Henry H. Arnold

But that raid was incredibly consequential, in part because there was real fear of how the American public would react.

And so right on the eve of that mission, in fact, Larry Norstad, who was the chief of staff to Hap Arnold, who was the head of the Air Force, is out in the Pacific when that mission is about to take off.

And he sends a message back to the Pentagon and warning them this mission is about to take off.

And they start monitoring the editorial pages.

He went back into uniform immediately.

He was 45 years old, wearing Lieutenant Colonel's leaves, and he walked into General Hap Arnold's office with an idea.

Take Army Air Force's B-25 Mitchell medium bombers, strip them down for extended range, modify them for carrier operations, load them with bombs, put them aboard a Navy aircraft carrier, sail within striking distance of the Japanese home islands and launch.

The bombers would hit Tokyo and other targets, then keep flying west until they could land in Nationalist China.

Germany had to win in the East before America was able to accomplish full mobilization.

And the Rainbow Five document, which was leaked, you know, for years it was blamed on poor Hap Arnold.

Deliberately, I believe, by intelligence elements in the United States.

But the entire leak in the Rainbow Five document was to convince Berlin, and specifically Hitler, that America could reach full mobilization potential and deploy...

He was evacuated to Australia, spent a few months there, and then really wanted to get back to fighting, and he asked to be deployed to Europe.

But one day when the commander of the Air Force's Hap Arnold was visiting, he found Maitland, as I think was described, unfit for duty.

And the thought is that Maitland had had too much to drink.

And so he ordered him stateside.

Common enough that the accident rate in training was shocking even by wartime standards.

When the assumption was that some losses were unavoidable, General Hap Arnold, driving the entire program from the top, was deeply worried.

The production schedule was already slipping.

The accident rate was producing casualties before a single mission was flown.

Under the signal corps, aces made history in the dogfights of World War I, but it wasn't until General William Billy Mitchell got himself court-martialed for backing up his statement that nothing can stop the attack of aircraft except other aircraft that the air arm really got going.

In World War II, General Henry H. Hap Arnold built the Army Air Corps into the greatest military armada ever seen, with his three-legged stool formula of pilots, planes, and airfields, and the slogan, keep them flying.

And in the Cold War that's been going on ever since, the now independent Air Force, with its ever-ready Strategic Air Command, carries the biggest stick we've got behind its soft-spoken motto, peace.

is our profession.

And there were very good reasons for that.

When General Hap Arnold asked Boeing to design a very long range heavy bomber around 1940, he laid out requirements the engineering world of the time considered essentially impossible.

He wanted a bomber that could carry 20,000 pounds of ordnance, cruise at 350 miles per hour, reach altitudes of 25,000 to 30,000 feet, and carry a combat radius of over 3,000 miles.

At the time, no production aircraft in the world could do any one of those things reliably, let alone all of them together.

We go now to an event April of 1939.

Hap Arnold, the head of the Air Corps, Army Air Corps, remember, at this point, not a separate force, is asleep, and he's waken by knocking at the door by the hotelier, saying, there's a man on the phone who wants to talk to you.

And General Arnold takes the call.

The man is Charles Lindbergh, just back from touring airplane factories and Bragadaccio in Hitlerite Germany, and says to the general, I must talk to you.

about how America must build a bomber to answer what Lindbergh believes is going on in Germany, which is bomber fleets.

Lindbergh has been misled by Nazi propaganda.

In any event, Hap Arnold gets the point.

Arthur, I tell that wonderful story from your book because everything turns on the credibility of Lindbergh and the authority and magic of Hap Arnold.

All right, folks, the United Nations are now at bat.

The coaches are George Marshall at third, Hap Arnold at first, and stepping up to the plate is Douglas MacArthur.

Hear that, Sam? He's one of the heaviest hitters we got.

Yep, and he's got a darn good batting average, too.