George Kenney - World War II

World War II

In 1939, Kenney was made Chief of the Production Engineering Section at Wright Field, Ohio. He was sent to France in early 1940, once again with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, as Assistant Military Attaché for Air. His mission was to observe Allied air operations during the early stages of World War II. As a result of his observations, he recommended many important changes to Air Corps equipment and tactics, including upgrading armament from .30 caliber to .50 caliber machine guns, and installing leak-proof fuel tanks, but his scathing comparisons of the German Luftwaffe with the Air Corps upset many officers. This resulted in his being sent back to Wright Field. In January 1941, he became commander of the Air Corps Experimental Depot and Engineering School there, with the rank of brigadier general. He was promoted to major general on 26 March 1942, when he became commander of the Fourth Air Force, an air defense and training organization based in San Francisco. Kenney personally instructed pilots on how to handle the Lockheed P-38 Lightning and A-29 Hudson.

In July 1942, Kenney received orders to take over the Allied Air Forces and Fifth Air Force in General Douglas MacArthur's Southwest Pacific Area. MacArthur had been dissatisfied with the performance of his air commander, Lieutenant General George Brett. Andrews turned down the job, and, offered a choice between Kenney and Major General James Doolittle, MacArthur chose Kenney. Kenney reported to MacArthur in Brisbane on 28 July 1942, and was treated to "a lecture for approximately an hour on the shortcomings of the Air Force in general, and the Allied Air Forces in the Southwest Pacific in particular." Kenney felt that MacArthur did not understand air operations, but recognized that he somehow needed to establish a good working relationship with him. When he asked MacArthur for authority to send people he considered "deadwood" home, something that his superiors in Washington, D.C. had refused to give, MacArthur enthusiastically approved.

Building a good relationship with MacArthur meant getting past Sutherland, MacArthur's chief of staff. Brett advised Kenney that "a showdown early in the game with Sutherland might clarify the entire atmosphere." Sutherland, who had a civil pilot's license, had taken to issuing detailed instructions to the Allied Air Forces. This was more than simply a turf battle; to many airmen, it was a part of the ongoing battle for an independent air force that they had long been advocating. At one point, Kenney drew a dot on a plain page of paper and told Sutherland, "the dot represents what you know about air operations, the entire rest of the paper what I know." Sutherland backed down, and would henceforth let Kenney run the Allied Air Forces without interference. It did not follow, however, that MacArthur would invariably accept Kenney's advice.

Kenney sent home Major General Ralph Royce, Brigadier Generals Edwin S. Perrin, Albert Sneed and Martin Scanlon, and about forty colonels. In Australia, he found two talented, recently arrived brigadier generals, Ennis Whitehead and Kenneth Walker. Kenney reorganized his command in August, appointed Whitehead as commander of the V Fighter Command and Walker as commander of the V Bomber Command. The Allied Air Forces was composed of both United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) personnel. Kenney moved to separate them. Brigadier General Donald Wilson arrived in September and replaced Air Vice Marshal William Bostock as Kenney's chief of staff. Bostock took over the newly created RAAF Command.

This brought Kenney into conflict with the Chief of the Air Staff of the RAAF, Air Vice Marshal George Jones, who felt that an opportunity had been lost to simplify the administration of the RAAF. Kenney preferred to have Bostock in command, and while he regarded the antipathy between Jones and Bostock as a nuisance, was happy to leave arrangements the way they were. However, Kenney deviated from the normal structure of an air force by creating the Advanced Echelon (ADVON) under Whitehead. The new headquarters had the authority to change the assignments of aircraft in the forward area, where fast-changing weather and enemy action could overtake orders drawn up in Australia. Kenney was promoted to lieutenant general on 21 October 1942.

Perhaps because of his experience in World War I, Kenney had a great deal of respect for Japanese fighters. He decided to conserve his bombers, and concentrate on attaining air superiority over New Guinea. Kenney switched the bombers to attacking by night unless fighter escorts could be provided. SWPA had a low priority, and simply could not afford to replace losses from costly daylight missions. What he needed was an effective long-range fighter, and Kenney hoped that the Lockheed P-38 Lightning would fit the bill, but the first ones delivered to SWPA were plagued with technical problems. Kenney had Charles Lindbergh teach his P-38 pilots how to extend the range of their aircraft.

The Southwest Pacific was not a promising theater of war for the strategic bomber. The bombers of the day did not have the range to reach Japan from Australia, and there were no typical strategic targets in the theater other than a few oil refineries. This set up a doctrinal clash between Kenney, an attack aviator, and Walker, the bomber advocate. The long-standing Air Corps tactic for attacking shipping called for large formations of high-altitude bombers. With sufficient mass, so the theory went, bombers could bracket any ship with walls of bombs, and do so from above the effective range of the ship's anti-aircraft fire. However the theoretical mass required was two orders of magnitude greater than what was available in the Southwest Pacific. A dozen or so bombers was the most that could be put together, owing to the small number of aircraft in the theater and the difficulties of keeping them serviceable. The results were therefore generally ineffective, and operations incurred heavy casualties.

Walker resisted Kenney's proposals that the bombers conduct attacks from low level using bombs armed with instantaneous fuses. Kenney ordered Walker to try the fuses for a couple of months, so that data could be gained about their effectiveness; a few weeks later Kenney discovered that Walker had discontinued their use. In November, Kenney arranged for a demonstration attack on the SS Pruth, a ship that had sunk off Port Moresby in 1924 and was often used for target practice. After the attack Walker and Kenney took a boat out to the wreck to inspect the damage. As expected, none of the four bombs dropped had hit the stationary wreck, but the instantaneous fuses had detonated the bombs when they struck the water, so bomb fragments had torn holes in the sides of the ship. Walker reluctantly conceded the point. A few weeks later, Walker was shot down leading a daylight raid over Rabaul, an attack that Kenney had ordered to be conducted at night.

In addition to trying different types of ordnance, the Allied Air Forces experimented with modifications to the aircraft themselves. the Major Paul I. "Pappy" Gunn modified some USAAF Douglas A-20 Havoc light bombers by installing four .50 in (12.7 mm) machine guns in their noses, and two 450-US-gallon (1,700 l; 370 imp gal) fuel tanks were added to give the aircraft more range. This was successful, and an attempt was then made to create a longer range attack aircraft by doing the same thing to a B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, to operate as a "commerce destroyer". This proved to be somewhat more difficult. The resulting aircraft was obviously nose heavy despite adding lead ballast to the tail, and the vibrations caused by firing the machine guns were enough to make rivets pop out of the skin of the aircraft. The tail guns and belly turrets were removed, the latter being of little use if the aircraft was flying low.

The Allied Air Forces also adopted innovative tactics. In February 1942, the RAAF began experimenting with skip bombing, a anti-shipping technique used by the British and Germans. Flying only a few dozen feet above the sea toward their targets, aircraft would release their bombs, which would then, ideally, ricochet across the surface of the water and explode at the side of the target ship, under it, or just over it. A similar technique was mast-height bombing, in which bombers would approach the target at low altitude, 200 to 500 feet (61 to 150 m), at about 265 to 275 miles per hour (426 to 443 km/h), and then drop down to mast height, 10 to 15 feet (3.0 to 4.6 m) about 600 yards (550 m) from the target. They would release their bombs at around 300 yards (270 m), aiming directly at the side of the ship. The two techniques were not mutually exclusive. A bomber could drop two bombs, skipping the first and launching the second at mast height. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea demonstrated the effectiveness of low-level attacks on shipping.

Another form of airpower employed by Kenney was air transport. This started in September 1942 when troops of the 32nd Infantry Division were airlifted from Australia to Port Moresby. Later in the campaign, C-47 Dakotas landed Australian troops at Wanigela. A year later, American paratroops landed at Nadzab, enabling the Australian 7th Division to be flown in.

The ultimate challenge was to integrate air power with MacArthur's strategy. Kenney described the process this way in 1944:

The first step in this advancement of the bomber line is to gain and maintain air control as far into enemy territory as our longest range fighters can reach. Then we put an air blockade around the Jap positions or section of the coast which we want in order to stop him from getting supplies or reinforcements. The bombers then go to work and pulverize his defensive system, methodically taking out artillery positions, stores, bivouac areas and so on. Finally comes the air cover escorting the amphibious expedition to the landing beach, a last minute blasting and smoking of the enemy beach defenses and the maintenance of strafers and fighters overhead, on call from the surface forces until their beachhead is secured. If emergency supplies are needed we drop them by parachute. The ground troops get a transport field ready as fast as possible so that we can supplement boat supply by cargo carrying airplanes. When necessary, we evacuate the wounded and sick and bring in reinforcements in a hurry. The transport field becomes a fighter field, the strafers and finally the heavies arrive and it is time to move forward again.

In June 1944, Kenney was appointed commander of the Far East Air Forces (FEAF), which came to include the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Seventh Air Forces. He created the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Air Task Forces to control air operations in forward areas, each for a specific mission, another departure from doctrine. While Kenney was enthusiastic about this innovation, Washington did not like it and, over Kenney's objections, converted the three air task forces into the 308th, 309th and 310th Bombardment Wings. He was promoted to general on 9 March 1945.

Kenney hoped to get Boeing B-29 Superfortresses assigned to the Far East Air Forces so that, based from airfields near Darwin, they could destroy the Japanese oilfields at Balikpapan. His agitation for the B-29s did not endear him to the USAAF staff in Washington, D.C. After the war, the Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that this would have been far more productive than Operation Matterhorn, which saw B-29s based in China to bomb steel plants in Japan, as oil was more critical to the Japanese war effort than steel.