The Department of the Air Force, an agency of the Department of Defense, was established on September 18, 1947, according to provisions of the National Security Act of the previous July 26. On September 26, 1947, by order of the Secretary of Defense, personnel of the Army Air Forces (AAF) were transferred from the Department of the Army (formerly the War Department) to the Department of the Air Force and established as the United States Air Force (USAF). As this action shows, the Air Force can claim lineal antecedents long predating the 1947 act.
The USAF had its roots in a turn-of-the century effort at technology assessment. In January 1905 the War Department took up consideration of an offer it had received from two inventors in Dayton, Ohio, to provide the government with a heavier-than-air flying machine. The fact that many still doubted the claim of Wilbur and Orville Wright to have invented a workable airplane is part of the history of aviation.
The Board of Ordnance and Fortifications, which examined the Wrights' proposal, had other facts to consider as well. Outside the realm of science fiction, the role in warfare of airships, gliders, and airplanes was by no means clear. Only balloons had proven value of any sort. The French revolutionaries had used a balloon at the battle of Fleurus in 1794. In the American Civil War, balloons had seen service, and the job of procuring and operating them had duly passed to the Signal Corps.
Only in 1892, however, did the Signal Corps organize a permanent balloon section, and this unit's service in the war with Spain in 1898 was undistinguished. In 1898, the Signal Corps contracted with Samuel P. Langley for an airplane, but tests ended with a spectacular dive into the Potomac River on December 8, 1903, nine days before the Wright brothers flew. The War Department, still smarting from that episode in 1905, turned down the new offer.
But the progress of aviation, the issuance of a patent to the Wrights in 1906, and the interest of President Theodore Roosevelt brought the matter up again. On August 1, 1907, Captain Charles DeF. Chandler became the head of the Aeronautical Division of the Signal Corps, newly established to develop all forms of flying. In 1908, the corps ordered a dirigible balloon of the Zeppelin type then in use in Germany and contracted with the Wrights for an airplane. Despite a crash that destroyed the first model, the Wright plane was delivered in 1909. The inventors then began to teach a few enthusiastic young officers to fly.
The progress of American aviation was slow in the early years. Congress voted the first appropriation for military aviation in 1911. The Navy was starting its own program at about the same time.
Soon after, the aviators rejected a proposal to separate their service from the Signal Corps. A makeshift squadron had an unlucky time with General John J. Pershing on the Mexican border in 1916.
What really proved the importance of military aviation was its role in Europe during World War I. There balloons used for artillery spotting and airplanes for reconnaissance over enemy lines made a decisive contribution. Dirigible airships and airplanes proved effective at bombing. Every army sought control of the air, and great battles between the "knights of the air" became the stuff of romance.
At the same time a serious doctrine of air warfare was beginning to emerge. The commanders began to distinguish, for example, between "strategic" air operations, deep in an enemy's territory, directed at his vital war-making industries and civilian morale, and "tactical" operations against his ground forces.
At the time of America's declaration of war against Germany on April 6, 1917, the Aviation Section was marginal at best. Its 1,200 officers and men had no knowledge of the air war in Europe. Its 250 airplanes and 5 balloons could not have survived long in combat. The nation's aircraft manufacturers had up to that time produced 1,000 planes. Yet, when France asked the United States to provide an air force of 4,500 airplanes and 50,000 men, there was no hesitation. With more enthusiasm than wisdom, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker asked for and received $ 640 million from Congress for aviation. The result was a fiasco. By the spring of 1918, it was clear that the Signal Corps had failed. The War Department then set up an Air Service consisting of two agencies: one under a civilian to deal with the manufacturers and one under a military officer to train and organize units.
This setup, begun in April and May, was consolidated in August, when President Woodrow Wilson appointed John D. Ryan, Second Assistant Secretary of War, as aviation "czar" to straighten out the mess.
In the end the only American achievement in the field of aircraft production was the Liberty engine. Of the 740 U. S. aircraft at the front in France at the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, almost all were European-made. Still, the Air Service of General Pershing American Expeditionary Forces, organized by Major General Mason M. Patrick and Brigadier General William (Billy) Mitchell, had distinguished itself in action against the Germans.
As a result of the important role air power had played in the war, a movement developed during the 1920s and 1930s to create an independent air force. The model for this was Great Britain, which, early in 1918, had combined its Army and Navy air arms into the Royal Air Force (RAF) under an Air Ministry.
The U. S. Army's leaders saw the airplane primarily as a weapon for supporting the infantry and gave the Air Service a status comparable to that of the field artillery or the engineers, responsible for procuring aircraft and training flying units. Local commanders, none of them aviators, ran the air forces assigned to them. A series of boards and commissions studied and restudied the question of air organization, with no result other than the name change to Air Corps in 1926.
Nevertheless, just as in the RAF, the formulation of theories of strategic bombing gave new impetus to the argument for an independent air force. Strategic or long-range bombardment was intended to destroy an enemy nation's industry and war-making potential, and only an independent service would have a free hand to do so.
Amid intense controversy, Billy Mitchell came to espouse these views and, in 1925, went to the point of "martyrdom" before a court-martial to publicize his position. But despite what it perceived as "obstruction" from the War Department, much of which was attributable to a shortage of funds, the Air Corps made great strides during the 1930s.
A doctrine emerged that stressed precision bombing of industrial targets by heavily armed long-range aircraft. A big step was taken in 1935 with the creation of a combat air force, commanded by an aviator and answering to the Chief of Staff of the Army.
Called the "GHQ Air Force" because it would be under the General Headquarters in time of war, this command took combat air units out of the hands of the local commanders in the continental United States.
Nonetheless, the GHQ Air Force remained small as compared to air forces in Europe. The Air Corps could only buy a few of the new four-engined B-17 Flying Fortresses, designed for strategic bombing, and in 1938, there were only thirteen on hand.
World War II was the true age of liberation for American air power. Reports from Europe in 1939 and 1940 proved the dominant role of the airplane in modern war. On June 20, 1941, Major General Henry H. Arnold, then chief of the Air Corps, assumed the title of chief of Army Air Forces and was given command of the Air Force Combat Command, as the GHQ Air Force had been renamed (Arnold's title was changed to "Commanding General, Army Air Forces" in March 1942, when he became co-equal with the commanders of Army ground Forces and Services of Supply). The AAF was directly under the orders of the Chief of Staff of the Army, General George C. Marshall. Arnold and Marshall agreed that the AAF would enjoy autonomy within the War Department until the end of the war, when the air arm would become a fully independent service.
Soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Arnold gained another victory. In staff talks with the Americans, the British always included representatives of the RAF as well as the Army and Navy, so the United States had to include an air representative of its own.
Arnold, although technically Marshall's subordinate, became an equal with him on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the body that served as the focal point of American strategic planning during the war.
In its expansion during World War II, the AAF became the world's most powerful air force. From the Air Corps of 1939, with 20,000 men and 2,400 planes, to the nearly autonomous AAF of 1944, with almost 2.4 million personnel and 80,000 aircraft, was a remarkable expansion.
Robert A. Lovett, the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, together with Arnold, presided over an increase greater than for either the ground Army or the Navy, while at the same time dispatching combat air forces to the battlefronts.
Air Combat Command was discontinued, and four air forces were created in the continental United States. In the end, twelve more air forces went overseas and served against the Germans and Japanese.
The above information comes from AIR FORCE HISTORY SUPPORT OFFICE
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