OCR Text |
Show AIR POWER: In Spotlight Three days after salty little Jimmy Jim-my Doolittle stirred a congressional congression-al committee with a plea for a unified uni-fied military command by pointing up the strategic Importance of the airplane in modern warfare. Gen. H. H. (Hap) Arnold, chief of the army air forces, presented a comprehensive com-prehensive program for maintaining America's tremendous air power in the postwar world. Declaring that the airplane will play an even greater role in the next war in neutralizing an enemy's Industrial machine and whittling his military force, Arnold called for a large, well-equipped AAF which would maintain the closest harmony with aviation producers to assure continuous development and expansion. expan-sion. Harking back to World War II to blueprint the potentialities of the airplane in the next conflict, Arnold cited the devastation visited upon j German industry, synthetic oil output out-put and transport, and the burning out of over 169 square miles of Japanese Jap-anese producing and communication communica-tion centers in 15,000 raids. Asking for a unified military command com-mand to co-ordinate all of the nation's na-tion's fighting services, Doolittle ripped into what he called antiquated anti-quated defense' notions. Pointing to the AAF's achievements in the Pacific, he declared: "... The battleship has been obsolescent 20 years and obsolete 10. The navy airplane air-plane carrier has reached its highest high-est efficiency and is going down. . . . It was not sea power that compelled Japan to sue for peace. . . . Ninety-six Ninety-six per cent of the bombing damage done to Japan was done by land-based land-based airplanes and 4 per cent by carrier planes. . . . The B-29s made (the invasion) unnecessary. ..." In Chicago, HI., for an Armistice day celebration, Admiral (Bull) Halsey retorted: "If that's Jimmy's opinion I'm sure he's welcome to hold it. But I'd like to remind him that the island bases from which the B-29s took off were conquered by the combined efforts of the army, navy and air forces." |