A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Quarles had apparently heard enough. He turned to General Twining. “What do you think, Nate?” he asked. Ferguson was thirty-three years old at the time of the briefing, but Twining belonged to that First World War generation of Army Air Corps officers who still referred to a relatively junior officer as a “boy.” He answered without hesitation. “The boy’s right,” he said. Quarles looked up at Ferguson: “Go home and tell Schriever he’s got Camp Cooke.” The budget-bound Quarles continued to have misgivings, but he did not renege on his word. When Ferguson and Ritland returned that evening to the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, where they were staying, they stripped down to their underwear so that they could completely relax, called for a fifth of whiskey, and did not have a great deal left in the bottle when they ordered something to eat. On November 16, 1956, Secretary Wilson transferred the 64,000 acres of Camp Cooke that Schriever wanted to the Air Force. Approximately two years later, on October 4, 1958, the place was renamed in honor of the late Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force’s second chief of staff.

  62.

  A TIE

  By the time Basil Williamson and his contingent of RAF missileers-to-be arrived in the summer of 1959, desolation had given way to a panoply of permanent concrete launching pads, a network of roads connecting them, and housing and office blocks. SAC crews who had been trained on Thor by Douglas technicians were waiting to pass their knowledge on to their British allies. Months of lectures, demonstrations of the many parts of the weapon system, and practice countdowns followed. Graduation was a live firing. The SAC training team worked with the RAF men to be certain everything on the site was ready, but then, as soon as the actual countdown began, stepped back and let their pupils take the count through to the climax of flame and liftoff over the Pacific. In the England to which they returned in October 1959, ghost airfields from which the B-17s and the B-24s had once taken off to pummel the Third Reich had been pressed into a new mission. Down through the east of England, from East Riding in Yorkshire to the north, through Lincolnshire, and Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and neighboring counties, the Thors were being arrayed. The RAF broke the sixty Thors down into batteries of three missiles each and formed a squadron of five launch control officers and forty enlisted technicians to man each battery, twenty squadrons in all. Four regular RAF airfields currently in use were selected as headquarters bases to provide communications and whatever other support was needed and the twenty squadrons were divided between them, five squadrons, or five three-missile batteries totaling fifteen missiles, assigned to each main base. One of the batteries was sited at the headquarters base. The other four were set up on abandoned airfields around it, many of these the Second World War American bomber bases. To disperse the missiles and prevent all from being knocked out in one blow, the airfields selected for the sites were roughly fifteen miles apart. From the air the whites and grays of the individual missile installations, emplaced in a one, two, three line, stood out starkly in the green of the English countryside.

  Not all went well in the beginning. The missile itself was up to its mission, but the Douglas technicians had a lot of trouble making the ground support equipment function properly. For a time as much unusable equipment was coming home in the C-124s as new “modification kits” were going over. Although the first missiles ready to be launched against the Soviet Union theoretically went on alert at RAF Feltwell and its satellite installations in Norfolk in the spring and summer of 1959, the Thors there and at other installations rapidly organizing were, in fact, harmless. While the Soviets may not have known it, the Mark 2 reentry vehicles were empty. The RAF high command did not trust the system enough to allow the nuclear warheads to be mounted. The problem had not arisen because of Jamie Wallace’s maximum speed philosophy. Had he not applied the blowtorch to move the ground support program along as rapidly as possible, more time would have been lost. The difficulty was that they were pushing the limits of technology with what was, for its era, a complex system. The failings could not be detected until Thor was actually being deployed. Jacobson solved the impasse by handing it to one of the most astute Air Force engineers of his time, Benjamin Bellis, then a thirty-five-year-old major.

  Like Henry, Bellis was also eventually to wear three stars on his shoulder tabs and to oversee the creation of one of the most potent American fighter-bombers of the last quarter of the twentieth century, the F-15 Eagle. To stop the helter-skelter improvising that was occurring in the effort to make the Thor system function as advertised, Bellis instituted a procedure he called “configuration control.” When a fix to a problem was achieved, the change was carefully recorded, applied universally, and coordinated with the production line of the manufacturer so that it would be phased into newly built ground support equipment. Bellis formed a committee, with himself, naturally, as its chairman, to supervise and enforce the process. To make certain there was an end to the confusion that had reigned prior to his arrival, no change in any equipment on site in England could be made without the permission of the committee. Within months, Bellis’s engineering modifications and the forceful manner in which he applied them had the ground support gear working as it should. The achievement was not without casualties. Two Douglas technicians were killed in California by an accidental explosion while testing redesigned machinery to fuel the Thor’s LOX tank. But in those years of Cold War urgency, such fatal accidents were a price everyone was prepared to pay. The RAF hierarchy was at last convinced it had a reliable IRBM. In May 1960, the one-megaton warheads were mounted on the Thors. All of the western Soviet Union, including Moscow and beyond to many of the industrial centers as far as the upper Volga, was within the fan of their 1,725-mile range.

  Finding homes for the Jupiters among the other NATO allies was to prove a more difficult task. As a result, the Air Force, to the helpless rage of the Army’s John Medaris at the Redstone Arsenal, reduced the number of Jupiters destined for NATO from sixty to forty-five. Charles de Gaulle had returned to power in Paris in 1958 as the only French leader capable of staving off the country’s descent toward chaos and civil war because of the impending loss of Algeria after another fruitless colonial conflict. He was obsessed with restoring French pride and independence, regaining the international stature lost with the defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940, and creating France’s own nuclear arsenal, his Force de Frappe. Although he privately admitted that Western Europe’s security relied on American power, he was not about to publicly concede dependence on anyone by leaning on Washington’s missiles. De Gaulle refused the Jupiters.

  Italy was more forthcoming. It agreed to the stationing of thirty Jupiters under the two-key system of dual control worked out by the British. A headquarters was established at the air base at Gioia del Colle, in the heel of the boot formed by the bottom of the Italian peninsula. Italian air force launch crews were sent to Alabama for training at Redstone. In contrast to the Thors, which were laid on their sides within their shelters, the Jupiters, painted white with Italian air force markings, were emplaced in the open, erect for firing and ranged phalluslike across the southern Italian countryside in three-missile batteries. Turkey, also a NATO member, was short of skilled manpower to be trained as missile technicians, but more trusting of the United States. The fifteen Jupiters it accepted were entirely manned and controlled by U.S. Air Force personnel. The Turks simply provided security troops for the batteries. Again to prevent the missiles from being destroyed in a single preemptive strike, the batteries were widely dispersed through the rugged terrain inland from the port of Izmir, a once predominantly Greek city on the western end of the Anatolian Peninsula, known as Smyrna until the Turks expelled the Greek minority after the First World War.

  From Turkey, the Jupiters could cover the entirety of European Russia and fly as far as Soviet Central Asia. The presence of American IRBMs in a nation right on the Soviet frontier was particularly unsettling to the Russians. It was, in fact, an act of provocation and should have been foreseen as such. The Soviets were upset enough t
o, on at least one occasion, send down a jet fighter on a photoreconnaissance mission. The plane crashed.

  The dispatch of the Thors to England and the Jupiters to Italy and Turkey had effectively stymied the Russians. They had deployed their medium-and intermediate-range missiles earlier than Schriever and his comrades had managed to field their IRBMs, but not early enough to cause undue anxiety, because Britain’s and Washington’s other NATO allies had known that the American missiles were on the way. Schriever and those who labored with him had tied with their Soviet opponents in this first round of the race to deploy nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, and in the process they had learned some important lessons.

  63.

  BLACK SATURDAY

  Bennie made the cover of Time magazine in the spring of 1957. The issue of April 1 displayed a profile shot in color of a handsome man in the dark blue uniform of an Air Force major general, silver braid on the brim of his cap, two silver stars on his shoulder tabs. “Missileman Schriever,” the caption beside the photograph said, while in the background a ballistic missile lit a fiery trail above the clouds of earth as it streaked toward space. The cover photograph and the feature article inside that it advertised were a major public relations coup for Schriever, an indication that he and ballistic missiles were arriving. For months he had been pressing the Air Force hierarchy to raise some of the security curtains on the missile program in order to reap the public and congressional support that favorable publicity could provide, and this was the first, notable fruit of his effort. Time, which proclaimed itself “the Weekly Newsmagazine,” was at the height of its influence in the 1950s as a newsmaker and fashioner of public opinion. Under the leadership of its co-founder and editor-in-chief, Henry Luce, who had heralded the twentieth as “the American Century,” Time was a model of militant anti-Communism and brisk, upbeat reporting on the inevitably triumphant future of the United States. There was no hint in the article of the excruciating struggle Schriever, Gardner, and von Neumann, assisted by the intrigues of Vince Ford, had waged to set the ICBM enterprise in motion. “The history of the missile has little record of military unwillingness to accept it as the weapon that must be developed at top speed,” Time said. “Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson bulled the ICBM project through the National Security Council.” Nor was there ever any doubt as to who was to lead the program. “Actually we didn’t appoint him—Benny was born for this job,” the magazine quoted an anonymous general in the Pentagon. “There wasn’t another soul we knew who could handle it, so we just sort of nodded and said ‘OK, now,’ and Benny walked in and took over.” (Time spelled Schriever’s nickname as the sports reporters in the San Antonio of his youth had.)

  The most factually accurate section was a warm account of Schriever’s arrival in the United States in 1917 as a six-year-old from Germany with his mother and younger brother, Gerry, and of Elizabeth Schriever’s heroic travail to raise her boys with housekeeping and the sandwich stand at the twelfth green of the Brackenridge Park Golf Course. But he was no longer San Antonio’s boy wonder of golf who had achieved a mention in Ripley’s Believe It or Not for three times driving a ball more than 300 yards onto the green and then sinking it with a single putt, quite a feat with the golf clubs of his youth. Now he was “hard-eyed Ben Schriever” pitted against the Soviets in “his destiny-sized race for an operational ICBM.” The encomiums rolled on. “Ben Schriever, a tomorrow’s man,” had “the most important job in the country.” He was a “discerning, thinking leader,” an “outstanding and extremely tenacious manager.” Not that much of the praise was unmerited, for Bennie was “a tireless, able, dedicated, imaginative officer” and in 1957 he was the man of the moment. And if much of the Time cover story was fiction, for a man who lived on the edge as Schriever did and who rarely strayed from a grasp on reality himself, fairy tales, as long as they were friendly, were welcome.

  The fifteen men whom Schriever had gathered at the Schoolhouse when he had officially taken command of his fledgling Western Development Division on August 2, 1954, had metamorphosed into a ballistic missile and space satellite center. By the end of 1957, testing of Thor had been under way for virtually a year, Atlas launches had begun that June, and manufacture had started on Titan, the alternative ICBM in case Atlas should prove a failure. Planning for a photo-reconnaissance satellite under the WS-117L program was advancing. On June 1, 1957, in line with the same relaxing of security that had led to the Time cover story, the Air Force also peeled away the official disguise and redesignated the innocuously named WDD as the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division (AFBMD). Schriever had 485 Air Force officers and noncommissioned specialists and 222 civilian clerks, secretaries, and other auxiliary personnel at work in his new BMD. Employed alongside them to facilitate the processing of contracts was a special Ballistic Missile Office detachment from the Air Matériel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It consisted of another 55 Air Force and 155 civilian employees. After Power took over from LeMay at Omaha, a decision was also made in late 1957 that SAC would take responsibility for the training and deployment of all ICBM units. A full-fledged SAC liaison office was created to work at Schriever’s WDD. It was titled Office of the Assistant Commander-in-Chief, Strategic Air Command for Missiles, but it was known by its acronym, SAC-MIKE. Its head was Colonel William Large, Jr., a highly decorated B-24 veteran. He had won the Silver Star for Gallantry and twice been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for leading raids out of Italy against the notoriously perilous Ploeşti oil fields in Romania and other targets in east and south Europe. Co-located with all of these WDD components in the same but now much expanded Arbor Vitae complex of office buildings near Los Angeles Airport was a Ramo-Wooldridge organization that had mushroomed from 170 scientists and technicians in 1954 to 1,961 in 1957.

  These numbers were paltry when compared to the tens of thousands at work in the offices and on the assembly lines of the firms building the missiles. The two ICBMs encompassed seventeen major contractors, like Convair and the Martin Company, which had the air-frame and assembly contracts for Atlas and Titan, respectively, 200 subcontractors, and thousands of suppliers all over the United States. Nor were the profits small. Aerojet General, for example, had been given $400 million in Air Force orders to furnish the engines for Titan. Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge, whose products were the intangibles of technical expertise and brainpower, were not doing badly either with the simple cost-plus-fee arrangement Trevor Gardner had first pressed them into on the formation of the Tea Pot Committee in September 1953. By the close of Fiscal Year 1958, Ramo-Wooldridge had earned approximately $70 million.

  While Schriever’s primary management technique was and always would be selecting the right man and giving him the freedom and authority to accomplish a task, he had developed a second system for keeping track of all of these projects. It centered on a monthly briefing the staff referred to ruefully as “Black Saturday.” The man Schriever chose to orchestrate this second system was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Getz III, tall and dark-haired, with round, friendly features. Getz had joined the Army Air Forces in May 1942 while he was still a senior in high school in Fort Wayne, Indiana, flew thirty-one missions against Germany out of England as a B-24 pilot in 1944, and then volunteered to fly a P-51 Mustang fighter in a special unit that scouted targets ahead of the bomber formations. The scouts would radio the bomber leader whether the target was sufficiently free of clouds to permit visual bombing, whether he would have to bomb by radar, or whether the cloud cover was so thick that the bombers would have to go on to their secondary target. In the course of an additional forty missions as a scout, Getz joined the tiny club of American aviators who shot down one of the new Messerschmitt 262 jet fighters. He spotted the German pilot descending for a landing, dove on him at full throttle, and opened fire with his six .50 calibers, the P-51 shuddering with the 400-mile-per-hour speed of the descent and the recoil of the guns. As he saw his tracer bullets striking, Getz got so excited that he forgot to take his f
inger off the firing button to shoot in bursts and burned out all six of his machine gun barrels.

  After the war, to avoid being demobilized before he could obtain a Regular commission, Getz took a course in statistical analysis that would qualify him for an unusual job classification, or Military Occupation Specialty as it was called, and was sent off to Japan for two years as a statistical control officer with the Far East Air Forces. A subsequent bachelor’s degree in accounting and economics and a master’s in industrial management made him precisely the man Schriever was seeking when he arrived at WDD in the latter half of 1955. Simon Ramo had decided to create a control room in the Ramo-Wooldridge Arbor Vitae office complex, where Schriever and his staff were shortly to move from the Schoolhouse in Inglewood. It was to serve as a focal point for management of the various programs. Schriever saw this as a move that could end with him becoming a captive of civilian managers. “I want to keep control,” he told Getz when he summoned him to his office shortly after Getz’s arrival. Getz was to assume responsibility for all management systems on Schriever’s behalf. “Your job is to work with them [Ramo-Wooldridge], but you are in charge and take charge.” To make the point to all that Getz spoke for him, Schriever assigned Getz directly to his office.

  Getz proceeded to cast a reporting net that encompassed every detail of every enterprise in Schriever’s little empire. For example, each month prior to the main briefing, the Air Force project officers and the Ramo-Wooldridge engineers working on a missile had to get together, reach agreement on the current status of all aspects—engines, guidance, warhead, and so forth—and then sign their assent on a chart that illustrated this. Milestones were established, such as a completion date for each stage in the testing of a missile. The milestones were often not met, of course, and when this happened, the charts had to indicate exactly how much slippage had occurred and why.