A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  INTERVIEWS

  This book could not have been written without interviews. Fine histories have been composed on the basis of letters, diaries, memoirs, newspaper accounts, documents, and previously published books. But there is another and equally important dimension to history and that is human memory. It is the perishable dimension and must be captured from the participants before time washes it away. I am immensely grateful to those who shared their memories of the events chronicled in this book with me. Lapses in those memories brought about by the years between the occurrence of the events and the later recollection of them had to be corrected, where necessary, from the written record, but those memories were indispensable nonetheless. I am also grateful to those interviewed who were not participants in the events, but who added a further dimension from their knowledge of the subjects and the individuals involved. The rank and status given for military personnel are those held at the time of the initial interview. If the abbreviation for retired (Ret.) does not follow the name, the individual was still on active duty. The intensity of the interviews varied from the fifty-two I had with General Schriever over the years of research, to hours or days at the homes of participants around the country, to telephone sessions and conversations. The standing invitation General Schriever and his comrades extended me to attend their annual Oldtimers Reunion was also particularly helpful. The most important interviews were tape-recorded and transcripts made so that I could compare memories and do my best to arrive at the truth of an event, again with the assistance of the written record. I also accumulated forty-five stenographer pads of notes. Most of the interviewees listed here are not to be found in the narrative because mentioning them was not central to the telling of the events I chose to recount. This does not mean they were any less important than those I do mention. They gave me insights I would otherwise never have had and educated me in subjects in which I had sparse knowledge when the research and writing of the book began. All listed below contributed to the completion of this book, but any flaws that may lie in it are my sole responsibility.

  Barbara Schriever Allan

  J. Leland Atwood

  Col. Langdon Ayres, USAF (Ret.)

  Michael Baker

  Naomi Baker

  Lt. Gen. Benjamin Bellis, USAF (Ret.)

  Victor Bilek

  Maj. Gen. Franklin Blaisdell, USAF (Ret.)

  Lt. Col. Benjamin P. “Paul” Blasingame, USAF (Ret.)

  Lt. Gen. Devol Brett, USAF (Ret.)

  Burton Brown

  Dino Brugioni

  Lt. Col. Frank Buzard, USAF (Ret.)

  Samuel Cohen

  Brig. Gen. Maurice Cristadoro, USAF (Ret.)

  Maj. Gen. Richard Curtin, USAF (Ret.)

  Maj. Dik Daso, USAF

  James R. Dempsey

  Lt. Col. Lucille Dion, USAF (Ret.)

  Brig. Gen. John Dougherty, USAF (Ret.)

  Brig. Gen. Robert Duffy, USAF (Ret.)

  Gen. Howell Estes III, USAF

  Dr. Foster Evans

  Maj. Gen. Harry Evans, USAF (Ret.)

  Lt. Col. Roy Ferguson, Jr., USAF (Ret.)

  Brig. Gen. William Fiorentino, USA (Ret.)

  Harry Fitzgibbons

  Gen. Ronald Fogleman, USAF

  Col. Vincent Ford, USAF (Ret.)

  Dr. John Foster, Jr.

  Maj. Gen. Ben Funk, USAF (Ret.)

  Trevor Gardner, Jr.

  Dr. Ivan Getting

  Lt. Col. Charles Getz III, USAF (Ret.)

  Dr. Stanley Goldberg

  Col. Leroy Good, USAF (Ret.)

  Michael Gorn

  Sidney Graybeal

  Col. Sidney Greene, USAF (Ret.)

  R. Cargill Hall

  Col. Edward Hall, USAF (Ret.)

  Edith Shawcross (Mrs. Edward) Hall

  Sheila Hall

  Dr. Richard Hallion

  Col. Joseph Hamilton, USAF (Ret.)

  Air Marshal Sir Reginald Harland, RAF (Ret.)

  William Harwood

  Col. Vernon Hastings, USAF (Ret.)

  Lt. Gen. Richard Henry, USAF (Ret.)

  Maj. Gen. John Hepfer, USAF (Ret.)

  Richard Holbrooke

  Prof. David Holloway

  Sir Michael Howard

  Col. Charles Hughes, USAF (Ret.)

  Ethel “Peg” Jacobson

  Col. Richard Jacobson, USAF (Ret.)

  Gen. John Jumper, USAF

  Col. Francis Kane, USAF (Ret.)

  Spurgeon Keeny, Jr.

  Lt. Col. Michael Kelly, USAF

  Chief Master Sergeant Raymond Kelsay, USAF (Ret.)

  Brig. Gen. William King, Jr., USAF (Ret.)

  Arnold Kramish

  W. Anthony Lake

  Col. William Large, Jr., USAF (Ret.)

  Lt. Col. John Leber, USAF (Ret.)

  Col. Richard Leghorn, USAF (Ret.)

  Brig. Gen. William Leonhard, USAF (Ret.)

  Julian Levine

  Gen. Lance Lord, USAF

  Col. James Manatt, USAF (Ret.)

  Col. Charles Mathison, USAF (Ret.)

  Lt. Gen. Forrest McCartney, USAF (Ret.)

  Felix McKnight

  Group Captain Peter McMillan, RAF (Ret.)

  Dr. Ruben Mettler

  Dr. Aubrey Michelwait

  Dodie Schriever (Mrs. Theodore) Moeller

  Col. Theodore Moeller, USAF (Ret.)

  Gen. Thomas Moorman, USAF

  Joseph Moriarty

  Robert Muchmore

  Gen. Richard Myers, USAF

  Jacob Neufeld

  Paul Nitze

  Robert Norris

  Col. Robert O’Brien, USAF (Ret.)

  Col. Frederic Oder, USAF (Ret.)

  Col. Peter Palmos, USAF (Ret.)

  Col. Prentice Peabody, USAF (Ret.)

  Thomas Pownall

  Donald Prichard

  Dr. Simon Ramo

  Robert Reck

  Maj. James Rosolanka, USAF

  Col. Rob Roy, USAF (Ret.)

  Lt. Col. Peter Schenk, USAF (Ret.)

  Gen. Bernard Schriever, USAF (Ret.)

  Col. Gerhard Schriever, USAF (Ret.)

  Joni James (Mrs. Bernard) Schriever

  Dr. Glenn Seaborg

  Col. Ray Soper, USAF (Ret.)

  Senior Master Sergeant Peter Standish, USAF (Ret.)

  Sue Taskin

  Dr. Edward Teller

  Lt. Gen. Charles Terhune, USAF (Ret.)

  Dr. Adolph Thiel

  Françoise (Mrs. Stanislaw) Ulam

  Nicholas Vonneuman, Esq.

  Lt. Col. Jamie Walker Wallace, USAF (Ret.)

  Paul Warnke, Esq.

  Dr. Jacob Wechsler

  Dr. Gary Weir

  Col. Albert Wetzel, USAF (Ret.)

  Dr. Albert Wheelon

  Dr. Marina von Neumann Whitman

  Squadron Leader Basil Williamson, RAF (Ret.)

  Maj. Gen. John Zierdt, USA (Ret.)

  SOURCE NOTES

  BOOK I BECOMING AN AMERICAN

  Until I decided to write a book on the Cold War and the Soviet-American arms race, I had never heard of Gen. Bernard Adolph Schriever. The subject is an immense one. I needed to distill this immensity into a human narrative that a reader could identify with and comprehend. One afternoon in the fall of 1993, while I was seeking the elements of such a narrative in the library of the Air Force Association just across the Potomac River from Washington in Arlington, Virginia, someone suggested that I look up Schriever. The first item in the library’s file on him was an eight-by-ten photograph of a tall, handsome man in the uniform of an Air Force general with four stars, sitting on the edge of a table surrounded by models of rockets. The man and his creations looked interesting. Further research bore out the intimation. He turned out to be living in retirement only about six blocks from my own home in northwest Washington. I telephoned him and explained my hope to use his story as a framework around which to organize a larger tale. He agreed. We began the first of fifty-two interviews that lasted until, in th
e final few years of his life, he became too feeble for searching examination of the past. My visits then became conversations between friends, yet often still fruitful of history. His diary, which he allowed me to copy, likewise proved of inestimable value.

  I do not use footnotes. What follows are summaries of the sources drawn on for the writing of each chapter. The summaries do not list all sources, only the main ones.

  In this section and elsewhere in the book, conversations are rendered in quotation marks where there is a written record or the memory of the person or persons interviewed seemed precise enough to justify placing the words in quotes.

  Chapters 1–3: Early interviews with General Schriever; scrapbooks he kept of his baseball and golf exploits with newspaper clippings and photographs; additional family photographs; documents such as a history of his maternal grandmother’s family, the Klattenhoffs, which contained details of General Schriever’s own family; Morningside Ministries of San Antonio, which runs the Chandler House and adjacent facilities as a retirement community, for biographical details of Edward Chandler and a history of the house. I am also in debt to General Schriever’s younger brother, Col. Gerhard “Gerry” Schriever, USAF (Ret.). During a trip to San Antonio in 2001, he and his wife, Zada, took my wife, Susan, and me on a tour of the youthful haunts of the Schriever boys. They showed us the little house on the edge of the twelfth green of the Brackenridge Park Golf Course in which the boys had grown up. The house is now cut off from the course by an atrocity of a highway driven through by the city in the 1960s, but Elizabeth Schriever’s sandwich stand, abandoned and crumbling, can still be seen beneath the overarching limbs of the antique live oak trees.

  Chapters 4–8: Schriever interviews and scrapbooks of his year at Flying School and his first year of service at March Field in California. At my request, General Schriever obtained a copy of his entire service record from the Air Force. Here and later in the writing of this book, the file was invaluable in reconciling dates of his assignments with his memories of them, seeing how his superiors viewed him through his efficiency reports, and other details of his career. I am indebted in these chapters for historical background, the characteristics of aircraft of the period, and biographical information on such figures as Henry “Hap” Arnold to a number of Air Force historians whose works are cited in the Bibliography. For example, Maj. Gen. Benjamin Foulois’s incredible assertion that the Army Air Corps of 1934 was proficient in night and bad weather flying is to be found on p. 132 of John Shiner’s Foulois and the U.S. Army Air Corps: 1931–1935. Biographical information on the Air Force Web site, Air Force Link, was also helpful. Arnold’s autobiography, Global Mission, and biographies of Carl Spaatz and Ira Eaker are also listed in the Bibliography. See DeWitt Copp’s 1980 A Few Great Captains for colorful biographical data on all three men, particularly Arnold.

  Chapters 9–10: John Toland’s history of the Second World War from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun, and William Manchester’s magnificent biography of Douglas MacArthur, American Caesar, were invaluable in providing the wider context of the war in the Southwest Pacific. George Kenney’s autobiography, General Kenney Reports, provided grist for the air war against the Japanese and his relationship with MacArthur. The account of the harum-scarum dive-bombing in a B-17 is based on interviews with both General Schriever and Brig. Gen. John Dougherty. A copy of the written report on the incident submitted by Schriever and Dougherty at the time and preserved among Schriever’s papers was also crucial in correcting lapses in their memories and in contributing more fascinating details. Chapter 10 was, as is obvious from the narrative, drawn mainly from General Schriever’s memory, corrected and amplified by his service record.

  BOOK II INHERITING A DIFFERENT WORLD

  For a number of years after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, until Vladimir Putin closed them again, the archives of the former Communist superpower were opened to Western scholars and open-minded Russian historians. The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington launched the Cold War International History Project, funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. For the first time, the world was able to learn what transpired in the secret councils of the Kremlin and the real motivations of Stalin and his successors. The research into these archives has contributed to all ten chapters of Book II. I am, for example, grateful to Kathryn Weathersby for her monograph on the origins of the Korean War and to Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov for their comprehensive 1996 study, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev.

  Earlier work, however, has also been valuable. I drew on Daniel Yergin’s 1977 book, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, as well as on Samuel Williamson, Jr., and Steven Rearden’s 1993 The Origins of U.S. Nuclear Strategy: 1945–1953 for help with Harry Truman and James Byrnes’s atomic diplomacy in Chapter 11.

  Chapter 12: I drew principally on Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel’s Bombshell: The Secret Story of America’s Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy for Theodore Hall’s spying at Los Alamos. I also consulted Richard Rhodes’s magisterial The Making of the Atomic Bomb and his subsequent Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, along with David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb, as well as sundry newspaper clippings.

  Chapters 13–16: See Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War; Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun; Yergin, Shattered Peace; Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation; and James Chace’s Acheson: The Secretary of State Who Created the American World. Also Dimitri Volkogonov’s authoritative and immensely valuable 1988 biography, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy. As a colonel general in the Red Army responsible for the army’s political education and its publishing activities, Volkogonov had access to the most closely guarded archives, sources denied to other historians before the Soviet Union’s fall. He also interviewed widely knowledgeable survivors of Stalin’s reign. The extent of German cruelty and destruction in Russia and the preeminent role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazi Germany, at a horrendous cost in human life, was long suppressed in the West by the atmosphere of the Cold War and the myths created in the self-serving memoirs of German generals like Heinz Guderian and Erich von Manstein. Alexander Werth’s 1964 history, Russia at War: 1941–1945, was an attempt to set the past straight, but it was premature. The task was then successfully launched in 1975 by the English historian John Erickson, with the first volume of his massively documented history of the Soviet-German war, The Road to Stalingrad, followed in 1983 by his second volume, The Road to Berlin. The English historian Richard Overy contributed a brief but still useful history, Russia’s War: Blood upon the Snow, in 1997. John Keegan, that most prolific of British military historians, documents the effects of the fighting on the Eastern Front on the German divisions awaiting the Allied landing in Normandy in his 1982 work, Six Armies in Normandy: From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris. I have leaned on all four historians in Chapter 15. For Chapter 16 see Acheson’s memoir, Chace’s biography of him, Yergin, and Zubok and Pleshakov.

  Chapter 17: The U.S. Air Force has amply documented the Berlin Airlift in its 1997 two-volume history, Winged Shield, Winged Sword: A History of the USAF, edited by Bernard Nalty. See also a 1998 paperback by Roger Miller, To Save a City: The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949, and Lt. Gen. William Tunner’s 1964 memoir, Over the Hump.

  Chapter 18: See Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb; Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun; and Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War.

  Chapter 19: For the sad anecdote of Ho Chi Minh’s prediction that the United States would not wage a war in his country, see Mieczyslaw Maneli’s 1971 memoir, War of the Vanquished.

  Chapter 20: Albright and Kunstel’s Bombshell; Kathryn Weathersby’s unpublished 1993 monograph, “Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives”; and Zubok and Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold War.r />
  BOOK III THE PERILS OF AN APPRENTICESHIP

  Chapters 21–22: Interviews with General Schriever; his service record, including his efficiency reports; Michael Gorn’s 1988 study of the Toward New Horizons project and the creation of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, Harnessing the Genie: Science and Technolgy Forecasting for the Air Force, 1944–1986; his further 1994 work on the project and its repercussions, Prophecy Fulfilled: “Toward New Horizons” and Its Legacy, and his 1992 biography of Theodore von Kármán, The Universal Man: Theodore von Kármán’s Life in Aeronautics; Thomas Sturm’s 1967 The USAF Scientific Advisory Board: Its First Twenty Years, 1944–1964; Maj. Dik Daso’s 1997 Architects of American Air Suprem acy: General Hap Arnold and Dr. Theodore von Kármán; sections of the Toward New Horizons project provided to me from Air Force archives; the von Kármán papers held at the California Institute of Technology; interview with Dr. Ivan Getting, brilliant radar designer at the MIT Radiation Laboratory, on his experience on the Scientific Advisory Board as well as his 1989 memoir, All in a Lifetime: Science in the Defense of Democracy. On the creation of the Air Research and Development Command: interviews with General Schriever, Col. Vincent Ford, Lt. Col. James Dempsey; Lt. Col. Peter Schenk; Air Force pamphlet, 1955, The First Five Years of the Air Research and Development Command; and Michael Gorn’s 1985 monograph, Vulcan’s Forge: The Making of the Air Force Command for Weapons Acquisition (1950–1985), Vol. 1 (narrative).

  Chapter 23: I drew on two biographies of Curtis LeMay: Mission with LeMay: My Story, a collaborative effort published in 1965 between LeMay and the writer MacKinlay Kantor, a friend of the general, and Thomas Coffey’s 1986 Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay. The two-volume history of the Air Force Winged Shield, Winged Sword and Copp’s A Few Great Captains contain further biographical information on LeMay. The fortieth anniversary official history of SAC, The Development of Strategic Air Command, 1946–1986, tracks well LeMay’s buildup of his formidable force.