General Carl Spaatz was Commander in Chief of all the US Air Forces that fought in Europe during World War II―in numbers, probably the largest assemblage of aircraft that ever came under one man’s direct control. After Germany’s surrender on May 8, 1945, General “Hap” Arnold
ed hardy jeans, the Chief of Staff of the Army Air Forces, wanted him to assume the corresponding position in the war against Japan. General MacArthur
tiffany charm, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, disagreed. Spaatz was therefore sent to command the US Eighth Air Force, whose redeployment from the United Kingdom was just beginning, and of a fleet of “Superfortresses,” the new B-29s.
In addition, Spaatz had something that the other US commanders in the Pacific, including General George Kenney, MacArthur’s top airman, did not have―the atom bomb, about which he had known nothing until his return to Washington to prepare for his new assignment. After he was briefed about the nature of the new weapon, Arnold gave Spaatz a list of four Japanese cities that Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, had agreed were to be the targets against which the weapon was to be used, if an imminent test to see whether it worked proved successful. On August 6th, 1945, only a week after his arrival in the Pacific, and in accordance with explicit presidential authorization, Hiroshima was effaced. Nagasaki was destroyed three days later. After witnessing the ceremonial surrender of Japan on September 2, Spaatz returned to Washington, where after some six months he succeeded Arnold as Chief of Staff of all the Army Air Forces. At his own wish
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The biography that Dr. David Mets has written contains much interesting information about Spaatz up to the time he took command of the US Eighth Air Force in the UK in 1942
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Spaatz graduated from West Point in 1914, gaining his wings in 1916
The North Face parka, and spending the final year of the First World War in France. He was an ardent admirer of Brigadier General “Billy” Mitchell, the most glamorous American airman to emerge from the First World War, and shared Mitchell’s commitment to the doctrine that wars can be won over the heads of battling armies by bombing the enemy’s homeland. In promoting this doctrine, Mitchell publicly denounced Washington’s military establishment for “their incompetency
christian louboutin pumps, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense.” He was court-marshalled …
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