EIGHT OF THE EIGHTH NOTE ON ORGANIZATION The Eighth Air Force was one of 16 numbered air forces that comprised the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) during World War II. Numbered air forces were composed of "commands," defined by function and typically designated with a Roman numeral that was the same number as that of the air force. The Eighth was composed of the VIII Bomber Command and the VIII Fighter Command--long-range heavy bombers and the fighters to escort them--as well as the VIII Air Force Base Command to manage its base infrastructure. The VIII Air Support Command was added to operate medium bombers in a tactical role, but was later peeled off to form the nucleus of the Ninth Air Force. Within the USAAF table of organization, the "group" was the basic building block, and was contained within the commands. Groups initially contained three squadrons, although larger organizations, such as the Eighth Air Force, later added a fourth squadron to many groups. As the numbers of groups increased in 1943-1944, "wings" were activated to contain multiple groups, and "divisions" were later activated to contain multiple wings. Both wings and divisions were technically contained within commands, although, beginning in 1944, those within the Eighth Air Force answered directly to the Eighth Air Force headquarters. INTRODUCTION The Eighth Air Force is not the subject of this book but the stage upon which the climactic act of eight stories takes place. It was the wartime home of these eight individuals, whose lives intersected beneath its roof. These are eight parallel lives chosen from among those of around 350,000 men who were part of this unique organization during a crossroads of world history. These eight came from widely varied backgrounds, in a dozen states, from North Carolina to Alaska (then a territory). Tooey Spaatz, Ira Eaker, and Jimmy Doolittle each served as commander of the Eighth Air Force during World War II, but their careers were much more than their time with the Eighth. Their aviation careers were closely intertwined with one another and with the early evolution of American aviation and American airpower. Curtis LeMay and Hub Zemke were also accomplished prewar military pilots, and they became important leaders in the middle tier of command at the Eighth. With LeMay commanding bomber units and Zemke commanding fighters, both led large numbers of men, but both also flew combat missions themselves. Maynard "Snuffy" Smith, an anomaly among the eight, was the only enlisted man. He was the first living airman in the European Theater to receive the Medal of Honor, but his medal was a shining island in a lifetime of mischief and failure. Recalling Smith's life is like looking at a train wreck. Though it is unsettling to watch, we cannot avert our eyes. Yet he is an icon of the Eighth who is not forgotten, and who symbolizes how service with the Eighth brought out the very best in even the most unlikely people. Bob Morgan piloted the Memphis Belle , probably the best remembered of the tens of thousands of B-17 Flying Fortresses that were operated by the Eighth--and he later served under LeMay in the Pacific. Just as Doolittle led the first American raid on Tokyo in 1942, Morgan led the next mission to Tokyo in 1944. Rosie Rosenthal flew Flying Fortresses with the 100th Bomb Group, known as the "Bloody Hundredth" for the terribly heavy losses that it suffered in combat. On his third mission with the Bloody Hundredth, Rosenthal was the only member of the group on that mission who came back. He interrupted his career as an attorney to fly with the Eighth, and then returned to Germany after the war as part of the prosecution team at Nuremberg. Though the Eighth Air Force was only one of 16 numbered air forces within the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) during World War II, it was the largest, and today it is probably the most famous. At the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler, Georgia, we are reminded that the Eighth suffered half the casualties of the entire USAAF during World War II. These eight lives are representative of those of more than a third of a million men who rose to a challenge and helped wield the relentless hammer that pounded the Third Reich into submission, earning an indelible place in the annals of world history for the Eighth Air Force. CHAPTER 1 Three of the eight were born on the cusp of two centuries, in which the paradigms that had defined the nineteenth were recognized to have expired but the defining characteristics of the twentieth were not yet known. These men, who were born when manned, powered flight was still a pipe dream, would be among the shapers of twentieth-century military aviation. Carl Andrew Spatz came into the world on June 28, 1891, in the southeastern Pennsylvania community of Boyertown, a village of 1,436 people by the reckoning of the previous year's national census. A second-generation American of German extraction, he was the eldest son and second child of Anne Muntz Spatz and her husband of two years, Charles Spatz, a politically active newspaperman whose own parents, Karl and Juliana Amalie Busch Spatz, had emigrated from Prussia in 1865. Karl was an accomplished commercial printer fluent in several languages; Juliana was related to the Krupp family, the powerful German industrialists. Later in the coming century, a second "a" was added to the surname to give it a "Dutch" appearance. According to David Mets, Carl Andrew's biographer, the second "a" was also intended to encourage the correct pronunciation of the surname ("spots") rather than "spats," which was synonymous with the pretentious and outmoded footwear accessory. Karl bought the Boyertown Democrat newspaper, running it until his death in 1884, after which it was taken over by Charles, then only 19 years old. By 1891, when young Carl Andrew was born, the paper was still going strong and Charles was gaining influence in the Boyertown community. On the editorial page, Charles expressed a sentiment for an expansionist foreign policy, such as the intervention in Cuba on behalf of its independence from Spain. Today, small-town papers usually restrict themselves to local news, but in those days--before cable news networks or even radio--people got all their world news and journalistic opinion from newspapers. In 1896, Charles Spatz was elected to the state assembly, and young Carl Andrew joined him in Harrisburg as a page before joining the staff of the paper, now called the Berks County Democrat , where he was described as the youngest Linotype operator in the state. -- Ira Clarence Eaker and James Harold Doolittle were both born in 1896, a year in which hints of the transition to a new age in the coming century were seen and discussed. It was the year that Henry Ford first putted down a Michigan lane in his gasoline-powered "Quadricycle," though no one but Ford himself--and perhaps not even him--grasped the importance of this turn of events. In Dayton, Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright were imagining technology that was even further from the imagination of the average person than that which Ford was exploring. Eaker was born on April 13, 1896, in Field Creek in Llano County, Texas, about 100 miles north of San Antonio, near the Old Chisholm Trail. Doolittle was born eight months later, on December 14, at the western edge of the continent in Alameda, California, a Navy town within sight of San Francisco. Field Creek, where the post office was closed in 1976, still doesn't appear on most maps. Ira was the eldest of the five sons of a farmhand and part-time cowboy named Young Yancy "Y.Y." Eaker and his wife, Dona Lee Graham Eaker, who was only 17 when Ira was born. As Eaker later told Colonel Joe Green of the US Military History Institute, the family was "poor by any modern standard, but we didn't know it. We were comfortable and had plenty of food and we considered that our status enabled us to move forward and encouraged us to do so." The family, originally called Ecker, had emigrated from the Pfalz (Palatine) region in what is now southwestern Germany in the early eighteenth century. They originally settled in upstate New York, but later generations drifted west. Ira's grandfather William Eaker came to Eden in Concho County, Texas, after the Civil War. Y. Y. Eaker was born there two years before his father died in 1874 at the age of 60. Ira's father moved the family back to Eden--named for Fred Ede, not for the biblical garden--and bought a farm near the town when the eldest son was nine. Schooling was important for all the Eaker children--Dona's father was on the school board--but Ira's mother always felt that he was the smartest one of her brood and urged him to set his sights beyond the horizon as viewed from Eden. Church was also an important part of the family routine, and as a small boy Ira had once aspired to be an apostle--until he was told that their ranks had been closed after the first 12. "I went to church enough before I was ten to do me the rest of my life," he later told his biographer, James Parton. Ira grew up, like most boys, reading adventure stories, but an exciting reality that other boys only read about in stories was not far from his door. "My earliest heroes were cowboys and Indians," Ira later recalled. "I grew up with them. Cowboys taught me to play poker." -- Jimmy Doolittle was the son of a carpenter who had left Massachusetts for California to seek his fortune. Having sailed around Cape Horn to reach the Golden State, Frank Henry Doolittle settled in Alameda. It was here that he met and married Rosa Ceremah Shepherd, and where they had their only child, a little boy. On his birth certificate, he was called simply "Doolittle." He was never to know why he was not named until later, nor why they eventually named him James Harold. He knew only that he hated his middle name. Frank and Rosa might have remained in Alameda or thereabouts permanently, but 1896 was the year of the Klondike Gold Rush. Gold was discovered in Canada's Yukon Territory in August of that year, and news soon reached Seattle and San Francisco that a man could gather up nuggets the size of a robin's egg by the handful. A few hardy souls headed north immediately, despite the onset of winter in a harsh environment that most could not have anticipated. After the "Rush" of 1896 and the spring thaw of 1897, there came what was to be called the Klondike "Stampede." Frank Doolittle was among the thousands who stampeded northward. He was one of many who arrived after the easy pickings had been picked, but he found his carpentry skills in high demand in boomtowns such as Dawson. His gold came in a manner that he had not expected, but in a manner more reliable than staking his fate on flecks in a gold pan. While Frank was up north, young Jimmy Doolittle spent his first three birthdays back in California without a father. Meanwhile, stories told of golden sand along the shores of the Bering Sea fired another gold rush. In 1899, Frank Doolittle reached Nome, a little village that quickly became Alaska's largest city, and in June 1900 he sent for his family. Rosa, Jimmy, and Rosa's sister, Sarah, were among 25,000 who arrived that summer. As he had in the Klondike, Frank Doolittle returned to carpentry. Among other things, he built a comfortable home for his family. On the plains of Texas and Oklahoma, Ira Eaker's family did not have electricity in their home until he was in his teens. In Nome, Jimmy Doolittle's family had electricity before he started to school. Once in school, Jimmy found himself the shortest in his class, and discovered that size put him at a disadvantage. "A few of the taller boys took delight in teasing and provoking the shorter boys, and since I was the shortest one around, they tried to give me a bad time," he wrote in his memoirs. "They shoved and I shoved back. They punched and I returned their punches. . . . Since my size was against me, I decided my survival could be insured only by a speedy attack right from the start. I began to blast my opponents with a flurry of punches regardless of the consequences. The tactics worked. I found it was easy to draw blood if you were nimble on your feet, aimed at a fellow's nose, and got your licks in early. After several antagonists went home with bloody noses, I earned a certain measure of respect." Though Frank rarely engaged in conversation with his son and remained distant and aloof, he did teach the boy how to work with tools. Jimmy wrote in his memoirs that he longed for a closer relationship with his loner father, but it never happened. In his recollections, the defining moment in their relationship came when Frank falsely accused Jimmy of lying--and then beat him up. The skinny little boy promised that one day he would do the same to his father, and Frank Doolittle just laughed. Jimmy might have grown to manhood in Alaska, hunting and fishing and perhaps pursuing his father's trade, but in the late summer of 1908, as he was nearing his twelfth birthday, his mother decided to leave Frank, and Alaska, permanently. Taking Jimmy, she sailed for Los Angeles, where she had relatives, and where she would spend the rest of her life. Jimmy wrote in his memoirs that he assumed he would see his father again soon. It would be six years. CHAPTER 2 In 1906, Carl Andrew Spaatz (we'll use the later double-"a" spelling for the sake of consistency) enrolled in the college prep Perkiomen School in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, but when his father was injured in a fire in 1908, Carl was called home to run the family newspaper. By the time Charles recovered, the family's finances were stretched thin. Despite his local prominence, Charles had never become a wealthy man. Being a big fish in a 1,436-person pond had its limitations, as did the circulation of such a pond's leading newspaper. The family, which had come to include five children--plus Charles's mother--lived in the same building that contained the newspaper offices and the pressroom. The family had always imagined higher education for Carl, though, as times were hard, this now seemed further and further from their grasp financially. Though the US Military Academy at West Point--like its naval counterpart in Annapolis--offered free education, it was considered as a higher education option even by families with no military pedigree, so competition was fierce, and it was extremely hard to gain admission. Somehow, though, Carl got into West Point. David Mets notes that Charles was an acquaintance of Major Thomas Rhoads, personal physician to President William Howard Taft, and that it was he who made the suggestion and facilitated the appointment. However, a June 3, 1982, article in the Boyertown Area Times (a descendant of Charles's newspaper, but no longer family owned) suggests that Congressman John Hoover Rothermel made a congressional appointment in exchange for Charles Spatz's not running against him for Congress. As with many men who went on to significant military careers, Carl Andrew Spaatz's time at West Point was undistinguished academically and marred by frequent infractions of the strict rules, usually involving pranks, petty gambling, and smuggling booze into the hallowed halls. He did well academically until his later years, and graduated in the bottom half of the Class of 1914, but he did learn enough from his French course to make himself understood when he was working with French officers during the First World War. It was at West Point that Spaatz picked up his lifelong nickname. Because of his physical resemblance to a fellow cadet, Francis Toohey of the Class of 1913, Spaatz was dubbed "Toohey," though, over time, the name somehow came to be spelled without the "h." In addition to their red hair and freckles, the two shared the same waning interest in academics. Francis Toohey reportedly graduated last in his class. Spaatz did a little better. As viewed through the lens of hindsight, the most important day of Tooey's years at the academy was probably May 29, 1910. It was on this day, for a few moments, that he looked into the sky and watched the fragile biplane built by aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss. Curtiss was in the midst of a widely publicized and ultimately successful attempt to be the first person to pilot an airplane between Albany and New York City. He completed the flight in 171 minutes--the longest airplane flight to date--to claim a $10,000 prize that had been offered by the New York World . It was this moment that inspired Tooey Spaatz to become an aviator. Having considered dropping out of West Point after the terrible hazing that he had experienced as a plebe, Spaatz decided to stay because the US Army was training an increasing number of pilots. He had been lucky to get into the academy and was betting that on the other side of West Point he would be lucky enough to get into flight school. A graduating cadet's career track was directly linked to his place in his graduating class. Those at the top went into the Corps of Engineers. Below them were men destined for the artillery or the cavalry. The men at the bottom, like Spaatz, were assigned to the infantry. For Lieutenant Spaatz of the infantry, luck was with him so far as his first duty station assignment was concerned. In October 1914, as Europe was tumbling into World War I--then called the Great War or the World War--he was making his way to Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, where he would bide his time while waiting for an opportunity to apply for one of the small but growing number of slots within the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps. In 1914, there were only 122 men in that organization. It was also during his time in Hawaii that Spaatz met his future wife, Ruth Harrison. Their courtship was complicated by the fact that her father, Colonel Ralph Harrison, considered it inappropriate for his teenage daughter to go on dates without a chaperone. He was also one of those old cavalry officers ruling the US Army in those days who considered military aviation to be a waste of both time and money. -- In 1909, as Spaatz was preparing to enter West Point, Ira Eaker's family was on the move on the southern plains. A drought forced the Eakers out of Texas, across the Red River Valley, and into Bryan County, Oklahoma, which had been part of the autonomous Choctaw Nation until Oklahoma was formed and admitted to the Union just two years earlier. They rented a house in the tiny railroad town of Kenefic, and Y. Y. Eaker got work hauling sand for a cement works. Ira did well enough in high school in Kenefic to gain early admission to the newly opened Southeastern State Normal School, a teachers college in Durant, Oklahoma--the closest thing to higher learning that was available to him. It was in 1912, while he was living in Durant, that Eaker saw his first airplane. Contrary to what might have been expected, this experience did not inspire his imagination. As he recalled in a 1961 speech at the Air University, "I was not moved at the time to consider myself a possible participant in flying." In contrast with the underwhelming academic career of Tooey Spaatz, Ira Eaker was diligent and focused, earning consistently high scores. As James Parton points out, his only grades below A came in music and are explained by his being tone-deaf. He was an ambitious student who was described in the yearbook as "Ira Eager." In 1915, as a freshman, he served as vice president of the Debating Club. Recalling a particularly memorable debate, the yearbook notes that "Eaker won first place by a narrow margin; his style was logic rather than oratory; his delivery was characterized by a whole-souled earnestness that won him the day." -- Having spent his early years in Nome, Jimmy Doolittle experienced the culture shock of moving to Los Angeles for middle school. He later was a member of the first class to attend the Manual Arts Senior High School. Los Angeles was still young in its life as a city, and the school was only the third high school in town. Like Tooey Spaatz, but unlike Ira Eaker, Doolittle was a fair student, with a C average and a greater interest in the extracurricular than in the classroom. As had been the case when he was in Nome, Doolittle was picked on because of his size--he was just five foot four, although he always claimed to be two inches taller. To compensate, he took up boxing, entering amateur matches at the Los Angeles Athletic Club when he was 15 and winning the flyweight division at the West Coast Amateur Championships when he was 17. He was also, much to the consternation of his mother, boxing in exhibition bouts with professionals. One Saturday night when he was still 15, he was arrested in an unsanctioned street fight. His mother bailed him out of jail on Monday morning in time to take him to school. Neither his mother nor a weekend in jail affected his amateur boxing career, but meeting his future wife and falling under her spell did. As he later recalled, Josephine "Joe" Daniels, by his account a straight-A student, was "unimpressed" with his success as a boxer. In 1910, the same year that Doolittle started at Manual Arts, the City of Angels hosted what was to be a watershed moment in the history of aviation in the western United States. Based on the big air show that had been held at Reims in France in 1909, the Aviation Meet held at Dominguez Field, south of downtown Los Angeles, brought many of America's leading aviators together for what turned out to be the country's first major air show. Glenn Curtiss came to demonstrate his latest machines, and Louis Paulhan came over from France to show off the airplanes designed by Louis Blériot, who had just become the first man to fly across the English Channel. Doolittle's impression was one of amazement that machines with "radical differences" in design could all fly. Among the pilots whose demonstrations at the show Doolittle recalled in his memoirs was the great Lincoln Beachey, considered by many to be the world's greatest flyer. "An aeroplane in the hands of Lincoln Beachey is poetry," Orville Wright had said. "His mastery is a thing of beauty to watch. He is the most wonderful flyer of all." Two years later, Doolittle, still in his teens, built his own glider--using plans that he found in Popular Mechanics . He tried flying it, crashed it, repaired it, and tried again. The second time, he was pulled by a friend who had borrowed his father's car in order to help Doolittle achieve a faster takeoff speed, but this attempt also failed. Undaunted, he decided to build another airplane, with a propeller driven by an engine extracted from his motorcycle, but that aircraft was destroyed in a windstorm before he could fly it. When he graduated from high school in 1915, Doolittle headed for Alaska to seek his fortune, promising Joe Daniels that he would send for her--as his father had once promised his mother. There, Jimmy saw his father for the first time in six years. Sizing up a boy who had grown into a champion prizefighter, Frank Doolittle asked his son whether he recalled his earlier threat to get even for the beating his father had given him. Jimmy nodded, and Frank asked him whether he thought he would come out on top in a rematch. Jimmy nodded again. Frank said he probably would, and turned away. The Jimmy Doolittle who signed up as a steward on a Seattle-bound steamer after a summer of failure with a gold pan was, by his own reckoning, "far wiser" than the one who had gone north. He enrolled at Los Angeles Junior College, and told Joe Daniels that the marriage of which they had spoken on and off would have to wait until he finished college. Her mother was relieved. CHAPTER 3 In 1915, as both Ira Eaker and Jimmy Doolittle were in the early days of their respective college careers, Lieutenant Tooey Spaatz had finally made the transition from infantry to aviation and was earning his wings as a US Army aviator at Rockwell Field on North Island at the mouth of San Diego Bay. With its good flying weather, North Island had become one of the most important aviation centers in the country. Glenn Curtiss opened a flight school there in 1912, and both the US Army and the US Navy maintained busy flight training operations. Military aviation was in its infancy, and even as the men were learning to fly, they were pioneering the art and science of using aircraft tactically. The ongoing and evolving air combat tactics in the war-blackened skies of Europe were discussed and carefully dissected by the American pilots at North Island. Meanwhile, with the Germans conducting unrestricted submarine warfare against ships in the North Atlantic--including American ships--they wondered whether the United States would one day find itself in the war. None could have predicted that the first use of US Army airpower in a war would come much closer to home. On March 9, 1916, the violent revolution and civil war that had been raging in Mexico since 1910 spilled across the border. One of the principal belligerents, the flamboyant General José Doroteo Arango Arámbula--better known by his nom de guerre, Francisco "Pancho" Villa--led a cross-border raid on the town of Columbus, New Mexico, which left ten civilians and eight members of the US Army's 13th Cavalry dead. An outraged American public demanded retaliation, so President Woodrow Wilson ordered American troops to cross the border and hunt Pancho down. The massive intervention was under the command of General John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, who would later earn lasting notoriety as the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. The air contingent of Pershing's "Punitive Expedition" was the 1st Aero Squadron, commanded by Captain Benjamin Delahauf Foulois, who would be the US Army's top airman two decades later. Then based at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the 1st Aero soon forward-deployed to Casas Grandes in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. This became Tooey Spaatz's first duty assignment as a combat airman. He arrived in May, shortly after he earned his wings, and was soon flying reconnaissance missions over Mexico in a Curtiss JN-3 biplane. The Mexican Punitive Expedition was a failure. The stated objectives had been to kill or capture Pancho Villa and to halt border raids by armed Mexican gangs, but neither was met. Meanwhile, the US Army had lost many of the skirmishes that took place south of the border. For the Aviation Section, the shortcomings in their equipment choices were underscored by the poor performance of their aircraft in the high elevations of the Mexican mountains and plateaus. There was also a steep learning curve in managing logistics for an air force deployed far from its bases, but the lessons learned would be valuable later. For the young Tooey Spaatz, the thrill of being in action so early in his aviation career overshadowed the hardships and adversity. "At that time we were all young and somewhat irresponsible, so that we enjoyed our work and we enjoyed our play at the same time," he told David Mets, comparing his Mexican adventures to his future career. "Later on, we enjoyed our work less and played less." -- A year later, much had changed. Against the backdrop of unrestricted German submarine attacks on shipping, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Tooey Spaatz, now a first lieutenant, was assigned to the newly formed 3rd Aero Squadron at San Antonio. It was here that he reconnected with Ruth Harrison, whose father was now assigned to Fort Sam Houston. By this time, as part of the buildup for the war, the Aviation Section was undergoing a rapid expansion. Spaatz was promoted to captain and given command of the new 31st Aero Squadron. On July 26, when Spaatz learned that the 31st was due to head overseas in two weeks, he contacted Ruth and proposed that they get married immediately--by which he meant that day . Ruth agreed that this seemed like the right thing to do, and so they did, much to the consternation of her parents. Shortly after his arrival in France in September 1917, Spaatz was reassigned to the 3rd Air Instruction Center at Issoudun Aerodrome as the second in command to Lieutenant Colonel Walter Glenn Kilner of West Point's Class of 1912, with whom Spaatz had flown during the Mexican Punitive Expedition. Located about 130 miles south of Paris, the base was nothing more than a vast plot of ground that was referred to as a "mudhole." It was a forlorn collection of shacks, where the unlucky airmen were housed in tents and carted into a nearby town to take their weekly showers. Airplanes could not land because the ground was so spongy. Whipping Issoudun into shape was an uphill task, but Kilner and Spaatz leapt into the challenge. -- In April 1917, as the United States went to war, Jimmy Doolittle had graduated from Los Angeles Junior College and was enrolled in the University of California in Berkeley, just a few miles from where he was born. He had studied engineering in junior college, aiming for a life as a mining engineer, and had continued in this vein at Berkeley. After a summer working in Nevada silver mines, Doolittle returned to Cal in the fall of 1917, but took a leave of absence to sign up as a US Army Reserve flying cadet. With the war on, there was suddenly a great deal of demand for Army pilots--and Doolittle had long wanted to learn to fly. When Tooey Spaatz first applied for a slot, the total Aviation Section head count was 122. By the summer of 1917, it was up to 1,218. In 1918, that number reached 195,023, the largest number that would be seen in the service until 1942. Doolittle and Joe Daniels had earlier agreed to wait until his college career was over to get married, but they now adjusted this pledge and were wed on Christmas Eve in 1917 in Los Angeles. His cadet pay had yet to arrive, so she paid for the license and for a short honeymoon trip to San Diego. By now, she had a good job in Los Angeles and was moving into management at Pacific Mutual Insurance. His career as an airman began with ground school on the University of California campus, and flight training at Rockwell Field, where Tooey Spaatz had earned his wings three years before. It was an inauspicious beginning. As Doolittle was taxiing out to the runway with his instructor for his first flight in an airplane, two Curtiss JN-4s collided in the air above and crashed, tumbling to the ground in a twisted mess that missed them by only a few yards. When Doolittle earned his wings and his second lieutenant's bars in March 1918, he expected to be sent overseas to join the US Army airmen training for combat at Issoudun. Instead, he suffered the fate of so many good military pilots on the threshold of their careers. His skill made him desirable as an instructor, and he remained behind, teaching first at Rockwell and later at Kelly Field in Texas. -- Meanwhile, Ira Eaker had enlisted in April 1917 when the United States declared war. All 37 of the male students at Southeastern State Normal School raced to the nearest US Army recruiting office, which happened to be in Greenville, Texas. The seniors, including Eaker, who were about to graduate, joined as privates but were diverted to an officer training school that was being set up at Fort Roots in Arkansas. Only a few years earlier, advancements in rank of just a single grade took years. In 1917, against the backdrop of the wartime expansion, they came quickly. Tooey Spaatz had gone from second lieutenant to captain in ten months. Ira Eaker made it from private to a Reserve Army second lieutenant in four, and earned a Regular Army commission in two. Shortly after Lieutenant Eaker was assigned to the 64th Infantry Regiment at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, he was standing on the parade ground when an airplane flew past. He watched the pilot attempt to fly over the mountains to the west, fail to reach the proper altitude, and then circle back to land. When Eaker walked over to speak with him, the pilot explained that he was on a pilot recruiting drive and was trying to reach Deming, New Mexico. Examining the aircraft's engine, Eaker spotted a disconnected spark plug wire, reconnected it, and told the pilot to try again. The man thanked Eaker and suggested that with his knowledge of aircraft engines--this was the first one Eaker had seen up close--he should apply for flight training. Being on a recruiting drive, he just happened to have copies of the application forms. The paperwork went up the line and back down, and in March 1918 Ira Eaker received orders to report for aviation ground school in Austin. Eight weeks later, he graduated to flight training at Kelly Field. Four hours into his aerial education, his instructor landed, climbed out, and told Eaker, "You had better take this round by yourself." He took off solo, executed several touch-and-goes, and by the afternoon, the instructor had him doing loops, rolls, and spins. Eaker earned his wings in July 1918, four months after Jimmy Doolittle. Though his transfer out of the infantry would not be official for two years, Lieutenant Ira Eaker was now in the US Army Air Service. Like Doolittle, though, Eaker never made it overseas during the war. -- By the summer of 1918, Tooey Spaatz had been in France for ten months, having guided the transformation of muddy Issoudun into a first-class training facility. He had overseen the construction of wooden barracks with running water, and ruts had become paved roads. When he arrived, aircraft operations were essentially impossible on the rugged terrain. Within a few months, Issoudun had grown into a complex of ten modern airfields, each one earmarked for a different phase of training. In May 1918, when Kilner was relocated to Pershing's American Expeditionary Forces headquarters, Spaatz, now with the brevet rank of major, took over as base commander. While in France, Spaatz had met the colorful General William Lendrum "Billy" Mitchell, the senior air commander for the American Expeditionary Forces. A charismatic leader and an outspoken advocate of the use of airpower in warfare, Mitchell was a larger-than-life character who greatly influenced the history of airpower in the early twentieth century, as well as the opinions and careers of most of the young officers who served under him. In Mitchell, Spaatz found a receptive ear when he expressed his desire to get away from the training base and into combat. Mitchell liked what Spaatz had done at Issoudun and was anxious to keep him in a training role. He had even prepared orders for Spaatz to return to the United States to revamp training there with lessons that had been learned in combat. When Spaatz complained, Mitchell sympathized with the young warrior's desire to see real combat and promised that he would get a combat tour after he spent some time in the States. Spaatz argued that he should have a combat tour before that, adding that he feared the war would be over before he got into action. Mitchell relented, and July 1918 found Spaatz in Toul, on the edge of the Saint-Mihiel salient, assigned--on temporary duty--to the 13th Pursuit Squadron of the 2nd Pursuit Group, where he would be flying the French-built SPAD XIII, arguably the best Allied fighter of the war and widely used by American pilots. In his new job, Spaatz was destined to be at the center of the action for the great Allied offensive that was to take place in September. The Battle of Saint-Mihiel, in which American airpower was to play an important role in the offensive action, began on September 12, although cloud cover restricted air operations and Spaatz didn't see combat for three days. Though the term had yet to be coined, the aerial battles of World War I truly resembled dogfights as the masses of opposing fighter planes rolled and tumbled across the sky, with each pilot intent on staying out of the sights of the opposition while attempting to place his own sights on an enemy. Tooey Spaatz managed to place his gunsight on a German Fokker D.VII and pour a sufficient stream of lead into it to send it cartwheeling into the land battle below. His next and last tangle with German fighters came on September 26, the day that his temporary duty assignment to the 13th expired. In this engagement, Spaatz managed to down two Fokkers in quick succession, but he committed two potentially fatal errors, which were made doubly egregious by the fact that he should have known better, for they were common mistakes. The first was his becoming so fixated on the enemy aircraft he was attacking that he forgot his own "six" (his six o'clock position, the area of sky directly behind his aircraft). In so doing, he allowed two German fighters to get on his tail. Had Charles Biddle, his squadron commander, not intervened personally, Spaatz would have been a goner. His second flub was that he lingered so long in the battle, running dangerously low on fuel, an error that was compounded by the fact that the aerial battle had drifted into the skies over enemy territory. Fortunately, he made it as far as no-man's-land before he had to execute a crash landing--and the first troops who reached him were French. Spaatz later told a reporter that he had shot down three aircraft on that day, "two Germans and my own." Billy Mitchell awarded Spaatz the Distinguished Service Cross--despite the preventable loss of a US Army airplane. When the Great War came to an end on "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918, Brevet Major Tooey Spaatz and his wife were on a train, passing through El Paso, Texas, en route to San Diego's Rockwell Field. When Spaatz reached his first postwar duty station, two of the first men he met were Lieutenants Ira Eaker and Jimmy Doolittle, who had arrived just a short time earlier. -- On November 25, 1918, less than a week after the guns fell silent, Doolittle was part of a dramatic 212-plane flyover of San Diego. The Los Angeles Times reported that "they formed a ceiling over the sky that almost blotted out the struggling rays of the sun and with majestic solemnity, they patrolled the air, magnificent in the perfection of their formation, and while they framed a perfect background at 5,000 feet, the five aerobats below swooped, dived, looped and spun in as perfect unison as though they had been operated by a single hand." Jimmy Doolittle was one of the "five aerobats." The media and the public were in love with aviation, and Doolittle, who as a boy had been part of an excited audience, was now the object of air show fascination. In January 1919, Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle were on hand to greet the new commanding officer of the US Army Air Service Western District, Colonel Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold. It was an auspicious moment, as the careers of these men, especially Arnold, Spaatz, and Eaker, would be closely intertwined in a command role for more than a quarter of a century. Arnold would eventually rise through the ranks to serve as America's senior airman in World War II, but all four would play significant roles in the continuing evolution of their service, and in its triumph in that future conflict. In the meantime, in those early days, before the wartime future we take for granted could be imagined, there was one man who did imagine the future of airpower. Arnold, Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle were to become his active disciples, and their enthusiasm for his doctrine, as well as the notion of an autonomous--or even independent --air force, was to define their careers. When the First World War ended, Billy Mitchell was the public face of the Air Service. He was the kind of colorful, outspoken character that the media love, and his personality was tailor-made for the role. It had been widely assumed within the Air Service that Mitchell would be given the top job as director (the title was changed to chief after June 1920) of the Air Service. However, he was far too outspoken, and that made his bosses uneasy. He advocated the independence of the Air Service from the US Army, citing the fact that Britain's Royal Air Force had been spun off as a separate service in 1918. Instead, in what was interpreted by the airman as a decision motivated by a desire to keep the Air Service under the thumb of the ground army establishment, the position went to Major General Charles Menoher, who had commanded the 42nd Infantry Division during the war. Though Mitchell was named as Menoher's assistant, for men such as Arnold, Spaatz, Eaker, Doolittle, and many others, his not getting the top job was obviously both a snub and a mistake. This development served only to stimulate their advocacy of Mitchell's ideas, and fuel the fire that would drive them. CHAPTER 4 The next generation of the eight included two men whose lives were touched by an awareness of World War I but who were too young to have been a part of it. They had entered a world in which powered flight existed but was still mainly a novelty. Airplanes were so rare in those early days of flight that, in most places in the United States, few people had laid eyes on one. In Columbus, Ohio, only about 65 miles east of where the Wright brothers were inventing aviation, Curtis Emerson LeMay would later recall having seen what he always assumed was one of the Wright Flyer airplanes in the sky when he was about four years old. The sighting made a lasting impression. Born on November 15, 1906, LeMay was the eldest child of a handyman and sometime railroad hand named Erving LeMay and a farmer's daughter named Arizona Carpenter. The family moved around a great deal during his early years, mainly within Ohio, but when Curt was nearing school age, his father's railroad career took the family, which now included Curt's younger sister, Velma, and their new brother, Lloyd, west to Montana. The LeMays settled in at Nezperce, an obscure whistle-stop northwest of Butte. The boy who had once beheld the future in the magic of a Wright Flyer in the sky now found himself in a place as yet untouched by the technology of the twentieth century, where the "Old West" still prevailed, and where a young boy went to school on the back of a horse. He enjoyed the riding part, but cared little for the school part. -- While LeMay's father was a drifter who transported his family beyond the fringes of twentieth-century civilization, Maynard Harrison Smith's father was an attorney in the Michigan "Thumb" region north of Detroit. Henry Harrison Smith was the very archetype of the establishment man, thoroughly rooted in public life. Just two years younger than LeMay, Smith was born into a solid middle-class family on May 19, 1911, in Caro, Michigan. Located about 30 miles east of Saginaw and 40 miles northeast of Flint, Caro was a town of nearly 2,000 people, founded in 1847 by a man named Curtis Emerson--who apparently was not related to the family of Curtis Emerson LeMay. In 1928, when Maynard was 17, his father was named to the bench as presiding judge in the 40th Judicial Circuit. Of the stern and uncompromising Judge Smith, the local Advertiser wrote in 1934 that he "gave his undivided attention to every matter which came before his court. He had little sympathy with those who sought to involve cases with too many technicalities. Evil doers convicted in his court for major crimes . . . received little mercy, and it has been said that Tuscola County was quite free from such activities because criminals knew that they would be punished to the extent of the law, should they be captured and convicted." The irony was that Judge Smith's only son--of four children--was as likely as anyone to get into trouble. A May 1929 article in the Cass City Chronicle reported: "Four people narrowly escaped fatal injuries Thursday evening, when the automobile driven by Maynard Smith, 18, of Caro collided with a horse and buggy two miles west of Caro on the Gilford Road. Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Cody of Caro were riding in the buggy. Mr. Cody received fractured ribs and Mrs. Cody suffered from shock. The horse was driven from the shafts and killed instantly." The boy with the need for speed was not cited. The author Allen Mikaelian wrote that "Maynard got used to getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was trouble, [and] he got away with it. By the time he was old enough to cause a serious ruckus, his father was a circuit court judge with no tolerance for the policeman or prosecutor brave enough to drag his boy into court." In fact, the judge and Mrs. Mary Goes Smith, a busy primary school teacher, deliberately spoiled their son, rarely disciplining him at home and shielding him from the outside world. As Maynard's own son told Mikaelian many years later, "My dad was never really made to do anything. . . . He always had pretty much what he wanted or wished." By the time Maynard, who was known as "Hokie" (sometimes seen spelled "Hokey")--his "Snuffy" nickname came later--was in his teens, what he "wanted or wished" came to include all manner of dangerous high jinks with cars and motorcycles, including chasing a cop up a light pole. -- Hubert Zemke entered the world on March 14, 1914--his mother's twenty-fifth birthday--in Missoula, Montana, the seat and largest city in a Montana county of the same name that was nearly four times the size of Rhode Island but home to fewer than 5,000 people. Coincidentally, just 100 miles to the north, the author's father (born in 1908) was growing up on a homestead in Montana's Flathead Valley, a place that was even more remote. For the Zemke family, being first-generation German immigrants, the outside world intruded upon their solitude in the form of the anti-German sentiment that reared its ugly head across the United States during World War I. Benno Zemke had arrived in the United States at the turn of the century, a young merchant seaman from Pomerania who jumped ship in Philadelphia. He was deported, but he tried again, and finally entered legally in 1904. Zemke wound up with a job as a section hand with the Northern Pacific Railway and landed in Missoula, 100 miles west of where Erving LeMay later held a similar job. By 1910, he had amassed a nest egg sufficient to allow him the rare luxury of a vacation in his homeland. On his return voyage, he met Anna Maria Kutter, a Bavarian girl headed for a housemaid's job in Chicago. A long-distance correspondence led to a wedding in 1911, and the birth of their only child. Anna wanted to name him Wolfgang after Mozart, but Benno's uncle Hubert--a name that Anna always pronounced "Hoo-bart"--became the boy's namesake. Hubert would have remembered little of the wartime anti-German bigotry, but he grew up being called "kraut" by the bullies about town. Like Jimmy Doolittle, he learned to take care of himself with his own hands, and was the state middleweight boxing champ for two years running while he was at Montana State University (now the University of Montana). In the ring, Hubert was known as "the Hub," and thereafter, the nickname stuck. He would always be known, except by his mother, as "Hub" Zemke. -- It was while the LeMay family was in Montana that Erving began to take young Curt hunting, and the boy quickly developed a love of shooting and a respect for the power of firearms that would remain with him long after a horse and saddle were no longer the preferred method of travel. The family's sojourn in rural Montana was short-lived, as Erving LeMay pulled up stakes and headed west toward California and their next short-term home in Emeryville, on the marshy flats east of San Francisco Bay, a few miles from where Doolittle had spent his earliest years. It was while they were in Emeryville that the family's fourth daughter was born. She was named Methyll, a variation on the name of a cousin, Ethyllm LeMay. The LeMays arrived in time to be present for San Francisco's great 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, a world's fair designed to celebrate both the promise of California's role in the world after the completion of the Panama Canal and San Francisco's own "bigger and better" rebirth after the Great Earthquake of 1906. For Curtis LeMay, the highlight of the Panama-Pacific Exposition was becoming reacquainted with aviation. He had seen the Wright brothers a decade earlier, and now it was the Loughead brothers, who had just built an airplane in San Francisco that would be the first of many for the company that became Lockheed. In the sky above the fairgrounds were the great daredevils of whom the reigning monarch was the renowned Lincoln Beachey, considered by many to be the world's greatest aviator. Beachey's death, which came quickly when aerodynamic stress crumpled his fragile airplane while he performed above San Francisco Bay, did not deter Curtis LeMay from his thoughts of aviation. The LeMays were not long for the Golden State, however. Once again, Erving's wanderlust put them on the road. Erving and Arizona took the family back to Ohio by way of Pennsylvania, where their fifth child, Leonard, was born and where Curt graduated from high school in Columbus. He had wanted to go on to West Point, but this was impossible without a congressional appointment or the sort of contacts that came from putting down roots in a place longer than Erving LeMay had ever allowed himself to do. In 1924, Curt enrolled at Ohio State University in Columbus. He worked his way through college with a swing-shift job at a steel foundry, a circumstance that allowed little time for extracurricular activities and often placed him in morning classes with his mind and body in a state of exhaustion. If his standing in other classes suffered, the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) became his focus and his top priority. By now, LeMay had decided that he wanted to be a pilot. He had paid $2.50 to a state fair barnstormer for a five-minute jaunt, and had been seduced by the experience. Like so many members of his generation, LeMay thought the military seemed a good path to an aviation career, and he reasoned that ROTC would give him a better chance of eventually getting into US Army flight school. In 1928, after four years at Ohio State, LeMay was still 15 credits short of the number required for graduation (he subsequently made them up), but he was an honor graduate of the ROTC program. There were no Regular Army slots open to him in Ohio in 1928, but his ROTC honors earned him a commission in the US Army Reserve. Much to his chagrin, he discovered that Reserve officers had little chance of getting into flight school--but enlisted men in the Ohio National Guard had a better chance of becoming a pilot. He then decided to resign his new officer's commission and enlist as a private in the National Guard. When he was in the process of doing this, he crossed paths with a "nice old brigadier general" whom he had met as an ROTC cadet. The general thought LeMay was crazy until he explained his desire to learn to fly. As luck would have it, the general had the power to bring LeMay into the National Guard as a second lieutenant as a gateway to a regular commission in the US Army Air Corps--and as a flying cadet. He was ordered to report for pilot training at March Field, near Riverside, California--coincidentally the place where he lived during his final years--in November 1928. -- As LeMay had done at Ohio State, Hub Zemke enrolled in the ROTC program at Montana State. With LeMay, it had been a conscious decision aimed at a career as a US Army aviator. For Zemke, two years of ROTC were required of male students, and another two opened up the option for a US Army Reserve commission. There were few airplanes in the skies over Montana in the early 1930s, and Zemke would remain unbitten by the aviation bug until after he had completed his first two years. Among the airplanes that were in Montana skies were those operated by Bob Johnson, one of the state's aviation pioneers. Johnson Flying Service operated a fleet of charter aircraft out of Missoula, and was later a pioneer in the development and deployment of "smokejumpers," people who fought forest fires in places that were far from the nearest roads by parachuting into these remote areas. One day in 1935, Zemke drove out to the airport and paid for a ride into the Big Sky of Montana aboard Johnson's Stinson biplane. His second flight would be in the skies over Texas, courtesy of the US Army. CHAPTER 5 While the three oldest of the eight were in uniform when the United States entered the Great War, the youngest two were born during the war. Robert Rosenthal was born on June 11, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York, the first son and second child of Samuel Rosenthal, a technician with the New York City Health Department, and his wife, Rose. Their daughter, Jeannette, was three years older than Robert, though he later recalled with a chuckle that when they were adults, she referred to him as her "older brother." While Robert was growing up, the Rosenthal family lived on East 21st Street near Avenue X in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of southern Brooklyn, a few miles north of Brighton Beach and Coney Island. There was a great deal of elbow room in Sheepshead Bay while Robert and Jeannette were growing up. Indeed, there was a goat farm on East 22nd, not far from their home. "It was not bucolic," Robert said many years later of the neighborhood, "but it was a laid-back, open area." -- Robert Knight Morgan was born into a life of privilege in Asheville, North Carolina, on July 31, 1918. He grew up in a household where he was surrounded by servants, but he triumphed over advantage the way some of the others, notably Ira Eaker, triumphed over disadvantage. In his memoirs, he describes himself as "the first true Southerner of my family line," because his parents, David Bradley Morgan and Mabel Knight Morgan, had only just relocated to Asheville from Chicago, where their older children, David and Peggy, had been born. Bob grew up in a 4,000-square-foot home built by his father's employer, Carolina Wood Products, which manufactured furniture as well as homes. He described the house as one of his father's "perks." Other perks flowed from the family's association with the regional high society. One of Mabel's Asheville friends was Cornelia Vanderbilt Cecil, whose father, George Washington Vanderbilt II, had built a 178,926-square-foot family home called Biltmore House, the largest private home in the United States. The two women met at the country club where both were members. David Bradley Morgan later helped form and became president of Dimension Manufacturing Company, another furniture maker; he became even wealthier, and built another home near Biltmore when Bob was nine. During the Roaring Twenties, the country club world of fashionable soirees at Biltmore was enough to have made the "Great" Jay Gatsby feel at home, and it continued as though it would never end--until young Bob was 11. "We never talked about it around the house when it hit, not openly anyway," Bob Morgan wrote in his memoirs of the stock market crash of 1929. "It was whispers, glances between [my parents], long silences at dinner where there had always been lively conversation. My brother and sister and I never officially learned what had happened." Dimension Manufacturing Company struggled, then collapsed. The family home was sold, and David Morgan took a job as a night watchman at 5 percent of his Roaring Twenties salary. As Bob recalled, "The hardships we went through changed me for life, and not necessarily for the worse." Befriended by Cornelia Vanderbilt, Mabel spent much of the next several years traveling with her in Europe, and later settled in Washington, DC, with Peggy--while David attempted to revive Dimension Manufacturing with loans from the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and as their two sons worked their way through school. Eventually, both of the boys attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, across the Potomac from Washington, but by the time Bob arrived, David was at the University of North Carolina and Mabel had moved back to Asheville. Bob Morgan recalled that the "hardest blow of my life" came in 1936, when he was 17. His mother, with whom he had been close as a child but who had been absent from his life for several years, was diagnosed with inoperable thyroid cancer. Realizing the futility of her situation, Mabel took Bob's old squirrel gun from the closet and turned the .410-gauge barrel upon herself. CHAPTER 6 The World War I years had demonstrated the potential of aviation as not just machines of war but machines that could bind distant places more closely by reducing travel time between them. Just as civilians in Europe and America were beginning to implement the first airline schemes, the young aviation advocates within the Air Service were imagining ways to demonstrate the potential of military aviation. While Arnold, Spaatz, Eaker, and Doolittle were still at Rockwell Field, they were on hand to witness some of the first of the numerous long-endurance flights that proliferated in the United States in the decade after the end of World War I. In October 1919, Spaatz himself flew in the Transcontinental Reliability and Endurance Test--also called the Great Transcontinental Air Race--a scheme conceived by Billy Mitchell involving 48 Air Service aircraft, half flying west from Roosevelt Field on Long Island and half traveling east from Chrissy Field in San Francisco. Flying an American-built de Havilland DH-4 twin-cockpit biplane, Spaatz came in second--by 20 seconds--among the eastbound contingent. He would have been first had he not landed at the wrong airfield and had to take off again. As Spaatz and the exceedingly meticulous Eaker were moving toward career paths that would find them earmarked for responsible command positions early in their careers, Jimmy Doolittle was developing a reputation for the irresponsible . As a pilot, he was a natural, one of those aviators for whom flying was second nature, and for whom the controls were like an extension of his own hands. Like many a skilled aviator of that early generation of flight, Doolittle was also a daredevil. "I admit to being a bit of a mischief maker and am guilty of having had a little fun in an airplane," he wrote in his memoirs, describing himself as "free of spirit and a rebellious fighter pilot at heart." It was ironic that he was to achieve his greatest fame leading bombers, not fighters, but his skill and fearlessness, exhibited in fighters, would be a characteristic of his future notoriety. -- In June 1919, the Air Service was in the midst of a downsizing nearly as precipitous as its growth two years before. From 311 men in 1916, it had reached a peak of 195,023 in 1918, but in 1920, it was plummeting toward 9,050. The once robust training operation at Rockwell Field was down to nine instructors by the summer of 1919, and everyone was getting his transfer papers. Hap Arnold was reassigned to the Presidio of San Francisco as air commander of the IX Corps area, the western half of the United States, and Spaatz joined him there as his assistant a month later. Meanwhile, Ira Eaker received orders to embark for the Philippines, where he wound up with the 3rd Aero Squadron at Camp Stotsenburg, 50 miles north of Manila, where the landing field had just been renamed for Major Harold Clark, an Air Service pilot who had been killed in a crash in Panama. "We mowed a little strip out of the cavalry maneuver area and used it for a field," he later recalled in an Air Force Historical Research Center interview. Under Eaker's command, the 3rd Aero erected the first hangar at Clark Field, which evolved into the largest US Army air base in the Far East. Despite the technological advances that had come during the war, the state of aviation was still rather primitive. A case in point was the systems that Eaker and Lieutenant Newton Longfellow jury-rigged to help them fly through the low cloud cover that frequently blanketed the Philippines. "We'd pull up to about cloud level and get in them briefly," Eaker explained. "By having a plumb bob hanging down the center of our brief instrument board and by putting a carpenter's level on the top longeron, you could tell . . . when you were diving and when you were climbing. And you could tell by the plumb bob when you were turning to the right and turning to the left. [We practiced until we] could climb through 5,000 feet of cloud, come out on top and then come back through safely. That was the first demonstration that I had seen of the ability to fly with instruments." In July 1920, when Eaker's transfer from the infantry to the Air Service became official, he was promoted to captain and in September he was made executive officer of the Philippines Department Air Office, which was then commanded by General Leonard Wood, a future US Army chief of staff. Despite his decidedly junior rank, Eaker got along well with the colonels and generals at the headquarters, who recognized the value of military aviation--at least as an observation tool--and respected the new captain's opinions with regard to its practical application, in addition to appreciating his technical knowledge. -- In the summer of 1921, when his tour of duty in the Philippines concluded, Eaker headed home by sailing westward. Instead of traveling east, back across the Pacific to the West Coast of the United States, many officers chose to go in the opposite direction, thus completing a circumnavigation of the globe. Indeed, Hap Arnold had done this in 1909 when his tour as an infantry officer in the Philippines had ended. It was on this trip that he saw his first airplane, this being the Type XI monoplane with which Louis Blériot had just completed the first-ever aerial crossing of the English Channel. Eaker's odyssey took him to Indochina and a stopover in Saigon, a location that was to play an important role in American military history later in the century. He also visited Singapore, Suez, and Cairo, making landfall in Barcelona. Whereas Blériot had once made history with his international flight, Ira Eaker flew from Paris to London on a commercial airliner. So much in aviation had changed in those dozen years. However, Eaker still had yet to decide upon aviation as his life's work. Even after he returned to his homeland and was named commanding officer of the 5th Aero Squadron at Mitchel Field on Long Island in January 1922, he still assumed that he would soon turn in his uniform for a suit, a tie, and a stint in law school. Indeed the US Army was downsizing dramatically, offering captains a year's salary as an incentive for leaving the service. In life, momentous turning points often happen by chance, and such was the case with the career of Ira Eaker. He was a matter of weeks from leaving the US Army when Major General Mason Patrick landed at Mitchel Field. The second of two consecutive West Point classmates of General Pershing to serve as chief of the US Army Air Service, Patrick was on his way to the Army-Navy football game when his pilot fell ill and could not continue. When they touched down at Mitchel, it was a Saturday, and Ira Eaker happened to be the only qualified pilot on duty. He flew Patrick to West Point, and then back to Washington, DC. In the course of their time together, Eaker told his boss of his plans to get out and go to law school. "I'm authorized to send two percent of the officers in the Army to educational institutions," Patrick told him, trying to persuade him to remain in uniform. "I'll send you to law school. Where do you want to go?" "Columbia University, sir." Patrick no doubt recognized that a good officer aims high, and Eaker's orders to report to New York City's Ivy League institution came through a week later. -- In 1919, as Arnold, Spaatz, and Eaker had moved north and west from Rockwell Field, Doolittle was reassigned to the 90th Aero Squadron at Eagle Pass, Texas. He remained there until July 1920, flying DH-4s and Jennies on patrol over the same unsettled border country that had stymied Black Jack Pershing and thrilled Tooey Spaatz three years earlier. Forbidden by their rules of engagement from firing on Mexican bandits crossing the border, Doolittle and his fellow pilots had to content themselves with harassing them. In one instance, they stampeded a herd of cattle, which chased a band of Mexican snipers into the Rio Grande. During this time, Doolittle's only incursion deep into Mexican territory involved leading a mule train into the desert 80 miles south of the border to repair a downed DH-4 so that it could be flown out. -- During the early 1920s, both Doolittle and Spaatz passed through the large aviation training base at Kelly Field in Texas. Spaatz had departed from his post in San Francisco, served a few months at Mather Field near Sacramento, and landed at Kelly to serve as the air officer to the headquarters of VIII Corps. It was while Doolittle and his wife were at Kelly Field that both of their sons were born at the US Army hospital at nearby Fort Sam Houston. James Junior was born in October 1920, and John in June 1922. In his memoirs, Doolittle questions whether he "did him any favors" by naming his elder son after himself. Spaatz's oldest, Katharine, called "Tattie," was also born in Texas, midway between the Doolittle boys, in April 1921. Her sister Rebecca, known as "Beckie," followed in May 1923 after the family moved to Selfridge Field in Michigan. Carla, named for her father, would arrive in 1932 while the family was in California. As for Ira Eaker, though he would be married twice, he had no children. In November 1921, Spaatz was given command of the 1st Pursuit Group, then the Air Service's only dedicated pursuit group, an assignment that would continue until 1924. It was with the 1st, initially at Ellington Field near Houston and later at Selfridge, that Spaatz at last was able to fulfill his army pilot's dream of being in the cockpit in command of a tactical unit. On the ground, however, Spaatz was confronted by the difficult realities of a downsizing postwar US Army. At one point, he called for a civilian motorized ambulance to take an injured pilot to the hospital. When he asked for reimbursement from VIII Corps, he was refused because the US Army had plenty of horse-drawn vehicles that might have been used. So Spaatz took up a collection from the other pilots. The pilot, John Cannon, survived to become a general and the commander of the Twelfth Air Force during World War II. When the 1st Pursuit Group relocated to Selfridge in the summer of 1922, Spaatz found conditions scarcely better than they had been at Issoudun when he had arrived there five years earlier. The good news was that he had a few months to fix up the place before the winter snows began to blow. The bad news was that he had to do it before October, when the base would be called upon to host the third annual National Air Races, aka the Pulitzer Trophy Race. As Ira Eaker crossed paths with General Mason Patrick in 1922, so too did Tooey Spaatz. In this case, the boss had learned that liquor was being consumed at the Selfridge Field Officers' Club in defiance of Prohibition, which had become the law of the land in 1920. Spaatz might have expressed a stunned denial, but instead he told the chief that he thought it better for the men to be drinking on base as they always had rather than poking around Detroit looking for speakeasies that might be subject to police raids that could result in embarrassment to the Air Service. Patrick let the matter slide. Spaatz left Selfridge in September 1924 and attended the Air Corps Tactical School at Langley Field in Virginia until June 1925, when he was brought into Washington, DC, to serve in Mason Patrick's headquarters. It was here that he would serve once again alongside Hap Arnold, and get to know the charismatic Billy Mitchell. These would be exciting times in the halls of headquarters, as many friendships and alliances were formed that would later help to define the strategic direction of World War II. -- In Washington, the real work of the Air Service--or at least the business of promoting airpower--was being done by Patrick's assistant. As far as the men of his service were concerned, Mitchell was its guiding spirit. While Patrick concerned himself with routine management issues, it was Mitchell who was the service's advocate and the man who had taken it upon himself to craft and institutionalize tactical and strategic doctrine. Spaatz was in the right place at the right time. When it came to writing the official manuals for pursuit tactics, Mitchell turned to the recent commander of the 1st Pursuit Group. Even as he remained the public face of the Air Service, Billy Mitchell was becoming a controversial figure. In 1921, he incurred the wrath of the US Navy, and the embarrassment of the US Army, by asserting that he could use bombers to sink a battleship, the emblem of national military prowess around the world. The notion was considered absurd, so a demonstration was arranged with the idea that Mitchell would be humiliated and would go away quietly. Excerpted from Hit the Target: Eight Men Who Led the Eighth Air Force to Victory over the Luftwaffe by Bill Yenne All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
