Five-Star Hap

If any one man could be said to personify the U.S. Air Force, General Henry Harley ("Hap") Arnold was that man. He attended its birth, grew up with it, commanded it all through its great years in World War II. He was its first five-star general.

Born the son of a country doctor near Philadelphia, Hap Arnold was the fourth U.S. pilot to be commissioned. Those were the days when the Air Corps had four planes and was a branch of the Signal Corps. Hap was taught to fly in Dayton by the Wright brothers. The planes he flew made 42 miles an hour and the only instrument was a piece of string tied to the undercarriage; if it did not tail straight back, the plane was sideslipping. Hap was the first to direct artillery fire by airborne radio, the first to show that planes could be used for reconnaissance. The first air mail was a mail sack he flew five miles across Long Island, N.Y., and plopped down in front of the Garden City post office. But he spent World War I chained to a Washington desk.

Master of the Mightiest. An all-out disciple of Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, Hap Arnold suffered a brief exile in the Army doghouse when he appeared as a defense witness at Billy's court-martial. But thereafter, he rose steadily, always trumpeting the importance of air power. In his leisure, he wrote a series of boys' books on aviation (Bill Bruce Becomes an Ace). In 1938 he became Chief of the Air Corps. In 1942, when the Army Air Forces were set up as an independent arm within the Army, Hap Arnold was its chief.

In 1938, the U.S. stood seventh among the world's nations in air power. Arnold built the U.S. Army Air Forces into the world's mightiest air force of 72,000 planes and 2,300,000 men, the gigantic weapon that proved decisive in Europe and that devastated Japan. Arnold insisted on the development of big bombers, argued the case for precision high-altitude bombing with the B17. He believed a battle area could be isolated by systematic bombing of communications behind the area, a contention that was proved brilliantly at the Normandy beachhead.

A big, florid man who looked almost too handsome to be able, Hap Arnold hated to admit there was anything the Air Forces couldn't do. In his expansive vocabulary, U.S. bombers and fighters were always without peer, U.S. pilots "the cream of the world's manhood." His prophecies frequently had the wild, heady ring of the visionary, but more often than not, events proved him right.

Under the Oak Tree. At war's end Hap Arnold turned over his command to General Carl Spaatz with a laconic, "Take it, Tooey, it's all yours." He added defiantly: "I'm going out to my ranch in the Valley of the Moon to sit under an oak tree. From there I'll look across the valley at the white-faced cattle. And if one of them even moves too fast, I'll look the other way."

For three years Hap Arnold sat on the redwood chairs he made himself in his woodworking shop and looked across the California valley. He wasn't exactly quiet: he wrote a book, and burst into print regularly with charges that the Air Force had been cut to "a one-punch outfit" by postwar economizers. When summoned by a congressional committee investigating charges of skulduggery in the procurement of the B-36, Arnold snapped brusquely: "Let's get this straight! You can't buy aircraft as you buy beans. I want it understood that no one man is responsible for the procurement of any kind of aircraft. I was the guy chiefly responsible for the B-36." And the B-36, he declared flatly, was "the world's outstanding bomber and the country should be proud of it."*

But energetic Hap Arnold had a bad heart. Last week he rose early, as usual, and told his wife he "felt pretty good." A few minutes later, his wife said, he "sat down on the bed and collapsed." By the time the local doctor arrived, Hap Arnold, 63, was dead. Said Dr. Russel V. Lee: "He should have quit during the war when he had his first attack [in 1944]. But things were hot then and he decided to take his chances with the rest of the soldiers and went back to duty."

*This week the House Armed Services Committee, which had listened to eight days of angry Navy attacks on the B-36, concluded: the B-36 was bought on merit alone, without the slightest trace of "dishonesty, corruption, fraud or political chicanery."

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