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Contact Info
Home Town Monroe, Wisconsin
Last Address San Antonio, Texas
Date of Passing Mar 29, 1982
Location of Interment Arlington National Cemetery (VLM) - Arlington, Virginia
General, USAF. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Born in Monroe, Wisconsin, the son of Maizie Barber and Clarence Twining. His family then moved to Oregon, and in 1916, he joined the National Guard, serving with the Third Oregon Infantry. Rising to the rank of first sergeant in the Guard, he won appointment to the US Military Academy in 1917. Because of an accelerated wartime program, he graduated in November 1918 as a second lieutenant of Infantry. After the Armistice, he remained at the Academy as an officer cadet until June 1919. He was then posted to Germany as a military observer. He attended Infantry School at Fort Benning in September 1919, and was graduated in June 1920. He attended flight school in 1923, and transferred to the Army Air Service in 1926. In February 1929, he joined the 18th Pursuit Group at Schofield Barracks. He was posted to Fort Crockett in March 1932, and was assigned to the Third Attack Group as a squadron commander. In August he joined the 90th Attack Squadron and a month later, the 60th Service Squadron. In 1935, he attended the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field. After he completed training, and the Army Command and General Staff School, he was assigned Air Corps Technical Supervisor at the San Antonio Air Depot. In August 1940, he was reassigned to the Office of the Chief of Air Corps in Washington, D.C. He joined the Operations Division in December 1941, and in 1942, he was appointed director of War Organization and Movements. In July of that year, he was appointed chief of staff to Major General M.F. Harmon, commanding general of the U.S. Army Forces in the South Pacific. In January 1943, he assumed command of the Thirteenth Air Force, and in February was promoted to major general. His B-17 was forced down by weather in the Coral Sea off the New Hebrides on February 26th, 1943. He and his crew spent five days adrift before being rescued. In late 1943, he was transferred to the Mediterranean theater, where he assumed command of the Fifteenth Air Force and the Mediterranean Allied Strategic Air Forces. In June 1945, he received a promotion to lieutenant general and returned to the Pacific Theater as Commander of the Twentieth Air Force. He directed the final air strikes against Japan. After VJ Day, he returned to the United States in October 1945. After the formation of the US Air Force in 1947, he was appointed Commanding General of the Alaskan Department and Commander-in-Chief of the Alaskan Command. He was promoted to major general in February 1948. In July 1950, he returned to Washington and was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel at Air Force Headquarters. In October, he was appointed Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force and promoted to full general. In June 1953, he was named Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, and he became the third Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 15 August 1957; the first Air Force officer to serve in that capacity, where he was an advocate of air power and military preparedness. He retired in September 1960, and took a position with the publishing firm Holt, Rinehart, and Winston from which he published 'Neither Liberty Nor Safety: A Hard Look at US Military Policy and Strategy' in 1966. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1976.
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.
The War at Home & Abroad
On September 1, 1939, World War II started when Germany invaded Poland. By November 1942, the Axis powers controlled territory from Norway to North Africa and from France to the Soviet Union. After defeating the Axis in North Africa in May 1941, the United States and its Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 and forced Italy to surrender in September. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Northern France. In December, a German counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge) failed. Germany surrendered in May 1945.
The United States entered the war following a surprise attack by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The United States and its Allies halted Japanese expansion at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and in other campaigns in the South Pacific. From 1943 to August 1945, the Allies hopped from island to island across the Central Pacific and also battled the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. Japan agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945 after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Consequences:
1. The war ended Depression unemployment and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life. It led the federal government to create a War Production Board to oversee conversion to a wartime economy and the Office of Price Administration to set prices on many items and to supervise a rationing system.
2. During the war, African Americans, women, and Mexican Americans founded new opportunities in industry. But Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast were relocated from their homes and placed in internment camps.
The Dawn of the Atomic Age
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the Nazis might be able to build an atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi, an Italian refugee, produced the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.
To ensure that the United States developed a bomb before Nazi Germany did, the federal government started the secret $2 billion Manhattan Project. On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, the Manhattan Project's scientists exploded the first atomic bomb.
It was during the Potsdam negotiations that President Harry Truman learned that American scientists had tested the first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, released an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Between 80,000 and 140,000 people were killed or fatally wounded. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. About 35,000 people were killed. The following day Japan sued for peace.
President Truman's defenders argued that the bombs ended the war quickly, avoiding the necessity of a costly invasion and the probable loss of tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. His critics argued that the war might have ended even without the atomic bombings. They maintained that the Japanese economy would have been strangled by a continued naval blockade, and that Japan could have been forced to surrender by conventional firebombing or by a demonstration of the atomic bomb's power.
The unleashing of nuclear power during World War II generated hope of a cheap and abundant source of energy, but it also produced anxiety among large numbers of people in the United States and around the world.
