By the end of the war, every U.S. Army Air Force unit had its own operational analysis division. The scientists not only worked on calculations in the home office, but went out to the fronts, primarily to gather data, but also to make suggestions on how new tactics might be applied to the new weapons. Toward the latter part of the war, scientists were not just asked for advice; they were invited to sit alongside the generals and colonels in Washington headquarters and participate directly in war planning.
A key player in this new phase of civilian involvement was Edward Bowles. Bowles had come to the Office of Scientific Research and Development from the MIT Radiation Lab at the start of the war, then transferred to the War Department to serve as special consultant to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and General George Marshall. Starting in 1943, he worked with General Hap Arnold in adapting techniques of air warfare to the possibilities offered by the new scientific devices. Bowles had a tremendous faith in the power that comes from the fusion of military might with scientific brilliance.
Bowles was practically an agnostic in this faith compared with General Henry Harley Arnold. Everyone called Arnold “Hap” because of his amiability and the broad smile that nearly always crossed his face. Yet lurking behind the smile was a man obsessed with destructive power and with the role that scientists might play in making future weapons still more destructive. When he heard that Secretary of War Stimson had doubts about the bombing of Dresden, Arnold wrote a memorandum: “We must not get soft. War must be destructive and to a certain extent inhuman and ruthless.” He wanted his scientists to invent “explosives more terrible and more horrible than anyone has any idea of.”
Arnold was a devoted disciple of General Billy Mitchell, who was court-martialed in 1925 for proclaiming, against all orders, that in the next war battleships and land armies would be vulnerable to attack from the air. Arnold flew his first plane in 1910, when Harry Atwood, a famed cross-country barnstorming pilot, landed on a parade ground on Governors Island and asked then-Second Lieutenant Henry Arnold to take a spin. Many air officers of Arnold’s generation—the founders of the independent Air Force, Ira Eaker, Carl Spaatz, George Kenney, Jimmy Doolittle—first thrilled to the romance and derring-do of human flight in this fashion. Arnold was hooked on air travel from that moment on. One year later, he took flying lessons in Dayton, Ohio, from Orville Wright himself, and in 1912 earned his military pilot license.
That same year, he first met Billy Mitchell. Arnold was twenty-six, working in the office of the chief signal officer; Mitchell was thirty-two and on the command staff. The idea of a full and independent air force was just a dream in those days, but Arnold and Mitchell were among the dreamers. During Mitchell’s court-martial, Arnold testified on his behalf. At one point while he was on the stand, some planes could be heard flying over Washington. Pointing upward, Arnold solemnly said, “There goes all our air force. It has thirty-five planes, the largest number we could muster to defend Washington.” When World War II started and Arnold was commander of the Army Air Forces, he insisted on mass production of B-29 bombers.
Arnold considered himself a visionary. Four months before Germany was defeated, seven months before Japan surrendered, he called in his top officers and said, “We’ve got to think of what we’ll need in terms of twenty years from now. For the last twenty years we have built and run the air force on pilots. But we can’t do that anymore.” Arnold told them that he foresaw an age when intercontinental missiles would dominate warfare, that the Air Force would have to change radically to confront the challenges of this new age. His small audience was stunned into silence. Every man in the room was a pilot.
Meanwhile, Hap Arnold was worried. He was fifty-five when the war began. He was among those responsible for making something of air power, and he wanted to leave a legacy. The future would be an age of intercontinental missiles, robots, super destructiveness, but what would happen to all the scientists who would be necessary for the challenge, the scientists who were proving so valuable to the present war effort? After the war, peacetime demobilization would quickly spread to their ranks as well; they would go back to lucrative jobs in universities and industry; certainly the meager salaries of civil service would hardly serve as incentive for them to stay in and help their country prepare for World War III.
On November 7, 1944, Arnold wrote a memo to his chief scientific adviser, a brilliant Hungarian refugee named Theodore Von Karman. Arnold’s opening words: “I believe the security of the United States of America will continue to rest in part in developments instituted by our educational and professional scientists. I am anxious that the Air Force’s post war and next war research and development be placed on a sound and continuing basis.
“I am asking you and your associates,” Arnold continued, “to divorce yourselves from the present war in order to investigate all the possibilities and desirabilities for post war and future war’s development,” as they concern the Army Air Force.
Over the next thirteen months, Von Karman and his Army Air Force Scientific Advisory Board produced—and distributed piecemeal—a lengthy multivolume report called Toward New Horizons. Its message read like music to Hap Arnold’s ears. “The scientific discoveries in aerodynamics, electronics and nuclear physics open new horizons for the use of air power,” the report began. Even greater advances, including the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, lie just over the horizon. Therefore, the Air Staff must “be advised continuously on the progress of scientific research and development in view of the potentialities of new discoveries and improvements in aerial warfare.” The important thing is to maintain “a permanent interest of scientific workers in problems of the Air Forces.” Doing so involves the creation of “a nucleus for scientific groups such as those which successfully assisted in the command and staff work in the field during the war. In these studies experts in statistical, technical, economic and political science must cooperate.”
In these words, Von Karman laid out the blueprint for what would be called Air Force Project RAND.
In this respect, however, he only reinforced a movement already afoot and under the sturdy guidance of Hap Arnold, Ed Bowles and a few others, most notably Arthur Raymond, chief engineer at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Santa Monica, and his assistant Frank Collbohm.
Collbohm’s introduction to Arnold came in 1942, when Douglas Aircraft was building A-20 airplanes for the British. The British wanted some night-flight capability, but had only primitive radar installations, which could barely make out the targets that pilots needed to see. Collbohm, who told Donald Douglas, president of the company, that he had heard something about a radar project going on at MIT, went to its Radiation Lab in Cambridge. Ed Bowles and Lee DuBridge, two scientists at the lab, took Collbohm up on the roof, where they had the radar operating. The sky was extremely foggy. All pilots were grounded, except for David Griggs, a physicist at the lab who owned a private plane and who had been given an exemption. He was at the moment flying over the MIT campus. Collbohm could not see him, but the radar was tracking him perfectly.
Collbohm repeated the tale about the MIT radar to Douglas and General Arnold, who were highly impressed. From that point on, Ed Bowles and the MIT Rad Lab were in with the Army Air Force, and so was Frank Collbohm. He was already a dollar-a-year consultant to the Secretary of War. Now he started to consult for Arnold, too, mostly on tactics and economics.