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As it turned out, Larry Norstad never commanded a squadron. In 1936, after four years of flying pursuit planes in Hawaii, he was brought back to the U.S. for staff duty, and by the time the U.S. entered World War II he was assistant chief of staff for Air Intelligence, with a growing service reputation as the headiest young staff officer in the Air Corps. From then on, his rise into the military stratosphere was at missile speed. Tapped by the Air Corps' General "Hap" Arnold ("I need somebody to help me do my thinking"), Norstad became a peripatetic planner. Starting off as air operations officer for General Jimmy Doolittle's Twelfth Air Force in Britain and North Africa, he soon moved up to the same job in the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces. In the last year of the war, while serving simultaneously as Deputy Chief of Air Staff and chief of staff of the Twentieth Air Force, he helped to set up the B-29 raids on Japan, including the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Too Much, Too Soon. By then, Larry Norstad was a marked man. In 1946 General Dwight Eisenhower insisted on Norstad as War Department director of plans and operations. As such, he was the Army's representative in the dickering that preceded unification of the armed services, and with the late Admiral Forrest Sherman is credited with largely writing the unification act. But the newly independent Air Force, says one of his colleagues, "didn't know what the hell to do with him. He was too young to be Chief of Staff." The solution, finally arrived at in 1950, was to name him commander of the U.S. Air Force in Europe. Six months later, Norstad took on his first NATO assignment : Commander, Allied Air Forces, Central Europe. Last year, after serving as air deputy to SACEUR's Matthew Ridgway and Alfred Gruenther, he succeeded Gruenther as boss of SHAPE.