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Ichthyology & the Reds. Thanks to an unmilitary, scholarly commanding general named John Palmer, Lieut. White, while stationed in Panama as an infantry subaltern, got interested in both free-soaring thought and the young, free-soaring Air Corps. In 1924 he got an assignment to flight school at Brooks Field, Texas, won his wings.
In 1927 Tommy White packed his silk scarf, leather helmet and spurs (then Air Corps uniform items) and went to Peking as a language officer to study Chinese. This was a puzzling assignment that White still does not quite understand, but he made the most of it. He became proficient at Mandarin, even compiled a Chinese-English dictionary of military terms; he also got to know some White Russian refugees and studied Russian. Duly noted in his record, this helped get him assigned, at the age of 32, as assistant military attache at the U.S. embassy at Moscow.
There he piloted Ambassador William C. Bullitt in anO-38F observation plane for hours over targets that his Air Force was later to lock in—Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Odessa, the Crimea. There he made his first headlines. While White was flying Bullitt into Leningrad one day, the )0-38F engine iced up, whereupon White pancaked into a field, hit a few rough spots, went over on his back. Ambassador Bullitt wired President Roosevelt: "Landed upside down. Got out right side up." Later the Russians gave White a Soviet military pilot's license. ("Tommy," quips a Washington wag, "is the only card-carrying member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.")
As the world moved toward World War II, Tommy White built up more professional qualifications, more professional regard. In the U.S. he graduated from Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, Ala., the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. Kans. Abroad he served as an assistant air attache to Italy and Greece, as commander of a military air mission to Brazil (where he spoke Portuguese). Everywhere Tommy White went, from arctic Russia to Brazil, he went out fishing, collecting rare specimens, discoursing to his British wife Constance Millicent Rowe (his second) on the delights of ichthyology. White would catch the fish, getting soaked to the skin; Constance would paint them in watercolors. But when Pearl Harbor struck, said Constance, "I knew our happy days were over."
MacArthur & Morale. During World War II, the Air Corps flew to world glory, but Tommy White, increasingly and reluctantly tabbed as a plans-and-organization type, missed out on most of the cheers. For 21 months in 1942-44 he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations, then Chief of Staff of the Stateside Third Air Force that "staged the flights of U.S. aircraft across the North and South Atlantic to Europe. ("If we don't hit Ascension, my wife gets a pension.") In September 1944 he was assigned as deputy commander of MacArthur's Thirteenth ("Jungle") Air Force in the South Pacific, but MacArthur grounded all personnel with knowledge of U.S. codes and advance strategic plans—and that included Tommy White. In June 1945 he got command of the Seventh Air Force at Okinawa, but his chances of glory were overtaken by the peace.