Talk:Lewis H. Brereton

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December 8[edit]

It is not true that Brereton "did not disperse" the FEAF airplanes. In reality, all of the B-17s at Clark Field were ordered into the air on the morning of December 8 after word reached Luzon of the attack on Pearl Harbor. They were recalled to rearm and refuel for an attack on Formosa and were caught on the ground by Japanese bombers and fighters that appeared over the field at mid-day. A fighter squadron was also on the ground refueling after making an earlier patrol after reports of Japanese aircraft over northern Luzon was recieved. They were in the process of taking off for another patrol when most of them were caught in a bomb pattern. The B-17s were caught by strafers, but not all of them were destroyed as is commonly believed. Three were still serviceable but were destroyed in accidents the following day. SamMcGowan (talk) 02:24, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]

If you have a source then add that information to the article. --Shimbo (talk) 08:45, 17 May 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Done. There are several POV biases inserted here some time back. Brereton's actions, and controversies associated with them, need to be detailed, but the previous tone and language was clearly condemnatory. Morton is the "official" US Army source and wrote (1953) when MacArthur was still nearly universally an icon. He gives a balanced account of both versions. Miller is an AF historian but his history is unofficial. He too states both sides, but he gives a compelling summary of why all the evidence is on Brereton's side, particularly in that MacArthur's statements indicated that he was predisposed to follow his own pre-war plan and not Rainbow 5, which had displaced it. He also shows that the argument is moot, other than embarrassment to one side or the other, because all the fiasco on Dec 8 did was delay the inevitable. The B-17s in the Philippines were already obsolete, in too few numbers, and without nearly enough adequate facilities or spare parts to be effective. The Japanese would have destroyed the small force because it had to land some time and was vulnerable when it did.--Reedmalloy (talk) 09:00, 25 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The article is still surprisingly long, detailed and hagiographic for an officer who was really a sort of middle-ranking bureaucrat and accident-prone pilot with well-known personality issues, now remembered mainly, if at all, for his infamous 'one lift per day' order which fatally compromised Operation Market Garden, along with his equally dubious order to ground British 2nd Tactical Air Force whenever his aircraft were flying, which effectively ceded air superiority over the battlefield to the enemy. Both orders were quite stupendously culpable errors, but perhaps only to be expected of the officer who managed to lose almost the entire strength of his command (FEAF) due to panicky instructions on 8 December 1941.
Sir Antony Beevor, in Arnhem: The Battle for the Bridges, 1944 (Penguin Books, London, 2019, ISBN 978-0-670-91867-6), p.24, says of Brereton's friction with Lt-Gen Browning, his British deputy at First Allied Airborne Army, 'The only characteristic the two men had in common was vanity. Brereton, a small, difficult man, was such a compulsive womanizer that his activities provoked a severe rebuke from General George C. Marshall, the American chief of staff and a man of the strictest moral rectitude.'
Beevor is not an entirely reliable historian, but this appears to be correct. Marshall wrote to Brereton on 26 September 1942, “Information, official and otherwise, reaches me indicating that your relations with your secretary have given rise to facetious and derogatory gossip in India and in Egypt. Ordinarily I have little interest in an officer’s personal affairs that are not related to the performance of his military duty. However, your conspicuous position of command in a foreign theater of war makes it imperative that your personal affairs do not give rise to comment detrimental to the prestige of the American Army. I wish to make it clear that anything short of this will destroy my confidence in the effectiveness of your leadership.” https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/keeping-it-zipped-above-and-below-the-beltline/ Brereton duly fired the married secretary he was having an affair with, but presumably did not change his philandering habits, any more than he changed his drinking habits, because men like that don't, and there was no doubt a reason why he underwent a second divorce just after the war, and also a reason why he was only given time-wasting post-war jobs until his slightly early retirement.
Various explanations are given for the fatal 'one lift per day' order that compromised Market Garden so badly and unnecessarily, the order supposedly being the work of Maj-Gen Paul Williams of IX Troop Carrier Command, but with Brereton's backing and blessing. It was claimed that the USAAF had a shortage of ground crew and could not 'turn round' the transport aircraft in the required time, which is absurd -- if you can launch them, you can turn them round. It was also claimed that, with 'only' 13 hours of daylight available, the USAAF's escort fighter pilots were incapable of either taking off in dawn conditions or landing in dusk conditions, which, given actual US pilot training at the time, is again absurd. The article as it stands is weirdly long, reverential and hagiographic for this particular subject. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:30, 20 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

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