[5][nb 3] He attended St. John's College in Annapolis with the intention of entering West Point, but unable to secure an appointment, he followed his older brother into the Naval Academy in 1907,[1] graduating in June 1911, ranked 58th in merit in a class of 194.

In March 1911, he submitted a letter of resignation effective on the date of graduation, listing seasickness as a primary reason, and as a result, the Academy's Permanent Medical Examining Board rejected him for active duty.

[1] He applied for commissioning in the United States Army and was appointed a second lieutenant in the Coast Artillery Corps on August 17, 1911, and went on active duty September 6 with the 118th Company CAC at Fort Monroe, Virginia.

[1] In September 1912, he volunteered for detached service with the Signal Corps' Aeronautical Division to undertake flying training at the planned aviation school at Rockwell Field, San Diego, California.

In November, when Foulois was promoted to brigadier general and sent to France to command the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), he took with him over 100 members of his staff, including Brereton.

Although initially sent to a Services of Supply unit, Brereton's JMA rating enabled him to enter advanced flying training at Issoudun, which qualified him to take command of the 12th Aero Squadron on March 1, 1918.

[6] On June 4, 1925, Brereton was named commanding officer of the 2nd Bombardment Group at Langley Field,[nb 12] and was summoned to Washington in November as associate counsel for the defense at the court martial of now-Col. Mitchell for insubordination.

Returning to Langley from maneuvers in Texas on May 28, Brereton was the copilot of the XLB-5 when it experienced catastrophic engine failure over Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and crashed, killing a crewman who failed to parachute from the craft.

[1] In August 1927, after private treatment for his emotional problems, Brereton was restored to flying status by a flight surgeon, found not to be an alcoholic, and accepted into the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for which he had been rejected in 1919.

[6][nb 15] While stationed in Oklahoma, Brereton remarried, to Icy V. Larkin, and his officer fitness reports, which had fallen to "average" during most of his time in the Air Corps, returned to "excellent".

His superior in Panama was the same Gen. Brown who had rejected him for duty at First Corps Area headquarters, but Brereton's work performance reversed the general's earlier opinions and he received excellent ratings that restored the professional reputation nearly destroyed in 1927.

Following his duty in Panama, Brereton returned to Fort Leavenworth for a four-year tour as the Chief of the Air Corps Subsection at the Command and General Staff School, for which he received temporary promotion to colonel.

Delayed by bad weather for 11 days at various points along the way,[nb 17] Brereton and his small staff finally reached Manila on November 4 aboard a Pan American Clipper.

Airfield construction was behind schedule, many units were at half strength or less, a significant shortage of .50-caliber ammunition hampered training, and no equipment existed to provide oxygen to interceptor pilots, severely limiting operating ceilings.

[nb 18] He had been in the Philippines less than two weeks when MacArthur sent him to Australia "for twelve precious days"[21] to finalize plans for use of Australian bases in the event of war, disrupting his attempts to organize an effective air force.

While they were being fueled and armed for the afternoon mission, the bombers and many of the pursuit planes were caught on the ground when Japanese air units, whose takeoff from Formosa had been delayed for six hours by fog, attacked shortly after noon.

After the 14 surviving bombers of the B-17 force escaped to Darwin, Australia just ten days into the war, and with only a handful of fighters remaining, FEAF was broken up as an organization on December 24 and moved by individual units into the peninsula.

On the night of April 2–3, 1942, he participated in the first bombing mission of the Tenth Air Force—conducted by an LB-30 and two B-17s, of which he co-piloted one of the latter—in an attack against Japanese warships at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands in support of the British, for which he was decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross.

With the arrival of B-24s of the 98th Bomb Group at the end of July 1942, USAMEAF began to attack German depots in Libya, the chief of which was Tobruk,[32] and ship convoys as far away as Navarino Bay in Greece.

On October 22, 1942, the U.S. Desert Air Task Force was formed with Brereton in command to support the British offensive at El Alamein and gain experience for arriving USAAF staff officers.

Among the missions undertaken in 1943 by the heavy bomber units under Brereton's command was the minimum-altitude bombing of oil refineries at Ploieşti, Romania as part of Operation Tidal Wave.

The Ninth was re-activated on October 16 using the medium bomber component of the VIII Air Support Command as its nucleus,[nb 24] and Brereton made his headquarters at Sunninghill Park, Berkshire.

Gen. Omar Bradley implemented Operation Cobra, a plan to end the near-stalemate by using massive air power to punch a hole in the strong German defenses near Saint-Lô, allowing the VII Corps to break through into the French interior.

At a conference at AEAF headquarters at Stanmore on July 19, air commanders expressed serious reservations about the safety of U.S. troops, particularly their proximity to the target area, resulting in tactical compromises that ultimately proved inadequate.

[55] Fighter-bomber attacks of the immediate front lines by eight groups of IX TAC, to a depth of 250 yards (230 m), were generally excellent, but as air planners had predicted, created smoke and dust that obscured aiming points for the bombers at higher altitudes.

[61] After alerts and cancellations of several airborne drops to cut off retreating German forces, Eisenhower on September 10 tasked Brereton with planning Operation Market Garden.

A combination of poor weather, extensive resupply missions to the pursuing Allied armies, and anticipation of last-minute airborne drops cancelled virtually all training for IX TCC in August, as a consequence of which Brereton believed that untried and unpracticed double-tows were too hazardous.

Brereton also decided that the operation, protected by massive air support from the RAF and the AAF, would take place in daylight, to avoid the dispersion experienced during both the British and American airborne landings in Normandy in June.

[72] After serving continuously overseas in combat theaters since before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Brereton returned to the United States in May 1945 for assignment to Headquarters AAF at Washington, and in July was again given command of the Third Air Force.

Third, and closely related to the previous point, historians who have tended to give Brereton higher marks for competence, especially concerning the events in the Philippines, have largely been those ... who have written extensively on the history of air power.