Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany

by Donald L. Miller

On August 6, after receiving authority from Washington, Spaatz ordered his former Eighth Air Force pilot Paul Tibbets to drop a uranium bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, a more powerful plutonium bomb obliterated over half the city of Nagasaki. Spaatz then told Doolittle that if he wanted to get his Eighth Air Force in combat with the Japanese he had better organize an operation for the next day, for the war would soon be over. Doolittle had been assigned 720 B-29s and many of them were war-ready, but he stood them down. “If the war’s over,” he told Spaatz, “I will not risk one airplane nor a single bomber crew member just to be able to say the 8th Air Force had operated against the Japanese in the Pacific.” After Europe, his boys had nothing to prove. Three weeks later, Carl Spaatz was on the deck of the battleship Missouri for the Japanese surrender, making him the only person to witness all three major Axis capitulations. After the war, he succeeded the gravely ill Hap Arnold as commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He was at the helm on September 17, 1947, when the Air Force finally won its release from the Army and became an independent branch of the American military. Fittingly, Carl Spaatz became the first chief of staff.