- AFHF Member Authors
Every Inch a Soldier: Augustine Warner Robins and the Building of U.S. Airpower
by William P. Head
Who was Warner Robins, for whom an Air Force base in Georgia was named? “To write a story about General Robins is to write abut the `Olden Days’” his widow has remarked, “for Warner Robins was not in the Air Force as it is today.” No, but he helped to form the Air Force as it is today. His professional life developed along with the air service during that brave and daring era between the two World Wars. As author William Head explains, Robins was “one of those courageous few who left an indelible mark on today’s Air Force.”
As a West Point cadet (1903-1907), Augustine Warner Robins numbered among his classmates and friends Hap Arnold and Frank Andrews. As a young officer, he fought under Black Jack Pershing in Mexico and met a young George Patton and Ben Foulois. As a senior officer, he worked with such luminaries of the day as Charles A. Lindbergh, Jimmy Doolittle, Lester Maitland, Orville Wright, and Billy Mitchell.
Even more significantly, during his career he was instrumental in developing the first official and workable Air Force supply maintenance and accountability system. He helped establish official guidelines for training of logistics officers, NCOs, and civilians working for the Army Air Corps.
Robins’s life provides, through his thousands of letters, telephone transcripts, and other primary materials, a unique window on the interward period, and especially on the history of aviation in America. Through his eyes, the events and personalities of the 1920s and 1930s–which shaped the Air Force of World II and the Cold War–come into sharp focus. The anecdotes and sometimes humorous stories of the building of this branch of the service make this a book not just for historians, but for all those interested in the military and in aviation.
