, under Bao Dai and Ngo Dinh Diem. The desire to contain 

58 
pg

Vietnam. When President Kennedy declared that the United States would 

“pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, 

oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” the stage 

was set. The Taylor-Rostow mission of October 1961 investigated the situation in South Vietnam and proposed the use of American air power 

against North Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1974 the United States would 

drop three times as many bombs in Southeast Asia as it did in all of World 

War 11, but victory would prove even more elusive than in the Korean 

War. 

Driven by its nuclear strategic bombing doctrine, the Air Force 

was ill-prepared for a limited war in Vietnam. Air Force training, technology, and strategy focused on general nuclear war with the Soviet 

Union. F-105 Thunderchief “fighters” had been designed to carry tactical nuclear weapons in an internal bomb bay, but were forced into use in 

Vietnam carrying 750-pound high-explosive bombs. F-104 Starfighters, 

the fastest fighters in the world, were designed to intercept Soviet bombers, but lacked the range and dogfighting ability to compete for air superiority over North Vietnam. Fortunately for the Air Force, the Navy had 

begun the development of two superb fighter-bombers, the F-4 Phantom 

I1 and the A-7 Corsair 11, better suited to combat, although the absence of 

a machine gun in the former aircraft limited its usefulness as an air superiority fighter until the arrival of the gun-equipped E model. 

U.S. Air Force aircrews flew combat missions in South Vietnam 

before 1964, but only if accompanied by South Vietnamese aircrews. The 

Gulf of Tonkin incident involving the Navy destroyers C. Turner Joy and 

Maddox in August 1964 resulted in a nearly unanimous Congressional 

vote of support for President Johnson “to take all necessary measures to 

prevent further aggression.” As in Korea, however, there would be no 

declaration of war. Neutral sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia would be 

off-limits to aerial attack for much of the conflict. Targets close to China 

and in Hanoi and Haiphong would also be off-limits for fear an expanded fight would lead to a direct confrontation between the United States 

and the Soviet Union and China, with the possible result of a nuclear 

holocaust. Vietnam would be another limited war. National objectives 

were, for the military, exasperating: “Don’t lose this war, but don’t win it, 

either.” As President Johnson stated: “. . . not now, or not there, or too 

much, or not at all.” The strategy was designed to hold off North Vietnam 

until South Vietnam became a viable nation able to defend itself. The Air 

Force would fight two wars-one against internal subversion by South 

59 
Vietnam-based Viet Cong, the other against North Vietnamese aggression. 

The Air Force initially intended to destroy North Vietnam’s industrial fabric and then to interdict its supplies to Viet Cong units in South 

The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, above, and the 

Republic F-105 Thunderchief, below. Although ill-suited to 

it, they were pressed into limited, rather than nuclear 

strategic conflict in Vietnam. The Starfighter interceptor, 

known as “the missile with a man in it,” was one of the 

smallest aircraft ever to Serve with the USAF. It could sustain speeds above Mach 2 and held the first ever simultaneous speed and altitude records. Its wings were extremely 

thin and small. The powerful Thunderchief was one of the 

most important weapons used in the bombing of North 

Vietnam. Its wings were sharply swept. Modifications that 

allowed it to carry anti-radar missiles gave it yet another 

mission. 

Vietnam by attacking its railroads and Ocean shipping and mining its harbors. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Chairman of the Joint 

Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor vetoed the air plan, however, because it 

might prompt Chinese or Soviet intervention. Like that in Korea, the 

strategy in Vietnam was to punish the enemy until it agreed to a ceasefire 

and peace, not to provoke the Chinese or Soviets. 

60 
The Air Force, they stated, would provide close air support for 

Army units operating in South Vietnam. The sustained bombing of North 

Vietnam began when circumstances changed in South Vietnam. On February 8, 1965, Operation FLAMING DART I launched tit-for-tat retaliatory bombings in response to enemy attacks on American installations in 

South Vietnam. Such an attack on the Pleiku Special Forces base resulted in limited air strikes against oil supplies and naval bases in North Vietnam. The strikes were intended to deter the enemy with the “potential” of 

American air power. 

These circumscribed efforts gave Ho Chi Minh time to construct 

perhaps the strongest air defense network in the world at the time. Eventually, it included over 8,000 antiaircraft artillery pieces, over 40 active 

surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites, and over 200 MiG-l7s, -19s, and 

-21s. Continued Communist ground action in South Vietnam brought the 

Air Force into the teeth of this network. Operation ROLLING THUNDER began in March 1965 and continued until October 1968. It was a 

frustrating air campaign marked by limits at every turn, gradualism, measured response, and, especially, restrictive rules of engagement. Doctrine 

drove the Air Force to strike against industrial web, but Air Force and 

Navy aircraft would be bombing a nation with a gross national product of 

$1.6 billion, only $192 million of which came from industrial activity. 

Like those of Korea, the industrial sources of North Vietnam’s power 

were in China and the Soviet Union, beyond the reach of American air 

power. 

RQLLING THUNDER’S initial targets were roads, radar sites, 

railroads, and supply dumps. Because of bad weather the first mission of 

March 2,1965, was not followed up until March 15. The Johnson administration did not permit attacks on airfields until 1967. SA-2 surface-toair missile sites went unmolested; North Vietnam was permitted to establish SAM sites, and only after missiles were launched from them could 

they be attacked. Another rule restricted operations in a 30-mile zone and 

prohibited operations in a 10-mile zone around Hanoi. In 1965 and 1966 

165,000 sorties against the North killed an estimated 37,000, but the war 

intensified in the South, with 325,000 American troops stationed there by 

the end of 1966. 

In the summer of 1964, the JCS had proposed a list of 94 strategic targets as part of an intensified bombing campaign over which President Johnson and his advisers maintained careful control, assigning targets during Tuesday luncheon meetings at the White House. They doled 

out enough to pressure Ho Chi Minh but too many to prevent peace negotiations or to invite Soviet or Chinese intervention. Of the many bridges 

61 
bombed, the two most famous were the Thanh Hoa bridge eight miles 

south of Hanoi and the Paul Doumer bridge in Hanoi itself. Both were 

critical to transport supplies flowing from China into North and South 

Vietnam. Hundreds of bombing sorties conducted over several years 

failed to bring down the solidly-built Thanh Hoa bridge. When the 

Johnson administration finally permitted the bombing of the Doumer 

bridge in 1967, fighter-bombers quickly dropped one span. After several 

weeks, repair crews put the bridge back into operation and it had to be 

bombed again. Over France in World War I, American airmen contested 

with Fokkers for air superiority and over Germany in World War 11, with 

Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts. Over Korea they fought MiGs. Over 

North Vietnam they fought fewer MiGs as the struggle became primarily 

directed against surface-to-air missiles and antiaircraft artillery. When the 

Johnson administration approved the cessation of bombing north of the 

19th parallel in the spring of 1968, North Vietnam agreed to negotiate. 

Peace negotiations began in Paris in November 1968, and the United 

States halted ROLLING THUNDER. The JCS then limited Air Force 

operations in North Vietnam to protective reaction missions. Aircraft 

would conduct reconnaissance and would strike only if attacked. 

Meanwhile, in South Vietnam, the ground war worsened. In 1965 

American commander, General William Westmoreland, oversaw the 

change of commitment in South Vietnam from a coastal enclave strategy 

for the protection of large cities, to direct ground involvement (“search 

and destroy” missions) into the interior after Communist forces in a massive campaign of close air support and interdiction. By 1968 over half a 

million American troops were engaged. Again, as it had in Korea, 

American strategy called for substituting air power for ground action 

whenever possible to reduce Army casualties. Ironically, while dropping 

less than one million tons of bombs on North Vietnam, the enemy, the 

United States dropped more than four million tons on South Vietnam, the 

ally. When Westmoreland ordered a major offensive into the “Iron 

Triangle” northwest of Saigon, more than 5,000 Air Force tactical strike 

sorties, 125 B-52 strikes, and 2,000 airlift sorties paved the way. 

Operations included an extensive defoliation campaign (RANCH 

HAND) in which C-123 Providers and other transports sprayed 19 million gallons of herbicides over the jungles that provided convenient hiding places for Viet Cong guerrillas and North Vietnamese regular units 

out to ambush American ground troops. The overwhelming firepower 

brought by America to Vietnam gave Air Force airlift a major role in the 

war. Because jungle roads were rarely safe, Allied forces called on Army 

helicopters and Air Force C47 Skytrains, C-119 Boxcars, C-123 

62 
South Vietnam. C-141 Starlifters and C-5 Galaxies, augmented by commercial airlines, helped move in personnel and critical supplies from the 

United States. 

Despite the fact that many targets were obscured much of the 

time by Vietnam’s triple canopy jungles, the key to limiting ground casualties was close air support. As in earlier wars, the solution was to drop 

more bombs to inundate an area. Carpet bombing by B-52 Stratofortresses, each dropping up to 108 500- and 750-pound bombs, was the 

favored technique. Directed by LORAN, occasionally to within one thousand feet of American units, these ARC LIGHT missions flew at 30,000 

feet. Bombs fell without warning. After the war, Vietnamese who survived this deluge described the ARC LIGHT experience as the most terrible they had faced. Another technique involved employing newlydeveloped gunships, including the AC-47 Spooky (known popularly as 

Puff the Magic Dragon), AC-119 Shadow, and AC-130 Spectre. The latter carried four 7.62-mm machine guns and four 20-mm cannon, each firing 6,000 rounds per minute, and 40-mm and 105-mm cannon. Orbiting 

over enemy concentrations at night, they covered the jungle with a rain of 

projectiles, well-appreciated by American soldiers nearby. 

Again, as it had in Korea, the Air Force in Vietnam learned that 

the most difficult function of air power was interdiction; its major effort 

involved interdicting the flow of enemy troops and supplies down the Ho 

Chi Minh trail through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. Many 

Aerial interdiction in Vietnam. Flying under 

radar control, four Republic F-105 Thunderchiefs 

and a North American F-100 Super Sabre release 

bombs over a North Vietnamese supply storage area 

hidden under a blanket of dense jungle. 

63 
Transport Aircraft in Vietnam 

The USAF employed a variety of cargo aircraft in Vietnam. Top to bottom: The Fairchild 

C-123 Provider was fitted with special spray bars for jungle defoliation missions; the Fairchild 

C-119 Boxcar with its distinctive twin-boom construction, was designed with an unimpeded hold 

for large, bulky items and ground-level loading access; the Lockheed C-130 Hercules was used 

in rescue missions; the Lockheed C-141 Starlifter was the first pure jet transport; and the gargantuan Lockheed C-5 Galaxy had a 28-wheel undercarriage and furnished the farthest transport of the service’s heaviest loads. 
targets were merely geographical coordinates superimposed over the vast 

green jungle of Southeast Asia. Others were the smoke and dust kicked 

up by enemy forces as they moved down the trail by day. At night, they 

were campfires, hot engines, and other man-made infrared signatures 

picked up by airborne sensors. Fighters soon compelled the enemy to 

move only by night, when gunships took over. But using $10 million aircraft to destroy $10,000 trucks was no solution. Three Soviet ZIL-157 

six-wheel drive trucks or 400 bicycles carrying 75 pounds each could 

provide the fifteen tons of supplies to Communist forces in South 

A close up rear view of an AC-130 gunship 

at Ubon Air Base, Thailand, showing both the 

interior and exterior positioning of a 105-mm 

howitzer. 

Vietnam each day. More came from plundered American and South 

Vietnamese storehouses. 

On January 30, 1968, enemy units launched the Tet Offensive, 

striking cities and other targets throughout South Vietnam. In February 

alone, Air Force units launched 16,000 strike sorties in support of ground 

operations, helping to blunt the offensive. The focus of the Air Force’s 

operations, however, was the besieged firebase at Khe Sanh, where 6,000 

Marines faced three North Vietnamese divisions. President Johnson told 

General Westmoreland that he did not want another “damn [Dien Bien 

Phu].” Air power would have to hold off Communist attacks. Three 

months of Operation NIAGARA totaled 24,000 fighter-bomber and 

2,700 B-52 strikes, 110,OOO tons of bombs, and nightly assaults by gunships. Additionally, the Air Force airlifted 12,000 tons of supplies to the 

surrounded Marines. Air power guaranteed that there would be no repeat 

of the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu. 

65 
The Tet offensive proved a military defeat for the Communists, 

who lost between 50,000 and 80,000 soldiers, but it represented a political victory that galvanized the antiwar movement in the United States. It 

led many other Americans to question the war’s objectives, especially in 

the face of General Westmoreland’s announcement just before its launching that he could see “the light at the end of the tunnel.” The Tet offensive (and a poor showing in the New Hampshire primary) convinced 

President Johnson not to run for reelection. It also brought to the Oval 

Office a new president, Richard Nixon, committed to ending American 

involvement in the war and turning it over to the South Vietnamese. F-5 

Freedom Fighters strengthened the South Vietnamese Air Force while 

Nixon withdrew American ground units. On March 30, 1972, the North 

Vietnamese Army invaded South Vietnam with 12 divisions from the 

north and west. Although South Vietnamese forces were no match for the 

invaders, the Spring offensive was a major miscalculation. American 

ground forces were gone, but U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy aviation 

remained. For the first time in the war, the Air Force was up against the 

kind of conventional war it could win. Eighteen thousand fighter-bomber 

and 1,800 B-52 sorties stiffened South Vietnamese resolve. In the desperation of the moment, fighter pilots found themselves aiming 2,000- 

pound laser-guided bombs at Communist tanks-not cost effective, but 

effective nevertheless. The massive employment of air power bought 

more time for South Vietnam. 

Although American air power had repelled the invasion, implications for Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy were clear. American hopes for 

ending the war revolved around the Air Force’s applying greater pressure 

on North Vietnam to influence its negotiators to return to the Paris peace 

talks. The LINEBACKER I bombing campaign from May to October 

1972 was a major escalation of the war and included the mining of 

Haiphong and other ports. Bridges that had resisted bombing now fell 

before precision laser-guided and electro-optically-guided bombs. Before 

LINEBACKER, peer pressure and pride drove American aircrews, even 

as they asked: “What the hell is this all about?’ During LINEBACKER 

they had a clear and limited objective-forcing the regime in Hanoi back 

to Paris. 

In Paris some progress was made, but in December 1972 Communist negotiators became recalcitrant. Their delaying tactics prompted 

President Nixon to order the most concentrated bombing campaign of the 

war-LINEBACKER 11. For 11 days beginning on December 18, with a 

Christmas break, SAC B-52s struck at rail yards and other targets in the 

outskirts of Hanoi and Haiphong. On the first mission, 129 B-52s pene66 
trated the area, supported by a wide array of Air Force and Navy aircraft. 

F-4s dropped chaff in wide corridors. EB-66s, EA-~s, and EA-6s 

jammed enemy radar with electronic countermeasures. F-105 Wild WeaLINEBACKER I and I1 operations, 

1972. In missions carried out from May to 

October and in December to compel enemy 

negotiators back to the Paris peace talks, 

intercontinental Boeing B-52 Stratofortresses, top, form up to take off for intensive 

bombing missions over North Vietnam. A 

General Dynamics variable-sweep wing 

F-111 tactical fighter, center, provides highprecision bombing. The aerial photograph 

of a military weapons storage area, bottom, 

in Hanoi reveals widespread bomb cratering and demolished buildings. 

sels with Shrike radar-seeking missiles attacked enemy radar sites. 

SR-7 1 s provided reconnaissance. EC-12 1 s fed early warning information to the attacking aircraft. F-~s, A-7s, and F-111s struck airfields, 

storage sites, and other precision targets. F-4s flew MiG suppression. 

KC-135s orbited over the Gulf of Tonkin, ready to feed thirsty jets. This 

was the air war the Air Force had wanted from the beginning. A B-52 tail 

67 
The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird strategic 

reconnaissance aircraft, first employed during 

the Vietnam War. A marvel of technology, it outperformed all of the other military aircraft of its 

time, attaining altitudes above 85,000 feet and 

speeds of nearly Mach 3.5. 

gunner shot down a MiG on the first night, but 200 surface-to-air missile 

launches claimed three B-52s-the first 3 of 15 lost. 

By December 27 North Vietnam had depleted its supply of SA-2 

missiles and much of its antiaircraft ammunition. Interdiction strikes 

against rail lines and bridges coupled with mines in Haiphong Harbor 

prevented resupply from China or the Soviet Union. By December 30, 

LINEBACKER I1 had destroyed many industrial and military targets in 

the Hanoi and Haiphong area, although its major impact was on North 

Vietnam’s morale. To Captain Ray Bean, an F-4 crewman imprisoned in 

the “Hanoi Hilton,” the B-52s “got the attention of the North 

Vietnamese” because the United States seemed to have forsaken precision attacks on purely military and industrial targets in favor of “wholesale destruction.” North Vietnam witnessed the path of devastation a single B-52 could create, especially in an urban environment. Its negotiators 

returned to the peace talks, agreeing to a cease-fire in January 1973 and 

signing a treaty in April. Before the year was out Congress cut funds for 

Southeast Asian operations and passed the War Powers Act, which limited the President’s options. 

Two years later North Vietnam launched a final offensive against 

a South Vietnam operating without American air support. After 55 days, 

on April 29, 1975, Saigon fell. In Vietnam, the United States lost 58,000 

68 
p

ed a genleration. The Air Force had invested over 1.2 million fixed wing 

sorties, 6.2 million tons of explosives, 2,118 dead, 599 missing in action, 

and 2,257 aircraft (at a cost of $3.1 billion). 

The Air Force learned the dangers of political and military micromanagement, of gradualism, and of being used to influence the conduct 

of America’s enemies instead of defeating them. Restrictive rules of engagement caused aircrews to die and left little room for initiative. “Route 

packages,” artificial divisions of North Vietnam in which Air Force and 

Navy aircraft operated separately, guaranteed a dilution of effort. A generation of future air leaders came away convinced that “body counts,” 

sortie rates, and tons of bombs dropped were all poor means for judging 

air power’s effectiveness. They also relearned the importance of air superiority, but with a twist-air superiority now involved not only overcoming an enemy’s air force; it involved also overcoming an enemy’s air 

defenses on the surface. Air power had to be focused, united, and coordinated in what was termed “jointness” after the war. 

Most of all, the Air Force learned the dangers of strict, uncompromising adherence to doctrine. In the years after Vietnam a new generation of air leaders realized that the Air Force had focused almost exclusively on the strategic bombing of industrial chokepoints without regard 

for the character of the society to be bombed or the type of war to be 

fought. Training, technology, and doctrine revolved around the destruction of a developed nation’s industrial fabric or the nuclear destruction of 

a nation’s cities. The Air Force had become imprisoned by a doctrine 

established in the years before and after World War 11. Applied against 

undeveloped states such as North Korea and North Vietnam, each equipped and supplied by other countries, and unable to use nuclear weapons 

because of the Cold War and moral considerations, strategic bombardment and its related strategies did not prevail. 

The Cold War Concluded 

President Kennedy’s flexible-response nuclear war-fighting doctrine of the early 1960s lacked the technology to match its vision of many 

options adapted to meet the varieties of Cold War crises. Advances in 

geodesy and cartography and the integrated circuit developed in the early 

1960s for missile and satellite guidance systems, significantly improved 

missile accuracy. Decreased CEP (circular error probable-the radius of 

a circle in which at least 50 percent of the targeted missiles would hit) 

69 
meant that warheads could be smaller. New warheads could be sized to 

detonate at kiloton or megaton ranges independently. Because they were 

smaller and lighter, more warheads could be mounted to each ICBM and 

SLBM. In the early 1970s the DOD developed MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles), allowing three or more warheads 

on each ICBM and SLBM. The Air Force’s arsenal did not rise above 

1,054 ICBMs; many now carried three MIRVs (Minuteman 111) as 

opposed to earlier models that carried a single Minuteman I or I1 warhead. Strategic launchers remained static, but warheads multiplied. 

Although Secretary of Defense McNamara introduced “counterforce” targeting in 1962, the improvement in CEP and dramatic increases in the number of nuclear warheads in the American arsenal of the 

1970s encouraged the Air Force to return to the more traditional practice 

of bombing precise military targets instead of countervalue cities. 

Counterforce targeting identified enemy military and industrial chokepoints-command centers, military industries and bases, and ICBM silos. 

Whatever the targets selected, in the 1960s political leaders adopted a 

doctrine for deterring nuclear war known as “assured destruction,” i.e., 

the capability to destroy an aggressor as a viable society, even after a 

well-planned and executed surprise attack on American forces. This doctrine held that superpower strategic nuclear forces would be sized and 

protected to survive a nuclear attack and then to retaliate with sufficient 

force to ensure a level of destruction unacceptable to the other side. With 

such retaliatory destruction assured against an aggressor, no rational 

Soviet or American leader would consider starting a nuclear war. On May 

26, 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the Anti-Ballistic 

Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited both sides to two ABM sites each 

to protect the national capital and an ICBM complex. The treaty reinforced the continued effectiveness of assured destruction in deterring war 

in the face of new, destabilizing ABM weapons. SALT I, the Strategic 

Arms Limitation Treaty which was signed at the same time, limited the 

numbers of nuclear weapons with the objective of obtaining a verified 

freeze on the numerical growth and destabilizing characteristics of each 

side’s strategic nuclear forces. 

The Nixon administration adopted counterforce targeting beginning with SIOP 5 of 1974. The Carter administration expanded it with 

Presidential Directive 59 and SIOP 5D. Counterforce, however, offered 

an option to assured destruction of a limited, prolonged nuclear war based 

on accurate attacks with limited collateral damage while maintaining a 

creditable second strike capability. In an address on March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan proposed replacing the doctrine of assured destruc70 
The Fairchild A-10 Thunderbolt, top, the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, center, 

and the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon, bottom. These attack and fighter 

aircraft armed with missiles, cannon, and various electronic countermeasure (ECM) 

features have been in service since the 1970s and performed outstandingly in the 

Gulf War. 

tion with one of assured survival, in the form of the Strategic Defense 

Initiative (SDI). SDI was to focus on the development and deployment of 

a combination of defensive systems such as space-based lasers, particle 

beams, railguns, and fast ground-launched missiles, among other weapons, to intercept Soviet ICBMs during their ascent through the Earth’s 

outer atmosphere and their ballistic path in space. While the ABM Treaty 

restricted various methods of testing SDI weapon systems, the end of the 

Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union removed the justification for 

the level of research and development associated with this project, 

although research continued at a much reduced level under the Ballistic 

Missile Defense Organization. 

71 
Beginning in March 1985, Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev initiated major changes in Soviet-American 

relations. The Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in December 

1987 eliminated short-range nuclear missiles in Europe, including Air 

Force ground-launched cruise missiles stationed in the United Kingdom. 

Gorbachev’s announcement in May 1988 that the Soviet Union, after nine 

years of inconclusive combat, would begin withdrawing from the war in 

Afghanistan, indicated a major reduction in Cold War tensions, but it provided only a hint of the rapid changes to come. Relatively free and open 

Russian elections in March 1989 and a coal miners strike in July shook 

the foundations of Communist rule. East Germany opened the Berlin 

Wall in November, which led to German reunification in October 1990. 

A coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 by Boris Yeltsin, led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its replacement by the Commonwealth 

of Independent States on December 25, 1991. 

This chain of events brought major changes to American nuclear 

strategy. Under START I, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed by 

the United States and the Soviet Union in July 1991, the Air Force will 

be involved in reducing to a level of 6,000 total warheads on deployed 

ICBMs, SLBMs, and heavy bombers. START 11, signed in January 1993, 

will reduce (upon entry into force) total deployed warheads to a range of 

3,000 to 3,500. The resulting force structure (determined during the 

Nuclear Posture Review process overseen within his department by then 

Secretary of Defense Les Aspin), will ultimately lead to the deployment 

of five hundred single warhead Minuteman I11 ICBMs, 66 B-52H and 20 

B-2 heavy bombers. Ninety-four B-1 heavy bombers will be reoriented 

to a conventional role by 2003, in addition to all Peacekeeper ICBMs 

being removed from active inventory through the elimination of their 

associated silo launchers. The Air Force, by Presidential direction in September 1991, notified SAC to remove heavy bombers from alert status. 

SAC was subsequently inactivated several months later in June 1992. 

U.S. Strategic Command replaced Strategic Air Command, controlling 

all remaining Air Force and Navy strategic nuclear forces. 

Rebuilding the conventional Air Force after Vietnam began with 

personnel changes. The Vietnam-era Air Force included many officers 

and airmen who had entered its ranks in World War 11. President Nixon 

ended the draft in 1973 in favor of an “all volunteer” American military. 

The Air Force attracted recruits as best it could, but encountered problems with the racial friction and alcohol and drug abuse that reflected 

America’s social problems. Enough Vietnam career veterans remained, 

however, to direct the new service and institute changes, one of the most 

72 
noticeable of which was more realistic, and thus more dangerous, combat 

training. In combat simulations Air Force pilots flew as aggressors employing enemy tactics. By 1975 their training had evolved into Red Flag 

at the U.S. Air Force Weapons and Tactics Center at Nellis Air Force 

Base in Nevada, in which crews flew both individual sorties and formations in realistic situations, gaining experience before they entered actual 

combat. 

The vulnerability of air bases to enemy attack and sabotage had 

long been the Achilles heel of land-based air power. In western Europe, 

living under the threat of a massive Warsaw Pact air offensive and land 

invasion, the U.S. Air Force spearheaded an active program to improve 

the survivability and readiness of air bases. The effort was marked by the 

construction of thousands of reinforced concrete aircraft shelters and 

other hardened facilities, alternate runways, rapid repair elements, chemical weapons protection, and a host of other defensive measures. 

The Air Force’s post-Vietnam rebuilding also involved applying 

improved technology. The battle for control of the skies over North Vietnam underscored the need for a dogfighting aircraft that featured maneuverability before speed-one armed with missiles and cannon. Begun in 

the late 1960s and operational in the mid-l970s, the F-15 Eagle and the 

F-16 Fighting Falcon filled this need. The struggle against radar-guided 

antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles in Vietnam encouraged 

the Air Force to pursue stealth technology utilizing special paints, materials, and designs that reduced or eliminated an aircraft’s radar, thermal, 

and electronic signatures. Operational by October 1980, both the B-2 

stealth bomber and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter featured detection avoidance. 

Other Vietnam War technologies included precision guided missiles and bombs. From April 1972 to January 1973 the United States used 

over 4,000 of these early “smart weapons” in Vietnam to knock down 

bridges and destroy enemy tanks. Continued development of laser-guided bombs and electro-optically-guided missiles offered the prospects of 

pinpoint, precision bombing on which traditional Air Force doctrine rested-the destruction of chokepoints in an enemy nation’s industrial web 

with economy of force and without collateral damage. These technologies, which afforded a strike precision far beyond that available to earlier air power thinkers, sparked a revision of the traditional doctrine of 

strategic bombing. This revision took two forms. First, the Air Force, to 

overcome numerically superior Warsaw Pact forces, cooperated with the 

Army in updating the tactical doctrine of AirLand Battle promulgated in 

Field Manual 100-5 in 1982. The Air Force would make deep air attacks 

73 
on an enemy army to isolate it on the battlefield, conduct battlefield air 

interdiction (BAI) to disrupt the movement of secondary forces to the 

front, and provide close air support (CAS) to Army ground forces. The 

Air Force procured the A-10 Thunderbolt I1 CAS attack-bomber in the 

1970s to support such missions. 

Second, the Air Force pursued a new approach to conventional 

strategic bombing doctrine in the fertile atmosphere of the post-Vietnam 

era. Key leaders in the effort were Generals Charles Boyd and Charles 

Link and Colonel Dennis Drew. Strategic bombing doctrine of the Air 

Corps Tactical School, World War 11, Korea, and Vietnam had relied on 

carpet bombing to saturate linear chokepoints, with industry as the key. 

Colonel John Warden’s ideas in the Gulf War relied on precision munitions to attack an expanded complex of targets. He viewed an enemy 

nation’s war-making capacity in five concentric rings. The center ring 

consisted of its civilian and military leadership, the first ring out, its key 

production sources, the second ring out, its transportation and communication infrastructure, third ring out, the will of its population, and, the last 

ring, its military forces. An air attack on these would be “inside-out” warfare, starting from the center and working outward. The first objective of 

an air war would be to seize air superiority followed by attacks on an 

enemy’s leadership and other vital centers. Colonel John Boyd focused on 

“control warfare” and “strategic paralysis” by loosening the observation, 

orientation, decision, and action loops (the “OODA Loop”) that maintained the “moral-mental-phy sical being” of an enemy nation. 

Participation in three crises in the 1980s allowed the Air Force to 

test these new ideas and technologies. Operation URGENT FURY (October 1983) rescued American students and restored order on the island of 

Grenada. In this operation the Air Force primarily transported troops and 

cargo, but discovered problems with command, control, planning, and 

intraservice and interservice coordination. President Reagan called on 

England-based F-111s to strike against Libya on April 19, 1986, in support of his pclicies to counter state terrorism. Operation ELDORADO 

CANYON exposed continuing difficulties with target identification and 

intelligence, punctuated by some inaccurate bombing. Finally, Operation 

JUST CAUSE in 1989 again tested air operations, this time in Panama. 

The Air Force provided the airlift for troops and supplies, although the 

F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter made its debut when it and an AC-130 

Spectre gunship intimidated Panamanian troops loyal to the dictator 

Manuel Noriega. 

74 
p

The U.S. Air Force found itself in a third major war since 1945 

when, on August 2, 1990, forces led by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, 

seized Kuwait and began a conflict that differed considerably from those 

in Korea and Vietnam. The ending of the Cold War had eliminated concerns about an expanded war and the client support Iraq might have 

expected from the Soviet Union. Flexibility of doctrine, technology, leadership, and training allowed the Air Force to adjust to the unique components of the Gulf War-a desert battlefield, a loosely united coalition 

(including several Arab nations desiring minimal damage to Iraq), and an 

American people strongly opposed to a prolonged war and resulting 

heavy casualties. A first phase, Operation DESERT SHIELD, the defense 

Saudi Arabia and its huge oil reserves, began on August 6, when Saudi 

Arabia requested American assistance. Two days later F-l5C Eagles 

from the First Tactical Fighter Wing, supported by E-3B Sentry airborne 

warning and control aircraft, arrived in the Persian Gulf-a first step in 

the rapid relocation of one-quarter of the Air Force’s total combat inventory and nearly all of its precision bombing assets. Military airlift, including the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, rapidly moved 660,000 Coalition personnel to the area, although most supplies and equipment came by sea. 

Turbojet-powered C-141 and C-5 military transports operating between 

the United States and the Persian Gulf carried ten times more tons of 

cargo per day than all of the piston-engine transports designed for commercial trafTic carried during the entire Berlin Airlift. That distance 

insured that U.S. Air Force KC-135 and KC-10 tankers would play a 

critical role in a war that required more than fifteen hundred aerial refuelings per day. Fortunately, Operation NICKEL GRASS, the aerial resupply of Israel during the October 1973 War, had revealed the need to equip 

Air Force C-141 cargo aircraft with inflight refueling capabilities, 

extending airlift’s range in time for the Gulf War. 

The second phase was Operation DESERT STORM, the liberation of Kuwait and the reduction of Iraqi military capabilities, especially 

its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The U.N. coalition opposing Hussein depended primarily on air power to hammer enemy forces 

and achieve its objectives while minimizing casualties. The U.S. Air 

Force flew nearly 60 percent of all fixed-wing combat sorties in support 

of DESERT STORM, dropping 82 percent of precision guided weapons. 

The air offensive began at 0238 local time, January 17, 1991, 

with night attacks on Iraqi early warning radar sites, Scud short-range 

ballistic missile sites, and communication centers, including the interna75 
America’s Air War in the Gulf 
Stars of the Gulf War, opposite, top to borrom: Spectacularly demonstrating the 

value of stealth technology, the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk fighter performed 

almost perfectly. The KC-135 Stratotanker’s latest version provided necessary aerial refueling over huge distances, and Boeing 63 Sentry Airborne Warning and 

Control Systems (AWACS) aircraft ensured the Allied air supremacy that won the 

day over Iraq. Making yet another vital contribution over the battlefield, the venerable B-52, the USAF’s longest-serving aircraft, provided heavy, high-altitude 

bombing capability. The USAF effectively rendered useless massively reinforced 

concrete aircraft shelters, such as those above, top and center, and vital oil production and storage facilities, borrom, with bombing precise enough to leave little collateral damage. 
tionally-televised attack by two F-l17A Nighthawks on the so-called 

AT&T communications building in downtown Baghdad. Air Force and 

Navy cruise missiles hit additional targets, including government buildings and power plants. It was the beginning of a thirty-eight day aerial 

offensive consisting of four phases: a strategic campaign against Iraq, an 

air superiority campaign, an effort to weaken Iraqi ground units in 

Kuwait, and, eventually, close air support for the ground offensive. Over 

2,000 combat aircraft in the Coalition inventory struck targets in all four 

components to be struck simultaneously. Contrasted sharply with the 12 

sorties Eighth Air Force launched on August 17, 1942, in its first strike 

against German targets in World War 11, the Coalition flew 2,759 combat 

sorties on day one of the Gulf air offensive. 

The air war defied easy analysis because of simultaneous strikes 

against targets in all of Warden’s concentric rings. In past wars identifiable campaigns were mounted against various kinds of targets-ball 

bearing, aircraft assembly, oil production, transportation, irrigation, 

power dams, or interdiction, but in the Gulf War such attacks and more 

were mounted concurrently. Unlike AWPD planners of 1941, Gulf War 

planners did not have to choose between target categories-they selected 

targets from among all categories. Coordinating the two or three thousand 

sorties required per day was the responsibility of Lieutenant General 

Charles Homer, the Joint Force Air Component Commander (JFACC). 

He controlled all aircraft in the theater except those of the Navy in sorties 

over water, those of the Marines supporting their own ground units, and 

helicopters flying below five hundred feet. The lesson of conflicting 

responsibilities, priorities, and command and control represented by the 

“route packages” of Vietnam had been learned well. Despite problems 

with intelligence and communication between the diverse Coalition air 

forces, never had there been such a carefully directed air campaign. 

Lieutenant General Charles 

Horner, Joint Force Air Component Commander (JFACC) for 

Operation DESERT STORM, ran 

the coalition air war. 

78 
force not to compete for command of the skies. His plan was to absorb 

any air blows and force the Coalition into bloody trench warfare, in the 

“mother of all battles.” Losses to Coalition attackers on the first night 

were limited to one Navy F/A-18. Considering the quantity and quality 

of the forces arrayed against Iraq, Hussein’s withholding of his Air Force 

was perhaps appropriate. Coalition air forces shot down only 32 of 700 

fixed-wing combat aircraft in the Iraqi Air Force (27 by the U.S. Air 

Force), although they destroyed many more on the ground. There would 

be no air aces in this war. Rules of engagement that allowed the firing of 

missiles at enemy aircraft beyond visual range aided Coalition success 

against the few Iraqi jets rising to do battle. Pressed by U.S. Air Force 

attacks on their protective shelters, more than one hundred Iraqi aircraft 

fled to safety in neutral Iran. The struggle for control of the air was primarily against Iraqi ground defenses, which absorbed many Coalition 

strikes. These included 122 airfields, 600 hardened aircraft shelters, 7,000 

antiaircraft guns, and 200 surface-to-air missile batteries. 

Never had the world seen such a variety of bombing targets and 

aircraft. Air Force crews dropped laser-guided bombs down air shafts in 

hardened buildings and on oil tank valves when Saddam Hussein ordered 

millions of gallons of oil poured into the Persian Gulf. They “plinked” 

tanks with laser-guided and electro-optically guided bombs and missiles. 

They carpet-bombed Iraq’s Republican Guard divisions from high altitude in B-52s. Coalition aircraft, including more than 70 distinct types 

from ten countries, struck at command, control, and communications tenters, bridges, oil refineries, air defense facilities, radar sites, nuclear 

weapon production facilities, chemical and biological production facilities, electrical production facilities, weapons production facilities, missile 

launch sites, ports, and others. There were plenty of targets. The initial 

INSTANT THUNDER air plan for the strategic bombing of Iraq identified 84 to be hit in less than a week. By the start of the air war on January 

17, however, the Coalition target list had increased to 481, compared to 

the 154 of World War 11’s AWPD/l. 

The most sensitive targets were in Baghdad, defended by the 

heaviest concentration of antiaircraft weapons. The world press observed 

Coalition strikes there and reported collateral damage and civilian casualties with special interest. General Homer limited these most dangerous 

and most critical attacks to Air Force F-117 stealth fighters flying by 

night and Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles striking by day and night. The 

stealthy F-117 Nighthawk fighters proved most valuable to Coalition 

success, bombing 40 percent of strategic targets in Iraq while flying only 

79 
2 percent of combat sorties. Their favorite weapon was the laser-guided 

bomb, which although amounting to less than 5 percent of all bombs 

dropped, accounted for most of the key targets. Precision guided munitions and F-117s proved their value as “force multipliers,” increasing the 

impact of the bombing campaign. Their strikes were not completely free 

of political interference, however, as President Bush made Baghdad offlimits to bombing for a week after two laser-guided bombs hit the A1 

Firdos Bunker on February 13, a command structure also used as an air 

raid shelter by civilians. The attack left hundreds dead. 

The Iraqi army mounted Scud surface-to-surface ballistic missiles on small, mobile launchers. Hidden in civilian traffic, and fired at 

night, the Scud counteroffensive proved nearly unstoppable, although 

Iraq launched only eighty eight of these weapons during the war. One 

Scud landed in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, and killed twenty-eight American 

soldiers, the deadliest single action for the United States during the war. 

Like the V-1 and V-2 weapons of World War 11, Scud missiles caused a 

major diversion of sorties from the air offensive. The Coalition leadership 

diverted 22 percent of its sorties from strategic targets to eliminate the 

politically significant Scud missile attacks on Israel and Saudi Arabia, but 

the mission proved impossible. 

The Gulf War demonstrated the vital importance of the U.S. Air 

Force’s Space Command. Organized on September 1, 1982, it provided a 

first look at what warfare would be like in the twenty-first century. The 

Air Force began launching satellites of the Navstar Global Positioning 

System, made famous simply as GPS, in 1973, but GPS was not fully 

operational until after DESERT STORM. Nonetheless, signals from the 

constellation of available GPS satellites provided Coalition forces information about Iraqi Scud Missile position, altitude, and velocity with 

unparalleled accuracy during most hours of the day. DSP satellites furnished early warning of launches, while DSCS satellites ensured secure 

communications between the Gulf, the United States, and facilities all 

over the world. These satellite systems were controlled through the Consolidated Space Operations Center at Colorado Springs, Colorado, and 

the Satellite Control Facility at Sunnyvale, California. 

When General Norman Schwarzkopf launched the “100-hour” 

DESERT STORM ground offensive on February 24, 1991, his forces met 

little resistance. Air power and total command of the air made possible 

the maneuver warfare of Schwarzkopf’s “Hail Mary”-the employing of 

American Army and Marine and Arab ground forces in a direct assault on 

Kuwait while Coalition armored units looped around it to cut off enemy 

forces retreating into Iraq. Three thousand air sorties that day provided air 

80 
support, but found few tactical targets-the air campaign had worked. 

The greatest threat to ground troops that day was friendly fire. On the first 

day of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, British casualties amounted to 57,000, including 20,000 killed. On the first day of the Gulf War 

ground attack, Coalition casualties totaled 14, including 3 killed. Over the 

next several days the Air Force focused its attention on battering the 

Republican Guard divisions held in reserve in southern Iraq and interdicting the flood of Iraqi units retreating from Kuwait. The most visible 

of these efforts was the bottleneck created on the highway northwest out 

of Kuwait City, in what was called the “highway of death.” The strategic 

bombing campaign continued through the one hundred hours of the 

ground offensive, including a last effort to destroy Saddam Hussein’s 

bunker sanctuaries. Early in the morning of February 28 President Bush 

and the Coalition unilaterally declared a cease fire. Despite flying 37,567 

combat sorties, the Air Force lost only 14 aircraft to hostile action (all 

from ground fire)-testimony to the professionalism, training, technology, leadership, and doctrine of the post-Vietnam U.S. Air Force. 

The Future 

With the end of the Cold War, the Air Force adopted a new doctrine-Global Reach-Global Power. Released in June 1990, it prompted 

the first major Air Force reorganization since March 1946. Under Chief 

of Staff General Merrill McPeak, Strategic Air Command and Tactical 

Air Command were deactivated on June 1, 1992. Many of their assets 

were incorporated into Air Combat Command, headquartered at Langley 

Air Force Base in Virginia. The new organization represents the “global 

power” portion of the new Air Force, controlling ICBMs; command, control, communication, and intelligence functions; reconnaissance; tactical 

airlift and tankers; fighters; and bombers. Air Mobility Command and its 

in-flight refueling assets headquartered at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois, 

replaced Military Airlift Command as the “global reach” portion of the 

Air Force, controlling strategic airlift and tanker forces. 

Global Reach-Global Power and a new doctrinal manual issued 

in March 1992, AFM 1- 1 , Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States 

Air Force, represent an Air Force committed to matching aerial forces 

with changing circumstances, drawing on nearly 100 years of experience. 

The Gulf War, like previous wars, demonstrated that the technology, leadership, training, strategy, and tactics employed for a specific set of conditions and circumstances in one war will not necessarily guarantee success 

81 
in the next. An innovator behind fighter tactics in the Vietnam War, 

Colonel Robin Olds, concluded from his own experience that “no one 

knows exactly what air fighting will be like in the future.” The U.S. Air 

Force proved decisive to victory in World War I1 and in the Gulf War and 

to separation from the limited conflicts in Korea and Vietnam. Future 

conflicts will bring new challenges for air power in the service of the 

nation. 

82 
Suggested Readings 

Air University Air Command and Staff College. Space Handbook: A War Fighter’s Guide to Space. Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air University Press, 

1993. 

Beck, Alfred M., ed. With Courage: The U.S. Army Air Forces in World War 11. 

Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1994. 

Burrows, William E. Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security. New 

York: Random House, 1986. 

Clodfelter, Mark. The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North 

Vietnam. New York: Free Press, 1989. 

Cooling, Benjamin F., ed. Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority. 

Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1994. 

, ed. Case Studies in the Development of Close Air Support. Washington, 

D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1990. 

Copp, DeWitt S. A Few Great Captains: The Men and Events that Shaped the 

Development of US. Air Power. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980. 

. Forged in Fire: Strategy and Decisions in the Air War over Europe, 

1940-1945. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1982. 

Craven, Wesley Frank, and James Lea Cate, eds. The Army Air Forces in World 

War IZ. 7 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948-1955. 

Davis, Richard G. Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe. Washington, D.C.: 

Center for Air Force History, 1993. 

Douglas, Deborah G. United States Women in Aviation, 1940-1985. Washington, 

D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. 

Futrell, Robert F. Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Training in the 

United States Air Force, 1907-1964. Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala.: Air 

University, 1974. 

, The United States Air Force in Korea, 1950-1953. New York: Duell, 

Sloan and Pearce, 1961. 

Glines, Carroll V., Jr. The Compact History of the United States Air Force, New 

York: Hawthorn Books, 1973. 

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