1.
Twenty-four hours earlier, across the ocean, Captain Charles Wendorf sat in Saint Luke's Methodist Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina, teaching his weekly Sunday school class to a group of lanky teenagers. Thirty years old, blue-eyed, and athletic, Wendorf sported a blond buzz cut and a relaxed confidence that belied his years. Wendorf had it all—a wife, three kids, a house, and a great job flying B-52 bombers. He also held a deep, earnest faith in God, America, and the U.S. Air Force, a faith tempered by an easy, self-deprecating manner and a gentle sense of humor. He had the disarming habit of starting sentences with the phrase “Well, I guess …” When asked if the kids in his Sunday school class looked up to him, a hotshot pilot, he chuckled and said in his aw-shucks way, “Well, I guess I suppose they did.”
When the class finished, Wendorf got into his car with his wife, Betty, for the drive back to their home on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. It was early in the afternoon. Wendorf had to be at squadron headquarters for a preflight briefing at 3:30 p.m., and he wanted to get home in time for a quick nap. In the car, Betty spoke up. She had a bad feeling about tonight's flight and wished Charlie could get out of it. Wendorf reassured his wife; he had flown this mission more than fifty times before, it was perfectly routine, there was nothing to worry about. She dropped the subject. There was no point in arguing; they both knew that the Air Force always won.
Wendorf had been in the Air Force his entire adult life, starting with ROTC when he was a student at Duke. He had entered flight training right after graduation and earned his wings in October 1959. His Air Force supervisors called him a born pilot. Wendorf had spent the last five and a half years behind the controls of B-52s, logging 2,100 flying hours in that plane alone. Initially disappointed to be assigned to the lumbering B-52, rather than a glamorous fighter plane, he eventually came to believe it far more challenging to manage a seven-man crew than a fighter plane and rose to become the youngest aircraft commander in the Strategic Air Command (SAC), his part of the Air Force. He also came to love his plane. “The airplane is huge, it's mammoth,” he said. “But if you could fly that airplane like I could, you could thread a needle with it.”
Wendorf got home from church around 2 p.m. and took his nap. When he woke up, he put on his olive green flight suit, grabbed his flight gear and briefcase, and headed to squadron headquarters. There, he checked his box for messages, found nothing, and met up with the rest of his crew for the preflight briefing. On this mission, Wendorf would be sharing pilot duties with two other men. His copilot was twenty-five-year-old First Lieutenant Michael Rooney. Only four years junior to Wendorf, Rooney had a hard-partying lifestyle that made him seem younger. One writer described the pilot as a jolly bachelor who enjoyed chasing skirts in nearby Raleigh. Rooney said the writer should have included Durham, Charlotte, and Goldsboro as well. His bachelor status made him a fish out of water in SAC, where most of the airmen were married with kids. SAC wives like Betty Wendorf fussed over the young man, inviting him for dinner and stuffing him with home-cooked food. Rooney's close friendship with the Wendorf family led to a lot of easy banter between the two men. Rooney had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a longtime rival of Wendorf's Duke, and for the two pilots, trashing the other's alma mater was an endless source of amusement.
Like many young men, Rooney had joined the Air Force with dreams of becoming a fighter pilot. His grades in flight school had put that dream out of reach, at least temporarily. He respected the B-52 but didn't enjoy flying it; it was too much like driving a truck.
That morning, while Wendorf was teaching Sunday school, Rooney, a practicing Catholic, went to Mass. (“I may have been doing something wild the night before,” he said, “but I'm not telling.”) Then he changed into uniform and drove his big, white 1963 Chevy Impala convertible to headquarters. The parking lot was nearly empty that Sunday, so he parked illegally in a senior officer's spot. He figured he'd be back before the officer showed up for work.
The third pilot that day was Major Larry Messinger, at forty-four the oldest and most experienced member of the crew and less inclined to joking around. He was on board as the relief pilot, standard practice for long flights. Messinger had served in the Air Force for more than twenty years, collecting a cluster of medals along the way. When the United States entered World War II, he signed up for the Army Air Forces right away and was soon rumbling over Germany in a B-17 bomber. On his sixth mission, while bombing an oil refinery, he took fire and lost an engine. Headed for a crash landing in a wheat field, his plane's left wing caught a wire strung between two telephone poles. The B-17 cartwheeled end over end, finally crashing on its back. Messinger and the copilot were suspended upside down, hanging from their seat belts. They unfastened their belts and dropped into the wreckage, finding themselves in the no-man's-land between the German and American lines. Badly injured, the two men struggled to the U.S. side and huddled on the front lines with the Seventh Armored division for a week before they were airlifted out. Messinger spent two months in an English hospital before getting back into the air, flying twenty-nine more missions before the end of the war. He later flew B-29s over Korea, where he “got shot up a bunch of times but never shot down.” In his two combat tours, he flew seventy missions. Now he worked as an air controller at Seymour Johnson, filling in as a relief pilot when needed. Tall and trim, he had a long face and serious, steady eyes.
After the briefing, the three pilots walked out onto the tarmac, looked over their B-52, and then went to the bomb bay to inspect the four hydrogen bombs they'd be carrying that day. Each bomb packed 1.45 megatons of explosive power, about seventy times as much as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Rooney put a hand on each of them and gave a good tug, just to make sure they were locked in tight. Then the pilots climbed inside the plane with the rest of the crew to begin the systems check. They found two small problems: the UHF radio wasn't working right, and neither was one of the oil pressure gauges. By the time these were fixed, the crew was running eleven minutes late. The plane lumbered down the long runway and crept into the air, just after 6 p.m. Once they were airborne, Wendorf lit up a cigarette and settled in for the ride.
It was a perfectly ordinary Sunday in Cold War America. The big news stories were an army coup in Nigeria that had left two government ministers dead and a proposed $3 billion spending hike for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs. Also, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, facing a failed “peace offensive” in Vietnam, told reporters that the U.S. government would consider “all necessary military measures” against Communist aggression in Southeast Asia. News analysts were trying to figure out exactly what that meant. And 35,000 feet above it all, Wendorf turned his plane east and headed toward Russia.
Over the next twenty-three hours or so, Wendorf and his crew, in tandem with another B-52, planned to fly across the Atlantic, circle over the Mediterranean, and then—unless they heard otherwise—turn around and come home. Wendorf's flight, part of a program called airborne alert, was a key activity of the Strategic Air Command, the nuclear strike component of the U.S. Air Force. In 1966, most Americans still assumed that the United States and the USSR stood, at all times, on the brink of nuclear war. Many believed—with an unshakable, almost religious fervor—that it was SAC, and these highly visible bomber flights, that kept the Soviets in check.
SAC's growth over the two previous decades had been explosive. In 1945, when America had dropped “Fat Man” and “Little Boy” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, SAC didn't exist and the United States owned exactly two atomic bombs. By 1966, SAC was the most powerful force in military history. The primary guardian of America's nuclear arsenal, it controlled the bulk of the nation's 32,193 nuclear warheads, as well as 674 bombers, 968 missiles, and 196,887 people. The commander of SAC directed the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff, which selected America's nuclear targets. SAC supplied much of the military intelligence and got the lion's share of the United States' defense money. To many inside and outside the military, SAC seemed all-powerful and unstoppable. Their influence was so great that it seemed perfectly reasonable—even necessary—for pilots to fly toward Russia, during peacetime, with four hydrogen bombs in their plane.
The story of the Strategic Air Command—its origin, mission, and philosophy—lay at the heart of the Cold War. And the story of SAC, and thus the story of Charles Wendorf's ill-fated flight, began during World War II, before humans had invented nuclear bombs, before people dreamed of nuclear war, and before the U.S. Air Force even existed. World War II launched the Air Force into being and spawned the atomic weapons that made it preeminent among the services. The war also shaped the military ideas of a tough young general named Curtis Emerson LeMay, teaching him the lessons he needed to turn SAC into the most powerful fighting force the world had ever seen.
At dusk on March 9, 1945, on an airstrip on the South Pacific island of Guam, an American B-29 Superfortress sped down a runway and lifted off just as the sun dropped below the horizon. One minute later, another B-29 followed, its four churning propellers roaring it into the sky. Again and again, American bombers took off from two runways in Guam, one minute after another for almost three hours. At the same time, bombers lifted off from nearby Saipan and Tinian. By 8:10 p.m., 325 American planes were flying toward Tokyo, filling the sky in a massive, roaring herd. That night, the bombers would make history in the deadliest bombing raid of World War II. This mission over Tokyo would cement the future of the Air Force and the legend of Curtis LeMay.
The bombing raid was a gamble. LeMay, a tough, reticent, thirty-eight-year-old general, was well known for his ability to solve problems and whip struggling outfits into shape. He had done it earlier in the war in Europe and China, and now he was in charge of the ailing 21st Bomber Command in Guam. LeMay had been running the show since January, but so far he hadn't fared much better than his predecessor, who had been fired. LeMay knew that if he didn't get results soon, he would be sent packing as well.
LeMay's assignment in Japan was the same one he had had in Europe: bomb the enemy's factories, gas depots, and ports and destroy its ability to wage war. But Japan had thrown him a few curveballs. First, the weather over the country was terrible for bombing—clouds covered the major cities almost every day, making accurate visual targeting nearly impossible. And at 35,000 feet, the powerful jet stream blew bombers (and bombs) off course and forced planes to use an inordinate amount of fuel. Each four-engine B-29 needed twenty-three tons of fuel just to get from Guam to Tokyo and back, leaving room for only three tons of bombs. In his first two months in the Pacific, LeMay had learned these facts the hard way, through a series of embarrassing missions where his bombers hit only a few targets by chance.
Sensing impatience from Washington, LeMay devised a daring plan for the March 9 mission. He would send the bombers in at night at a low altitude—under 10,000 feet—to avoid the jet stream and surprise the Japanese. If a bomber didn't have to fight the jet stream, LeMay calculated, it would use about two and a half tons less fuel. And he could save an additional two tons by stripping the planes of most of their guns, gunners, and ammunition. These two changes—flying at low altitudes and basically unarmed—would allow each plane to double its payload and drop bombs more accurately. It would also put the pilots at greater risk from Japanese antiaircraft fire, but LeMay concluded that it was a fair gamble. The Japanese air defenses were weaker than those he had seen in Europe. He thought his pilots could pull it off.
LeMay was used to tough decisions, but this was one of the toughest. If this strategy worked, it could shorten the war and maybe prevent an invasion of Japan. But if he had miscalculated, he would be sending hundreds of young men on a suicide run. On the night of March 9, after seeing the planes off, the mission weighed heavy on his mind. At about 2 a.m., an Air Force PR officer named St. Clair McKelway found LeMay sitting on a wooden bench beneath the mission control boards. “I'm sweating this one out,” LeMay told McKelway. “A lot could go wrong. I can't sleep. I usually can, but not tonight.”
LeMay knew that there was much at stake: his reputation, the lives of all those men, possibly the outcome of the war. But something else hung in the balance, too—the future of an independent Air Force.
When World War II began, there was no such thing as the U.S. Air Force. Planes and pilots served under the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF), which provided firepower, transport, and supplies—what's called tactical support—to Army troops on the ground, where the real fighting was going on. The airplane was just another tool for ground warfare, and it had no mission or role beyond what the Army assigned it.
To airmen, however, the airplane wasn't just a glorified school bus or food truck, it was a machine that could change the face of warfare. But they knew airpower could never reach its full potential under Army generals. They wanted their own service, with their own money, their own rules, and airmen in charge. To make a legitimate claim for independence, they had to prove that they were indeed different and offered a valuable skill that the Army and Navy lacked. That skill, most agreed, was long-range strategic bombing.
Strategic bombing can be a bit hard to distinguish from tactical bombing, because the two often overlap. But in general it means dropping bombs on key bits of enemy infrastructure—oil refineries, engine plants, important bridges—that aren't directly involved in a current battle but greatly affect the enemy's ability to fight. In 1921, an Italian general named Giulio Douhet first defined strategic bombing in his book The Command of the Air. Douhet's idea gained popularity between World War I and World War II but faced some resistance. For Douhet, strategic bombing meant that an entire country was fair game; planes could target hospitals and food depots as legitimately as airstrips and factories. There were few safe havens, no noncombatants. Bombing city centers could crush the will of the civilian population, argued Douhet, forcing enemy leaders to surrender quickly and leading to less bloodshed in the end. American airmen, wary of civilian casualties, advocated bombing specific targets to disable the enemy's economy. Even so, critics called such tactics uncivilized, immoral, and un-American. Outside airpower circles, the idea fizzled.
Then came World War II, and the Army Air Forces saw their chance. They argued for the opportunity to bomb German train yards and oil refineries, and they got it. And it was true that the airplanes offered something that Navy ships and Army tanks couldn't: only airborne bombers could fly deep into Germany, destroy German factories, and break the German war machine. That is, if the bombers could actually get to Germany and manage to hit anything.
In the early days of World War II, an assignment to a bomber crew was nearly a death sentence. The lumbering B-17 Stratofortresses flew in large, rigid formations, easy targets for enemy fighters and flak. Bombers flying from England to Germany sometimes had fighter escorts, but the fighters had such a short range that they usually turned back at the border of Germany, leaving the bombers to face the most risky portion of the journey alone. Bomber groups sometimes lost half—or more—of their planes on raids over Germany. In one infamous circumstance, the 100th Bomber Group lost seven planes over Bremen on October 8, 1943. Two days later, it lost twelve of its remaining thirteen planes over Munster. Bomber crews were more likely than foot soldiers to be killed, wounded, or captured. Twice as many air officers died in combat as those on the ground, despite their smaller numbers. An airman in a World War II bomber had a shorter life expectancy than an infantryman in the trenches of World War I.
After reading accounts of air battles, such statistics seem less surprising. On August 17, 1943, German fighters attacked a division of American B-17 bombers over Belgium. An observer in one of the rear planes later described the battle:
A stricken B-17 fell gradually out of formation to the right, then moments later disintegrated in one giant explosion. As the fighters kept pressing their attacks, one plane after another felt their fury. Engine parts, wing tips, even tail assemblies were blasted free. Rearward planes had to fly through showers of exit doors, emergency hatches, sheets of metal, partially opened parachutes, and other debris, in addition to human bodies, some German, some American, some dead, some still alive and writhing. As more German fighters arrived and the battle intensified, there were so many disintegrating airplanes that “sixty 'chutes in the air at one time was hardly worth a second look.” A man crawled out of the copilot's window of a Fortress engulfed in flames. He was the only person to emerge. Standing precariously on the wing, he reached back inside for his parachute—he could hardly have gotten through the window with his chute on—used one hand to get into the harness while he clung to the plane with the other, then dove off the wing for an apparently safe descent, only to be hit by the plane's onrushing horizontal stabilizer. His chute did not open.
The passage comes from Iron Eagle, Thomas Coffey's biography of Curtis LeMay. LeMay, head of the 4th Bombardment Wing in England at the time, flew in the lead bomber. Until his superiors forbade it, LeMay often accompanied his men on bombing missions, a habit that inspired deep trust and loyalty among his flyers. LeMay also inspired fear, or at least trepidation. Stocky, square-jawed, and perpetually chewing a cigar, he was a tough guy who looked the part. He scowled often and spoke little. Decades after the war, LeMay's gruff demeanor and blunt, often tactless public statements would make him the object of widespread derision and caricature. But here, in World War II, he was in his element. He got things done.
LeMay hated the thought of being unprepared, of losing men and bombers because of poor training or sloppy mistakes. When he arrived in England, he was alarmed by the rabble the Army gave him—rookie airmen who could barely fly a plane or bomb a target. These kids would die unless he whipped them into shape. And whip them he did. His men called him “Iron Ass” for his relentless training regimen—exhausted pilots would return from a bombing run ready for bed, only to be ordered back in the plane to practice bad weather takeoffs. Bombardiers had to memorize stacks of photographs in preparation for future missions. LeMay worked as hard as his troops, becoming a brilliant strategist. During his time in Europe, he devised new flying formations and bombing techniques that saved bombers and helped pick off German factories. On August 17, 1943, the day of the mission described in the passage above, the surviving B-17s flew to Regensburg and dropped 303 tons of bombs on a Messerschmitt aircraft plant, one of the most accurate strategic bombing runs of the war.
By the time LeMay arrived in Guam, the AAF bombing campaign against Japan seemed a pretty dismal failure. The Navy, not the AAF, deserved the credit for gains in the Pacific, having crushed the Japanese fleet, mined the Japanese harbors, and captured valuable islands. The Navy brass, riding high, were even eyeing the powerful new B-29 bombers, plotting to steal them from the Army and incorporate them into the Navy. If LeMay didn't get some results soon, Washington might scrap the strategic bombing campaign altogether. Failure in Japan would seriously jeopardize the case for an independent Air Force.
Luckily, LeMay had a new weapon at his disposal, one that would alter the fate of strategic bombing in Japan: napalm, a jellied gasoline that stuck to almost anything and burned slow and steady. In a city like Tokyo, where about 98 percent of the buildings were made of wood, incendiary bombs promised massive destruction. When his 325 planes left Guam, Saipan, and Tinian on March 9, most carried six to eight tons of napalm “bomblets,” designed to scatter when dropped and ignite buildings at a number of points.
LeMay put a trusted brigadier general named Thomas Power in charge of the raid. Power was to lead the planes to Tokyo, drop his bombs, and then circle at 10,000 feet to observe the rest of the operation. At around 2:30 a.m., Power, circling Tokyo, sent his first message to LeMay: “Bombing the primary target visually. Large fires observed, flak moderate. Fighter opposition nil.” Soon, messages arrived from other bombers reporting “conflagration.”
The raid devastated Tokyo. The flaming napalm stuck to the flimsy wooden houses, starting small fires that quickly spread into giant firestorms. The flames burned so brightly that the bomber pilots could read their watch dials by the glow. The blaze burned nearly seventeen square miles of the city to cinders, destroying 18 percent of its industry. Somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 people died, burned to death when their hair, clothes, and houses caught fire or suffocated when the firestorm sucked away oxygen. The smell of burning flesh hung in the air for days.
The carnage sparked little sympathy in America. “When you kill 100,000 people, civilians, you cross some sort of moral divide,” said the historian Edward Drea. “Yet at the time, it was generally accepted that this was fair treatment, that the Japanese deserved this, that they had brought this on themselves.” If LeMay had any moral qualms about the slaughter, he never acknowledged them. For him, it was an obvious trade: Japanese lives for American. “No matter how you slice it, you're going to kill an awful lot of civilians. Thousands and thousands. But if you don't destroy the Japanese industry, we're going to have to invade Japan,” he wrote in his autobiography, Mission with LeMay. “We're at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?”
When the B-29s returned from Tokyo on the morning of March 10, LeMay ordered them to get back into the air that evening and bomb Nagoya, Japan's second largest city. But after a look at the exhausted crews, he postponed the Nagoya raid for twenty-four hours. Over ten days, LeMay's B-29s firebombed aircraft plants in Nagoya, steel mills in Osaka, and the port of Kobe, destroying thirty-three square miles of those cities. He bombed Japan until he ran out of bombs and started again when the Navy brought him more. Throughout April, May, and June 1945, LeMay's bombers pounded the cities of Japan. By summer, LeMay announced that strategic bombing could probably force Japan's surrender by October.
The end came even sooner. On August 7, 1945, U.S. forces dropped an atomic bomb named “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. Nine days later, they dropped a second, “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki. That evening, Japan surrendered. The war was over.
The Japanese surrender confirmed one of LeMay's long-standing beliefs: the value of massive, overwhelming force. In his eyes, the widespread bombing had shortened the war and saved lives. “I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary than it is to use more,” he wrote. “If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle.” It was far more humane, he argued, to cut off a dog's tail with one quick flick of the knife than to saw it off one inch at a time.
On September 2, LeMay attended the Japanese surrender ceremonies on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. As he stood on the ship's crowded deck, thinking of the Americans who had died and “where I'd gone wrong in losing as many as we did,” a roar filled the air. Four hundred sixty-two B-29s flew overhead in a massive, deafening salute. To LeMay, the atomic bombs had been impressive but anticlimactic. In his opinion, those B-29s had won the war.
In the months after VJ Day, LeMay and his fellow air generals toured the United States, drumming up support for an independent Air Force. Despite his initial ambivalence, LeMay soon realized that the atomic bomb was a major boon for his cause. In LeMay's biggest raid over Japan, hundreds of planes had dropped thousands of bombs, adding up to the power of about 3,000 tons of T.N.T. A single atomic bomb, dropped onto Hiroshima by a single plane, exploded with five times that power—the equivalent of 15,000 tons of T.N.T. One bomb could now destroy a city. Whoever controlled this new weapon owned the future of war.
The Army Air Forces had a head start. The early atomic bombs were far too big and heavy (the bomb dropped on Nagasaki weighed 10,000 pounds) to be launched by a soldier, tank, or battleship. Only a few, specially modified B-29s could actually drop one of these behemoths on a target. Some airpower advocates gleefully claimed that the atomic bomb had made the Army and Navy obsolete. The famed pilot Jimmy Doolittle said that the Navy's only purpose now was ferrying supplies, the Army's only job to occupy a country after bombers had crushed it into submission. LeMay wasn't quite so harsh but argued that this new atomic age required a strong, vigilant Air Force to protect America. “Being peace-loving and weak didn't stop us from getting into a fight,” he told the Wings Club in October 1945. “Maybe being strong and ready will do it.”
Congress, the president, and even the Army agreed that World War II and the atomic bomb had enhanced the status of airpower. With the Army's blessing, the AAF broke free. In September 1947, the U.S. Air Force became an independent service.
The Air Force started life with three distinct commands. The Tactical Air Command (TAC) handled fighter planes and tactical support, the Air Defense Command (ADC) defended America against air attack, and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) took care of the bombers and atomic weapons. Most of the new Air Force generals believed that strategic bombing had won them independence, and they saw SAC as the key to the Air Force's future. In the postwar scramble for planes, bases, and personnel, SAC grabbed the lion's share.
Not that there was much to grab. After the war ended, President Harry Truman rapidly demobilized the military, reducing defense spending from 40 percent of the gross national product in 1944 to a mere 4 percent by 1948. He slashed Air Force personnel from a high of 2.4 million to only 300,000 by May 1947. He sent soldiers home to their regular jobs and ordered planes and jeeps sold for scrap. Records were dumped into boxes and thrown away. “We just walked away and left everything,” said Leon Johnson, a bomber pilot who became an influential Air Force general. “We started from nothing, from nothing, to rebuild the Air Force.”
For several years after the war, SAC floundered under limited budgets and weak leadership. But by 1948, there was a sense of urgency; the uneasy postwar alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States was rapidly crumbling. The two countries had never shared an easy friendship, even while allies in World War II, but now the relationship was worsening by the day. The Communists were gobbling up territory in Eastern Europe, and their hunger for more seemed insatiable. Then, in 1948, the tension reached a new height, focused on the German city of Berlin.
After World War II, Germany had been divided into four sectors, under American, French, British, and Soviet control. Deep within the Soviet sector, the city of Berlin was subdivided into four sectors. The Soviets had long bristled at this arrangement, and in June 1948 they ramped up their efforts to assert themselves in the city by blocking all road, rail, and barge traffic to the western sectors of Berlin, leaving the Berliners marooned without adequate food or fuel. The United States responded with a massive airlift, hauling tons of milk, flour, medicine, and coal into the starving city. But Western leaders feared that the Berlin blockade was merely a prelude, that the USSR would soon try to push beyond Berlin and deep into Western Europe. If the Soviets made a move, Washington might need the bumbling Strategic Air Command to intervene. On October 19, 1948, SAC got a new commander: Curtis LeMay.
LeMay, who had been running the Berlin airlift, started his new job by visiting SAC headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. The situation shocked him. “Not one crew—not one crew—in the entire command could do a professional job,” he said. “Not one of the outfits was up to strength—neither in airplanes nor in people nor anything else.” LeMay grew annoyed when people at SAC told him that “everything was rosy.” He knew that pilots had been running practice bombing raids and asked about their accuracy. The commanders bragged that bombardiers were hitting targets “right on the button.”
They produced the bombing scores, and they were so good I didn't believe them…. I found out that SAC wasn't bombing from combat altitudes, but from 12,000 to 15,000 feet…. It was completely unrealistic. It was perfectly apparent to me that while we didn't have much capability, everyone thought we were doing fine.
LeMay saw history repeating itself. SAC was just like the ragtag bomber groups he had initially commanded in Europe. But this time, America faced an even bigger threat: the Soviet Union would undoubtedly have its own atomic bomb soon. LeMay felt a tremendous sense of urgency. “We had to be ready to go to war not next week, not tomorrow, but this afternoon, today,” he said. “We had to operate every day as if we were at war.”
With Air Force leadership backing him, LeMay sprang into action. Seven days after taking command, LeMay put Tommy Power, his old friend from the Pacific, into the deputy commander slot. Power was not well liked (even LeMay said he was a “mean sonofabitch”), but he got things done. LeMay replaced virtually all SAC's commanders and headquarters staff with his pals from the Pacific bombing campaign. Their first mission was to prepare at least one group for atomic combat. They started with the 509th Bomber Group at Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico. The Army had created the 509th for the sole purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now it was the only group even close to atomic readiness. LeMay's staff stocked their warehouses with supplies and made sure that the planes had parts, guns, and gas. They weeded through personnel, replacing dead wood with crack crews.
LeMay worked nearly every day, from eight in the morning until well into the evening, and his housecleaning touched every corner of SAC. “My goal,” he said later, “was to build a force that was so professional, so strong, so powerful, that we would not have to fight. In other words, we had to build this deterrent force. And it had to be good.” He argued to Air Force leaders that SAC must be their top priority in funding, research, planes, and personnel. Aided by his reputation and zeal and the growing Soviet threat, LeMay convinced them to give him carte blanche. He created a recruitment and screening system that filled SAC's ranks with bomber crews handpicked for their self-discipline and maturity. He arranged for new housing to be built so the airmen would have decent places to live. He made his leaders write detailed manuals for every job and train the airmen relentlessly. SAC developed elaborate war strategies, which it planned to change every six months. It built a million-dollar telephone and teletype system to link all SAC bases with the new headquarters at Offutt Field in Omaha, Nebraska. In six months, LeMay had turned SAC around and landed on the cover of Newsweek. Underneath his scowling portrait ran the headline “Air General LeMay: A Tough Guy Does It Again.” Inside the magazine, a glowing article called LeMay a genius and described how he had turned SAC from a “creampuff outfit” into an atomic force with real teeth. “When LeMay first came in, we were nothing but a bunch of nits and gnats,” one young officer told Newsweek. “Today, we're a going concern.”
LeMay had done more than shape SAC up; he had created a religion. The gospel he preached was a simple parable: the schoolyard bully and the gentle giant. The Soviets were the schoolyard bullies, aiming to seize Europe, crush America, and spread communism throughout the world. SAC was the gentle giant, the muscle-bound kid who stuck up for the skinny geeks and pimply weaklings, the kid who didn't want to hurt anyone but could knock you out with one punch if he had to. The Strategic Air Command, and no one else, stood as America's shield and protector.
In the years to come, LeMay would never waver from this core message. Increasingly, those who doubted this truth or questioned its morality were labeled fools, cowards, or Commies.
The year 1952 began the golden age of SAC. The command had a clear mission, a strong leader, and the American public on board. In the early 1950s, the Bomb loomed over everything. Those were the years when schoolchildren ducked under their desks for atomic air-raid drills and teachers handed out dog tags so they could identify students after a nuclear blast. The year 1952 also brought a new president—Dwight Eisenhower—who announced that strategic airpower and nuclear weapons were now the nation's top defense priority.
Disgusted by the slogging stalemate of the Korean War, Eisenhower viewed nuclear deterrence as a far cheaper way to keep the nation safe and oversaw a massive buildup of SAC and the nation's nuclear stockpile. He also believed that there could be no such thing as a “limited” nuclear war. Because such a war would destroy both countries, if not the world, it had to be prevented at all costs. Eisenhower had joined LeMay's church of deterrence: America could prevent nuclear war only by showing spectacular strength.
Eisenhower's philosophy led to a windfall for the nuclear military, especially the Air Force. Between 1952 and 1960, the Air Force received 46 percent of America's defense money. SAC more than doubled its personnel in five years, from 85,473 in 1950 to 195,997 by 1955. During those five years the bomber fleet also grew dramatically, from 520 to 1,309. In 1951, SAC had thirty-three bases, including eleven outside the continental United States. By 1957, SAC operated out of sixty-eight bases. Thirty of these were spread around the world, in North Africa, Canada, New Zealand, England, Guam, Greenland, and Spain. Although other services had nuclear weapons by the mid-1950s—Army soldiers could fire small nuclear artillery shells, and the Navy could launch cruise missiles from submarines—SAC ruled the nuclear kingdom. “SAC was still the big daddy,” said Jerry Martin, command historian for the U.S. Strategic Command. “They had the nuclear hammer.”
On March 19, 1954, at the height of this expansion, SAC hosted a classified briefing at its headquarters in Omaha. Major General A. J. Old, director of SAC operations, spoke to about thirty military officers from various service branches, regaling the crowd with charts, graphs, and maps detailing SAC's capabilities. Afterward, LeMay answered questions for a half hour.
Sitting in the audience that day was a Navy captain named William Brigham Moore. Moore took detailed notes at the meeting and later wrote a memo describing it for his director. The top secret memo, declassified in the 1980s, gives a small but rare glimpse inside SAC at the apex of its power.
According to Moore, Old told the crowd that SAC had several hundred strike plans. Then he described SAC's optimum strike plan, what defense insiders called the “Sunday Punch.” With enough warning time, SAC could send 735 bombers flying toward the Soviet Union. The bombers, approaching from many different directions, would hit the Soviets' early warning screen simultaneously and overwhelm their defenses. Old estimated that the planes could drop somewhere between 600 and 750 bombs. “The final impression,” wrote Moore, “was that virtually all of Russia would be nothing but a smoking, radiating ruin at the end of two hours.”
General Old concluded the meeting by raising an issue that would come to dominate SAC policy, the concept of “alert time.” Old framed it this way: If the Soviets launched a surprise attack against the United States, would SAC have enough time to load its planes and get them off the ground before Russian bombs blew them to bits? With two hours' warning, he said, Russian bombs could destroy about 35 percent of the command. But if the Soviets sneaked in a total surprise attack and caught SAC with its pants down, the bombs could decimate the command, obliterating 90 percent of its infrastructure. “The amount of alert time,” concluded Moore, “is the most important factor as far as SAC is concerned.”
The concept of alert time had been cooked up by defense analysts at the RAND Corporation, a California think tank sponsored by the Air Force. In the early 1950s, RAND analysts became convinced that SAC bases, especially those overseas, were vulnerable to a surprise attack. SAC leaders soon realized that these vulnerabilities could work in their favor. For SAC to survive an all-out surprise attack and retaliate in kind, it would need a striking force at least double the size of the Soviets'. Building such a force would require a massive influx of funding. SAC could ask for the sky.
On April 30, 1956, Curtis LeMay sat at a long table in the Capitol building, facing a row of somber senators. LeMay had flown to Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Forces Subcommittee about the strength of SAC's bomber fleet and its vulnerability to surprise attack. The hearings had been in the making for about a year. Senate Democrats had accused President Eisenhower of pinching military funds excessively in order to balance the budget. With a presidential election looming, the subcommittee had called for hearings to examine, specifically, Eisenhower's Air Force policies. The sessions, which became known as the Congressional Air Power Hearings of 1956, brought the question of SAC's vulnerability to the American public and made “bomber gap” a household term.
Worrisome intelligence had trickled in from Russia over the past year. One incident in particular had caused grave concern. The previous summer, the Soviets had invited a number of U.S. Air Force attachés to an air show near Moscow. The day of the air show had started pleasantly enough—one news report describes the attachés sitting under colored umbrellas, drinking beer, and chatting with other foreigners. Then came the air parade, which included Soviet Bison bombers, four-engine jet planes suspected to have intercontinental range. At the time, Air Force Intelligence guessed that the Soviets had about twenty-five Bisons, maybe up to forty. But at the air show, the Americans saw ten Bisons flying overhead, then another nine, then yet another nine. There were twenty-eight planes in all, just at the parade.
The Air Force representatives realized—or rather, thought they did—that they had grossly underestimated the size of the Soviet bomber force. Returning home, they fed the information to Air Force intelligence, who figured that twenty-eight Bisons in the air meant the Soviets must have fifty-six already finished. Adding in what they knew about Soviet factory space and learning curves, intelligence analysts predicted that by 1959 the Soviets could have five hundred to eight hundred Bisons.
We know today, and some suspected even then, that the Soviets had nowhere near that number of long-range bombers. In fact, the Soviets had only ten Bisons at the time, and those had rolled off the assembly line just weeks before the air show. Analysts later speculated that the Soviets had fooled the American attachés by flying the same planes over the viewing area again and again.
The suspected Soviet bomber strength became public knowledge during Curtis LeMay's testimony before the Senate subcommittee. LeMay's testimony was a bit odd—because the hearings involved issues of national security, the senators had given LeMay written questions and he read the censored answers. (One reporter speculated that Air Force PR had dreamed up this tactic to keep LeMay from shooting his mouth off.) Despite the stilted setting, LeMay got his point across. Looking “guarded” and “somber,” he told the senators that the Russians were beating America in the bomber race. SAC's new long-range B-52 bomber, he said, had a serious engineering flaw: a flywheel in the B-52's alternator had a nasty habit of breaking off. The defect had already caused one crash and led to serious production delays. Boeing had delivered seventy-eight B-52s so far, and SAC had returned thirty-one to the shop. This left SAC with only forty-seven of the new long-range bombers. The Air Force guessed that the Soviets already had about a hundred.
LeMay's testimony on this “bomber gap” made front-page headlines, and Americans reacted with dismay. How did Russia get ahead of us? Both houses of Congress demanded that the president add an additional billion dollars to the Air Force budget. (The budget already included $16.9 billion for the Air Force, $10 billion for the Navy, and $7.7 billion for the Army.) Eisenhower, sensing trouble, cautioned against getting caught up in a “numbers racket” and trying to match the Russians plane for plane. He pointed out that the United States had a massive fleet of midrange bombers stationed all over the globe, not to mention the most powerful navy in the world. When the full story came out, he said, the American public would “feel a lot better.”
The president's soothing words calmed the storm for a few weeks. The House of Representatives passed Eisenhower's budget as it stood, without additional funds for the Air Force. Then LeMay returned for one more Senate hearing. It was his “guess,” he said on May 26, that the Soviets could destroy the United States in a surprise attack by 1959. From 1958 on, he said, the Russians would be “stronger in long-range airpower than we are, and it naturally follows that if [the enemy] is stronger, he may feel that he should attack.”
It's impossible to tell if LeMay believed his own rhetoric. Some considered him a cynical opportunist, using spotty intelligence and scare tactics to build SAC into an empire at the expense of the other services. One anonymous administration spokesman told Time magazine that “Curt LeMay thinks only of SAC.” But many believed him a patriot defending his country against an ominous enemy. Most Americans assumed that the Communists were hell-bent on world domination and would like nothing better than to bomb America into a nuclear wasteland. If the United States gave them an inch or fell behind at all, they would try it.
At the conclusion of the airpower hearings, the Senate sided with LeMay. Over Eisenhower's objections, Congress gave the Air Force an additional $928.5 million to bulk up against the Soviet threat. SAC could move its mission forward.
To counter the threat of a surprise attack, SAC started experimenting with a program called “ground alert” in November 1956. In this system, maintenance crews kept a handful of SAC bombers poised on the airstrip, filled with fuel and bombs. Flight crews lived and slept in nearby barracks. They could leave the barracks while on alert duty but never wander more than fifteen minutes away from their planes. Frequent drills kept the airmen in line. When the alarm—a blaring klaxon that could wake the dead—sounded, the crews ran to their planes at full speed, as if Curtis LeMay himself were chasing them. The first plane took off within fifteen minutes; the others followed at one-minute intervals. On October 1, 1957, ground alert became official SAC policy.
The new system came just in the nick of time. Three days later, on October 4, the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. Sputnik by itself was no threat to the United States. Barely bigger than a basketball, it contained scientific instruments to measure the density of the atmosphere. But Sputnik hadn't climbed into orbit by itself; the Soviets had shot it up there with a rocket. And if Soviet rockets could shoot satellites into space, they could certainly shoot nuclear missiles at the United States. “Soon they will be dropping bombs on us from space like kids dropping rocks onto cars from freeway overpasses,” said Senator Lyndon Johnson. SAC's new ground alert seemed like a brilliant, prescient move. By the following year, SAC had reorganized its structure to keep one third of the bomber force on alert at all times.
That same year, SAC began testing another program, called “airborne alert.” Instead of holding bombers ready on the ground, this program kept loaded SAC bombers in the air at all times, flying in prearranged orbits that approached Soviet airspace. Proponents argued that airborne alert gave SAC added security. “Any Soviet surprise attack,” wrote one reporter, “would find the ‘birds’ gone from their nests.” Airborne bombers, closer than planes on the ground to Soviet targets, also posed a more powerful deterrent. With those bombers in the sky, the Soviets would think twice before trying any funny business.
Tommy Power told Congress about the new program in 1959, after he had finished initial testing. Airborne alert was ready to go, but SAC needed more money. “I feel strongly that we must get on with this airborne alert,” Power told Congress in February. “We must impress Mr. Khrushchev that we have it, and that he cannot strike this country with impunity.”
Power's arguments did not convince Eisenhower. It would be “futile and disastrous,” said the president, to strive for constant readiness against any Soviet attack. It was madness to sit around thinking, every minute of the day, that bombs were about to fall on Washington. Airborne alert, he implied, promoted just that type of thinking.
Eventually the two sides reached a compromise. Eisenhower gave SAC permission to start an airborne alert training program, just in case America ever needed such a system in place. On January 18, 1961, Power publicly announced that airborne alert had begun. Reports said that SAC now kept at least twelve bombers in the air at all times; the exact number remained classified. SAC named the program “Chrome Dome,” probably because most of the bombers' flight paths arched over the Arctic Circle, drawing a cap over the top of the world. Power refused to confirm or deny if the flights carried nuclear bombs (they did), but an Air Force spokesman said that “the training is conducted under the most realistic conditions possible.” The flights were still called “indoctrination” or “training” flights because they wouldn't actually be dropping bombs on the USSR—unless, of course, an order came through from the president, and then, in an instant, a training flight would become a bombing mission.
By the time the first Chrome Dome mission went up, LeMay had moved on. In 1957, he had been promoted to Air Force vice chief of staff. Tommy Power was now in charge of the thriving Strategic Air Command. LeMay left Power a force of 1,655 bombers, 68 bases, and 224,014 men. In his nine years at SAC, LeMay had transformed the force from a national joke into a nuclear powerhouse.
Over the next seven years, Power carried the torch through changing times. As engineers made nuclear weapons smaller and lighter and missiles more reliable, other services—especially the Navy, with its nuclear submarines—began to get a larger share of the nuclear pie. By the 1960s, the United States had a nuclear “triad” of long-range land-based missiles, manned bombers, and submarine-launched missiles. SAC controlled everything but the subs and wanted to keep it that way. But as missiles grew more sophisticated and accurate, some asked whether bombers were becoming obsolete. Robert McNamara, who became secretary of defense in 1961, was seen as a missile man, hostile to the continued reliance on manned bombers. But Power, who had circled the burning Tokyo and seen the devastating power of bombers firsthand, argued that the manned bombers, which he called the “backbone of SAC's deterrent strength,” would always have a role in nuclear strategy. SAC, he insisted, must continue to demonstrate its power through programs like airborne alert. In order to deter nuclear war, said Power, the Soviets had to see America's strength and know that America stood ready to use it.