William General - Air Power in Three Wars: World War II, Korea, Vietnam

I began working on this book some months ago when a number of colleagues asked me to record my thoughts about the employment of airpower, especially tactical airpower, after 35 years in the profession. I hadnt any illusions of being blessed with special wisdom, but, as they said, no one else shared exactly my perspective on tactical airpower, and other professional airmen might find it useful to know how I saw things, particularly during the Vietnam years, whether they happened to approve of my perceptions or not.

Very soon I realized that my perspective was in fact several perspectives, and none of them could be maintained in perfect isolation from the others. I had watched strategy, tactics, and technology evolve, and all three of these evolutions fascinated me in recollection. I had seen tactical airpower from the viewpoints of the greenest fighter pilot (in 1939), the senior air commander in our longest war, and almost every position in between: dozens of perspectives there, and all of them seemed valid and important to me. So my problem became one of choosing from among my many perspectives the few that seemed likely to offer the most to other airmen.

Although I take most delight in recalling my experiences as a young fighter pilot, I had to admit that theres probably nothing unique about that perspective. Hundreds of others shared about the same experiences and could describe them as well or better than I. Thus I turned away (fellow fighter pilots will understand how difficult this was) from the temptation to spin, stories about those days.

On the other hand, if theres little justification for my discussing many of the things I do recall from World War II, theres little point, either, in attempting to analyze what I didnt know (or knew only by reading about it later) about airpower in World War II. My experience was in North Africa and Italy; I didnt participate in, for instance, the combined bomber offensive against Germany or the B-29 offensive against Japan. I have some strong opinions about the mistakes and successes of those campaigns, opinions which Ill share with other airmen in private, but I dont want those judgments lying around in a book like this one where future airmen might see them and suppose they were based on authoritative, firsthand observation.

I examined and discarded many other approaches using this same filtering processavoid discussing what I dont know from my own experience and the experiences of my companions, and consider telling what I do know only if future airmen might profit from seeing how those events looked from a perspective that was uniquely, or almost uniquely, mine. This filtering process kept me away from perspectives that would include such large topics as our employment of the atomic bomb in World War II (no firsthand knowledge of the decision process), and such personal topics as the ways in which President Johnson seemed to have aged between December 1967 when I talked with him at length about the bombing campaign and the defense of Khe Sanh as we flew from Korat to Cam Ranh Bay and October 1968 when I spoke with him for the last time at the White House (not likely to be of professional interest to future airmen).

What the filtering left me with were the perspectives you find in this book, the major preoccupations of my years as a senior commander: strategy, command and control, counter air operations, interdiction, and close air support. Most of my unique opportunities to perceive airpower occurred during my tenure as Commander of 7th Air Force in Vietnam from July 1966 until August 1968, and youll see here mostly what I saw then. But some of my perceptions from earlier and later years must be recorded, too, to place my observations from the Vietnam years in context. My perspective on command and control when I ran 7th Air Force was certainly affected by my earlier observations in 1942-1944 when I was a fighter group commander in North Africa and those in 1944-1946 when I was Chief of the Army Air Forces Board for Combined Operations. While I was Assistant Chief of Staff at Tactical Air Command headquarters between 1946-1949, I undoubtedly picked up many of the ideas reflected in my approach to close air support in Vietnam. Also, as a member of the faculty of the Air War College from 1950-1953, I was ideally situated to observe the command and control relationships and the complexities of the interdiction, close air support, and counter air missions during the Korean War.

After a series of tours in which I commanded the 8th Fighter-Bomber Wing and the 314th Air Division in Korea, and the 312th Fighter-Bomber Wing and the 832nd Air Division in the U.S., I served as Director of Plans, Headquarters Tactical Air Command, from 1958 until 1961. There I saw firsthand the effects on our tactical air forces of both the Eisenhower administrations emphasis on nuclear weapons and the Kennedy administrations enthusiasm for the weapons and techniques of sub-limited war. During my tour in the Air Staff from 1961-1964 I was directly involved in the discussion of counterinsurgency and the forces that were needed for the developing war in Vietnam. My assignment in Vietnam was preceded by a two-year tour as Commander of Air Training Command. As Commander of Tactical Air Command from the time I returned from Vietnam in 1968 until I retired in 1973, I remained intimately involved in the planning for all of our tactical air operations in Vietnam.