George Kenney
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George Churchill Kenny was born in Nova Scotia on 6 August 1889 while his parents were vacationing there from Boston. Trained as a civil engineer, Kenny joined the US Army as an aviation cadet two months before his 28th birthday—long in the tooth for a first-time military flyer, but in 1917 it was extraordinary. In November, the Army Reserve commissioned Kenny as a 1st Lieutenant and sent him to France, where he flew reconnaissance ships for the rest of the war. They dubbed him "Bust 'em Up George" after he crashed on his first operational flight, and the nickname stuck for the rest of his career.
The AEF awarded Kenney both a Silver Star and a Distinguished Service Cross for his service, and his aerial gunners shot down two German planes.
After he returned from France, Kenney applied for and got a Regular Army commission as a captain in 1920. His first wife died of complications of childbirth in 1922, but Army aviators are flexible: he married the neighbor he hired as a nurse for his son in 1923. Kenny, meantime, proceeded through the ranks and schools of the 1920s Army Air Service, attending the Air Corps Tactical School, the Command and General Staff School, and the War College, where he worked on War Plan Orange—the contingency plans for war with Japan. In 1939, as air attaché to the Paris embassy, Kenny wrote reports that got the standard weapon calibers for aircraft machine guns to 0.50 and wrote scathing (if accurate) comparative reviews of Luftwaffe operations to those of the US air services in the early stages of the war that got him sent home. In January 1941, Kenny got his first star; in March 1942, his second, and the command of the Fifth Air Force, then in Australia, in July 1942.
Working for Douglas MacArthur, however, was a delicate dance between actually working for the glory of the Boss or to defeat the Japanese.
As the commander of everything with Army wings (US, Australian, some New Zealand and British), Kenny could affect air operations only with tact and, frankly, a certain genius for operating an air force on a shoestring. He instructed flyers to take off out of muddy ruts called airstrips, sent scores of inefficient officers home, disagreed with MacArthur frequently and sparred with his staff much more. Still, the destruction of a Japanese convoy resupplying New Guinea in March 1943, known as the battle of the Bismarck Sea, was largely at Kenny's direction.
When the B-29 Superfortresses became available, Kenny lobbied hard to get them based in Australia so they could bomb the oil fields of Indonesia.
Kenny was one reason his old friend HH Arnold, then the boss of the entire Army Air Force, kept control of the long-range bombers to himself. Strategic bombardment did not fare well in the Pacific with the Liberators and Flying Fortresses that Kenny had on hand because of the distances involved, and because of the tremendous logistical load that those aircraft needed to operate. While Kenny struggled with using the heavy bombers in his command effectively, he turned everything he could into ground support or shipping attack planes, with deadly effect. After the war, Kenny was the boss of SAC for a time, then as commandant of the Air University until his retirement in 1951. George Kenny died three days after his 88th birthday in 1977. People do not remember Kenny as much as Arnold or LeMay, but he was one of many examples of the worker bees who made American air power possible, even if others often overshadowed their efforts.
The Fire Blitz: Burning Down Japan
There was some danger that Arnold would lose control of the B-29s before The Fire Blitz, but very little afterwards.
Kenny, for all his good intentions, could not have provided the facilities the big, cantankerous Superforts needed, and the fields he controlled were too far away to hit Japan. Available from your favorite bookseller or from me if you want an autograph.
Coming Up…
Naktong River/Pusan Perimeter Reconsidered
The Problem of the Horse
And Finally...
On 10 August:
1945: A day after the destruction of Nagasaki, Japan’s Foreign Ministry agrees to the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, with conditions. Instructed to do so by the Showa Emperor Hirohito, the condition is for an agreement on the status of the Emperor.
1960: The US Navy recovers the Explorer XIII capsule north of Hawaii. The first man-made object to return intact from space contained only instruments, but those that followed, part of the CORONA photoreconnaissance project, carried more.
And today is NATIONAL SHAPEWEAR DAY. Mostly women wear this kind of garment, intended to change/enhance/improve both figures and postures, and to make hard-to-fit women fit into contemporary clothes. Both sexes have worn this kind of thing since garments were invented, fellas, so don’t laugh.