Word: commandants
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Next day General LeMay moved out of the double Quonset hut which had been his headquarters since January-first, as commanding general, 21st Bomber Command, lately as commanding general, Twentieth Air Force. When he moved 1,500 ft. beyond the road to a cramped, three-man office he took with him a Lucite name plate, a box of cigars, a black walnut tobacco humidor, a letter opener made from a B-29 throttle by some of his boys in India long ago, and a leather folder containing pictures of his wife Helen and six-year-old daughter Jane, who wait...
...executive capacity, just when the B-29s were getting a new atomic weapon which might change the whole concept of war, he would run the B-29 show under the overall supervision of the U.S.'s top strategic airman, wise, imperturbable General Carl Spaatz. In Spaatz's command were both Twining's Twentieth and Lieut. General "Jimmy" Doolittle's Okinawa-based Eighth Air Force...
foot soldier ever touched a beach on Honshu. To command this force, "Tooey" Spaatz, director of the strategic campaign against Germany, was an obvious choice, both by seniority and accomplishment...
Spaatz already had his team - Doolittle and Twining - who had done the job for him in the European theater. He also had in Curt LeMay a brilliant tactical commander; LeMay's know-how in Pacific battle and B-29 operations had to be spread through the enlarged strategic air forces. So while LeMay's officers grumbled a bit at a good man and a crack leader being taken from tactical command, their black-browed boss was moved...
...which taken at the flood leads on to fortune" had come on Dec. 7, 1941. In a brilliant, if treacherous, imitation of the U.S. Navy's carrier striking-force technique, they had broken the back of the battle line on which (by standards then prevailing) U.S. command of the east and central Pacific depended. If the Japanese had returned the next day with three divisions of assault troops, supported by air groups from all their carriers (about ten) and gunfire from all their battleships (ten or twelve) they might well have captured Oahu, keystone in the Alaska-Hawaii-Panama...