Many of us have heard the term “Joint Base Andrews.” It is the U. S. Army base in suburban Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington D.C. — the airport that President Joseph Biden usually takes off from on Air Force One. Formerly known as Andrews Air Force Base, it was named for General Frank Maxwell Andrews. So what, you might ask.
Well, the answer is that Andrews is the most overlooked military hero in Tennessee’s history. Born in South Nashville in 1884, he grew up in what was called Waverly Place where, in the 1890s, he delivered the Nashville Banner on his bicycle. In 1900, he was the quarterback, coach and play caller on a championship Montgomery Bell Academy football team. Graduating from MBA in 1901, he applied to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point. Initially put on the waiting list, one day he got a long distance telephone call saying that he had been accepted.
Andy Andrews graduated from West Point in 1906, standing 42nd in his class. As a second lieutenant, he was assigned to the Cavalry and he stayed there for a number of years. In 1914, he married and took his bride on a horseback honeymoon in Virginia.
In 1917, Andrews was shifted to the Army’s new aviation section and became a flyer. He stayed in the aviation side for the rest of his career, working his way up through the ranks with such assignments as the first commandant of the advanced flying school established at Kelley Field, Texas. In 1928, 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 and graduated from the War College in 1935. That year the U.S. Army consolidated all of its Air Corps tactical units into one unit. In March, General Douglas MacArthur promoted Colonel Andrews to brigadier general and made him commander of the new unit. Andrews is “tough, fiftyish, handsome,” reported TIME Magazine. Army wives called Andrews the “best looking man in the service.” Less than a year later, Andrews was promoted to major general (temporary). In August 1935, Col. Andrews broke three airplane speed records that had formerly been held by Charles Lindbergh.
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-17s in large numbers as the Army’s standard bomber. General Malin Craig, who had replaced General Macrthur as chief of staff, opposed any mission for the Air Corps except that of supporting ground troops. Consequently, he cut back on the planned purchases of B-17s and instead ordered cheaper and inferior twin-engine light and medium bombers such as the Douglas B-18.
Andrews was passed over for appointment as Chief of the Air Corps following the death of Major General Oscar Wesover in 1938, partly because of his aggressive support for strategic bombing.He had pushed too hard in the eyes of senior military authorities, who hoped he would resign from the Army. Andrews did not resign and instead became, in 1938, a trusted air advisor to George C. Marshall, newly appointed deputy chief of staff of the Army.
In January 1939, after President Franklin Roosevelt called for a greatly expanded Army Air Corps, General Andrews publically described the United States as a “sixth-rate airpower.” This infuriated the isolationist Secretary of War Harry Woodring, who was then assuring the American public of adequate U.S. air strength. At the end of Andrews’ four-year term as Commanding General of JQAF, he was not reappointed, reverted to his permanent rank of colonel, and reassigned as an air officer for the Eighth Corps Area in San Antonio, the same exile to which Billy Mitchell had been sent. Four months later, General George Marshall , the new chief of staff replacing general Craig, recalled Andrews to Washington and permanently promoted him to major general. Woodring and others objected furiously, but Marshall prevailed after threatening to resign. General Andrews was named assistant chief of staff in charge of readying the entire Army in the run-up to America’s inevitable involvement in World War II.
At different times during World War II, Major General Andrews was commander of the Caribbean Defense Command and commander of U. S. forces in the Middle East. At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, General Andrews was named commander of all U. S. forces in Europe, replacing Dwight Eisenhower. His tenure as commander of all U.S. forces in Europe did not last long. On May 3, 1943, during an inspection tour in bad weather, Andrews was killed when the plane he was piloting crashed while trying to land in Iceland. At the time of his death, he was the highest-ranking allied officer killed in the line of duty in the war. Some people remembered having heard General Andrews say, “I don’t want to be one of those generals who die in bed.” The United States government did not initially publicize his death because they did not want the Germans to know that he died. He was quietly buried in an American Cemetery in Iceland, not in Arlington National Cemetery. Had Andrews lived, historians have speculated that General Andrews, not General Dwight Eisenhower, would have been chosen by George Marshall to head the Normandy invasion. Had that been the case, it seems likely that Andrews would not have moved American armies under the command of General Omar Bradley to British Field Marshal Bernard “Monte” Montgomery in December 1944. Andrews and Patton were old friends who played poker together. If the aggressive Patton had more resources and a freer hand as he pushed toward the Metz, Nancy and the German border in August 1944, he might have gone on to capture Berlin in the winter of 1944-45.
The first public tribute to General Andrews came on Feb. 7, 1945 when the World War II Army Air Force Base for the First Air Force in Morningside, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D. C., was named for General Frank Andrews. Twenty months later, on October 25, 1946, Alumni Field at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville was rededicated as Frank Andrews Field in honor of General Andrews. Representing the family at the dedication were General Andrews’ brother, Col. J. D. Andrews, Colonel Andrews’ wife and oldest son, David, and his sister, Mrs. Gillespie Sykes. Missing at the dedication, which preceded a football game with Father Ryan, was Col. Andrews’ younger son, Nelson, who was a second year cadet and football player at the United States Military Academy at West Point.