Henry H. "Hap" Arnold

Henry Harley Arnold grew up in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, son of a country doctor who expected discipline and a mother who supplied the household's humor. He wanted Bucknell and the ministry, not West Point, and only sat the entrance exam because his older brother refused to. He placed second, got in on a delayed appointment, graduated 66th of 111 in 1907, and was commissioned into the infantry, not the flying corps that did not yet exist. In 1911 the Army sent him to Dayton for flight instruction from the Wright brothers themselves — he soloed after fewer than four hours in the air and became one of the country's first 24 rated military pilots.

A 1912 crash that killed his instructor left Arnold grounded by fear for four years — he forced himself back into a cockpit in 1916 and rarely spoke of the gap again. He set early altitude and airmail records, then spent the interwar years arguing for an independent bomber air force against a War Department that treated aviation as an infantry accessory. Franklin Roosevelt made him chief of the Army Air Forces in 1938, and by 1944 he commanded roughly 2.4 million men and 80,000 aircraft, the largest air force the world had seen. He pushed the B-17 and B-29 into production, ran the B-29 campaign against Japan through a Twentieth Air Force under his own command, and in December 1944 became one of only four World War II officers to hold five-star rank.

The command cost him his heart, almost literally. Arnold had five coronary events between February 1943 and January 1948, the first after returning from a Casablanca conference and an exhausting swing through China, the fourth nine days after he replaced bomber commander Haywood Hansell with the harder-edged Curtis LeMay because the firebombing campaign against Japan was not proceeding fast enough for him. He kept working through all of them. He had also, in 1941, resisted training Black pilots as a separate Army Air Forces unit, relenting only after pressure from Washington produced the Tuskegee program he had not wanted to create. His subordinate Robert Lovett said afterward that Arnold had been as much a casualty of the war as any man wounded in it.

Arnold retired in 1946 to a ranch near Sonoma, wrote his memoirs for money because a general's pension was thin, and died there of heart failure on January 15, 1950, less than three years after the Air Force he had spent two decades arguing for became its own service in September 1947. Congress created the rank of General of the Air Force for him alone in 1949, making him the only person to hold five-star rank in two branches of the US military. His name now marks an Air Force base in Tennessee, a cadet hall at the Academy, and a stretch of road through the Sonoma valley where he spent his last unhurried years.

Henry H. "Hap" Arnold's life against the full span of the corpus.

• First authorized US airmail flight mission
  Flew mail near Los Angeles as an early demonstration of military aviation's use 1911
• Twentieth Air Force mission
  B-29 strategic bombing campaign against Japan, run under his direct personal command 1944
• Project RAND company
  Founded with leftover wartime funds — became the RAND Corporation 1945
• National Security Act of 1947 law
  Created an independent US Air Force after two decades of his advocacy 1947
• Global Mission book
  His memoir, written for income during a three-month hospitalization 1949

• June 25, 1886 aged 0 Born in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania
• 1907 aged ~21 Graduates West Point, commissioned into the infantry
• May 13, 1911 aged 24 Makes his first solo flight after training with the Wright brothers
• June 1912 aged 25 Grounds himself after his flight instructor is killed in a crash Did not fly again until late 1916.
• 1938 aged ~52 Named chief of the US Army Air Corps, soon renamed the Army Air Forces
• December 21, 1944 aged 58 Promoted to five-star General of the Army
• September 18, 1947 aged 61 The US Air Force becomes an independent service He had retired the year before, after arguing for this for two decades.
• January 15, 1950 aged 63 Dies of heart failure at his home near Sonoma, California

• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. fellow five-star general
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. fellow five-star general
• Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964
  Commander who led major Pacific campaigns, oversaw Japan’s occupation, and became central to the Korean War controversy. fellow five-star general, rival service branch
• Orville Wright 1871–1948
  Co-inventor of the first successful powered airplane, achieving human flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. trained him to fly