I remember one congressman being quoted as saying, “Why do we have all this controversy over airplanes? Why don’t we just buy one of them and let the services share it?”
The very first site of the Air Corps Tactical School was not in Alabama but in Langley, Virginia. There were stables out by the airplane hangars, and pilots were expected to learn how to ride, as if it were still the nineteenth century. Can you imagine how the Army’s pilots of that era—and there were only a few hundred of them—felt about that? So long as they were part of the Army, they came to believe, they would be under the command of people who couldn’t fly airplanes, didn’t understand airplanes, and wanted them to rub down the horses every morning. The pilots wanted to be independent. And the first step toward independence was to move their training school as far away from the influence of the Army—culturally and physically—as humanly possible. The fact that Maxwell Field was on an old cotton plantation in a sleepy corner of the South was, to use the modern expression, a feature and not a bug.
Because airpower was young, the faculty of the Tactical School was young—in their twenties and thirties, full of the ambition of youth. They got drunk on the weekends, flew warplanes for fun, and raced each other in their cars. Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” It was not intended as a compliment—these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck.
Harold George, one of the spiritual leaders of the Bomber Mafia, put it like this: “We were highly enthusiastic; we were starting on, like, a crusade…knowing that there were a dozen of us and the only opposition we had was ten thousand officers and the rest of the Army, rest of the Navy.”
George was from Boston. He joined the Army during the First World War and became captivated by airplanes. He started teaching at the Tactical School in the early 1930s and rose to the rank of general during the Second World War. After the war, he went to work for Howard Hughes, setting up Hughes’s electronics business. Then George left to help build another electronics firm that became a giant defense contractor. And this is my favorite part: he was twice elected mayor of Beverly Hills.
That’s one man. In one lifetime. But if you had asked Harold George what was the highlight of his career, he probably would have said those heady days in the 1930s, teaching at Maxwell Field.
As he said in an oral history in 1970, “Nobody seemed to understand what we were doing, and therefore we got no directives that we were to stop the kind of instruction that we were giving.”
The Tactical School was a university. An academy. But not many of the faculty had any experience teaching. And the things they were teaching were so new and radical that there weren’t really any textbooks for anyone to study or articles for anyone to read. So they mostly made things up—on the fly, so to speak. Lectures quickly turned into seminars, which turned into open discussions, which spilled out into dinner in the evening. That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.
Donald Wilson was another of the Bomber Mafia inner circle. He was the one who later wrote in his memoirs that he had a dream of a different kind of war. As he recalled of those days,
I feel quite certain that if the controlling element of the War Department general staff had known what we were doing at Maxwell Field, we would have all been put in jail. Because it was just so contrary to their established doctrine that I just can’t imagine their knowing and allowing us to do it.
2.
When people thought about military aircraft in the first part of the twentieth century, they thought of fighter planes: small and highly maneuverable airplanes that could engage the enemy in the air. But not the renegades at Maxwell Field. They were obsessed with the technological advances in aviation that happened during the 1930s. Aluminum and steel replaced plywood. Engines got more powerful. Planes got bigger and easier to fly. They had retractable landing gear and pressurized fuselages. And those advances allowed the Bomber Mafia to imagine an entirely new class of airplane—something as large as the commercial airliners that had just started ferrying passengers across the United States. A plane that big and powerful wouldn’t be limited to fighting other planes in the sky. It could carry bombs: heavy, powerful explosives that could do significant damage to the enemy’s positions on the ground.