Hap Arnold: The General Who Invented the US Air Force by Bill Yenne

Author:Bill Yenne [Yenne, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Aviation, History, Military, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781621571759
Google: okeDAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00E25849S
Publisher: Regnery History
Published: 2013-10-13T23:00:00+00:00

Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff departed from Cairo on November 27 for their meeting with Stalin in Tehran. Iran had been picked as a conference site because of its proximity to the Soviet Union and Stalin’s wariness of traveling too far from home while his armies were still locked in fierce combat with the Germans across a vast front.

In 1943, Iran was an occupied country, having been invaded in August 1941 by Britain and the Soviet Union and subdued in three weeks. The catalyst for the invasion was the pro-German leanings of Iran’s monarch, Reza Shah Pahlavi, and the underlying strategy involved keeping Iranian oil out of Axis hands and securing a supply route into the Soviet Union that could be used for American lend-lease shipments.

Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and some of their advisors met briefly on November 28 for an unscheduled preliminary meeting, which Arnold and Marshall missed. They were touring the country-side in a borrowed car and were not notified until after the meeting had started.

The principal Big Three portion of the Eureka Conference came during the following two days. The leading agenda item, as it had been when Churchill and Harriman had met with Stalin on previous occasions, was the Soviet leader’s impatience with his Anglo-American allies for not yet having opened a “second front” against the Germans. By this, he meant the cross-channel invasion of northern France, not the invasion of Italy that they had conducted two months earlier. For their part, Roosevelt and Churchill assured him that they were working toward this goal for the spring of 1944.

Arnold had come to Tehran with a generally dismissive attitude toward Josef Stalin, referring to him in his diaries as “Red Joe.” However, as he had the opportunity to speak with Stalin at length—through an interpreter—he came to be greatly impressed with the Soviet leader’s command of facts and details. In his postwar memoirs, Arnold describes his conversations, recalling that “I talked with Stalin quite a bit . . . about our airplanes; about our methods of operations; our heavy bombers; about the ability of the Russians to fly our airplanes, and how, before they could fly our heavy bombers, they would have to receive special instruction about all the gadgets in the cockpit. Stalin surprised me with his knowledge of our planes. He knew details of their performance, their characteristics, their armament, and their armor much better than many of the senior officers in our own Air Force.”

Although Arnold noted that “neither [Stalin] nor his generals seemed able to comprehend the necessity for strategic bombing,” Stalin had obviously been following the Eighth Air Force campaign against the Reich with great interest. He went so far as to inquire about obtaining some American four-engine bombers for his own air force.

“He asked me for improved airplanes and he asked me for heavy bombers,” Arnold wrote. “I told him if he wanted heavy bombers he would have to send his engineers and maintenance and combat crews to the

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