George Kenney - Between The Wars

Between The Wars

Kenney applied for one of a number of Regular Army commissions offered to reservists after the war, and was commissioned as a captain in the Air Service on 1 July 1920. While he was in hospital in Texas recovering from an aviation accident, he met a nurse, Helen "Hazel" Dell Richardson, the daughter of a Mobile, Alabama, contractor, George W. Richardson. They were married in Mobile on 6 October 1920. Hazel miscarried twins, and was warned by her doctor of the danger of another pregnancy, but she strongly wished to have a child. In 1922, while the couple was living on Long Island, New York, a son, William Richardson Kenney, was born to them, but Hazel died soon afterward from complications. Kenney arranged to have the infant cared for by his neighbor, Alice Steward Maxey, another nurse. On 5 June 1923 Kenney married Maxey in her home town of Gardiner, Maine.

From July to November 1920, Kenney was air detachment commander at Camp Knox, Kentucky. He then became a student at the Air Service Engineering School at McCook Field, near Dayton Ohio. He was the Air Service Inspector at the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company in Garden City, New York, where he was responsible for the acceptance of the fifty Martin NBS-1 bombers that the Air Service had ordered from Curtis between 1921 and 1923. Kenney inspected the aircraft, and test flew them. While there, he was reduced in rank from captain to first lieutenant on 18 November 1922, a common occurrence in the aftermath of World War I when the wartime army was demobilized. He returned to McCook in 1923, and developed techniques for mounting .30 caliber machine guns on the wings of a DH.4. He was promoted to captain again on 3 November 1923. His daughter, Julia Churchill Kenney, was born in Dayton in June 1926.

In 1926, Kenney became a student at the Air Corps Tactical School, at Langley Field, Virginia, the Air Corps' advanced training school. He then attended the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the Army's advanced school where officers were taught how to handle large formations as commanders or staff officers. Most Air Corps officers, including Kenney, considered the course largely irrelevant to them, and therefore a waste of time, but nonetheless a prerequisite for promotion in a ground-oriented Army. Afterwards, he returned to the Air Corps Tactical School as an instructor. He taught classes of attack aviation. He was particularly interested in low-level attacks, as a means of improving accuracy. There were tactical problems with this, as low-flying aircraft were vulnerable to ground fire. There were also technical problems to be solved, as an aircraft could be struck by its own bomb fragments. His interest in attack aviation would ultimately set him apart in an Air Corps where strategic bombardment came to dominate thinking.

Kenney reached the pinnacle of his professional education in September 1932, when he entered the Army War College in Washington, D.C.. At the war college, committees of students studied a number of World War I battles; Kenney's committee examined the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes. They updated actual war plans, Kenney's study group working on War Plan Orange. They also had to write an individual paper; Kenney wrote his on "The Proper Composition of the Air Force". One benefit of the Army War College was that it brought Air Corps officers into contact with ground officers that they would later have to work closely with. Members of Kenney's class included Richard Sutherland and Stephen Chamberlain, both of whom worked with him on committees.

Graduation from the Army War College was normally followed by a staff posting, and on graduation in June 1933 Kenney became an assistant to Major James E. Chaney in the Plans Division of the Office of the Chief of the Air Corps, Major General Benjamin Foulois. He performed various duties, including translating an article by the Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet into English. In 1934, he was involved with drafting legislation that granted the Air Corps a greater degree of independence. This legislation prompted the Army to create GHQ Air Force, a centralized, air force-level command headed by an aviator answering directly to the Army Chief of Staff. Lieutenant Colonel Frank M. Andrews was chosen to command it, and selected Kenney as his Assistant Chief of Staff for Plans and Training.

In this role, Kenney was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel on 2 March 1935, skipping that of major. He became involved in an acrimonious debate with the Army General Staff over the Air Corps' desire to purchase more Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers. He also became caught up in a bureaucratic battle between Andrews and Major General Oscar Westover over whether the Chief of the Air Corps should control GHQ Air Force. As a result, Kenney was transferred to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, on 16 June 1936, with the temporary rank of major, to teach tactics to young infantry officers. He was promoted to the substantive rank of major on 1 October 1937, but the assignment was hardly a choice one for an Air Corps officer. In September 1938 he accepted an offer to command the 97th Observation Squadron at Mitchell Field, New York.