Hoyt Sanford Vandenberg was born on January 24, 1899, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was the son of William Collins and Pearl Kane Vandenberg.
His father was president of a bookbindery and later a street-car company in Lowell, Massachusetts, where Vandenberg was raised.
Vandenberg graduated from the United States Military Academy on June 12, 1923. He also graduated from the Air Service Flying School at Brooks Field, Texas, in February 1924, and from the Air Service Advanced Flying School at Kelly Field, Texas, in September 1924.
He completed his studies at the Air Corps Tactical School in 1935, the Command and General Staff School in 1936, and the Army War College in 1939.
Vandenberg's interest in a military career emerged after the United States entry into World War I, and he enlisted in an army officer training course at Plattsburgh, New York. The war ended before he could use his training, and, following his father's advice, Vandenberg established residence in Grand Rapids, Mich. , where his uncle, Arthur H. Vandenberg, then publisher of the Grand Rapids Herald and later a powerful U. S. senator from Michigan, helped him to win congressional appointment to the United States Military Academy. Vandenberg's record at West Point was undistinguished. His lifelong reputation for affability began there, but he won no military rank in the Corps of Cadets and graduated in 1923 number 240 out of 261.
A demonstration flight at the academy by a barnstormer sparked Vandenberg's interest, and he applied for pilot training after graduation. In 1924, Vandenberg began a ten-year round of flying assignments in the Army Air Service (later Army Air Corps). He developed an excellent reputation as a pilot. He commanded attack squadrons in Texas and Hawaii and served two tours as a flying instructor in California and in Texas. Vandenberg gradually won recognition for his ability to harmonize divergent views and to achieve results through subtlety. As an instructor in pursuit plane tactics at the Air Corps Tactical School from 1936 to 1938, he promoted close working relations between previously hostile advocates of pursuit planes and bombers.
After graduation from the Army War College in 1939, Vandenberg was assigned as a captain at Air Corps Headquarters, under Henry ("Hap") Arnold. Winning Arnold's favor he rose to colonel before going overseas in August 1942, to be chief of staff of the Twelfth Air Force, charged with supporting the North African campaign. His performance in a situation where virtually all of the American military forces had no previous combat experience earned the approval of the overall commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he became brigadier general in December 1942.
Arnold recalled Vandenberg to Washington as deputy chief of the Army Air Forces Headquarters Staff in August 1943 and soon appointed him a senior officer on the air mission to Russia. Vandenberg's main task was to help negotiate for the bases in Russia used briefly by American bombers attempting shuttle raids against enemy targets. Vandenberg was also a member of the presidential party at the Quebec, Cairo, and Teheran conferences. In March 1944, Vandenberg rejoined the Eisenhower team in England as a major general and deputy to Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of the Allied Expeditionary Air Forces, a support agency for the Normandy invasion.
Vandenberg soon came under close consideration by Eisenhower for appointment as commander of the First Allied Airborne Army, which carried the rank of lieutenant general. General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the United States Army, was reluctant to allow the forty-five-year-old Vandenberg such rapid promotion and suggested that he be given command of the Ninth Air Force, ultimately a more significant responsibility. Beginning in August 1944, Vandenberg led the 400, 000-man Ninth Air Force in direct support of the advance by Lieutenant General Omar Bradley's Twelfth Army Group into Germany.
His wholehearted support provoked criticism from those anxious to use airpower in other ways but Vandenberg won Eisenhower's recommendation for promotion to lieutenant general in March 1945. After the war, Vandenberg held brief assignments as head of Army Intelligence and as the second director of the Central Intelligence Group, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1947, he became a full general and vice-chief of staff of the newly established United States Air Force. When Carl Spaatz, Vandenberg's senior air associate in Europe during the war, retired as chief of staff, Vandenberg was named to the post. Critics of Vandenberg's appointment in April 1948 feared that he was too easygoing to be effective. A more assertive personality, however, might have provoked even greater acrimony than that which engulfed the newly created Department of Defense.
Vandenberg presided over the air force for more than five years. In this period the new service bore the brunt of the Berlin airlift, engaged Communist air forces for the first time during the Korean War, and, as appropriations began to increase after 1950, dramatically enlarged the nation's strategic air capability. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Vandenberg wrestled with the priority to be given the demands of the Korean War compared with those of the emerging North Atlantic Treaty Organization. He and his colleagues concurred in the Truman administration's refusal to support General Douglas MacArthur's call for an expanded war in Asia to counter the Chinese Communist invasion of Korea.
On the other hand, the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were far from unanimous in their appraisal of another controversial policy question directly involving Vandenberg: the relative merits of B-36 intercontinental bombers and the navy's aircraft carriers. The result was a standoff, in that both kinds of weapons systems survived in the enlarged defense structure of the 1950's. In May 1952, Vandenberg underwent abdominal surgery. He retired from the Air Force in June 1953, and less than a year later died of cancer in Washington, D. C.
During World War II, Vandenberg was the commanding general of the Ninth Air Force, a tactical air force in England and in France, supporting the Army, from August 1944 until V-E Day. Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central coast of California is named after him. In 1946, he was briefly the U. S. Chief of Military Intelligence.
Quotations: "Air power alone does not guarantee America's security, but I believe it best exploits the nation's greatest asset - our technical skill. "
Vandenberg was the nephew of Arthur H. Vandenberg, a former U. S. Senator from Michigan.
On December 26, 1923, while taking flight training in Texas, Vandenberg married Gladys Merritt Rose of Sloatsburg, New York; they had two children.
