T H E A R M Y A I R F O R C E S I N W O R L D W A R I 1
Air power today has decided the fate of nations. Germany with her powerful
air armadas has vanquished one people after another. O n the ground, large
armies have been mobilized to resist her, but each time it was that additional
power in the air that decided the fate of each individual nation.. . . [As a con-
sequence] we are in the midst of a great crisis. T h e time factor is our principal
obstacle.43
This attitude was reflected in the sympathetic hearing accorded to
AAF problems by the highest officials of the W a r Department. In
commenting to Mr. Stimson in mid-1941 on the 500 per cent increase
in AAF tactical squadrons, General Marshall wrote: “I do not think
the public generally appreciates the vastness of the undertaking which
has been imposed upon the Air Corps in both personnel and ma-
teriel.” 44 That was almost an understatement.
T h e public could understand the announcement of a new goal for
aircraft production, for trained pilots, or for organized combat units;
rarely, one might suspect, did citizens consider the implications of
those increases in terms of their own occupations. What was required,
in civilian terms, was something like this: for a medium-sized college
to jump its graduating class from 300 to 50,000 students; for a manu-
facturer just recovering from the depression to step up his production
from 2,000 to 50,ooo items a year; for a firm doing business on a
national scale to expand its buildings and grounds by geometric rather
than arithmetic progression. All this within threc years and through
the leadership of a very limited number of trained administrators.
That progress was not smooth was all too apparent to those most in-
timately concerned-to the harried staff officer who saw each suc-
cessive program scrapped for another more difficult of attainment; to
the crew chief on the line whose team was constantly bled for cadres;
to the group commander attempting to build an effective organization
with green pilots and obsolete planes. It is little wonder that before
the period ended the war’s most expressive term-SNAFU-had been
coined. Yet for all the confusion, by 7 December 1941the AAF had
achieved a remarkable expansion, and the essential soundness of its
methods was to be manifested in its later development under war
conditions.
New Concepts of Hemisphere Defense
T h e expansion of the Army air arm which began in 1939 was mo-
tivated by considerations of hemisphere defense. T h e term was new,
the idea old. When President Roosevelt initiated the move toward re-
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