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When war came, they were readier than they had any reason to expect they would be. Orders from the Allies had set U.S. aircraft factories humming; designers, encouraged by the Army, & Navy, were ready with new engines and aircraft; U.S. industry was ready. And oldtime believers in air power, such as Frank Andrews (commander of the Canal Zone), Delos Emmons (of Hawaii) and Hap Arnold, held the top Air Force commands.
Hap Arnold had gone into infantry when he left the Academy in 1907, switched to flying in 1911, taking lessons from the Wrights and becoming one of the Army's first four military aviators.* From the start he was a spectacular airman. He still has a scar on his chin from the crack-up he prizes most. Hanging in the wreckage of his plane off Plymouth Beach in 1912, he saw help coming: two old codgers in G.A.R. uniforms in a rowboat. They passed him by; they were against airplanes.
Before World War I he had set an altitude record (6,540 ft. in 1912), won the Mackay Trophy for the first use of wireless in military reconnaissance, became the first man to carry mail by air, and scared the pants off the wide-ranging horse cavalry of the day by flying 30 miles from College Park, Md. to Fort Meyer, Va. and back.
He saw no fighting service in World War I. He was busy at administrative work in Washington, and now can thank his stars he was. In the midst of the biggest air-training program in history, he can look back to 1918 for experience. As Assistant Director of Military Aeronautics that year, he was boss of 30 training schools, 15,000 officers, 125,000 enlisted men. He was also a devoted follower of his old flying mate, spectacular bemedaled Billy Mitchell.
He was in Washington when the Mitchell row burst into flame. After the trial, Hap went into exile at Fort Riley, Kans., but later he began the rounds again. By this time he was a well-educated airman, with service in all the branches of the Air Corps and assorted experience as commander of flying fields, director of all the CCC camps in California, student at the best Army schools.
But most of all he liked flying, and when in 1934 the Army adopted his pet project, a survey of Alaska (Mitchell: "Who controls Alaska controls the Pacific"), Hap Arnold led the survey flight. That flight won him the Mackay Trophy for the second time and put Hap Arnold near the top of the Air Corps, with the rank of brigadier general.
From then on he had plain sailing to the top. General Arnold worked prodigiously at his desk, flew prodigiously, never lost his grin. Articulate, facile with words, he wrote boys' books about a young flying hero; with rugged Major General Ira Eaker as collaborator, he began turning out books about air power. But the lessons of other days had stuck. Arnold and Eaker tore no hair, snatched no lapels from their readers' coats. Their books were sound, but conservative and well hedged. If Billy Mitchell turns out not to be 100% right, neither of them has anything in print to regret.