by Neil Sheehan
Decision time came during his senior year at A&M. He was offered the pro’s position at the golf course at Bryan, Texas, just north of the college. The job paid $200 a month, more than he could make doing anything else and a lot of money in 1931, the third year of the Great Depression. He had no chance at all after graduation of employment in his major—structural architecture as his degree called it, construction engineering in a more plainspoken description—because the jobs simply did not exist. Professional golf competition did not have the social status it was later to acquire, however, and the tournament purses bore no resemblance to what they were to reach. Elizabeth was also opposed. She wanted her sons to become men worthy of respect, and professional athletes did not hold a place of respectability in the German middle-class world from which she drew her standards. Schriever made up his own mind, however. He reasoned that he hadn’t gone to college for four years and acquired a bachelor of science degree to devote the rest of his life to golf. He decided he was going to do what had begun to attract him most and become a flier in the U.S. Army Air Corps.
4.
WHITE SILK SCARVES AND OPEN COCKPITS
San Antonio was a military town in the 1920s and 1930s and Bennie Schriever had grown up in its aura. The Alamo is located there, and during the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt and the officers of his 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, better known as the Rough Riders, had hung out in the bar of the old Menger Hotel before departing for fame in Cuba. The tank had not yet replaced the horse in Schriever’s youth, although in a harbinger of what was to come a squadron of slow, lumbering First World War tanks was stationed at Fort Sam Houston. Bennie and Gerry would gather with crowds of other children to watch the tanks and the horses of the cavalry maneuver against each other on the expanse of the fort’s parade ground. The officers of the cavalry participated in the polo matches regularly staged there and at the municipal polo field next to Brackenridge Park Golf Course. In choosing Texas A&M, Schriever had also chosen to attend a military school. The college was all male then, and except for a few youths who were physically unqualified, every student wore an Army uniform, was enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and marched to and from the mess hall for breakfast and dinner. Bennie’s ROTC unit was B Battery of the Field Artillery, traditionally a San Antonio organization. After graduation, he was commissioned a Reserve second lieutenant in the artillery of the day, also still drawn by teams of horses. Howitzers and horses held no interest for Schriever. He would later joke that his legs were too long for the stirrups.
Above all, San Antonio was an Army fliers town. Schriever had grown up in a place where technology had literally flown past the horse. Kelly Field on the edge of the city was the Air Corps’ main center for advanced pilot training. As a boy, Schriever would sit on the fence out there and watch the First World War-era biplanes take off and land, their Liberty engines emitting so much thick black exhaust that they were called “coal burners.” Golf had also played its part in attracting him to flying because he had first caddied for and then played with and against the Air Corps officers who frequented the Brackenridge Park course. Schriever looked up to them as an elite. This was the romantic era of flying, of white silk scarves, leather helmets and goggles, and open cockpits, the First World War exploits of the German knight of the sky, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, and the American Ace of Aces, Edward V. “Eddie” Rickenbacker, fresh in memory. “The gals sure liked it. It was better than owning a convertible,” Bennie would laugh and say in his old age. His mother dated a pilot who was subsequently one of his instructors.
In late 1931, after he had reached the minimum age of twenty-one, he applied for Flying School, as it was then called, as a cadet and was chosen for the entering class of July 1932. The course was a year, with Primary and Basic training at recently completed Randolph Field, also adjacent to San Antonio, and then Advanced at Kelly. Even if he survived the 50 percent washout rate and won his wings and a Reserve commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he still could not have high expectations of turning the Air Corps into a career because he probably would not be able to convert his commission into a Regular, i.e., permanent, one. He could look forward with certainty only to a year of active service before he was tossed back to civilian life and unemployment. In the midst of the Depression, the Air Corps was being kept on a bare-cupboard budget by Congress. It had no funds to take in more than a few new Regular officers annually or to give its Reservists more than a year of flying experience. But at twenty-one, a man could always hope that he might beat the odds.
To pass the time and earn what he could before Flying School, he played a number of exhibition tournaments with other amateurs against pros in the area, worked behind the counter at the clubhouse shop at Brackenridge, and in June 1932, just before going to Randolph Field, won the San Antonio city championship for a second time. His opponent in the final round, Lieutenant Kenneth Rogers, was a pilot instructor there who was to serve as a brigadier general during the Second World War. “City Golf Champ Will Enter Flying Service July 1,” the San Antonio Evening News bragged in a headline. Schriever paid for the headline and the rest of his local media acclaim with some special hazing: the more senior cadets in an earlier class at Randolph ordered him to stand at attention in the mess hall and read his golf clippings to them while they ate.
He managed to solo successfully after his first half dozen hours of instruction in Primary, when most washouts occurred, despite a badly sprained ankle, which he taped securely in order to work the rudder pedals. Of the approximately 200 aspiring airmen who had entered Randolph on July 1, 1932, Bennie was among the ninety or so who went on to Advanced training at Kelly eight months later. That ever-present risk of an airman’s profession, death in a fatal crash, claimed two of his classmates, but his steady temperament made him a good if not a spirited pilot, which may be why he was assigned to bombers rather than pursuit aircraft, as fighters were then designated. He graduated on June 29, 1933, was awarded his wings and second lieutenant’s commission, and was sent for his year of active duty to the 9th Bombardment Squadron at March Field near Riverside, California.
5.
ENTERING THE BROTHERHOOD
Elizabeth and Gerry went with him to Riverside. The grimly worsening Depression had severely reduced her business at the sandwich stand on the twelfth hole. People were not playing golf in nearly the numbers they had been and the number of visitors coming to San Antonio on vacation had also declined drastically. So she closed the stand before departing. Gerry had been forced to leave A&M in the middle of his sophomore year in January 1933 because of Elizabeth’s straitened circumstances. Her bank had failed and taken all of her savings with it. Bennie was now their source of support with his second lieutenant’s pay of $125 a month, an additional half again of $62.50 as flying pay, and an allowance of roughly $30 a month to rent a house off base because there were no quarters available at the field for the families of Reservists. His salary and flying pay were soon reduced, however, when the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, decreed a 15 percent pay cut for the entire military, which remained in effect into 1935.
In entering the officer ranks of the U.S. Army Air Corps, Bennie Schriever thought of himself as having joined an elite group of flying men. He could not know precisely how important to the destiny of the nation that elite was to be. At the end of 1938, when the menace of Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan at last began to awaken Congress, there were only about 1,650 officers, including Reservists, in the entire Air Corps. From these 1,650 officers would come the men who were to create and lead the mighty fleet of the skies during the Second World War.
The commanding officer at March Field that summer of 1933 was the man who was to shape and command that armada, Henry “Hap” Arnold, then just a lieutenant colonel. He would subsequently cast a long shadow of influence over the nature of American air, missile, and space power during the Cold War and the arms race
with the Soviet Union that followed. Arnold’s principal deputy at March Field in 1933 was a trim, mustachioed man, Major Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, who wore his uniform cap crushed in on the sides in rakish fashion as if he were sitting in a cockpit with his earphones on. At bachelor social occasions, he played the guitar and sang risqué songs, and he was fond of late-night poker games at which he would while away the hours sipping Scotch whiskey with soda and chain-smoking cigarettes. Lieutenant Schriever was soon initiated into these nocturnal gatherings. Spaatz’s carefree exterior concealed a relentless determination whenever the needs of his profession required it. He was an accomplished fighter pilot. During the First World War he had shot down three German aircraft in just a few weeks and returned with the nation’s second-highest decoration for valor, the Distinguished Service Cross. During the Second World War, he would command the air forces of the European theater as a four-star general and oversee the strategic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany. When the independent U.S. Air Force was finally established in 1947, Spaatz would become its first chief of staff. The other officer at March Field on whom Arnold depended was a captain named Ira Eaker—short, balding, and round-faced, with penetrating eyes. In the war to come, Eaker would lead the famous Eighth Air Force out of England and then command the Mediterranean air forces under Spaatz in the task of pummeling the Third Reich into bits and pieces.
Of the three, Arnold was the man who was to matter the most for Second Lieutenant Schriever. Arnold went back to the origins of American aviation. A West Point graduate in the Class of 1907, he had aspired to the cavalry and instead had been sent to the infantry, which he detested. To escape, he had volunteered for the Signal Corps’ nascent Aeronautical Division, from which the Air Corps was eventually to evolve, and became one of the first half dozen Army pilots when he was trained to fly in 1911 at the factory the Wright brothers had established at Dayton, Ohio, to profit from their invention. A solidly proportioned man of medium build, Arnold was a complicated figure, always impatient to accomplish any task at hand, yet long-enduring of the frustrations of military life and the struggle to build a modern air force. During the First World War he had been denied a combat assignment in Europe until it was too late to see any action; instead, he had been posted to Washington to monitor the effort to gear up American industry for the mass production of aircraft. The program had been a failure, from which Arnold had learned what not to do when it was his turn to take charge and organize industry for the production of hundreds of thousands of planes during the Second World War. In 1925, he had displayed the moral courage to ignore warnings from his superiors and place his career in peril by testifying in defense of Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, the crusader for an independent air force, at Mitchell’s court-martial. Afterward, Arnold had barely evaded court-martial himself for using military printing facilities to lobby congressmen and the press on Mitchell’s behalf. His punishment was exile to Fort Riley, Kansas, the nation’s largest cavalry post, to take charge of a small detachment of observation aircraft attached to the horse soldiers.
When Schriever met him in 1933, Arnold’s career was back in motion. March Field was the Air Corps’ West Coast tactical operations center. At forty-nine, Arnold had matured as an adept organizer and commander. In his search for ideas to create a modern air force he had formed a friendship with Robert Millikan, who headed the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Millikan had in turn introduced him to Theodore von Kármán, the Hungarian aeronautical engineering genius whom Millikan had recruited for Caltech in 1930. Von Kármán, who had been teaching and directing an aeronautical engineering laboratory at Aachen, was among the first of the distinguished European intellectuals of Jewish ancestry driven across the Atlantic by the rise of Hitler and the growing national madness consuming Germany. Reaching out to such a man was a natural consequence of Arnold’s urge to employ science and technology to develop an effective air arm, an urge that was eventually to transform him into a technological visionary. He had every reason to be dissatisfied with the aircraft in his force. The planes with which the Air Corps was then equipped were essentially throwbacks to the First World War era. The B-3 and B-4 Keystone bombers that Bennie and his mates in the 9th Bombardment Squadron flew were big, ungainly biplanes with highly flammable cloth and wood-frame wings and fuselages. The cockpits were open. Some of the Keystones had two-way radios. Others had only receivers—the pilot could not reply. Top speed was a little more than 100 miles per hour and range was just 400. Safe flying was restricted to fair weather because the only instruments were an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, a horizontal needle-and-ball device that mimicked the attitude of the plane when turning or banking, and a compass. The fighters were better—Boeing P-12s with 500-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines—but they too were old-fashioned biplanes with wood and fabric wings and had no radios at all. Lack of operating funds also affected training. Pilots were restricted to four hours of flying a month, which meant that the younger aviators like Schriever could not get enough time in the air to become proficient.
Golf was one of the ways in which the lieutenant drew himself to the attention of the older man who was to so affect his destiny. Again for lack of operating funds, Air Corps officers usually worked only half a day, at most until 3:30 P.M., after a leisurely lunch, leaving plenty of time to play. Schriever’s prowess on the links at the nearby Victoria Country Club at Riverside, where he won two amateur tournaments and set a new club record of 63, received local newspaper coverage that quickly made him stand out among the new pilots. Elizabeth Schriever also helped because of the military social customs of the day. As Schriever was a bachelor, his mother substituted for a wife during social events at the base. Arnold’s wife, Eleanor, or “Bee” as she was nicknamed, was roughly the same age as Elizabeth. She had spent three years in Germany as a young woman and enjoyed speaking the language. The two women became friends. Their friendship led to Bennie becoming well acquainted with his commanding officer.
6.
A FIASCO AND REFORM
The air mail fiasco was the beginning of the end to stagnation. In February 1934, President Roosevelt suddenly canceled the air mail contracts between the Post Office and the new-fledged commercial airlines because a Senate investigation had discovered evidence of fraud. Roosevelt had not acted, however, without first having postal officials ask Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, chief of the Air Corps, if his pilots could temporarily fly the mail until honest arrangements could be made with the airlines. Foulois regarded the president’s inquiry as an order. He also saw it as an opportunity to gain more appropriations for his strapped Air Corps by generating a lot of favorable publicity from a successful operation. “We have had a great deal of experience in flying at night, and in flying in fogs and bad weather, in blind flying, and in flying under all other conditions,” Foulois told the House Post Office Committee. Given the state of his aircraft and the amateurishness of his pilots, Foulois’s recklessness in accepting the mission and his false testimony to Congress bordered on the criminal.
To meet the schedule set by the Post Office did require flying at night and in bad weather. Commercial airline pilots were flying at night by the mid-1930s. They had two-way radios to obtain information on weather conditions ahead and at airfields where they intended to land and some rudimentary instruments to fly by when the weather was marginal. Air Corps pilots were not only unaccustomed to flying at night, they couldn’t talk to anybody from many of their aircraft, and they lacked both instrumentation and training for dicey weather. The weather that February and March of 1934 would have daunted the best of airline pilots, however, and certainly forced delays in mail delivery. It was some of the worst late-winter weather—blizzards, dense fog, frigid gales, heavy rains—since records had been kept and it struck much of the country, but especially the West, where Schriever and his comrades were operating.
Arnold was put in charge of the Western Region, with his headquarters at Salt Lake City. He brok
e his squadrons down into detachments so that they could be parceled out along the various routes. Every available aircraft, from the P-12 pursuits, to the observation planes, to the awkward Keystones, was thrust into the task. To keep from freezing in the open cockpits, the pilots wore leather face masks and flying suits, both lined with sheepskin. Bennie’s detachment was assigned portions of two routes, from Salt Lake City to Boise, Idaho, and from Salt Lake to Cheyenne, Wyoming, via Rock Springs. Schriever remembered the eagerness with which he and his fellow pilots accepted the challenge, as young warriors so often do when they go into harm’s way without knowing the odds. After the miserly four-hours-a-month diet, it was above all finally a chance to do some flying. Bennie’s time in the air escalated rapidly and by March and April he was logging nearly sixty hours a month.
On February 19, 1934, just as Foulois had promised, the U.S. Army Air Corps loaded the mail and flew into the breach, night and weather be damned. Three pilots out of Salt Lake were killed in a single day, two of them Bennie’s Flying School classmates. One was trying to make it to Boise, pressing on beneath steadily lowering weather, when he ran out of visibility and altitude at the same time and flew into the ground. The two others smacked into the side of a mountain they could not see, apparently while forging on through a snowstorm. On another occasion, Schriever and two other pilots drove out to the airfield at Cheyenne to take a couple of O-38 observation planes from Cheyenne back to Salt Lake at night. The two other pilots were West Pointers who outranked Bennie. They chose to fly together and to take off first in a newer model of the O-38, which had a canopy over the tandem cockpits to protect them from the weather. While Schriever waited behind them in the open-cockpit version, the two West Pointers sped down the runway. What they had neglected to do, because they were too unseasoned to understand the necessity, was to come out and familiarize themselves with the airfield in daylight. They used only part of the runway, pulling up before they had gained enough speed and lift to clear a high-tension wire concealed by the darkness just beyond the end of the field. Bennie watched them die instantly. Twelve pilots were killed in all and there were sixty-six crashes. Although most were obviously not fatal, the wrecks still made for unpleasant photographs in the newspapers. In late March, an embarrassed and angry Roosevelt arranged for the airlines to resume flying the mail as of the beginning of June.