Frank Maxwell Andrews



Frank Maxwell Andrews (February 3, 1884 – May 3, 1943) was a general officer in the United States Army and one of the founders of the United States Army Air Forces, which was later to become the United States Air Force. In leadership positions within the United States Army Air Corps, he succeeded in advancing progress toward a separate and independent Air Force where predecessors and allies such as Billy Mitchell had failed. Andrews was the first head of a centralized American air force and the first air officer to serve on the Army's general staff. In early 1943, he took the place of Dwight D. Eisenhower as commander of all U.S. troops in the European Theater of Operations.

He was killed in an airplane accident during an inspection tour in Iceland, in 1943. Joint Base Andrews in Maryland (formerly Andrews Air Force Base) is named after him

Early life and World War I
Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Andrews was the grandson of a cavalry soldier who fought alongside Nathan Bedford Forrest and the great-great-nephew of two Tennessee governors, John C. Brown and Neill S. Brown. He graduated from the city's Montgomery Bell Academy in 1901 and entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in July 1902.

He graduated 42nd in his class and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the 8th Cavalry Regiment in June 1906, assigned to the Philippines from October 1906 to May 1907, and then to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. In 1912 he was promoted to first lieutenant in the 2nd Stryker Cavalry Regiment at Fort Bliss, Texas, and in 1916 received a promotion to captain in the regiment while at Plattsburgh Barracks, New York.

The United States Army he joined was smaller than that of Bulgaria, but it gave the young second lieutenant ample opportunities to play polo, see the world (serving as aide-de-camp to Gen. M.M. Macomb in the Hawaii between 1911 and 1913), and observe the high and low politics of leadership. After marrying Josephine "Johnny" Allen, the high-spirited daughter of Maj. Gen. Henry Tureman Allen, in 1914, Andrews gained entrée into elite inner circles of Washington society and within the military.

A story related in the press many times during Andrews' lifetime claimed that Gen. Allen forestalled aeronautical aspirations of his future son-in-law by declaring that no daughter of his would marry a flyer. Andrews' service records, however, show that his commanding officer in the Second Cavalry vetoed his application for temporary aeronautical duty with the Army Signal Corps in February 1914, a decision that held firm despite a plea from the Chief Signal Officer's for reconsideration by higher-ups.

After the United States entered World War I, Andrews was promoted to temporary major on August 5, 1917, and assigned over the objections of his cavalry commander to the Aviation Section, U.S. Signal Corps as part of its wartime expansion. After staff duty in Washington, D.C. in the Office of the Chief Signal Officer between September 1917 and April 1918, Andrews went to Rockwell Field, California, for flying training. There, he earned a rating of Junior Military Aviator at the age of 34. As with nearly all mid-career officers detailed to the Aviation Section, Andrews did not serve in France but as an administrator in the huge training establishment created to provide pilots. He commanded various training airfields in Texas and Florida, and served in the war plans division of the Army General Staff in Washington, D.C. Following the war, he replaced Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell as Air Officer of the Army of Occupation in Germany, which his father-in-law, Gen. Allen, commanded.

Air Service and Air Corps duty
After returning to the United States in 1923, Andrews again assumed command of Kelly Field, Texas, and he became the first commandant of the advanced flying school established there. In 1927, he attended the Air Corps Tactical School at Langley Field, Virginia, and the following year he went to the Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Andrews served as the chief of the Army Air Corps' Training and Operations Division in 1930-1931 before being replaced by the new Chief of the Air Corps, Maj. Gen. Benjamin D. Foulois. He then commanded the 1st Pursuit Group at Selfridge Field, Michigan. After graduation from the Army War College in 1933, Andrews returned to the General Staff in 1934.

In March 1935, Andrews was appointed by Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur to command the newly formed General Headquarters (GHQ) Air Force, which consolidated all the Army Air Corps' tactical units under a single commander. The Army promoted Andrews to brigadier general (temporary) and to major general (temporary) less than a year later.

A vocal proponent of the four-engine heavy bomber in general and the B-17 Flying Fortress in particular, General Andrews advocated the purchase of the B-17 in large numbers as the Army's standard bomber. MacArthur, however, was replaced as Chief of Staff by Gen. Malin Craig in October 1935. Craig, who opposed any mission for the Air Corps except that of supporting ground forces, and the Army General Staff, actively opposing a movement for a separate air force, disagreed with Andrews that the B-17 had proven its superiority as a bomber over all other types. Instead it cut back on planned purchases of B-17s to procure smaller but cheaper (and inferior) twin-engine light and medium bombers such as the Douglas B-18. However, the war in Europe would soon prove the advocates of long range airpower correct.

Later career, and World War II
Andrews was passed over for appointment as Chief of the Air Corps following the death of Maj. Gen. Oscar Westover in September 1938, partly because of his aggressive support for strategic bombing. He became a trusted air adviser to George C. Marshall, newly appointed as deputy chief of staff of the Army in 1938, but Andrews pushed too hard for the taste of more senior authorities.

In January 1939, after president Franklin D. Roosevelt had publicly called for a large expansion of the Air Corps, Andrews described the United States as a "sixth-rate air power" at a speech to the National Aeronautic Association, antagonizing isolationist Secretary of War Harry Woodring, who was then assuring the public of U.S. air strength. At the end of Andrews’ four-year term as Commanding General of GHQAF on March 1, he was not reappointed, reverted to his permanent rank of colonel, and was reassigned as air officer for the Eighth Corps Area in San Antonio, the same exile to which Billy Mitchell had been sent. Expected to retire, he instead was recalled to Washington just four months later by Marshall after President Roosevelt named Marshall to serve as Chief of Staff following Craig's retirement. His first senior staff selection, Marshall's choice of Andrews and its permanent promotion to brigadier general prompted furious opposition from Woodring and others, over which Marshall prevailed after threatening to resign his new post. As Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations (G-3), he was in charge of readying the entire Army in the run-up to America’s inevitable involvement in the war.

In 1940, Andrews assumed control of the Air Corps' Panama Canal Air Force, and in 1941, he became commander of the Caribbean Defense Command, which had the critically important duty during World War II of defending the southern approaches to the United States, including the vital Panama Canal. In February 1942, General Andrews was in Aruba and witnessed the German submarine attack on the island. That same year he went to North Africa, where he spent three months in command of all United States forces in the Middle East from a base in Cairo.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, Lieut. Gen. Andrews was appointed commander of all United States forces in the European Theater of Operations, replacing Dwight D. Eisenhower. In his memoirs, Gen. Henry H. Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces in World War II, expressed the belief that Andrews would have been given the command of the Allied invasion of Europe &mdash; the position that eventually went to Gen. Eisenhower. Gen. Marshall would say, late in life, that Andrews was the only general he had a chance to groom for a possible Supreme Allied Command later in the war.

However, on May 3, 1943, during an inspection tour, Lieut. Gen. Andrews was killed in crash of a B-24 of the 8th Air Force out of RAF Bovingdon, England, on Mt. Fagradalsfjall on the Reykjanes peninsula after an aborted attempt to land at the Royal Air Force station at Kaldadarnes, Iceland. Andrews and thirteen others died in the crash; only the tail gunner survived..

Andrews was the highest-ranking Allied officer to die in the line of duty to that time in the war. Camp Springs Army Air Field, Maryland, was renamed Andrews Air Force Base (later Joint Base Andrews), for him on 7 February 1945. Andrews is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

He was the uncle of Nashville business and community leader Nelson Andrews.