(2 of 5)
Revered Vision. Another was that, when the U.S. was pushed into World War II. it was also pushed into the vastest problem of world supply that any nation had ever had to meet. A third was that the vision of aviation's mission in the world, in war and peace, given to Army airmen by the late great Billy Mitchell, was still revered.
By no man had the Mitchell vision been more devoutly cherished or more openly defended than by Harold Lee George. In 1921, when General Mitchell was finally allowed, under smothering restrictions, to test the battle worth of airplanes, young Lieut. George piloted one of the six Martin bombers that sank the ex-German battleship Ostfriesland, and proved to the world that even a dreadnought, under some conditions, was no match for air power. When a court-martial of generals tried Billy Mitchell for insubordination, Hal George was one of his defense witnesses.
Air Transport's Problem. As students of strategy like Harold George have long known, a war is fought primarily by logistics—the. supply and movement of men and materiel. But it is probable that few, if any, of the Army's experts on strategy realized how complicated logistics would become in the global developments of World War II.
Today ATC, big as it is, is still only a skeleton of the vast structure it will become by the end of this year. Its operating lines already vein the world. Its freighter pilots fly along the Alaska highway, past Whitehorse to Fairbanks; its delivery flyers whip fighters and bombers close to Bering Strait to be turned over to Russia for the eastern front. Freighters, and bombers on the way to combat, cross central Canada to Greenland, Iceland, Britain. They blanket the Caribbean and sweep across Mexico. They fly down both sides of South America.
They span the South Atlantic from the "hump" to Africa's west coast, shuttle across equatorial Africa and follow the Nile from Khartoum to Cairo, thence to Saudi Arabia and Karachi. From Cairo they fan out into Trans-Jordan and on to Teheran. From Karachi they reach across India, climb over the Himalayas and thunder across the roof of the world into China.
To the west they regularly make the world's biggest overwater hop—San Francisco to Honolulu, swing southwest by pinpoint navigation through the string of coral dots that lead to New Zealand, to Australia and New Guinea.
New routes are being opened. By the end of 1943, Hal George's Air Transport Command will be ten times as big as the combined airlines of the peacetime world. It will fly nearly three million miles daily, over routes 90,000 miles long. Meanwhile its airmen will fly thousands of hours in the U.S., in the domestic transfer of freight and military aircraft.
Air Transport's Beginning. Three years ago in the embassy at Washington the late Marquess of Lothian, His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador, was asked by a reporter how bombers bought under the cash-&-carry plan could be transported to sorely pressed England. Lord Lothian whispered: "I have been told they might be flown over."