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
more specific defense mission than that implied in the Joint Action of
I I September 1935. The recommendations contained therein were
indorsed by the Chief of the Air Corps, General Westover, and for-
warded to The Adjutant General for action; but by the summer of
1937 it was evident that no revision in the Army-Navy agreement
would be made. By the following year the international situation was
such that national defense had come to assume a new significance, and
the concept of hemisphere defense was being shaped. On 17 October
1938 the Air Corps Board completed a study, “Air Corps Mission
under the Monroe Doctrine,” in which the primary air role was con-
ceived as defense against hostile efforts to operate from air bases estab-
lished in the This concept, which subordinated both
antishipping strikes and offensive strategic bombardment to counter-
air activities, was to exert a tremendous influence over air planning
and designing during the emergency years of 1939-41.*
Meanwhile there was no lack of a more aggressive doctrine within
certain circles in the Air Corps. Expounded by some officers in OCAC,
these doctrines received special attention in the Air Corps Tactical
School, which was moved from Langley Field to Maxwell Field,
Alabama, in 193I . The establishment of the GHQ Air Force, however
much that force might be considered as a defensive weapon, seemed
to many officers as a means by which a theory of offensive air war
might be revived. Even when the school in 1935 had emphasized the
defensive role in its comments on Kilbourne’s paper, the transitory
nature of that role had been stressed: “There is no intention anywhere
in these comments of not conveying the thought that the principal and
all important mission of air power, when its equipment permits, is the
attack of those vital objectives in a nation’s economic structure which
will tend to paralyze that nation’s ability to wage war and thus con-
tribute directly to the attainment of the ultimate objective of war,
namely, the disintegration of the hostile will to resist.” 1 3 5
That theme, from 1935 on, assumed even larger proportions in lec-
tures given a t the school. A full roster of the instructors might prove of
high significance for a history of World War 11, for it would include
an important proportion of officers-many still in junior grades-who
were to direct air strategy, as members either of the AAF Head-
quarters staff or of some joint or combined agency: Hal George, Ken
Walker, Tony Frank, Sandy Fairchild, Larry Kuter, Possum Hansell,
See below, Chap. 4.
50