Brian D. Laslie - Architect of Air Power: General Laurence S. Kuter and the Birth of the US Air Force

Architect of Air Power

AMERICAN WARRIORS

Throughout the nations history, numerous men and women of all ranks and branches of the U.S. military have served their country with honor and distinction. During times of war and peace, there are individuals whose exemplary achievements embody the highest standards of the U.S. armed forces. The aim of the American Warriors series is to examine the unique historical contributions of these individuals, whose legacies serve as enduring examples for soldiers and citizens alike. The series will promote a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the U.S. armed forces.

SERIES EDITOR: Roger Cirillo

An AUSA Book

ARCHITECT
OF
AIR POWER

General Laurence S. Kuter
and the
Birth of the US Air Force

BRIAN D. LASLIE

Copyright 2017 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Laslie, Brian D., author.

Title: Architect of air power : General Laurence S. Kuter and the birth of the US Air Force / Brian D. Laslie.

Other titles: General Laurence S. Kuter and the birth of the US Air Force

Description: Lexington, Kentucky : University Press of Kentucky, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017019447| ISBN 9780813169989 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 9780813174044 (pdf) | ISBN 9780813174051 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Kuter, Laurence Sherman, 1905-1979 | United States. Army Air ForcesOfficersBiography. | GeneralsUnited StatesBiography. | United States. Air ForceOfficersBiography. | World War, 1939-1945Aerial operations. | United States. Air ForceHistory20th century. | Air powerUnited States.

Classification: LCC UG626.2.K87 L37 2017 | DDC 358.40092 [B] dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019447

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

This book is dedicated to
Donald J. Mrozek, scholar, mentor, and Renaissance man

I am responsible for what I think was the greatest contribution to Air Force history in the [creation of] the Oral History Program. I organized the meeting of Frank Lahm and Benny Foulois with Tooey Spaatz as monitor at Maxwell [Air Force Base] in the interrogation room where they appeared to be alone with two bottles of whiskey. Tooey poured drinks for both Lahm and Foulois and took a big one himself and said, Who really was the first military aviator?

General Laurence S. Kuter, USAF (ret.), 1974

Contents

Preface

The idea of wanting to write a biography is challenging. The medium is a victim of its own success, and I have been told that scholars shy away from it. Each year another popular-history biography is published and eagerly purchased and read by masses of people. In the academic community, the biography has become something not to do. Maybe this is because, in writing a biography, historians must tread the perilous course of being objective while at the same time proclaiming why the subject needs individual attention in the first place. Too much of the former, and the subject can come across as uninspiring. Too much of the latter, and the historian becomes a cheerleader and hagiographer instead of a biographer. There is also the danger of going native and losing ones objectivity. Lloyd Ambrosius tells us in Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft that a biography presents the dual challenge of telling history and telling lives.1 So it was with great trepidation that this historian approached the task of telling the story of a little-known founding fatherto use a gendered term by way of explanationof air power. However, my fears are assuaged when I look at the many magnificent and growing number of biographies on air force leaders, including George Kenney, Carl Spaatz, Pete Quesada, and Claire Chennault, to name just a few. There is also excellent autobiographical literature from Hap Arnold, Jimmy Doolittle, and others. Still, there are many others whose biographies have yet to be written: Nathan Twining, Earl Partridge, Haywood Hansell, and Lauris Norstad come immediately to mind. Larry Kuter falls into this latter category. Yet the story of Laurence Sherman Kuter is a history, a biography, and, in a sense, the autobiographical story of the US Air Force. Kuters career dovetailed with the rise of an adolescent air power and ended with a fully grown and mature air force capable of global monitoring and response.

Introduction

On 30 September 1974, General Laurence S. Kuter, US Air Force retired, sat on a small chair in his apartment in Naples, Florida. He wore an open-collar button-down short-sleeved shirt and pants with a pattern of crossed golf clubs. His skin was a deep bronzed color thanks to the days in retirement spent on the golf courses of the southwestern Florida coastal city. At nearly seventy years of age, he still looked every part an air force general. With the general in his apartment sat two air force historians who were there to conduct an oral history interview to preserve the historical value of the generals life from his earliest days through World War II and his experiences in the newly formed US Air Force of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It was part of a program that Brigadier General Kuter himself authorized in the early days of American involvement in World War II when he directed that the Air Staff Historical Section gather history while it is hot and that personnel be selected and an agency set up for a clear historians job without axe to grind or defense to prepare. That directive, signed in July 1942, and the documents, interviews, mission reports, and other items collected during the war became the nucleus of the official archives of the US Air Force, now held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency. This was made possible because Kuter directed that that material be collected, preserved, and archived. Kuter himself might have been unaware at the time that so much of his own story would be captured by this program and that years later his personal remembrance of events would itself be archived away as an official report.1

Only the most ardent of air power historians know the name of General Laurence S. Kuter despite the fact that he welded a B-17 wing into a cohesive fighting force, was the deputy commander of Allied tactical air forces in North Africa, and later served as commander of the Military Air Transport Service, the Air University, and the Far East Air Forces (later Pacific Air Forces), and finally as a commander in chief of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). He was a rated command pilot, combat observer, technical observer, and aircraft observer. In his career he logged more than eight thousand flying hours, including thirty-two hundred hours as a command pilot, an unheard of number by todays air force standards. He flew in early biplane trainers and ended his flying time in F-106s and 747s. During World War II, he flew the B-24, the B-25, and the B-29. By 1952, his career had taken him around the world seven times visiting air force installations. At the beginning of World War II, he helped write the strategic plan for the air war, and, during the war, he served in every major theater of war in addition to tours in Washington, DC. He was everywhere, and, although he stayed in some places only a few weeks, he made enormous contributions to the development and changing of air power concepts, doctrines, and tactics everywhere he went.