The Man Who Paved the Way

(See Cover) Four days before the Great Invasion the aerial encirclement of Fortress Europe was completed.

U.S. Flying Fortresses took off from Italy, bombed rail targets in Rumania, flew straight on to new U.S. bases in the heart of the Soviet Ukraine.

From then on, every main base of attack on Germany was manned, at least in part, by Western Allied air power. Harassed German defense commanders had to rearrange their thinning squadrons to meet new bombing attacks from every direction. Allied air power had bombed around the compass.

The closing of that circle gave grim satisfaction to the man who commands U.S. Strategic Air Forces in Europe, brisk, wiry, peppery Lieut. General Carl Spaatz.

Now his bombers could shuttle back & forth, pounding from all sides at Germany's heart, destroying the enemy whom "Tooey" Spaatz hates. That hate and satisfaction he shared with Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris of the R.A.F., his collaborator in bringing more physical damage to Germany than the Germans had felt since the Thirty Years' War.

The Enemy Standard. German propagandists, hating and fearing Harris and Spaatz, called them the "aerial bandits." But the Germans themselves had established the first bombing standards for World War II. In the celebrated blitz of 1940-41, German planes attacked Britain with an average of 200 tons of bombs a night for about 100 nights. The "measuring stick" raid on Coventry saw about 275 tons fall in seven hours.

But now Berlin has received as many as 2,800 tons in half an hour. Last month the Allies dropped 147,000 tons on German targets; this meant more than three tons a minute. The month's total was 60 times greater than the bomb tonnage dropped by the Luftwaffe on Britain in all of 1943.

General Henry H. Arnold, commander in chief of U.S. Army Air Forces, considering such figures, thinking of the 33 German cities that have been hit worse than Coventry, admitted frankly that it made him wonder: how could the Germans stand it? Now that air power has probably lost its chance to prove itself the all-powerful weapon, the invasion will show what it has done. Most airmen are sure it has bled Germany white.

The Country Club. Tooey Spaatz is one of a little group of officers who kept the tiny Army Air Corps a going concern in the U.S. after World War I. The rest of the Army might snicker about "the Flying Country Club" and its publicity tricks, but the airmen kept right on.

"Hap" Arnold led a bomber flight to Alaska. Jimmy Doolittle was the first man to fly across the U.S. in less than 24 hours. Major General William Kepner (the Eighth Air Force fighter commander) flew around in a stratosphere balloon. Spaatz himself commanded the famous endurance flight of the Fokker monoplane Question Mark. In his crew were Lieut. General Ira Eaker, now Allied air commander in the Mediterranean, and Brigadier General Elwood ("Pete") Quesada, Ninth Air Force fighter commander in Britain.

The Unteachable Gambler. Then as now, Spaatz was a shy and silent yet strangely gregarious man, who loved to have people around him, and could open up and talk fluently--especially on air power. At games he is an insatiable (and unteachable) gambler, and a hard competitor. He plays to win.

Spaatz had the advantage of being a West Pointer, as well as an early birdman. By the time World War II broke out he was chief of the Air Corps plans section in Washington, and in 1940 he went to England to observe air war at first hand. That summer he wrote home:

"There is much talk of Hitler's secret weapons, but the British weapon that will defeat him isn't secret--it is Guts."

In 1941 Spaatz was Chief of Air Staff under Arnold, and the following year went to England to set up the Eighth Air Force. Late in 1942 he headed south to command the Allied Northwest African Air Forces through the Mediterranean campaigns, and last January he returned to England to boss all U.S. heavy bombing in Europe.

Life in X-House. In Britain today Spaatz's private life consists mainly of the four to eight hours he sleeps nightly in the spacious, big-windowed bedroom of "X-House," a comfortable, 19th-Century brick pile in a London suburb. There, as he did in Africa, he leads a kind of corporate, family existence, with his staff as family, and himself as patriarch, straw boss and referee.

His living room is almost filled with a huge rectangular table, covered with maps. That is his desk. At it, in front of a coal fire, he holds the all-important conferences to which he invites officers with such offhand orders as: "Come on over and see me" or "Better drop in tomorrow."

Here General Spaatz lives in the most informal style of any of the Allied military commanders.

His staff family of 15--the regular members of his mess--dine at home nightly. Their day's routine is done, but they stay around to talk after dinner. A half-dozen guests, mostly military, are usually spaced around the dinner table.

His chief commanders, including Doolittle, and such colleagues as Lewis Brereton, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory and Sir Arthur ("Mary") Coningham, come for dinner about once a week.

The most notable member of the official family is Spaatz's WAC aide, Captain Sally Bagby, a tall, slim brunette from New Haven, Mo., who functions as the General's confidential secretary, personal batwoman, mess hostess, badminton opponent ("I'm the only one he can beat"), wardrobe checker-upper and last line of defense against bores and time-wasters.

Sally is the only female aide extant in the top Allied command. Recently she was discussing an aide's tribulations with Eisenhower's aide, Commander Harry C. ("Butch") Butcher, and wound up with an artless: "But of course I like it. ... After all, it's really women's work, isn't it?" For once, smooth-tongued Butch was speechless. Someone told Tooey about it, and he spread the story with fiendish glee.

Most of the House family gather in Sally's room before dinner to gossip about the day's events, then they move on to Spaatz's office for drinks around the big table with guests. Sally serves the first round, then guests do their own pouring. The General, who is usually cutting someone's throat at cribbage beside the fire, sets up a hungry cry: "Sally, bring the anchovies!" and Sally reaches for a can opener. Mrs. Spaatz keeps a steady flow of ingenious crackers, biscuits, anchovies, kippers, sardines, smoked cheese and the like crossing the Atlantic for X-House; as a gift on his 53rd birthday (June 28) Tooey will get a Smithfield ham.

Home Family. Spaatz's strong feeling for the family relationship in his official life is a reflection of his happy and notably informal family life at home. He is devoted as only an inarticulate, hard-shelled Pennsylvania Dutchman could be to his spritely family of women, fondly known as the "harem." Tooey may be tough on the troops, but with his three daughters he is "weak in the head"--this from no less an authority than his wife, dark-haired, good-looking Ruth Harrison Spaatz.

Spaatz has not yet seen the youngest member of the harem--his five-month-old, redheaded granddaughter--but he was "pleased sick" over the addition, especially because it had turned out to be a girl. His eldest daughter, Katherine ("Tatty"), is in England with a Red Cross club-mobile crew; the rest of the family is living in the big old Spaatz home in Alexandria, Va., near Washington.

Letters from Tatty and Sally Bagby helped Mrs. Spaatz to fill in the picture of life in England which grew grimmer as the greatest test of the war approached. Tooey temporarily forsook the guitar (on which he is a fair hand) and, with a gesture to the fates worthy of an old ballplayer, he has refused to wear any headgear save a battered, villainous cap of the smartly sloppy Air Forces type.

But he still indulges his passion for gambling. X-House has the finest poker table in London, and at it Tooey works off any brashness or overoptimism that might be yeasting within him. He bets with a heavy hand, bluffs outrageously.

But his occasional loyalty to such mild holdings as two jacks or three treys, and his reformist zeal for keeping all the other players honest, can cost him dear when such scientific pokerists as Ira Eaker are present. Says Mrs. Spaatz, philosophically: "That's where the flying pay goes. It's an old Air Force custom. They all have that feeling: 'What the hell, let's take a chance.' "

The ultimate outcome of the ETO poker game will largely determine the size of the sailboat Spaatz intends to moor in the Potomac after the war. After 18 months he is about even, but all the players agree he is sure to wind up either a big winner or big loser. Aside from the sailboat, Tooey has another special dream of heaven--to come home to Alexandria in the evening and sit down on the floor of the living room. Then Tatty will mix him a pale highball. His second daughter Becky (wife of an air force lieutenant and mother of Tooey's granddaughter "Pinky") will play Beethoven on the piano. The third daughter, twelve-year-old Carla ("Boops") will join Tooey on the floor with the latest of the stray kittens she collects. And that will be that.

Long Road. Before the General attains that dream, he has a lot more warring to do. For Tooey Spaatz, the real march on the long, straight road to victory really began on the night of Feb. 19, 1944, a date for the historians of air power to remember.

Spaatz and his staff had gathered at

X-House as usual, for dinner and then for coffee in the big living room. There they talked shop, but this night there was no poker game. After months of building up U.S. strategic bombing power, after maddening delays and unavoidable diversions of equipment to other theaters of war, General Spaatz at last had the force in hand for fullscale, daylight, precision bombing of the enemy; he was waiting for weather reports.

Spaatz knew already that the time was strictly limited for using his weapon the way he wanted to use it; the day of invasion had been set. Quietly Sally Bagby put through a call to Jimmy Doolittle. Over the phone (equipped with a secrecy scrambling device) Tooey talked in low tones; the bombers were ready. A weather report came in. It was better than it had been for days, but still not too good. Bad icing conditions were forecast at 5,000 feet over the rendezvous area.

But Tooey was anxious to make a start on his greatest assignment: knocking the props from under the German air force. His plan was ready, with six top-priority factories listed for destruction in the first paralyzing blow.

"It's so important that I would risk the loss of 200 planes," he said.

Long Wait. At 11:30 p.m. Spaatz made his decision. Orders flashed out, at bases throughout Britain ground crews tumbled out of their bunks to ready the armada -- 1,600 bombers and fighters. The attack was to mark the beginning of modern precision air war. In the paneled room at X-House Spaatz and his officers talked on until 2 a.m., then went to bed.

Tooey's gamble turned out well. By next evening the results were in. The icing condition had not developed. Instead of 200 planes, 41 had been lost. Four of the six targets had been smashed, the other two severely damaged. From that night on, Tooey kept them flying. In the comparatively brief time this super-power bombing had to work, it forced the Luftwaffe to become an in-&-out air force, fighting hard one day but refusing battle the next.

By this desperate tactic of hoarding planes the Nazis have succeeded in holding together a fighter force that will still be formidable. But it is almost certainly a hollow-shell force.

Now Spaatz faces new tasks. Although the period when air power was the only Western Front against Germany is ended, long-range bombing will be an integral part of the overall campaign.

Tooey Spaatz believes thoroughly in the principle of joint operations by land, sea and air to win the final victory; he and his men will carry out their assignments bravely and well. Afterward there will be time for a wistful wondering: What could air power alone have achieved, if time and the logic of history had been altogether on its side?

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