A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 1

A Fiery peace in a cold war.

Bernard Schriever and the ultimate weapon.

by Neil Sheehan.

PROLOGUE:

A Rite of SuccessionGeneral Henry Harley Arnold, known as "Hap" because of his unusual smile, was in a hurry in January 1946. During the Second World War, which had ended the previous August with the surrender of j.a.pan, he had created and led the greatest air armada ever a.s.sembled, the U.S. Army Air Forces. The stress of the war had exacted a toll on a fragile heart. He had suffered two heart attacks during the war and a third shortly after its conclusion. (He was to die of heart failure on January 15, 1950, at the age of just sixty-three.) He knew he would have to retire soon and turn command of his Army Air Forces over to his trusted friend and second man, Carl "Tooey" Spaatz.While the outcome of the war was still in doubt, Arnold had, with a couple of exceptions, held innovation to what was practical and could be committed rapidly to combat. The one entirely new aircraft he had decided to build and nurtured to completion during the conflict was the B-29 Superfortress, because it had been necessary for the long-range strategic bombing campaign against j.a.pan. Not that he had neglected to avail himself earlier of civilian scientific talent whenever he thought that it could help him solve particular problems. Back in 1939 with the conflict in Europe just beginning, he had invited General George Marshall, then the new chief of staff and a friend of Arnold Army since they were lieutenants together in the Philippines prior to the First World War, to join him at lunch with a group of scientists with whom he was conferring. Marshall was a believer in the efficacy of air power, but respect born of the friends.h.i.+p was another reason he was to treat Arnold, officially subordinate to him, as an equal. During the war he made him a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and allowed him to organize the Army Air Forces with an autonomy that would prepare the way for postwar independence. Marshall was, however, an infantryman by profession. He was not accustomed to the company of "long hairs," as the regular military pejoratively referred to the scientific community. "What on earth are you doing with people like that?" he asked Arnold afterward. Arnold explained that he was using their original minds to create instruments "for our airplanes ... that are far too difficult for the Air Force engineers to develop themselves."As 1944 wore on, with the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich not long off and Imperial j.a.pan's demise certain to follow, Arnold could afford to look ahead and set free the evangelist of technology that dwelt within him. He intended to leave to his beloved air arm a heritage of science and technology so deeply imbued in the inst.i.tution that the weapons it would fight with would always be the best the state of the art could provide and those on its drawing boards would be prodigies of futuristic thought. Above all, he was determined to avoid a return in the postwar period to those disheartening years of the early 1930s when, as he put it in a letter to another old friend, Dr. Robert Millikan, president of the California Inst.i.tute of Technology, "just a relatively small group of enthusiastic officers [were] struggling against ignorance and indifference as to the importance of aviation and air power to the security and the very existence of the nation." Apparently with the Soviet Union in mind, he was also convinced that the downfall of Germany and j.a.pan did not mean an enduring peace. It was "axiomatic," he wrote, that because the United States would emerge from the conflict as "one of the predominant powers ... we will no doubt have potential enemies that will const.i.tute a continuing threat to the nation."The Second World War had also wrought a change in the military cosmos as transforming as the one it was bringing about in the geopolitical universe. The nation could no longer look to the seas as the protective barrier around it, nor to the U.S. Navy as the bulwark to stop an enemy from breaching that barrier. The air was now the s.p.a.ce that mattered and the safety of the nation depended upon the ability of the U.S. Army Air Forces, soon to become the independent U.S. Air Force, to reign supreme in the skies. Hiros.h.i.+ma was also to make the new air arm first among equals where the other services were concerned, because it could deliver that most cataclysmic of weapons-the atomic bomb.Ever since the early fall of 1944, Arnold had been commissioning studies and funding experimental weaponry. Now, with his retirement impending and his preparations for the future nearing completion, Arnold summoned to his Pentagon office a young colonel named Bernard Schriever. "Bennie" Schriever had grown up in San Antonio, Texas, and acquired his nickname from the sportswriters there. He had been a champion amateur golfer as a youth and they had wanted a snappy moniker for their articles about his exploits on the links. They had dubbed him "Benny," and the nickname had stuck during his military years but had acquired the somewhat inelegant spelling above. Schriever had spent the war out in the Pacific and had reported to the Research and Engineering Division of the Air Staff only a few days before. When he was told that Arnold wanted to see him as soon as possible, he hurried over to the River Entrance on the outer, or E Ring, corridor of the Pentagon overlooking the Potomac, where the high panjandrums like the general had their domain. After the usual wait in the outer office in which the aides and secretaries worked, he was shown into the ample inner one, where Hap Arnold sat behind a large desk. Each of the shoulder tabs of his olive drab uniform jacket held a ringlet of five silver stars, General of the Army, the highest rank to which an officer could aspire. Arnold was the only airman ever to achieve it. He beckoned Bennie to one of the easy chairs in front. What ensued was the cla.s.sic pa.s.sing on by an older man of the final mission of his life and career to a young disciple.There would come a day, Arnold told Schriever, when scientists and scientifically trained officers would be just as important to the Air Force as the "operators" who currently ran it, AAF parlance for the men who had risen to general officer commands by their ability to wield bomber and fighter forces in combat. Nurturing the process that would lead to this day was crucial because of the difference it would make in the potency of American air power. To emphasize his point, the general stressed to Schriever the same parting message he was leaving with Spaatz and others: it was the civilian scientists, not the military engineers, who had been the technological innovators during the war. "They are the ones who made the breakthroughs," he said. He predicted that those breakthroughs-in radar, in jet propulsion, in rocketry, in nuclear weapons-would prove to be the catalysts for further innovation that would radically alter the nature of war. The First World War had been decided by brawn, he said, the Second by logistics. "The Third World War will be different. It will be won by brains." There was no need for him to mention Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union as the threat. Both men understood it. "All of us, at least those of us in the military, thought that we were in for a long siege with Communism," Schriever was to say years later in recounting the meeting.The rub was that with the end of the war, the scientists responsible for these accomplishments were returning to their universities. The laboratories at which they had worked were either shutting down, like the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, or being drastically shrunk, as at Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb had been created. To try to preserve the relations.h.i.+p with these scientists, Arnold was ordering the formation of a new Scientific Liaison Branch within the Research and Engineering Division. He wanted Schriever to head it. Schriever's task would be to provide staff backup for projects civilian scientists undertook at the behest of the AAF. He was also to help with similar staffing in the establishment of a new network of research and testing centers for which Arnold had laid out plans, and to contribute to any other opportunities that arose to draft science and technology into air power's service.Had the officer sitting across the desk from Arnold been of more ordinary mind-set, the job he was being given would have been an interesting but hardly inspiring one. Perhaps Arnold sensed that Bernard Schriever was different and that was why he had sent for him. Perhaps he sensed it from their long relations.h.i.+p, which went back to the 1930s, or from the postgraduate degree Schriever had gained in aeronautical engineering; or from his stellar performance as an engineer officer in the Pacific; or from the fact that he had asked for research and development as a postwar a.s.signment. Whatever his reasons, Arnold had summoned the right man. Schriever had the intellectual bent and the foresight to see the implications for the future that Arnold saw. He also shared Arnold's vision. And there was more to it than that. There was a chemistry between the two men. Arnold had been his first chief when Schriever had been a novice second lieutenant pilot at March Field near Riverside, California, in 1933, fresh from the Flying School at Kelly Field next to San Antonio. Arnold had been the man who had later rescued him from the humdrum of an airline pilot's life and set him forth on the surpa.s.sing adventure of the Second World War. Arnold had been the leader who had fought so hard and so well to transform their ludicrously antique biplane Air Corps of the 1930s into an invincible host of the skies. In one of the last acts of his career, this man of whom Schriever stood in awe was appointing him to a task that Schriever knew meant more to Arnold than any other. Bennie Schriever said goodbye and left Arnold's office not just as an airman with an a.s.signment. He left as an apostle with a calling. What he would accomplish in the years to come he would do for himself, but in his mind he would also be doing it because Hap Arnold had entrusted him with the mission. He would not fail his chief. He would go on to become the father of the modern, high-technology Air Force and play a pivotal role in preserving peace during the grim years of the Cold War by building the first weapon in the history of warfare that was meant to deter rather than to be fired in anger-the intercontinental ballistic missile.

BOOK I.

BECOMING AN AMERICAN.

ELLIS ISLAND AND A TRAGEDY IN TEXAS.

The men in the Schriever family were venturesome types who immigrated to America to better themselves or took to the sea. Schriever's paternal grandfather, Bernhard, after whom he was named, had jumped s.h.i.+p as a young German sailor in the port of Norfolk, Virginia, in 1860 and volunteered for the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Afterward, he had made his way down to New Orleans and gone to work on the railroads, building watering towers for the steam locomotives of the time, before returning to Germany in 1870 to pursue the trade of a rigger for sailing s.h.i.+ps.

Schriever's mother, Elizabeth Milch, a pleasing dark brunette with bright blue eyes and a strong will, had left Germany as a teenager to work in the household of a German family who owned a pharmacy in lower Manhattan. She had initially dated Schriever's paternal uncle, George Schriever, who had immigrated to Union City, New Jersey, and become a prosperous baker and delicatessen owner there. But George was a bon vivant determined to remain a bachelor ("He played the field," his nephew recalled) and so he introduced Elizabeth to his brother Adolph, a tall stalk of a man with blond hair and a neat mustache who was an engineering officer on the pa.s.senger liners of the North German Lloyd Company. They were married at a Lutheran church in Hoboken in 1908, when she was twenty-two. Adolph took her back to Germany. Her first son, Bernhard Adolph, was born in the north German city of Bremen on September 14, 1910, and her second boy, Gerhard, followed two years later just before Christmas. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, while Adolph's s.h.i.+p, the George Was.h.i.+ngton George Was.h.i.+ngton, was in New York Harbor, suddenly separated the family, now living in his home port of nearby Bremerhaven. (The German line had apparently built the s.h.i.+p in 1909 for service to the United States and originally named it in honor of America's first president.) Adolph was stranded in New York, Britain's Royal Navy standing by to seize the vessel the moment the liner ventured out.

By the end of 1916, Elizabeth had had enough of waiting for the war to end and her husband to come home. Holland was neutral during the First World War. She booked pa.s.sage to New York for herself and her two boys out of Rotterdam. They left in January 1917 on the Dutch liner Noordam. Noordam. The English Channel was closed to neutral s.h.i.+pping because of the war and they had to sail north around Scotland. It took them more than two weeks. The North Atlantic was rough sailing in this winter season. Looking at the heaving waves, Schriever remembered thinking that the ocean must be a series of mountains. His mother had a scare when a British gunboat hailed the s.h.i.+p and an inspection party came aboard. She was afraid they would be seized as German nationals and taken off, but fortunately Gerhard had the mumps, a dangerous disease for an adult. When the Dutch crew warned the British sailors, the boarding party avoided the Schrievers' cabin. The next fright came in the intimidating immensity of the Great Hall at Ellis Island. It was a cavernous structure, 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling. Thousands of immigrants off the s.h.i.+ps lined up within it each day to be processed, either accepted as physically fit and freed to go ash.o.r.e or rejected and sent back to wherever they had come from with now vanished hope. Elizabeth spoke English well, with merely a slight accent, but her boys had only German. Anti-German feeling was reaching war pitch in much of the United States. She feared that if the immigration officials overheard a word of German, she and the boys might be turned away. "Be quiet," Schriever remembered her whispering, taking them by the hand. "Don't say anything." They were cleared and released as landed immigrants on February 1, 1917. Elizabeth Schriever had given her sons an American future just in time. The United States declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany only two months later. The English Channel was closed to neutral s.h.i.+pping because of the war and they had to sail north around Scotland. It took them more than two weeks. The North Atlantic was rough sailing in this winter season. Looking at the heaving waves, Schriever remembered thinking that the ocean must be a series of mountains. His mother had a scare when a British gunboat hailed the s.h.i.+p and an inspection party came aboard. She was afraid they would be seized as German nationals and taken off, but fortunately Gerhard had the mumps, a dangerous disease for an adult. When the Dutch crew warned the British sailors, the boarding party avoided the Schrievers' cabin. The next fright came in the intimidating immensity of the Great Hall at Ellis Island. It was a cavernous structure, 189 feet long and 102 feet wide with a 60-foot-high vaulted ceiling. Thousands of immigrants off the s.h.i.+ps lined up within it each day to be processed, either accepted as physically fit and freed to go ash.o.r.e or rejected and sent back to wherever they had come from with now vanished hope. Elizabeth spoke English well, with merely a slight accent, but her boys had only German. Anti-German feeling was reaching war pitch in much of the United States. She feared that if the immigration officials overheard a word of German, she and the boys might be turned away. "Be quiet," Schriever remembered her whispering, taking them by the hand. "Don't say anything." They were cleared and released as landed immigrants on February 1, 1917. Elizabeth Schriever had given her sons an American future just in time. The United States declared war on Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany only two months later.

Adolph was allowed to join his family. Before leaving the s.h.i.+p, he and the rest of his engineering crew, patriotic German men, had done their best to wreck the engines of the vessel they knew was soon to be confiscated. Schriever remembered learning of it because his father appeared with a bandaged thumb, injured while smas.h.i.+ng machinery. (The wrecking was to no avail. The George Was.h.i.+ngton George Was.h.i.+ngton was repaired and converted into a troops.h.i.+p to haul American soldiers to France to kill Germans and, after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, had the honor of carrying President Woodrow Wilson to and from the peace conference at Versailles. It survived through the next two decades to again serve as a troop transport during the Second World War.) was repaired and converted into a troops.h.i.+p to haul American soldiers to France to kill Germans and, after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, had the honor of carrying President Woodrow Wilson to and from the peace conference at Versailles. It survived through the next two decades to again serve as a troop transport during the Second World War.) To escape the anti-German hysteria of the Northeast, the family moved to the Texas Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio on the advice of John Schriever, another of Adolph's brothers, who had immigrated there years earlier and made his living at cattle ranching and speculating in land and oil properties. The region had been heavily settled by Germans since the wave of exiles created by the failure of the liberal revolutions in Germany in 1848. Adolph found work as superintendent of the machinery in the local brewery at New Braunfels, still a German-speaking community in 1917. School was taught in English and Bernhard and Gerhard learned the language quickly, but they had less trouble than they otherwise might have had because the teacher could always translate when they encountered a problem. With the United States now in the war and its industries going full bore, there was a demand for engineering talent. Adolph took a job as quality control engineer at a factory in San Antonio that was making large gasoline-driven engines. The Schrievers s.h.i.+fted to the city. One day in September 1918, Adolph had his head down inspecting an engine. Someone accidentally flipped the starter. The flywheel fractured his skull in two places. He never recovered consciousness and died on September 17, 1918, sixteen days after his thirty-fifth birthday.

A BENEFACTOR AND THE HOUSE ON THE TWELFTH GREEN.

Elizabeth Schriever and her two boys suddenly confronted a stark existence. There was no compensation for an accident like this in those years and she was a widow with a modic.u.m of education and no particular skills she could call upon to support her sons. They were taken in by an uncle of Bernhard's father, Magnus Klattenhoff, who had immigrated a generation earlier and gone into ranching at Slaton, near Lubbock in West Texas. Schriever got a start on a nickname and Americanization there. A Klattenhoff cousin of his age had been baptized with a good Texas first name-Ben. When another boy of the same age arrived at school with the Klattenhoffs, the teacher decided she was not going to be bothered addressing him by his German first name of Bernhard. She dubbed the cousin Ben One and the arrival Ben Two. The locals also had trouble p.r.o.nouncing Gerhard for some reason, and so he gradually acquired the nickname of Gerry. Life was mostly outdoors and healthy-helping with the cattle, picking cotton-but the trauma of their father's loss was always with them and charity is not a livelihood. After a year they moved back to New Braunfels, where friends rented them a small house and their mother worked part-time in a butcher shop and at a minor housekeeping job.

Neither brought in enough to sustain herself and her boys and so Elizabeth Schriever made a grim decision. She put her sons in an orphanage in San Antonio while she set about finding a housekeeping position in the city that paid a respectable wage. The next six months were desolate ones for her children. They were at an age, approximately ten and eight, when boys need their mother. In the span of just a few years, they had also been taken from a solid, familiar place to a strange land where they had lost their father and been repeatedly uprooted. "We never felt we'd been abandoned," Schriever said later, because Elizabeth visited often and explained why she'd had to put them in the orphanage. The staff also treated them well and the hards.h.i.+p was mitigated for Gerry because he had an older brother to give him support. But Schriever had no one to whom he could turn. Nothing could compensate for the loneliness. He did not complain. Ever since his father's death he had felt a sense of responsibility not to make things harder for his mother than they already were. In the end what sustained the boys' faith in their eventual rescue was, as Schriever put it, "the great confidence we had in our mother."

Even after she found a job and took them out of the orphanage, there was still the bar to acceptance for two German boys when all things German were unpopular in the hangover animosity from the war. Felix McKnight, who grew up to become a prominent Texas newspaperman-co-publisher and editor of the Dallas Times Herald- Dallas Times Herald- met Schriever in the third grade. Elizabeth took to McKnight when Schriever brought him home to the house she had rented and became a kind of second mother to him. The two boys began a close and lifelong friends.h.i.+p. McKnight remembered how hard the other boys were on the German kid who spoke with a bit of a guttural accent. He was taller than his schoolmates and so they were afraid to take him on individually, but they would ring him around in a gang, ragging him and yelling that he was Kaiser Wilhelm. Most of the time he kept his temper and endured the taunts, but every once in a while he would make for a couple of the taunters and McKnight would restrain him, afraid that Schriever would get into deeper trouble by being blamed for fist-fighting by a teacher who also had an animus toward Germans. His thirst to be adopted by this new land, however, gradually won over the other boys. Every day the cla.s.s would stand at attention, put their right hands over their hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Schriever recited the pledge with far more emotion than any of his schoolmates and it was not long before his voice was the one leading the daily recital. The German accent faded and so did the ragging. met Schriever in the third grade. Elizabeth took to McKnight when Schriever brought him home to the house she had rented and became a kind of second mother to him. The two boys began a close and lifelong friends.h.i.+p. McKnight remembered how hard the other boys were on the German kid who spoke with a bit of a guttural accent. He was taller than his schoolmates and so they were afraid to take him on individually, but they would ring him around in a gang, ragging him and yelling that he was Kaiser Wilhelm. Most of the time he kept his temper and endured the taunts, but every once in a while he would make for a couple of the taunters and McKnight would restrain him, afraid that Schriever would get into deeper trouble by being blamed for fist-fighting by a teacher who also had an animus toward Germans. His thirst to be adopted by this new land, however, gradually won over the other boys. Every day the cla.s.s would stand at attention, put their right hands over their hearts, and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Schriever recited the pledge with far more emotion than any of his schoolmates and it was not long before his voice was the one leading the daily recital. The German accent faded and so did the ragging.

The job Elizabeth finally found also soon transformed their lives. A wealthy and elderly mortgage banker, Edward Chandler, and his wife had a three-story, sixteen-room, gray brick mansion on West French Place in Laurel Heights, at the time the most fas.h.i.+onable section of San Antonio. The mansion required a staff of about half a dozen. The Chandlers recognized in Elizabeth Schriever an efficient, take-charge woman who could run the place for them-supervising the other servants, making the household purchases, relieving them of any worries as head housekeeper.

Within a year Chandler built her a home for herself in which to raise her boys on a lot he owned at 217 Terry Court on the edge of the Brackenridge Park Golf Course, then within the residential section of a San Antonio of roughly 160,000 persons and now at the center of a city of approximately 1,150,000. The house was a small but adequate wood-frame affair with a white clapboard exterior, set under the immense spreading branches of one of the lot's four antique live oak trees, said by local legend to date from the original Spanish settlement in the early eighteenth century. It had two bedrooms, a large dining-living room area, a kitchen and pantry, and a screened-in porch off to one side. Elizabeth occupied one of the bedrooms; her mother, who had come over from Germany to look after the boys while Elizabeth worked (they called her "Oma," the German equivalent of "Grandma" or "Granny"), slept in the other; and the two young men had their beds out on the porch. In winter they slept under heavy, old-fas.h.i.+oned eiderdown comforters from Germany, the sort that were common before central heating. Neither remembers ever being cold.

The rear of the house lot bordered the green of the twelfth hole. Chandler, who had no children of his own, became a bighearted uncle to the Schriever boys. He had a refreshment stand built under the enveloping tent of the branches of another of the live oak trees so that they could earn pocket money by selling lemonade and c.o.kes and the like to pa.s.sing golfers. When Chandler and his wife died in the early 1920s, Elizabeth struck out on her own. She transformed the soda pop stand at the twelfth green, which the boys had never made much of, into a business profitable enough to support her family. She had a small white structure built with serving windows on one side and in front set wooden benches next to picnic tables. She called her stand, appropriately, "The Oaks," in grat.i.tude for the shade the venerable trees provided her little building and the bench seats and picnic tables, and she featured homemade sandwiches and cookies, along with lemonade and other soft drinks. She charged fifteen cents for a sandwich and a nickel for a gla.s.s of lemonade. Several nights a week she would bake hams to slice for the sandwiches. She soon had a flouris.h.i.+ng business not only from the many golfers but also from other locals seeking a hearty bite and out-of-towners who had heard about her stand.

Elizabeth Schriever kept her boys under a strict regimen. Even when in high school, they had their homework done and were in bed by 9:00 P.M. P.M. Yet she did so with persuasion and self-control. Schriever could not recall her ever striking them, nor did she shout when they crossed her. "She talked you into it," he said. "She reasoned with you." Without health one had nothing, she would tell them, and eating well and sleeping well were vital to maintaining health. Not that they caused her much trouble. They could see how hard she was working to give them a good life and the sense of responsibility that had descended on Schriever with his father's death never left him. Gerry later suspected that her total devotion to raising her sons was the princ.i.p.al reason she did not remarry until she was past sixty. She made certain that they went to catechism cla.s.s at a church in the Lutheran faith of their father, Friedens Evangelical. She was not a churchgoer herself. She was a lapsed Catholic who had rebelled at harsh discipline from the nuns at a convent school in Germany as a girl. She also had no time for church, as weekends were her busiest days at the stand. Yet she did so with persuasion and self-control. Schriever could not recall her ever striking them, nor did she shout when they crossed her. "She talked you into it," he said. "She reasoned with you." Without health one had nothing, she would tell them, and eating well and sleeping well were vital to maintaining health. Not that they caused her much trouble. They could see how hard she was working to give them a good life and the sense of responsibility that had descended on Schriever with his father's death never left him. Gerry later suspected that her total devotion to raising her sons was the princ.i.p.al reason she did not remarry until she was past sixty. She made certain that they went to catechism cla.s.s at a church in the Lutheran faith of their father, Friedens Evangelical. She was not a churchgoer herself. She was a lapsed Catholic who had rebelled at harsh discipline from the nuns at a convent school in Germany as a girl. She also had no time for church, as weekends were her busiest days at the stand.

THE VIRTUES OF GOLF.

The boys settled into the not unpleasant task of growing up in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1920s and 1930s. Schriever was the star pitcher on the Friedens Evangelical baseball team, yet the all-American game did not attract him as much as it did most other boys. Golf became his pa.s.sion. His obsession with it first brought out the relentless compet.i.tiveness, the fierce desire to emerge as number one that was behind the friendly, restrained exterior of his personality. The generosity of Edward Chandler was responsible for getting him started. An enthusiastic golfer himself, Chandler had decided that Schriever and Gerry should be taught the game. After Elizabeth had gone to work for him, he took them out to the San Antonio Country Club (he was its president), and instructed the golf pro there to shorten some clubs (golf clubs had wooden shafts in those days) and to give them lessons. The boys had a ready supply of golf b.a.l.l.s from the San Antonio River, then a relatively shallow, free-flowing stream that ran through the middle of Brackenridge Park Golf Course, where they could play for a minimal fee because it was public. They would simply wade in and fish stray b.a.l.l.s from the river bottom. Gerry became a quite competent golfer, but never the dazzler on the links his older brother, Bernard, was to become. Schriever was off on his first quest.

Golf is a social game and yet it is also an intensely solitary one. A golfer plays on the course alongside others, but he wins or loses on his own performance. There is virtually no margin for error. A tournament can be won or lost by a single stroke. The game requires enormous and sustained powers of concentration and self-control, because it is as much mental as it is physical.

Much later in life, after the immigrant boy from Bremerhaven wore stars in the U.S. Air Force and was charged with creating America's intercontinental ballistic missile force, Schriever was renowned for his staunchness under stress and the deliberate fas.h.i.+on in which he would thread his way through multiple obstacles to a solution. When test missiles exploded in flames and thunder on the launching pads, fizzled out and crashed back to earth, or strayed wildly off course and had to be blown up in midair by the range safety officer-to ridicule in the press and irritation and impatience at the Pentagon and the White House-others would begin to lose their nerve. Not Schriever. He would remain calm and press on with the searching and questioning, he and his people learning from each failure until the rocket flew straight and true.

At school and on the links of Brackenridge Park Golf Course, he made a small number of close friends like McKnight and he had casual friends.h.i.+ps as well, but beneath the affable surface he was a loner. He did not consciously try to distance himself from others or to set himself apart, yet he noticed that others always seemed to sense a distance and to treat him accordingly. His casual friends, for example, usually addressed him as "Schriever," rather than as Ben or Bennie. Others sensed a distance because the distance was there. There was a kind of Teutonic quality about him. Reserve was his most natural state. He was little given to small talk and the jocular exchanges that make for easy friends.h.i.+ps. His conversations usually focused on what interested him, and what interested him he took seriously. Part of this introverted personality was undoubtedly in his genes, but whatever his genes gave him had clearly been magnified by the uprooting from Germany, the bolt-from-the-sky death of his father, the striving to be accepted as an American, and the painful, uncertain years before his mother found her position with the Chandlers. The experiences had taught him that to deal with adversity he had to look for strength within himself, a lesson he also learned from his mother, who set an example and of whom he was in awe. In the complexity that is the human personality this introverted side did not diminish in the least his drive to compete and to prevail, initially in golf and then in matters of greater moment later in life. He was insightful enough to be conscious of the need. As he would put it with his wry sense of humor, "I hate to lose."

Right after graduation in June of 1927, still sixteen, he demonstrated that he was a youngster to watch in the sport. The first Texas state champions.h.i.+p tournament for juniors was held at the difficult Willow Springs course right outside San Antonio. The dark horse of the tournament, as one local newspaper put it, led the field of fifty-four in the qualifying round to win a pair of golfing shoes from the Broadway Sporting Goods Store and a silver medal from the Light Light, a San Antonio newspaper that was one of the sponsors of the tournament. He was defeated in the semifinal round by another sixteen-year-old, from Dallas, but not before winning more praise from the local press as the "courageous" young golfer who "made a powerful comeback on the last nine holes as the count stood against him." The self-control Schriever displayed in tournaments did not mean that he lacked a temper. When he was playing badly for some reason, he would curse vehemently and fling whatever club he happened to have in his hands a remarkable distance.

His failure to attain the starting lineup on the freshman baseball team at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, popularly known as Texas A&M, which he entered that fall of 1927, confirmed him in his focus on golf. As always, it was Elizabeth who made it possible for him to go to college, paying the approximately $1,000 a year cost for his room, board, and tuition with the acc.u.mulated nickels and dimes from her sandwich stand and with some help from Uncle George back in Union City, New Jersey, who had branched out from the bakery and delicatessen business to acquire a local bus company as well. A shoulder broken the next year in a soph.o.m.ore touch football game ironically helped. He had always been relentless about practice. Gerry remembered how his brother would spend an hour working on a single stroke. He bore down harder in the course of rebuilding the shoulder muscles after the bone had healed. His golf score went from the low 80s into the low 70s. By his senior year at A&M, again captain of the golf team, he was a scratch player: he had to maintain a consistent average of playing up to par. He gained a mention in Ripley's Believe It or Not Ripley's Believe It or Not for three times driving more than 300 yards to the same green on the Brackenridge course and one-putting for an eagle. The year he graduated, 1931, he won the Texas state junior amateur champions.h.i.+p and the city champions.h.i.+p in San Antonio, where he had become a local golf celebrity. for three times driving more than 300 yards to the same green on the Brackenridge course and one-putting for an eagle. The year he graduated, 1931, he won the Texas state junior amateur champions.h.i.+p and the city champions.h.i.+p in San Antonio, where he had become a local golf celebrity.

Now approaching his full adult height of six feet, three inches, but still trimmer than the 180 pounds of muscle and bone he was eventually to weigh, he was a figure of angular elegance on the course, wavy dark brown hair over slim, well-cut features with the bright blue eyes he had inherited from his mother. Most young Texas golfers played in slacks. They considered the British-style golf outfit that the pros then favored as sissified. Bennie, who had a sense of style, did not. The light tan or gray plus fours he wore above long socks, two-tone brown and white golf shoes, a fancy cloth and leather belt at the waist, and a white short-sleeve s.h.i.+rt worked well on his frame and made him stand out still more from the pack.

Decision time came during his senior year at A&M. He was offered the pro's position at the golf course at Bryan, Texas, just north of the college. The job paid $200 a month, more than he could make doing anything else and a lot of money in 1931, the third year of the Great Depression. He had no chance at all after graduation of employment in his major-structural architecture as his degree called it, construction engineering in a more plainspoken description-because the jobs simply did not exist. Professional golf compet.i.tion did not have the social status it was later to acquire, however, and the tournament purses bore no resemblance to what they were to reach. Elizabeth was also opposed. She wanted her sons to become men worthy of respect, and professional athletes did not hold a place of respectability in the German middle-cla.s.s world from which she drew her standards. Schriever made up his own mind, however. He reasoned that he hadn't gone to college for four years and acquired a bachelor of science degree to devote the rest of his life to golf. He decided he was going to do what had begun to attract him most and become a flier in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

WHITE SILK SCARVES AND OPEN c.o.c.kPITS.

San Antonio was a military town in the 1920s and 1930s and Bennie Schriever had grown up in its aura. The Alamo is located there, and during the Spanish-American War at the turn of the century, Theodore Roosevelt and the officers of his 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, better known as the Rough Riders, had hung out in the bar of the old Menger Hotel before departing for fame in Cuba. The tank had not yet replaced the horse in Schriever's youth, although in a harbinger of what was to come a squadron of slow, lumbering First World War tanks was stationed at Fort Sam Houston. Bennie and Gerry would gather with crowds of other children to watch the tanks and the horses of the cavalry maneuver against each other on the expanse of the fort's parade ground. The officers of the cavalry partic.i.p.ated in the polo matches regularly staged there and at the munic.i.p.al polo field next to Brackenridge Park Golf Course. In choosing Texas A&M, Schriever had also chosen to attend a military school. The college was all male then, and except for a few youths who were physically unqualified, every student wore an Army uniform, was enrolled in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and marched to and from the mess hall for breakfast and dinner. Bennie's ROTC unit was B Battery of the Field Artillery, traditionally a San Antonio organization. After graduation, he was commissioned a Reserve second lieutenant in the artillery of the day, also still drawn by teams of horses. Howitzers and horses held no interest for Schriever. He would later joke that his legs were too long for the stirrups.

Above all, San Antonio was an Army fliers town. Schriever had grown up in a place where technology had literally flown past the horse. Kelly Field on the edge of the city was the Air Corps' main center for advanced pilot training. As a boy, Schriever would sit on the fence out there and watch the First World War-era biplanes take off and land, their Liberty engines emitting so much thick black exhaust that they were called "coal burners." Golf had also played its part in attracting him to flying because he had first caddied for and then played with and against the Air Corps officers who frequented the Brackenridge Park course. Schriever looked up to them as an elite. This was the romantic era of flying, of white silk scarves, leather helmets and goggles, and open c.o.c.kpits, the First World War exploits of the German knight of the sky, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, and the American Ace of Aces, Edward V. "Eddie" Rickenbacker, fresh in memory. "The gals sure liked it. It was better than owning a convertible," Bennie would laugh and say in his old age. His mother dated a pilot who was subsequently one of his instructors.

In late 1931, after he had reached the minimum age of twenty-one, he applied for Flying School, as it was then called, as a cadet and was chosen for the entering cla.s.s of July 1932. The course was a year, with Primary and Basic training at recently completed Randolph Field, also adjacent to San Antonio, and then Advanced at Kelly. Even if he survived the 50 percent washout rate and won his wings and a Reserve commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Corps, he still could not have high expectations of turning the Air Corps into a career because he probably would not be able to convert his commission into a Regular, i.e., permanent, one. He could look forward with certainty only to a year of active service before he was tossed back to civilian life and unemployment. In the midst of the Depression, the Air Corps was being kept on a bare-cupboard budget by Congress. It had no funds to take in more than a few new Regular officers annually or to give its Reservists more than a year of flying experience. But at twenty-one, a man could always hope that he might beat the odds.

To pa.s.s the time and earn what he could before Flying School, he played a number of exhibition tournaments with other amateurs against pros in the area, worked behind the counter at the clubhouse shop at Brackenridge, and in June 1932, just before going to Randolph Field, won the San Antonio city champions.h.i.+p for a second time. His opponent in the final round, Lieutenant Kenneth Rogers, was a pilot instructor there who was to serve as a brigadier general during the Second World War. "City Golf Champ Will Enter Flying Service July 1," the San Antonio Evening News San Antonio Evening News bragged in a headline. Schriever paid for the headline and the rest of his local media acclaim with some special hazing: the more senior cadets in an earlier cla.s.s at Randolph ordered him to stand at attention in the mess hall and read his golf clippings to them while they ate. bragged in a headline. Schriever paid for the headline and the rest of his local media acclaim with some special hazing: the more senior cadets in an earlier cla.s.s at Randolph ordered him to stand at attention in the mess hall and read his golf clippings to them while they ate.

He managed to solo successfully after his first half dozen hours of instruction in Primary, when most washouts occurred, despite a badly sprained ankle, which he taped securely in order to work the rudder pedals. Of the approximately 200 aspiring airmen who had entered Randolph on July 1, 1932, Bennie was among the ninety or so who went on to Advanced training at Kelly eight months later. That ever-present risk of an airman's profession, death in a fatal crash, claimed two of his cla.s.smates, but his steady temperament made him a good if not a spirited pilot, which may be why he was a.s.signed to bombers rather than pursuit aircraft, as fighters were then designated. He graduated on June 29, 1933, was awarded his wings and second lieutenant's commission, and was sent for his year of active duty to the 9th Bombardment Squadron at March Field near Riverside, California.

ENTERING THE BROTHERHOOD.

Elizabeth and Gerry went with him to Riverside. The grimly worsening Depression had severely reduced her business at the sandwich stand on the twelfth hole. People were not playing golf in nearly the numbers they had been and the number of visitors coming to San Antonio on vacation had also declined drastically. So she closed the stand before departing. Gerry had been forced to leave A&M in the middle of his soph.o.m.ore year in January 1933 because of Elizabeth's straitened circ.u.mstances. Her bank had failed and taken all of her savings with it. Bennie was now their source of support with his second lieutenant's pay of $125 a month, an additional half again of $62.50 as flying pay, and an allowance of roughly $30 a month to rent a house off base because there were no quarters available at the field for the families of Reservists. His salary and flying pay were soon reduced, however, when the new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, decreed a 15 percent pay cut for the entire military, which remained in effect into 1935.

In entering the officer ranks of the U.S. Army Air Corps, Bennie Schriever thought of himself as having joined an elite group of flying men. He could not know precisely how important to the destiny of the nation that elite was to be. At the end of 1938, when the menace of Hitler's Germany and Imperial j.a.pan at last began to awaken Congress, there were only about 1,650 officers, including Reservists, in the entire Air Corps. From these 1,650 officers would come the men who were to create and lead the mighty fleet of the skies during the Second World War.

The commanding officer at March Field that summer of 1933 was the man who was to shape and command that armada, Henry "Hap" Arnold, then just a lieutenant colonel. He would subsequently cast a long shadow of influence over the nature of American air, missile, and s.p.a.ce power during the Cold War and the arms race with the Soviet Union that followed. Arnold's princ.i.p.al deputy at March Field in 1933 was a trim, mustachioed man, Major Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, who wore his uniform cap crushed in on the sides in rakish fas.h.i.+on as if he were sitting in a c.o.c.kpit with his earphones on. At bachelor social occasions, he played the guitar and sang risque songs, and he was fond of late-night poker games at which he would while away the hours sipping Scotch whiskey with soda and chain-smoking cigarettes. Lieutenant Schriever was soon initiated into these nocturnal gatherings. Spaatz's carefree exterior concealed a relentless determination whenever the needs of his profession required it. He was an accomplished fighter pilot. During the First World War he had shot down three German aircraft in just a few weeks and returned with the nation's second-highest decoration for valor, the Distinguished Service Cross. During the Second World War, he would command the air forces of the European theater as a four-star general and oversee the strategic bombing campaign against n.a.z.i Germany. When the independent U.S. Air Force was finally established in 1947, Spaatz would become its first chief of staff. The other officer at March Field on whom Arnold depended was a captain named Ira Eaker-short, balding, and round-faced, with penetrating eyes. In the war to come, Eaker would lead the famous Eighth Air Force out of England and then command the Mediterranean air forces under Spaatz in the task of pummeling the Third Reich into bits and pieces.

Of the three, Arnold was the man who was to matter the most for Second Lieutenant Schriever. Arnold went back to the origins of American aviation. A West Point graduate in the Cla.s.s of 1907, he had aspired to the cavalry and instead had been sent to the infantry, which he detested. To escape, he had volunteered for the Signal Corps' nascent Aeronautical Division, from which the Air Corps was eventually to evolve, and became one of the first half dozen Army pilots when he was trained to fly in 1911 at the factory the Wright brothers had established at Dayton, Ohio, to profit from their invention. A solidly proportioned man of medium build, Arnold was a complicated figure, always impatient to accomplish any task at hand, yet long-enduring of the frustrations of military life and the struggle to build a modern air force. During the First World War he had been denied a combat a.s.signment in Europe until it was too late to see any action; instead, he had been posted to Was.h.i.+ngton to monitor the effort to gear up American industry for the ma.s.s production of aircraft. The program had been a failure, from which Arnold had learned what not to do when it was his turn to take charge and organize industry for the production of hundreds of thousands of planes during the Second World War. In 1925, he had displayed the moral courage to ignore warnings from his superiors and place his career in peril by testifying in defense of Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitch.e.l.l, the crusader for an independent air force, at Mitch.e.l.l's court-martial. Afterward, Arnold had barely evaded court-martial himself for using military printing facilities to lobby congressmen and the press on Mitch.e.l.l's behalf. His punishment was exile to Fort Riley, Kansas, the nation's largest cavalry post, to take charge of a small detachment of observation aircraft attached to the horse soldiers.

When Schriever met him in 1933, Arnold's career was back in motion. March Field was the Air Corps' West Coast tactical operations center. At forty-nine, Arnold had matured as an adept organizer and commander. In his search for ideas to create a modern air force he had formed a friends.h.i.+p with Robert Millikan, who headed the California Inst.i.tute of Technology in Pasadena. Millikan had in turn introduced him to Theodore von Karman, the Hungarian aeronautical engineering genius whom Millikan had recruited for Caltech in 1930. Von Karman, who had been teaching and directing an aeronautical engineering laboratory at Aachen, was among the first of the distinguished European intellectuals of Jewish ancestry driven across the Atlantic by the rise of Hitler and the growing national madness consuming Germany. Reaching out to such a man was a natural consequence of Arnold's urge to employ science and technology to develop an effective air arm, an urge that was eventually to transform him into a technological visionary. He had every reason to be dissatisfied with the aircraft in his force. The planes with which the Air Corps was then equipped were essentially throwbacks to the First World War era. The B-3 and B-4 Keystone bombers that Bennie and his mates in the 9th Bombardment Squadron flew were big, ungainly biplanes with highly flammable cloth and wood-frame wings and fuselages. The c.o.c.kpits were open. Some of the Keystones had two-way radios. Others had only receivers-the pilot could not reply. Top speed was a little more than 100 miles per hour and range was just 400. Safe flying was restricted to fair weather because the only instruments were an airspeed indicator, an altimeter, a horizontal needle-and-ball device that mimicked the att.i.tude of the plane when turning or banking, and a compa.s.s. The fighters were better-Boeing P-12s with 500-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines-but they too were old-fas.h.i.+oned biplanes with wood and fabric wings and had no radios at all. Lack of operating funds also affected training. Pilots were restricted to four hours of flying a month, which meant that the younger aviators like Schriever could not get enough time in the air to become proficient.

Golf was one of the ways in which the lieutenant drew himself to the attention of the older man who was to so affect his destiny. Again for lack of operating funds, Air Corps officers usually worked only half a day, at most until 3:30 P.M. P.M., after a leisurely lunch, leaving plenty of time to play. Schriever's prowess on the links at the nearby Victoria Country Club at Riverside, where he won two amateur tournaments and set a new club record of 63, received local newspaper coverage that quickly made him stand out among the new pilots. Elizabeth Schriever also helped because of the military social customs of the day. As Schriever was a bachelor, his mother subst.i.tuted for a wife during social events at the base. Arnold's wife, Eleanor, or "Bee" as she was nicknamed, was roughly the same age as Elizabeth. She had spent three years in Germany as a young woman and enjoyed speaking the language. The two women became friends. Their friends.h.i.+p led to Bennie becoming well acquainted with his commanding officer.

A FIASCO AND REFORM.

The air mail fiasco was the beginning of the end to stagnation. In February 1934, President Roosevelt suddenly canceled the air mail contracts between the Post Office and the new-fledged commercial airlines because a Senate investigation had discovered evidence of fraud. Roosevelt had not acted, however, without first having postal officials ask Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, chief of the Air Corps, if his pilots could temporarily fly the mail until honest arrangements could be made with the airlines. Foulois regarded the president's inquiry as an order. He also saw it as an opportunity to gain more appropriations for his strapped Air Corps by generating a lot of favorable publicity from a successful operation. "We have had a great deal of experience in flying at night, and in flying in fogs and bad weather, in blind flying, and in flying under all other conditions," Foulois told the House Post Office Committee. Given the state of his aircraft and the amateurishness of his pilots, Foulois's recklessness in accepting the mission and his false testimony to Congress bordered on the criminal.

To meet the schedule set by the Post Office did require flying at night and in bad weather. Commercial airline pilots were flying at night by the mid-1930s. They had two-way radios to obtain information on weather conditions ahead and at airfields where they intended to land and some rudimentary instruments to fly by when the weather was marginal. Air Corps pilots were not only unaccustomed to flying at night, they couldn't talk to anybody from many of their aircraft, and they lacked both instrumentation and training for dicey weather. The weather that February and March of 1934 would have daunted the best of airline pilots, however, and certainly forced delays in mail delivery. It was some of the worst late-winter weather-blizzards, dense fog, frigid gales, heavy rains-since records had been kept and it struck much of the country, but especially the West, where Schriever and his comrades were operating.

Arnold was put in charge of the Western Region, with his headquarters at Salt Lake City. He broke his squadrons down into detachments so that they could be parceled out along the various routes. Every available aircraft, from the P-12 pursuits, to the observation planes, to the awkward Keystones, was thrust into the task. To keep from freezing in the open c.o.c.kpits, the pilots wore leather face masks and flying suits, both lined with sheepskin. Bennie's detachment was a.s.signed portions of two routes, from Salt Lake City to Boise, Idaho, and from Salt Lake to Cheyenne, Wyoming, via Rock Springs. Schriever remembered the eagerness with which he and his fellow pilots accepted the challenge, as young warriors so often do when they go into harm's way without knowing the odds. After the miserly four-hours-a-month diet, it was above all finally a chance to do some flying. Bennie's time in the air escalated rapidly and by March and April he was logging nearly sixty hours a month.

On February 19, 1934, just as Foulois had promised, the U.S. Army Air Corps loaded the mail and flew into the breach, night and weather be d.a.m.ned. Three pilots out of Salt Lake were killed in a single day, two of them Bennie's Flying School cla.s.smates. One was trying to make it to Boise, pressing on beneath steadily lowering weather, when he ran out of visibility and alt.i.tude at the same time and flew into the ground. The two others smacked into the side of a mountain they could not see, apparently while forging on through a snowstorm. On another occasion, Schriever and two other pilots drove out to the airfield at Cheyenne to take a couple of O-38 observation planes from Cheyenne back to Salt Lake at night. The two other pilots were West Pointers who outranked Bennie. They chose to fly together and to take off first in a newer model of the O-38, which had a canopy over the tandem c.o.c.kpits to protect them from the weather. While Schriever waited behind them in the open-c.o.c.kpit version, the two West Pointers sped down the runway. What they had neglected to do, because they were too unseasoned to understand the necessity, was to come out and familiarize themselves with the airfield in daylight. They used only part of the runway, pulling up before they had gained enough speed and lift to clear a high-tension wire concealed by the darkness just beyond the end of the field. Bennie watched them die instantly. Twelve pilots were killed in all and there were sixty-six crashes. Although most were obviously not fatal, the wrecks still made for unpleasant photographs in the newspapers. In late March, an embarra.s.sed and angry Roosevelt arranged for the airlines to resume flying the mail as of the beginning of June.

Schriever and many of his fellow fliers came to believe that their comrades did not die in vain, that their deaths helped create an impetus to modernize the country's air force and thus avoid defeat in the new war to come. An investigative board convened under Newton Baker, President Woodrow Wilson's secretary of war during the First World War, recommended important organizational changes in the Air Corps structure and a program of instrument and night flying for pilots as well as enough hours in the air, three hundred per year, to raise them to proficiency. The board did not specifically recommend equipping the Air Corps and Naval Aviation with state-of-the-art aircraft, but the deaths and the shocking nature of the episode made this necessity strikingly apparent. Progress and reform, however, were neither steady nor uninterrupted. The Roosevelt administration and Congress remained stingy until war in Europe loomed in 1938 and hostilities actually began the following year. The Regular Army generals who opposed any independence for the Air Corps used the War Department General Staff, which they controlled, to keep the pace to a slow march. Nevertheless, officers like Hap Arnold kept prodding and cajoling from within and notable advances occurred through the ingenuity and entrepreneurs.h.i.+p of the struggling but resourceful American aircraft industry. In 1935, Boeing produced the prototype of the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress, the first of the long-range strategic bombers that, with the follow-on B-24 Liberator from the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, were to bring the dark cloud formations of destruction to Germany's skies. With the exception of the B-29 Superfortress, another Boeing triumph that was developed during the war, most of the combat aircraft the U.S. Army Air Forces were to fly during the Second World War were either in production or soon to go into production by the time the j.a.panese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Bennie recalled flying the workhorse Curtiss P-40 fighter when he was a test pilot at Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio, in 1939. That same year, the Air Corps purchased the test models of the twin-engine Lockheed P-38, the first of the high-alt.i.tude American pursuits to approach the performance of the latest German and j.a.panese fighters. A rudimentary fighting air force was in place when it was needed. A dozen B-17s on their way to the Philippines were, in fact, preparing to land at Hickam Field in Hawaii when the j.a.panese arrived on that Sunday morning of December 7. To Schriever, the sequence was clear. Had the alarm not been raised by the air mail disaster, that rudimentary air force would not have existed when the moment of peril came. Another lesson was equally clear to him-technological backwardness meant failure and defeat.

The air mail fiasco also enabled Bennie to extend his flying duty for eight months, in n.i.g.g.ardly increments of six months and then an additional two, until he finally was taken off active service in March 1935 and had to return to civilian life in San Antonio. Elizabeth went back with him to resurrect her sandwich stand. The Depression seemed to be easing a bit and she thought she could make a go of it once more. Gerry did stints as a social worker in Los Angeles and then in San Antonio, until he found a night job with an oil field mapping service. It enabled him to take enough cla.s.ses during the day at what was then called the University of San Antonio to complete the two years of college that was then one of the minimal requirements for Flying School. He entered, as Bennie had, at Randolph Field in February 1938, and won his wings as a pursuit pilot the following February. One of Franklin Roosevelt's programs to alleviate the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps, shortly enabled Bennie to return to active duty. Each of the CCC camps had an Army officer in charge. In June 1935, he volunteered to take over a CCC camp on the Gila River along the Arizona-New Mexico border. The camp was four to five miles down a gravel road off a tarmac strip that led to the New Mexico railroad crossing town of Lordsburg.

The CCC was Schriever's first lesson in unorthodox management. While now a Reserve first lieutenant in the Air Corps and theoretically the camp commander, he could not legally apply military discipline to the nearly 200 boys in the place because all of them were civilians. Duty with the CCC ruined a number of freshly begun military careers because the junior officers put in charge did apply ill-suited methods of military discipline and provoked a backlash. The youths, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, had volunteered to build small water retention dams and do other conservation work in the surrounding high desert country for a nominal salary. Most were whites from impoverished families in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, with a small number of Hispanics and a half dozen or so blacks. There was no segregation. The young men lived together in barracks. Schriever, at twenty-five not much older than his charges, decided that the only way he could acquire control of the camp was to identify those boys who seemed to be natural leaders and get them to run it for him. As carefully as he could, he chose the six to eight youths who stood out from the others and appointed them group leaders, in effect his top sergeants. They held regular meetings. Bennie urged them to level with him about any problems in the camp. They also held special meetings, in what Schriever called his "kangaroo court approach," whenever one of the inevitable troublemakers among the camp population made a serious nuisance of himself. If the boys decided that the offender, who was not invited to hear his fate, was incorrigible, Schriever would give them the nod to run him out of the camp. There was no violence, simply enough hara.s.sment to persuade the nuisance to leave.

The lesson he learned running the CCC camp stayed with Bennie. He was to apply the method again and again throughout his career, ultimately in accomplis.h.i.+ng the momentous projects he was given at its height: study a task, identify the right man to solve the problem-no yes-men, you have to know what is really going on and yes-men won't tell you the truth-then win the man's loyalty and back him up while he does the job. Capable people, he observed watching his youth leaders, also have minds of their own and you have to refrain from interfering and let them accomplish a task in their way. He made certain as well that his was a happy camp. He had Army trucks haul the boys into Lordsburg for baseball and basketball games against other camps or just for weekend liberty, showed films for entertainment, bought the best food he could locally, let the boys supplement it with the plentiful pheasants, quail, and doves they shot along the Gila River, and turned the kitchen over to a young man who happened to be a talented cook. When Bennie left in the summer of 1936 at the end of his year, the boys presented him with a .22 caliber Smith & Wesson target pistol and a wrist.w.a.tch they took up a collection to buy.

STAYING THE COURSE.

This time he was off to Panama. As it gradually geared up, the Air Corps had begun accepting applications from Reservists to return to active duty flying status. Schriever applied and was sent to Albrook Field on the Pacific side of the Ca.n.a.l Zone. Before going he had to agree to revert from first lieutenant back to second to save the Air Corps money on his salary. Golf came to his a.s.sistance again. The game is, as Schriever once shrewdly observed, "the finest avenue for meeting the right people.... It is a friend-making gam