Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift

2 / Tunner’s Women Pilots

2 / Tunner’s Women Pilots The standard account of the United States in World War II is one of glorious triumph, an unimpeded march to victory; it was no accident that StudsTerkel, one of the most sensitive chroniclers of American life, titled his volume on that era, The Good War. Reality, however, is rarely that simple, and a closer view of the events from 1941 to 1945 displays a more nuanced story. Success, for example, was hardly guaranteed. By mid-1942, months after the United States had entered the conflict, Bataan, Corregidor, and Burma had just fallen, and there was no indication of a U.S. counteroffensive. All of Western Europe had succumbed to Nazism, and in the east, a massive German thrust was advancing on Stalingrad with nothing in its way. In North Africa, meanwhile , Rommel was pulverizing the British with relatively little loss to his Afrika Korps. At home, Britain could still do little more than suffer bombings and respond with an air offensive. As the authors of one of the best single volumes on World War II described it, “German victories in summer 1942 represented the last moment when the Wehrmacht’s skill and force structure were still sufficient to gain and hold the initiative.”1 Thus, the notion that the Allies were destined to win was hardly in the air at this point, while a sense of desperation, a notion that extreme measures and extreme sacrifices would be needed to win this, was a far more typical viewpoint. In the face of such a dire threat, the usual assumption is that the nation came together as one to provide a comprehensive war effort. Not exactly. While it is accurate to state that the vast majority of Americans 26 / Tunner’s Women Pilots supported the war, what is astonishing is how unwilling they were to forgo a myriad of prejudices, thus blocking many groups from participating in this struggle. The idea that the country brought together every segment in a patriotic surge is simply not correct; instead, at a time when every citizen was needed, blatant discrimination severely limited the notion of any kind of full mobilization of resources. By now, the notion that racism still existed during World War II is a welldocumented one, led by efforts to popularize the struggle of the Tuskegee airmen to gain a right to fly and fight. During the war the Red Cross segregated blood supplies, to appease fears of southerners that they would acquire unwanted characteristics if treated with negro blood. Factories placed orders for “whites only,” denying themselves the skills and passions of blacks, and race riots broke out in Beaumont, Texas, and in Detroit, Michigan, after both cities experienced an influx of African American workers. In the former example, the rumor that a black man had raped a white women led to an episode that caused three deaths and hundreds of lesser casualties. The result was that twenty-five hundred black employees in local factories left the city temporarily, creating a loss of 210,000 hours of work in various defense plants. Detroit was even worse, where during a riot twenty-five African-Americans and nine whites were killed and eight hundred were injured; the War Production Board estimated two million hours of work lost in the first two days of the riot alone. During the summer of 1943, there were 242 major race fights in forty-seven cities across the United States.2 Color, however, was not the only barrier to full participation in the war effort . There was still, for example, considerable anti-Semitism in the United States Army, a belief held by officers such as George Patton.The last American military attaché in Berlin, for example, Colonel Truman Smith, opposed the melting-pot concept, compared the Germans to “the average white inhabitant of Alabama or Georgia, but with a racial feeling towards the Jew . . . rather than the Negro,” and noted that, “The international tendencies of Communism appeared to cover exactly with the international tendencies of Jewry.” Munich, he hoped, would permit Hitler “to liquidate the Jewish problem once and for all.”3 Smith was not alone. E. R. Warner McCabe, eventually to head the army’s G-2 Intelligence Section, was a defender of white supremacy and told superiors he thought it was “difficult to distinguish between the various Slavic races.” Throughout the late 1930s, standard speakers at the Army War College were Tunner’s Women Pilots / 27 Lothrop Stoddard and Henry Fairchild, two...