Kathy Wilson, Marshall’s Great Captain: Lieutenant General Frank M. Andrews and Air Power in the World Wars (University Press of Kentucky, 2025)
In 1938, Brigadier General George C. Marshall of the Army’s War Plans Division visited GHQ Air Force, a relatively new organization that allowed airmen more independence in employing airpower. In perhaps one of the most unknown but most fortuitous events in American airpower history, Frank M. Andrews took Marshall on a nine-day whirlwind traversing eight thousand miles. In this time, Marshall became convinced of Andrews’ views on airpower (75) so much so that he subsequently investigated the views that the Army’s General Staff and other officers held on airpower, finding them incorrectly dismissive (76). Upon becoming Chief of Staff, Marshall reached back to Andrews to serve as his Assistant Chief of Training and Operations. An airman with a foundational grounding in cavalry had now arisen to fill perhaps the most important position of any American airman. When Marshall subsequently signed off on the ambitious plans of Army Air Corps staffers in AWPD-1's strategic bombing campaign in 1941, it was no doubt in large part because of the education in airpower Andrews had provided him.
This biography expands significantly on the far shorter but similarly titled work of Dewitt S. Copp, who made a far shorter but similar argument for the need to recognize Andrews’ seminal contributions. More than a biography, Kathy Wilson’s work fills a secondary role in tracing the developments of the post-World War I air service as it morphed into the Army Air Forces. Readers familiar with this period may not learn much new in the way of well-known events like the air mail fiasco, but Wilson’s sections on how airmen latched onto coastal defense (26) and experimented with bombing ships well after more the Ostfriesland example provide insights into the organizational evolution of the future Air Force.
A close friend of Billy Mitchell, Andrews was a more subdued but equally tireless advocate for airpower in his own way. Andrews became head of the General Headquarters in 1933, ironically because conventional Army officers though he was a safe bet; instead, he appointed outspoken air advocates to his staff (49). More importantly, though, he made significant improvements to pilot readiness, In one year, for example, he increased the rate of instrument qualified pilots from 7 percent to 77 percent (70). Much scholarship focuses on the development of high-altitude precision doctrine during this period but ignores the more mundane but equally important aspects that enable airpower.
As already explained, Andrews left GHQ to work for Marshall. He continued this trajectory when Marshall sent him to command the Panama Canal Air Forces in 1940. Viewed from hindsight, this assignment does not seem particularly important. Wilson, however, does a great job of highlighting historical contingency (146). Keeping American access to the Panama Canal, for example allowed for “concentration of the U.S. fleet on either coast” (122). Ironically, though, Andrews’ major task was defensive, but of a very different type than his previous work. Whereas Andrews and his fellow airmen had attempted to carve out a role to use bombers as a kind of front-line defensive network in protecting the United States, now he had to create an integrated air defense consisting of an “early-warning system, intercept command, and antiaircraft batteries (126).” The author, however, does not note this irony given that she largely accepts Andrews’ airpower thought at face value. She largely repeats airmen’s original arguments for strategic bombardment without engaging critically and compellingly with revisionist historiography. Many scholars, for example, suggest that men like Andrews dogmatically fell under the lure of strategic bombing. She, however, cites newspaper articles from the time describing these airmen as “dogmatic” but does not actively seek to refute them (168). Elsewhere, this work arguably shows how Andrews suffered from some of the same problematic assumptions held by airmen, such as suggesting that “nti-air defenses can often be avoided” (64).
Andrews subsequently served three-month spans in both the Mediterranean and England (76). Such short spans in each theater raise the question of how much Andrews could absorb, learn, and contribute before being whisked away to another theater. The book concludes with two chapters detailing his final flight in 1943 followed by speculation on why he was returning to the United States and what his next position might have been.
Despite its many strengths, the work does have several weaknesses. First, in seeking to restore Andrews to the historical record, Andrews appears largely as perfect. Wilson only points out one failing—his tendency toward nepotism in staff positions. Second, Wilson does not wrestle deeply with the bomber mafia’s theory of victory. For example, in importantly bringing up Andrews’ foundational and original military background as a cavalrymen, she claims that the mindsets of airmen and cavalrymen were “one and the same” just “in a different medium, the plane in the air and the tank on the ground” (20). This claim is problematic because cavalrymen sought to use tanks to defeat the military while airmen like Andrews wanted above all to use airplanes to avoid fighting the military and instead win more directly by attacking a nation’s vital centers. A more nuanced argument, by contrast, could have suggested that Andrews was not as much of a diehard bomber believer compared to some other airmen given his repeated emphasis on joint operations (163).
Wilson firmly establishes Andrews’ seminal role in winning support for airpower through his relationship with Marshall. Andrews accomplished more than Mitchell because he convinced the Army’s Chief of Staff to accept his argument. Moreover, the span of his military career from joining the Army in 1906 to his unfortunate death in a B-17 crash in 1943 provide a comprehensive span of airpower developments from the birth of the airplane to the launching of the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany. As such, this account valuably provides a comprehensive, detailed chronology of Andrews’ contributions to the foundation of American airpower.
Dr. Heather Venable is Air Command and Staff College’s Director of Research. Before, she served for four years as the course director for the Airpower Strategy and Operations course.