Boyd

by Robert Coram

  Over the Green Spot, pilots called “Fight’s on” and fought down to the ground and back up again and down again, all the time banking and yanking, turning and burning, as they maneuvered to get on the other pilot’s six. They called it “rat-racing” or “playing grabass” or “getting in a furball.” One aircraft, one seat, one engine, one pilot—the most lethal combination of man and machinery ever devised.

  It only added to the allure of this shimmering fantasyland in the desert that it was one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Rarely did a week go by that a fighter pilot did not crash. And when a fighter crashed at 400 knots, it was for keeps. When a pilot augered in, screwed the pooch, fucked the duck, and bought the farm, then the base siren wailed and the blue car drove slowly and wives stood in the windows and the chaplain consoled and the flag hung at half staff. But it always happened to someone else, never to the best fighter pilot in the world. And if you have to ask who the best is, it sure as hell ain’t you. Fighter pilots fly with their fangs out and their hair on fire and they look death in the face every day and you ain’t shit if you ain’t done it.

  Nellis was a place where young men did things at 30,000 feet they would remember all their days. Nellis was Valhalla-in-the-desert.

  This was the world Boyd was about to enter—the world he would come to dominate.

  In the aftermath of Korea, the Air Force did not know what to do with the sudden excess of fighter pilots. Some were reassigned to squadrons around the world and some were sent to Nellis as instructors. But a surplus still existed, and Boyd almost was assigned to a maintenance squadron where his job would have been supervising mechanics. His Air Force records do not reflect canceled assignments, so the only record of this is in his Oral History interview, where he said, “I just raised hell. Bullshit on maintenance. I don’t want anything to do with it.” He won the battle and was assigned to Nellis.

  By 1954, Nellis was the busiest Air Force base in the world. It was also distinguished by its unusually high rates of courts-martial, sexually transmitted diseases, and those who had gone absent without leave. The nearby town of Las Vegas had begun the decade with a population of about 25,000 and would end it with a population of about 140,000.

  First Lieutenant John Boyd, accompanied by Mary and Stephen, reported for duty at Nellis on April 20, 1954. They drove from Iowa, and all during the trip Boyd talked of little but his ideas on aerial tactics and how he was going to change the Air Force. Mary nodded and cuddled with Stephen and made occasional noises of agreement. She understood little and cared less. In all Boyd’s years as a pilot, Mary would never see him take off on a single flight. But in this, she was not alone: it is a superstition of military flying, or at least it was in Boyd’s day, that the wives of fighter pilots never watch their husbands take off.

  Boyd had been assigned to Nellis as a student in the Advanced Flying School, the “hard-polish” school that new jet pilots went through before they were considered combat ready. It seems odd that a pilot fresh from combat and with Boyd’s reputation as a stick-and-rudder man would be sent to school. But he was about to become an instructor and he had to go through the school before he could teach. He had to learn the curriculum and he had to learn Air Force teaching methods. So Boyd was a student for nine hours of formation flying, ten point five hours of air-to-ground gunnery, seventeen hours of air-toair gunnery, and fifteen hours of applied tactics.

  Having completed the course, his future, which is to say his chance for promotion, looked good. He was a twenty-seven-year-old combat veteran whose last efficiency report could not have been much better had he written it himself. He was making a name for himself in fighter aviation. And he had ideas—hundreds of ideas—about aerial tactics tumbling around in his head. Nellis was the perfect place to put those ideas to work.

  But he and Mary and Stephen had barely settled into the old World War II house they were provided on base, a tiny house with neither telephone nor air-conditioning, when their troubles began.

  In June temperatures climbed into the hundreds. Stephen was sixteen months old and slowly learning to walk. One day Stephen developed a high temperature. Mary did not believe it was anything serious—all babies run temperatures at one time or another—but she watched him closely. Stephen did not improve and several days later grew listless and lethargic.

  “It must be the flu,” Mary thought, and gave him mild medication. Then one morning she went into Stephen’s room and he was not sitting up waiting for her, not demanding to be fed. Mary laughed and cooed to him and called him a lazy boy and pulled him upright. His head tilted to the side and he fell back on the bed. Mary pulled him upright again and again his head lolled to the side and again he toppled over.

  Mary was a young wife and a new mother and she was far from home and cold terror seized her heart. Something was seriously wrong with her son.

  Could it be… ?

  She could not utter the word.

  She rushed Stephen to the doctor.

  He had polio.

  Boyd had been here before, of course, with his sister Ann. Early stages of the disease caused something known as “foot drop” and, because some muscles in the back were affected and some were not, the victim’s legs often twisted outward. Treatment was cruel. Heavy sandbags were lodged against the legs and rigid steel braces held the patient’s back and legs firmly in place. Bright stainless-steel hoops pulled the victim’s head upright. Almost all patients were confined to wheelchairs. A patient was considered lucky if he could walk well enough to use crutches. Many victims died. But dying was considered by some to be preferable to spending one’s life in an iron lung.

  Ann had survived to walk again, but Stephen’s polio was especially severe. Sandbags went on his legs and braces on his back. Boyd went to a swimming-pool manufacturer and bought a small pump that he installed in the bathtub so Stephen could lie in warm swirling waters. The dining-room table was cleared and turned into an exercise table and every morning Boyd and Mary held Stephen and pulled and tugged and stretched his legs and massaged his atrophying muscles as he screamed with pain. Boyd often used his lunch break to come home and give Stephen additional exercise. Twice Stephen almost died. Mary wept with the pain of what her firstborn son was going through.

  When word of Stephen’s malady reached Erie, people thought of Ann and of the year John had limped, and a member of Jack Arbuckle’s family sent word that polio was hereditary. Boyd must have been going through the agony of the damned. But he never discussed it with Mary. He never talked about feelings or emotions. When Mary said Stephen’s polio might have come from Boyd’s side of the family, he squeezed his lips together and nodded and said such speculation was “interesting.” He found solace in an unusual place: the music of Wagner. His favorite was “Ride of the Valkyries,” which he played over and over at high volume.

  Mary remembered seeing the movie clips of President Franklin D. Roosevelt playing in the mineral-rich waters of Warm Springs, Georgia. If Roosevelt went there, it had to be a good place.

  Boyd traded in the family car for a station wagon so Stephen could lie down in the back and spread out and be reasonably comfortable. Boyd took emergency leave and he and Mary and Stephen struck out across country. They stayed in cheap motels in Texas and Alabama. For three days Stephen’s cloth diapers were washed in motels or at gas stations and hung out the car windows to dry.

  After three days of treatment at Warm Springs, the family returned to Nellis. The car had no air-conditioning and it was hot as they motored through the South and the Southwest. Stephen’s braces were uncomfortable and confining. The steel brace that held his chin high was painful. Sandbags piled on his neck and legs aggravated his plight. He cried for much of the trip.

  This was the first of numerous trips to Warm Springs the Boyd family would make over the years—long, arduous, ten-day round trips that, in the end, had no benefit for Stephen. Boyd was a lieutenant with no money for expensive treatments. Air Force doctors of the time did not hav
e the knowledge, equipment, or ability to treat polio. The March of Dimes and the Easter Seal Foundation paid for Stephen’s treatment. Boyd was a proud man and his agony at Stephen’s plight must have increased when he realized that his family, like his mother’s family, was forced to depend on charity.

  There were other concerns, too. Mary was again pregnant. She began a series of gamma globulin shots that doctors said might prevent her from contracting polio. But if polio were hereditary and if their first child had the disease, the same thing could happen to the next child. Mary repeatedly told Boyd of her fear that his family was the source of the polio. He said they would have to wait and see.

  To increase Stephen’s mobility and to help him have as normal a childhood as possible, Boyd nailed several boards together, attached skate wheels to the bottom, and showed Stephen how to lie on the board and push with his hands. As Stephen grew older, he took to the streets and played with neighborhood children. When Boyd came home from flying jets at 30,000 feet and at more than 400 mph, the first thing he saw when he drove into the neighborhood was his son on a homemade surfboardlike device, gamely pushing himself along the street behind a group of laughing and running children.

  The summer of 1954, when Stephen contracted polio, was the last summer America experienced a polio epidemic. Dr. Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine that year. In 1955 the U.S. government approved polio vaccinations, and for all practical purposes polio disappeared from America. It was good news for America and for the world, but what was even more important news to Boyd was that Dr. Salk said polio was a virus—the disease was not hereditary. Boyd was not responsible. But Stephen would never walk.

  That summer, Boyd graduated from Advanced Flying School and was assigned to the 3597th Flying Training Squadron as an instructor. He went through the training aids, the mission plans, the course outlines, and the class structure and announced he was going to “tweak up the tactics section.”

  Tweak? There was nothing to tweak. SAC generals thought advanced training for fighter pilots, unless it was training in how to put iron on the ground, was useless. The air-to-air portion of the curriculum had dwindled to almost nothing. There was not even a manual of tactics. Everything was a grab bag of tricks passed down from World War I to World War II to Korea.

  To understand how this came about, one must go back to the early days of aviation. German pilots in World War I developed the technique of diving with the sun at their backs and firing at blinded American pilots. This maneuver led to the expression, “Beware of the Hun in the sun.” American pilots copied the maneuver.

  Eric Hartman, the famous German pilot of World War II, simply pounced on slow bombers, unsuspecting fighters, or any crippled aircraft from behind. He was a back-shooter who shot down 352 airplanes and became the leading ace of all time.

  Because the P-38 was so unmaneuverable, Richard Bong, the leading American ace of World War II, had to rely on one trick: from a high perch he pushed over and used the blazing speed of his P-38 to dive onto an enemy formation. He pulled in so close he could not miss, blasted the enemy out of the air, then blew through the formation. Bong then used his superior diving speed to zoom back up to altitude and do the same thing again. There was nothing remotely sophisticated about this trick, but he used it to shoot down forty Japanese aircraft.

  Combat veterans of Korea were teaching what they learned in MiG Alley and, not surprisingly, it was not that much different from what Hartman or Bong did. That was because new pilots in Korea were told never to get in a turning fight with a MiG and to use their speed to blow through enemy formations. American pilots believed that both they and the enemy had such an infinite number of maneuvers at their disposal that aerial combat could never be codified. Air combat was an art, not a science. After simulated aerial combat, a young pilot would be defeated and never know why. Nor could his instructors tell him. They said something like, “Don’t worry, kid. Eventually you’ll be as good as we are.” Either a fighter pilot survived combat and became a member of the fraternity or he died. In short, aerial tactics—with one or two exceptions—had made no significant advance since World War I. Maneuvers performed in a Sopwith Camel in the First World War or in a P-38 in the Second World War still were performed by F-86s in Korea and taught at Nellis after Korea. The only difference was that the speed and power of jets enabled them to fight in vertical maneuvers that were nearly impossible in aircraft powered by gasoline engines. Even so, F-86 pilots in Korea had only begun to explore vertical maneuvers and most combat was still fought in the horizontal plane.

  So when Boyd said he was going to “tweak up the tactics,” what he meant was that he was going to develop, and codify for the first time in history, a formal regimen for fighter aircraft. He went about the job with a passion. He worked far into the night devising a series of briefings on fighter versus fighter and began to develop his skills as a lecturer.

  No one else in the Air Force was seeking to advance the art of airto-air combat. Everyone in government, up to and including the president, believed the next war would be a nuclear war. Thus Boyd soon knew more about what he was teaching than did any other person in the Air Force.

  Like most people who find a cause, he had little patience for those who did not understand or who disagreed with what he was doing. Boyd never suffered lightly the careerists or bureaucrats or others who did not understand his ideas. Most of the time he showed the proper military courtesy. But he had the aggressive personality of a fighter pilot, and if someone asked a question, they got a straight answer.

  Throughout his career Boyd polarized his superiors. There were those who did not like him and thought he was unprofessional and those who had tremendous admiration for him and respect for the contribution he was making to the Air Force. His first ER at Nellis reveals his precarious position. The front page of the ER requires the rating officer to check one of a series of boxes and grade the younger officer in various categories such as “job knowledge” or “leadership” or “growth potential.” The idea is to have the front page “fire walled,” that is, every check mark in the sixth box on the far right of the page. Boyd’s check marks were all in the third or fourth box. It is a mediocre and career-ending rating.

  On the more important second page, the rating officer says of Boyd, “He is nervous, talkative, and presents an engaging personality.… He becomes very excited and loud during the heat of an argument.… [Boyd is] well read and precise on any subject he is familiar with and will discuss it in detail.” In the all-important final paragraph, the one that deals with potential for promotion, the officer dismisses Boyd by describing him as “… an excellent young pilot commensurate with his grade and experience and would be an asset to any day fighter organization.”

  Fighter pilots have always been their own worst enemies when it comes to rating each other. One study showed that the toughest evaluators of their peers in the Air Force were fighter pilots, followed closely by nurses. By openly arguing with his superiors, by criticizing them, Boyd only increased this tendency toward harsh judgment. Less than a year after arriving at Nellis, he was in serious trouble.

  After a difficult pregnancy and a painful and protracted delivery, Mary Boyd gave birth to her second child on February 8, 1955. She named the girl Kathryn after Kathryn Grayson, a movie star of the 1950s. Mary was filled with apprehension about the possibility of polio and examined Kathy (as the girl became known) daily, feeling her legs and arms and watching for any of the symptoms that preceded Stephen’s illness, but Kathy was a healthy baby who would remain free of polio. Her problems would come later and would be of a far more confusing nature.

  In the March 1955 issue of the Fighter Weapons Newsletter, Major Frederick “Boots” Blesse, a double ace from the Korean War, published an article about fighter techniques used in Korea titled “No Guts, No Glory.” The newsletter was the official publication of the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis and usually contained no articles of consequence—but Blesse’s article was importan
t for three reasons. First, it was written by a certified MiG-killer, and aces always receive a lot of attention. Second, virtually nothing had been published about aerial tactics—not in World War I, World War II, or Korea. In a foreword, the editor of the newsletter took note of this when he said, “It is a poor testimonial that so little is documented about this vital phase of aerial warfare.” He added that “… much of this article is an application of known principles.” Even though there was nothing original in Blesse’s piece, to see an article about fighter tactics written by a fighter ace made Air Force officials nervous, and the issue of the newsletter containing the article was classified “confidential.” Finally, the article was important because Blesse’s observations would end up overshadowing much of Boyd’s original and creative work on aerial tactics.

  Boyd pressed on with his research and development of aerial tactics, continuing to test his ideas in the air. The F-86 was temporarily grounded because of structural problems. When it resumed flying, the normal inclination of most pilots was to baby it for a while. But Boyd manhandled the F-86. One of his favorite maneuvers was a snap roll, a violent maneuver that put enormous side loads on the vertical stabilizer. He wanted to teach the maneuver to students, but his superiors considered it too dangerous. If the maneuver was not properly and precisely performed, it could cause a structural failure and a crash. One day Boyd and another instructor were rat-racing when Boyd performed a snap roll. The other instructor looked over and radioed Boyd, “You have some wires flying formation on your tail.” Boyd returned to Nellis, made a gentle landing, and parked in a distant corner of the flight line. He was more than a little alarmed to see broken wires protruding from the twisted tail surface. He asked his crew chief to check the damage. Boyd was in the Officers Club when he was called to the front door. The crew chief informed him the main structural mount in the tail of the F-86 had broken and that it was a miracle the tail had not failed. Out of loyalty to Boyd, the crew chief covered up the incident and Boyd was never charged with any offense.