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

by Donald L. Miller

But the real difference between them, Quesada shrewdly noted, was that Spaatz “was more wise than decisive. Arnold was more decisive than wise.”

But there had to be inspired leadership to buttress morale, the most important of all the war-winning qualities.

Germany had begun the war with the world’s finest combat air force and its second strongest industrial economy. In 1939, the German aircraft industry was second to none. Aeronautic engineers of staggering creativity headed its design studios, and its factory workforce was superbly trained. But even before massive Allied raids on its plants, the industry was prevented from reaching its full potential by three principal factors: gross mismanagement by incompetent Nazi administrators, chief among them Col. Gen. Ernst Udet, Göring’s World War I squadron mate whom Göring had put in charge of the Luftwaffe’s technical office in 1936; shortsighted military planning at the highest level; and a deep national commitment to craft, not mass, production.

The Germans were also believed to have in development a supersonic rocket, the V-3, capable of reaching New York City. If the big brains of the Reich, led by boy genius Wernher von Braun, could put a nuclear payload on the New York rocket, they might win the war. German scientists, it turned out, were not close to completing such a rocket and had already given up hope of developing an atomic bomb, but in June 1944, Allied intelligence did not know this.