by Neil Sheehan
Von Kármán’s patron had also begun to focus that fall and winter of 1945 on ways to implement ideas he was garnering from the professor. He had the staff draw up a plan to initiate twenty-eight different pilot projects in guided missiles in the spring of 1946, from short-range, twenty-mile rockets to intercontinental ones, and set aside $34 million in wartime money to fund them. He allocated as well $10 million to the Douglas Aircraft Company for a one-year program of long-range studies. The first study, completed in May 1946, was on the feasibility of launching a satellite into space for a variety of military uses from photoreconnaissance to weather reporting and communications. The Douglas enterprise, called Project RAND, for “research and development,” was separated from the aircraft firm within a couple of years and metamorphosed into the RAND Corporation, located in Santa Monica, California, the think tank that provided the soon to be independent U.S. Air Force with strategic and tactical analyses throughout the Cold War.
Then, in January 1946, with less than a month to go before his retirement to his ranch in Northern California, Arnold had taken his final step. He had summoned Schriever and given him the mission of cultivating relations with the civilian scientific community in the postwar years through a new Scientific Liaison Branch to be established within the Research and Engineering Division.
22.
GETTING ORGANIZED
From the very beginning, however, nothing about von Kármán’s and Schriever’s mission was easy. Von Kármán’s Scientific Advisory Board languished and was nearly abolished. Deciding that it would be beneficial for the combat commanders also to get involved in long-range thinking, Arnold had established the position of assistant chief of the air staff for research and development in late 1945 and given it to his star bomber leader, young Major General Curtis LeMay. The post carried with it a mandate to coordinate all of the AAF’s R&D activities. No good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes, and Arnold’s was no exception. Like most of the rest of the bomber generals who were now succeeding to the direction of the air forces, electronics, guided missiles, and other advanced concepts held scant interest for LeMay. He wanted bigger and better bombers that could fly higher and farther and faster and carry as many as possible of the 10,000-pound Mark 3, the Nagasaki-type plutonium bomb that was to become the first standardized U.S. nuclear weapon.
Research and development to a man of LeMay’s outlook meant focusing on improvements to these new bombers coming on line. The B-36—a six-engine behemoth that dwarfed the B-29 at more than half the length of a football field, weighed in excess of 160,000 pounds, had a 72,000-pound bomb load, a ceiling of 40,000 feet, and a combat radius of approximately 3,500 miles—was the kind of weapon that got his attention. Moreover, he insisted that because he was head of R&D, the Scientific Advisory Board should report to him and not directly to the chief of staff, now Spaatz, as von Kármán had envisioned and Arnold had agreed in order to give the Advisory Board independence and standing. Spaatz was near the end of his own career and caught up in the interservice squabbling over the passage by Congress of the National Security Act of July 1947 and the emergence of an independent U.S. Air Force that September. He did not intervene.
As a result, no projects of consequence got accomplished by the board. Drastic postwar budget cuts worsened the board’s position and also wiped out most of the pilot projects in guided missiles that Arnold had set in train. Only one intercontinental missile project survived. It was code-named MX-774B and was under contract to the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation (Convair), postwar successor to the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, which had built the B-24 and was currently the manufacturer of the B-36 in San Diego, California. By 1947, the Scientific Advisory Board had disappeared from the service’s organization charts, and the specialists in the laboratories out at Wright Field, jealous of a group of civilian scientists they perceived as rivals, were lobbying for its formal abolition. While von Kármán was away in Paris on vacation, his secretary had to fend off a section of the Air Staff from taking over his office and her desk at the Pentagon.
Salvation occurred that September. LeMay was awarded his third star and transferred to Germany to command all U.S. air forces in Europe. His position on the Air Staff lapsed with his departure, and Major General Laurence Craigie replaced Bennie’s boss, Alden Crawford, as head of a newly formed Directorate of Research and Development. Crawford was a somewhat dour individual, but Schriever had won him over with his ability to anticipate what Crawford wanted and take the initiative to get it done. He was more at ease, however, with Craigie. Their acquaintanceship went back to 1923 and the links of the Brackenridge Park course in San Antonio. Bennie was still caddying at thirteen and Craigie played golf at Brackenridge while a student pilot at Kelly Field. They also saw the direction their institution ought to be taking through the same eyes, for Craigie was an officer with a long interest in technology. In 1942, while chief of the Experimental Aircraft Division at Wright Field, he became the first AAF pilot to fly a jet, the test model Bell XP-59A fighter Arnold had ordered built in secret during the war. Its short range, engine problems, and relative lack of speed kept it from going into production, but the knowledge gained resulted in the P-80, subsequently redesignated the F-80, a straight-winged, subsonic aircraft that was the initial American jet fighter of the post-war era. (After the Second World War the prefix for fighter models was changed from P., for “pursuit,” a term originating in the First World War, to F., for “fighter.”) Recognizing the Scientific Advisory Board’s need for renewed stature if its advice was to be heeded, Craigie arranged a formal agreement in May 1948 between von Kármán and Spaatz that the SAB would be considered part of the chief of staff’s personal organization and would report directly to him.
The main battle, however, was yet to be won. It was to break research and development away from the stultifying atmosphere of the Air Matériel Command at Wright Field and to set up a separate R&D organization. As matters stood, research and development, and the production of aircraft, as well as the maintenance of the air forces in the field through the supply of spare parts and replacement machines—logistics, as it is called in the military—were all responsibilities of the Matériel Command. One reason the laboratories at Wright Field were, with some exceptions, parochial was that the command they worked for was parochial. The Air Matériel Command had excelled during the Second World War in revving up industry for the mass production of planes. The command had, with commendable success, also seen to it that the air forces deployed in Europe and the Middle East, the cockpit of the war for the AAF, did not want for sustenance. The experience had given the AMC a focus on logistics and on quantity over quality that had carried over into the postwar period. Innovation required separation.
Schriever’s role in the campaign was as leader of a group of reformist-minded younger officers. They called themselves the “Junior Indians,” because they sat on the sides or at the back of the room, while their chiefs sat at the table during meetings and conferences. His good friend Major Teddy Walkowicz, who, after hitting on the title of Toward New Horizons while a member of von Kármán’s original team, had then become the first military secretary of the SAB, was a fellow agitator. They thought up ideas and strategies to further the cause and passed these along to their already sympathetic bosses.
Bennie had been putting in a performance at the Pentagon of the kind that had earned him the admiration of his superiors in the Southwest Pacific, earning the unusually fine efficiency reports that point a colonel who stands out from his peers toward a star. He was as much at ease with his third Pentagon boss, Major General Donald Putt, who succeeded Laurence Craigie in September 1948 as head of the Directorate of Research and Development, as he had been with Craigie. Once again, Schriever had a boss with whom he shared a view of what the Air Force ought to be doing. Like Craigie, Putt was another in the tiny band of technology-minded Air Force generals. He had taken his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and then a master’
s in aeronautical engineering under von Kármán at Caltech, and the Hungarian professor had remained a mentor and friend.
The campaign began to crest not long before Bennie was to leave in July 1949 for his year at the National War College. The Junior Indians hatched a plot to have von Kármán convene a general meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board that April and invite General Hoyt Vandenberg, who had become the second chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force on Spaatz’s retirement the previous year, to address it. Vandenberg’s elevation to leader of the Air Force had undoubtedly been assisted by the fact that he was a nephew of Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican power on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was Senator Vandenberg who had persuaded his Republican colleagues to join him in promoting the bipartisan foreign policy that Harry Truman depended on to sustain his strategy of containment against the Soviet Union. But Hoyt Vandenberg had also long been a favorite of Spaatz and he had acquitted himself well commanding the Ninth Air Force in the battle for France after the Normandy landing. He was considered to have an open mind in the current dispute. The crux of the plot was to have Walkowicz write a speech in which Vandenberg would ask the SAB to conduct a comprehensive study of how research and development should be handled in the Air Force and give him recommendations accordingly. If Vandenberg accepted the text and gave the speech, the hounds would be off and running. Putt and von Kármán approved the scheme and the meeting was scheduled.
Vandenberg agreed and then at the last minute had to cancel his appearance. The speech was delivered instead by his vice chief of staff, General Muir Fairchild. That was good enough. The hounds were running. A committee was formed with a swing member who was certain to uphold the plotters’ cause—that Renaissance man Jimmy Doolittle. He commanded respect high and low because he had done it all—champion racing plane pilot, the first aviator to take off and land blind on instruments alone, scholar, oil industry executive. His out-of-the-blue air raid on Tokyo in the bleak spring of 1942—Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle at the controls of the lead plane as sixteen bomb-laden B-25s wrestled their way aloft in a forty-mile-per-hour gale from the rolling deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet— was just the kind of lift in spirit the American public so sorely needed at the time. Hollywood was to make the raid a legend with the wartime film Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. Later that year, Hap Arnold had promoted him to brigadier general and given him command of a new air force, the Twelfth, being formed for Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa on November 8, 1942, the first offensive action of the war against the Nazis. Then he had gone to England to take over the Eighth Air Force and its strategic bombers. Doolittle had finished the war with the three stars of a lieutenant general and had returned to Shell Oil, but Arnold had persuaded him to become a permanent consultant to the chief of staff and given him an office at the Pentagon. Bennie made a point of getting to know him well, often seeking his help, and Doolittle was to join in pinning Bennie’s first star on his shoulder tabs.
Doolittle’s presence on the committee was a virtual guarantee that Vandenberg would accept its recommendations, although there were apparently important details still to be worked out. A tale in the Air Force, perhaps apocryphal, says that Doolittle did this final persuading while he and Vandenberg were crouching in a blind hunting ducks. The committee’s two principal findings were: (1) the establishment of a separate command to take charge of all research and development (the laboratories at Wright Field, for example, would remain there but no longer be under control of the Air Matériel Command); and (2) the appointment of a deputy chief of staff for development to exercise oversight from Air Force headquarters at the Pentagon and lend R&D equal status with other departments like Operations and Personnel. The Air Matériel Command would retain responsibility for production and supply. On January 23, 1950, a new Air Research and Development Command (ARDC), with headquarters in Baltimore, was established, and Major General Gordon Saville, a combatively forthright man who had shown a gift for destroying columns of German armor with P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, was named the first deputy chief of staff, development.
Schriever expected to be given a field assignment when he completed his year at the National War College in mid-1950, probably as deputy commander of the proving ground at Eglin Field, now Eglin Air Force Base, in Florida. Instead, General Saville brought him back to the Pentagon and he was soon promoted into a job that seemed ideal for an officer with Bennie’s education and temperament. He was made the assistant for development planning. His task was to formulate projections called Development Planning Objectives for each of the Air Force’s mission fields—strategic, tactical, air defense, transport, and recon naissance and intelligence. The projections were not paper exercises. Schriever had to discern the nature of the aircraft and other weaponry, and the related equipment and techniques, required to fulfill each mission in the future. The plans had to be realistic and practical. The aircraft, for example, while next-generation, had to be achievable within what could reasonably be foreseen in the advance of technology. Schriever, of course, lacked the knowledge to complete such projections by himself. To formulate them he had to organize teams of scientists and engineers and other specialists in each area, drawing on the talent pool available to him from the Scientific Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation, and consultants recruited from the universities and industry. The Development Planning job turned out to be excellent preparation for the work that lay ahead of him in overseeing the building of the intercontinental ballistic missile. Because he was always dealing with what was to be accomplished tomorrow and not today, he was learning how to differentiate between what was future-feasible and future-fantasy and to do so in a variety of disciplines, not just in aeronautical engineering, where he had specific competence.
The job, however, soon turned out to be anything but ideal. It put Bennie at grave career risk by running him afoul of “the Cigar,” the service nickname for Curtis LeMay, the most prestigious combat officer in the United States Air Force, who was now back from his tour in Europe. His trademark was a stogie, perpetually in hand or clenched defiantly in the side of his mouth, and he had power and influence exceeded only by that of the chief of staff.
23.
BOMBER LEADER
He would be remembered as the crazed general who wanted to bomb the people of North Vietnam “back into the Stone Age,” as the crank who ran for vice president on the 1968 presidential ticket of George Wallace, the racist from Alabama, and as the inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove. But in earlier years there had been a great deal more to Curtis Emerson LeMay. He had been the greatest leader of bomber aircraft in the history of American aviation until his judgment was warped by the advent of nuclear weapons and the fear and fervor of the Cold War. He looked the grim part of a bomber commander. His broad square-jawed face, straight mouth, strong chin, intense eyes, and thick black hair combed back from a high forehead said that this was a man who meant business. The lingering effects on the right side of his face of an episode of Bell’s palsy, a type of facial paralysis brought on in his case by flying in the frigid air of unheated cockpits at high altitudes, heightened the impression. So did his taciturn nature and blunt manner of speech.
He began as a fighter pilot, but in 1936, at the age of thirty, he requested a transfer to bombers. He reasoned that the fighter was a defensive aircraft (and this would hold true until the coming of the jet age and the development of powerful fighter-bombers in the late 1950s and 1960s), whereas the bomber was an intrinsically offensive weapon that carried the war to the enemy. His reasoning was infused with the theory on long-range strategic bombardment that had become the central doctrine of the Air Corps in the 1920s and 1930s. As refined and taught at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Alabama, the doctrine held that air power could win a war alone by bombing an enemy’s industry and related infrastructure into rubble and thus destroying his capacity to fight. The bombardment faculty at the
Tactical School contended that “a well organized, well planned, and well flown air force attack … cannot be stopped.” Moreover, the attacks were to be flown in daytime, so that the bombers could be certain of their targets and strike with accuracy.
When LeMay made his decision at the end of 1936, the first of the bombers capable of conducting such long-range raids, the four-engine Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, was about to enter the Air Corps inventory. The second, the B-24 Liberator, was not far off. Hap Arnold, Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker, and the other men who were to lead the U.S. Army Air Forces in the Second World War all subscribed to the theory, but evolving a military theory is one thing and carrying it into practice in the furnace of conflict is another. LeMay had the genius of the implementer. While the theory proved too optimistic—air power alone could not win the war—LeMay was the man who demonstrated how it could make a mighty contribution to victory.
The bombsight of the Second World War was called the Norden after Carl Norden, who perfected it over several years during the 1930s. It required a minimum of four and preferably seven or eight minutes of straight and level flight, while the bombardier adjusted it, in order to put enough bombs on a large target, such as a petroleum refinery, a factory complex, or a railway marshaling yard, to inflict serious damage. Sent to England in October 1942, as a colonel commanding a bombardment group of B-17s, LeMay proved that this could be done without losing most of a formation to German antiaircraft fire. Some of the planes would be shot down, others would be damaged, but the majority would get through and the target would be hit hard.