A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 3

The campaign began to crest not long before Bennie was to leave in July 1949 for his year at the National War College. The Junior Indians hatched a plot to have von Karman convene a general meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board that April and invite General Hoyt Vandenberg, who had become the second chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force on Spaatz's retirement the previous year, to address it. Vandenberg's elevation to leader of the Air Force had undoubtedly been a.s.sisted by the fact that he was a nephew of Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican power on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. It was Senator Vandenberg who had persuaded his Republican colleagues to join him in promoting the bipartisan foreign policy that Harry Truman depended on to sustain his strategy of containment against the Soviet Union. But Hoyt Vandenberg had also long been a favorite of Spaatz and he had acquitted himself well commanding the Ninth Air Force in the battle for France after the Normandy landing. He was considered to have an open mind in the current dispute. The crux of the plot was to have Walkowicz write a speech in which Vandenberg would ask the SAB to conduct a comprehensive study of how research and development should be handled in the Air Force and give him recommendations accordingly. If Vandenberg accepted the text and gave the speech, the hounds would be off and running. Putt and von Karman approved the scheme and the meeting was scheduled.

Vandenberg agreed and then at the last minute had to cancel his appearance. The speech was delivered instead by his vice chief of staff, General Muir Fairchild. That was good enough. The hounds were were running. A committee was formed with a swing member who was certain to uphold the plotters' cause-that Renaissance man Jimmy Doolittle. He commanded respect high and low because he had done it all-champion racing plane pilot, the first aviator to take off and land blind on instruments alone, scholar, oil industry executive. His out-of-the-blue air raid on Tokyo in the bleak spring of 1942-Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle at the controls of the lead plane as sixteen bomb-laden B-25s wrestled their way aloft in a forty-mile-per-hour gale from the rolling deck of the aircraft carrier USS running. A committee was formed with a swing member who was certain to uphold the plotters' cause-that Renaissance man Jimmy Doolittle. He commanded respect high and low because he had done it all-champion racing plane pilot, the first aviator to take off and land blind on instruments alone, scholar, oil industry executive. His out-of-the-blue air raid on Tokyo in the bleak spring of 1942-Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle at the controls of the lead plane as sixteen bomb-laden B-25s wrestled their way aloft in a forty-mile-per-hour gale from the rolling deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet- Hornet- was just the kind of lift in spirit the American public so sorely needed at the time. Hollywood was to make the raid a legend with the wartime film was just the kind of lift in spirit the American public so sorely needed at the time. Hollywood was to make the raid a legend with the wartime film Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. Later that year, Hap Arnold had promoted him to brigadier general and given him command of a new air force, the Twelfth, being formed for Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa on November 8, 1942, the first offensive action of the war against the n.a.z.is. Then he had gone to England to take over the Eighth Air Force and its strategic bombers. Doolittle had finished the war with the three stars of a lieutenant general and had returned to Sh.e.l.l Oil, but Arnold had persuaded him to become a permanent consultant to the chief of staff and given him an office at the Pentagon. Bennie made a point of getting to know him well, often seeking his help, and Doolittle was to join in pinning Bennie's first star on his shoulder tabs. Later that year, Hap Arnold had promoted him to brigadier general and given him command of a new air force, the Twelfth, being formed for Torch, the Anglo-American invasion of French North Africa on November 8, 1942, the first offensive action of the war against the n.a.z.is. Then he had gone to England to take over the Eighth Air Force and its strategic bombers. Doolittle had finished the war with the three stars of a lieutenant general and had returned to Sh.e.l.l Oil, but Arnold had persuaded him to become a permanent consultant to the chief of staff and given him an office at the Pentagon. Bennie made a point of getting to know him well, often seeking his help, and Doolittle was to join in pinning Bennie's first star on his shoulder tabs.

Doolittle's presence on the committee was a virtual guarantee that Vandenberg would accept its recommendations, although there were apparently important details still to be worked out. A tale in the Air Force, perhaps apocryphal, says that Doolittle did this final persuading while he and Vandenberg were crouching in a blind hunting ducks. The committee's two princ.i.p.al findings were: (1) the establishment of a separate command to take charge of all research and development (the laboratories at Wright Field, for example, would remain there but no longer be under control of the Air Materiel Command); and (2) the appointment of a deputy chief of staff for development to exercise oversight from Air Force headquarters at the Pentagon and lend R&D equal status with other departments like Operations and Personnel. The Air Materiel Command would retain responsibility for production and supply. On January 23, 1950, a new Air Research and Development Command (ARDC), with headquarters in Baltimore, was established, and Major General Gordon Saville, a combatively forthright man who had shown a gift for destroying columns of German armor with P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, was named the first deputy chief of staff, development.

Schriever expected to be given a field a.s.signment when he completed his year at the National War College in mid-1950, probably as deputy commander of the proving ground at Eglin Field, now Eglin Air Force Base, in Florida. Instead, General Saville brought him back to the Pentagon and he was soon promoted into a job that seemed ideal for an officer with Bennie's education and temperament. He was made the a.s.sistant for development planning. His task was to formulate projections called Development Planning Objectives for each of the Air Force's mission fields-strategic, tactical, air defense, transport, and recon naissance and intelligence. The projections were not paper exercises. Schriever had to discern the nature of the aircraft and other weaponry, and the related equipment and techniques, required to fulfill each mission in the future. The plans had to be realistic and practical. The aircraft, for example, while next-generation, had to be achievable within what could reasonably be foreseen in the advance of technology. Schriever, of course, lacked the knowledge to complete such projections by himself. To formulate them he had to organize teams of scientists and engineers and other specialists in each area, drawing on the talent pool available to him from the Scientific Advisory Board, the RAND Corporation, and consultants recruited from the universities and industry. The Development Planning job turned out to be excellent preparation for the work that lay ahead of him in overseeing the building of the intercontinental ballistic missile. Because he was always dealing with what was to be accomplished tomorrow and not today, he was learning how to differentiate between what was future-feasible and future-fantasy and to do so in a variety of disciplines, not just in aeronautical engineering, where he had specific competence.

The job, however, soon turned out to be anything but ideal. It put Bennie at grave career risk by running him afoul of "the Cigar," the service nickname for Curtis LeMay, the most prestigious combat officer in the United States Air Force, who was now back from his tour in Europe. His trademark was a stogie, perpetually in hand or clenched defiantly in the side of his mouth, and he had power and influence exceeded only by that of the chief of staff.

BOMBER LEADER.

He would be remembered as the crazed general who wanted to bomb the people of North Vietnam "back into the Stone Age," as the crank who ran for vice president on the 1968 presidential ticket of George Wallace, the racist from Alabama, and as the inspiration for General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove. Dr. Strangelove. But in earlier years there had been a great deal more to Curtis Emerson LeMay. He had been the greatest leader of bomber aircraft in the history of American aviation until his judgment was warped by the advent of nuclear weapons and the fear and fervor of the Cold War. He looked the grim part of a bomber commander. His broad square-jawed face, straight mouth, strong chin, intense eyes, and thick black hair combed back from a high forehead said that this was a man who meant business. The lingering effects on the right side of his face of an episode of Bell's palsy, a type of facial paralysis brought on in his case by flying in the frigid air of unheated c.o.c.kpits at high alt.i.tudes, heightened the impression. So did his taciturn nature and blunt manner of speech. But in earlier years there had been a great deal more to Curtis Emerson LeMay. He had been the greatest leader of bomber aircraft in the history of American aviation until his judgment was warped by the advent of nuclear weapons and the fear and fervor of the Cold War. He looked the grim part of a bomber commander. His broad square-jawed face, straight mouth, strong chin, intense eyes, and thick black hair combed back from a high forehead said that this was a man who meant business. The lingering effects on the right side of his face of an episode of Bell's palsy, a type of facial paralysis brought on in his case by flying in the frigid air of unheated c.o.c.kpits at high alt.i.tudes, heightened the impression. So did his taciturn nature and blunt manner of speech.

He began as a fighter pilot, but in 1936, at the age of thirty, he requested a transfer to bombers. He reasoned that the fighter was a defensive aircraft (and this would hold true until the coming of the jet age and the development of powerful fighter-bombers in the late 1950s and 1960s), whereas the bomber was an intrinsically offensive weapon that carried the war to the enemy. His reasoning was infused with the theory on long-range strategic bombardment that had become the central doctrine of the Air Corps in the 1920s and 1930s. As refined and taught at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Alabama, the doctrine held that air power could win a war alone by bombing an enemy's industry and related infrastructure into rubble and thus destroying his capacity to fight. The bombardment faculty at the Tactical School contended that "a well organized, well planned, and well flown air force attack ... cannot be stopped." Moreover, the attacks were to be flown in daytime, so that the bombers could be certain of their targets and strike with accuracy.

When LeMay made his decision at the end of 1936, the first of the bombers capable of conducting such long-range raids, the four-engine Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, was about to enter the Air Corps inventory. The second, the B-24 Liberator, was not far off. Hap Arnold, Carl Spaatz, Ira Eaker, and the other men who were to lead the U.S. Army Air Forces in the Second World War all subscribed to the theory, but evolving a military theory is one thing and carrying it into practice in the furnace of conflict is another. LeMay had the genius of the implementer. While the theory proved too optimistic-air power alone could not win the war-LeMay was the man who demonstrated how it could make a mighty contribution to victory.

The bombsight of the Second World War was called the Norden after Carl Norden, who perfected it over several years during the 1930s. It required a minimum of four and preferably seven or eight minutes of straight and level flight, while the bombardier adjusted it, in order to put enough bombs on a large target, such as a petroleum refinery, a factory complex, or a railway marshaling yard, to inflict serious damage. Sent to England in October 1942, as a colonel commanding a bombardment group of B-17s, LeMay proved that this could be done without losing most of a formation to German antiaircraft fire. Some of the planes would be shot down, others would be damaged, but the majority would get through and the target would be hit hard.

He developed the first practical bomber formation, called the "combat box." He put multiple combat boxes together to form a "combat wing." The aerial gunnery schools in the United States for a bomber's machine gunners were pathetically amateurish in the early years of the war. LeMay lobbied for gunnery schools in England to teach the men how to handle their .50 calibers well enough to knock down German fighters boring in to rake a bomber. He established "lead crew" schools for bombardiers and navigators to familiarize themselves with potential targets. When one of these was designated for a strike at a morning briefing, someone in the room already knew how to fly there and the best approach. As LeMay devised each of these innovations, they were quickly adopted as standard procedure by now Major General Ira Eaker's VIII Bomber Command, the bomber branch of his fledgling Eighth Air Force. And as the struggle in the skies over Germany intensified, the bomber became more than a weapon to Curtis LeMay, it became a fighting machine to which he was deeply wedded emotionally, an arm in which he had unshakable faith.

In September 1943, he received his first star, and then in March 1944, at Eaker's urging, Hap Arnold pa.s.sed over several more senior brigadiers to give LeMay his second, making him, at thirty-seven, the youngest major general in the U.S. Army. He was also a well-decorated one, with two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation's second highest award for valor, for LeMay was never shy about taking over the co-pilot's seat in the lead bomber on a mission.

The new long-range B-29 Superfortress was entering the bomber force. Arnold was convinced that if the full potential of the B-29s could be brought to bear on j.a.panese industry, the transportation system, and other infrastructure, j.a.pan could be forced to surrender without the necessity of an invasion. The seizure of the southern home island of Kyushu, planned for November 1945 at the estimated cost of roughly 300,000 American servicemen killed and wounded, could be averted. Victory through the B-29s would, in addition, demonstrate the efficacy of air power in the most dramatic way possible and strengthen mightily the argument for an independent air force after the war.

In January 1945, Arnold demonstrated the special confidence he had grown to have in LeMay by placing him in command of all B-29s operating out of Guam and its sister islands, Saipan and Tinian, in the Marianas group in the western Pacific. The islands had been seized from the j.a.panese during the summer of 1944 at the cost of more than 16,000 Marines killed and wounded and nearly 4,000 Army casualties. But LeMay encountered over j.a.pan an enemy he had not met in the German skies. It was a high-alt.i.tude jet stream, a wind so strong that it would grab B-29s, whose crews were attempting to line up on a target at 195 miles per hour, and propel them ahead at a speed of almost 450 mph. Accurate calculations with the Norden bombsight became impossible. To make matters worse, the reigning deity of the atmosphere over j.a.pan was a G.o.d of the clouds. Clear visibility was infrequent.

LeMay was not a man to persist in a futile exercise and the challenge he faced brought out the ruthlessness in him. In contrast to the brick-and-mortar cities of Europe, j.a.pan's cities, like many other urban centers in the Asia of the time, were wooden and thus highly vulnerable to fire. An estimated 90 percent of the buildings in the wealthier sections of Tokyo were constructed of wood and 99 99 percent in the poorer districts. Moreover, the streets were narrow and the houses and other buildings close together, so that flames could easily spring from one structure to another and leap the streets, rapidly engulfing an entire area. Tokyo and the neighboring port of Yokohama to its south had experienced devastating fires on several occasions prior to the war, the worst set off by the earthquake of 1923, when much of the metropolitan areas of both cities had been devastated and 100,000 people killed. Since he could not bomb j.a.pan's industries directly, LeMay decided he would burn down the factories by burning down the cities around them. percent in the poorer districts. Moreover, the streets were narrow and the houses and other buildings close together, so that flames could easily spring from one structure to another and leap the streets, rapidly engulfing an entire area. Tokyo and the neighboring port of Yokohama to its south had experienced devastating fires on several occasions prior to the war, the worst set off by the earthquake of 1923, when much of the metropolitan areas of both cities had been devastated and 100,000 people killed. Since he could not bomb j.a.pan's industries directly, LeMay decided he would burn down the factories by burning down the cities around them.

On the night of March 9, 1945, he staged the most horrendous fire-bombing in the history of modern warfare. He sent 334 B-29s over the center of Tokyo, each loaded with six tons plus of 100-pound Mark 47 oil-gel bombs, one of which could ignite a major blaze, and Mark 69 69 bombs of napalm, a jellied gasoline, one of the more terrifying inventions of the war, which had been devised by a Harvard chemist named Louis Fieser. LeMay wanted to head the raid himself, but he had been briefed only recently on the atomic bomb and was thus barred from flying for fear that he might divulge the secret under torture if shot down and captured. He chose as the man to lead the attack his newest wing commander, Brigadier General Thomas "Tommy" Power, a slim, angular Irishman from New York City. His leaders.h.i.+p of the attack that night was to begin a long a.s.sociation between the two men, and Power, in a subsequent and quite different role, was also to become a major figure in Bennie Schriever's career in the building of the intercontinental ballistic missile during the 1950s. bombs of napalm, a jellied gasoline, one of the more terrifying inventions of the war, which had been devised by a Harvard chemist named Louis Fieser. LeMay wanted to head the raid himself, but he had been briefed only recently on the atomic bomb and was thus barred from flying for fear that he might divulge the secret under torture if shot down and captured. He chose as the man to lead the attack his newest wing commander, Brigadier General Thomas "Tommy" Power, a slim, angular Irishman from New York City. His leaders.h.i.+p of the attack that night was to begin a long a.s.sociation between the two men, and Power, in a subsequent and quite different role, was also to become a major figure in Bennie Schriever's career in the building of the intercontinental ballistic missile during the 1950s.

"It was a h.e.l.l of a good mission," Tommy Power shouted down from the c.o.c.kpit of his Superfortress when LeMay came out to meet him as the bomber taxied to a halt on the airstrip back on Guam at 9:00 on the morning of the 10th. The aerial reconnaissance photographs that afternoon showed that LeMay had razed a wasteland in Tokyo at least fifteen miles square. (The subsequent official j.a.panese calculation was 16.8.) Hardly anything was left standing amidst the ashes except charred steel beams and the concrete and masonry fragments that had once been parts of buildings. No one knows precisely how many people he killed in that single raid. At the time the j.a.panese authorities put the number at 83,793 dead and another 40,918 people injured. An official j.a.panese history of the war later revised the number to 72,489 deaths. A million people were also rendered homeless as the firestorm destroyed more than 267,000 buildings.

While LeMay's willingness to engage in slaughter on such a scale demonstrated the remorselessness of the man, he was not attempting to be deliberately cruel. The firebombings were the only way he could think of to destroy j.a.pan's industry. Balanced against the bloodletting the American infantryman and Marine would have to endure to invade and physically conquer the j.a.panese home islands, the agony of j.a.pan's civilians had no weight in the scales. No American leader, military or civilian, was going to protect j.a.panese civilians at the expense of American soldiers.

Two nights later it was the turn of Nagoya, the center of j.a.pan's aircraft industry. Then it was the turn of Osaka, then Kobe. Over a period of ten nights the somewhat stocky man of medium height with the square jaw and the taciturn manner razed thirty-three square miles of j.a.pan's four leading industrial cities. On the night of April 13, 1945, 327 Superfortresses revisited Tokyo, dropping 2,139 tons of incendiaries and torching another 11.4 square miles of the city. The capital's sister city of Yokohama to the south was added to the list. The statistics became a litany of destruction. By the middle of June, LeMay had eliminated 105.6 square miles of j.a.pan's main centers of industry, including 56.3 square miles of Tokyo.

Working his ever-growing fleet of B-29s a record 120 hours a month, LeMay began to drop incendiaries virtually as fast as the Navy transports carrying them reached the Marianas. j.a.pan had become more naked than ever at the end of March 1945, after the a.s.sault and seizure of the small volcanic island of Iwo Jima, less than a third the size of Manhattan, from its 21,000 dug-in j.a.panese defenders at the cost of 6,821 Americans killed from all services, including 4,554 Marines. (For the first time in the war, the a.s.sault forces sustained more casualties than there were j.a.panese on the island-almost 30,000 Americans in all, 23,573 from among the Marines.) Iwo Jima was located just 670 miles south of Tokyo, approximately midpoint from the Marianas. The island was the perfect base for P-51 Mustangs, s.h.i.+fted to the Pacific after the defeat of Germany. From Iwo Jima the P-51s, king of Second World War propeller-driven fighters, could easily rendezvous with the B-29s and escort them on daytime missions. They shot the remaining j.a.panese fighters out of the sky. The island also served as an emergency landing point for damaged bombers that would never have made it the remaining 625 miles to the airfield at Saipan, north of Guam. Bennie's younger brother, Gerry Schriever, who had also become an Army Air Forces engineering officer in the Pacific, was awarded his colonel's eagles by LeMay for the speed with which the engineer group he commanded repaired these B-29s on Iwo Jima and had them flown back to the Marianas.

By the end of July, LeMay had scorched the greater part of sixty large and medium-sized j.a.panese cities to cinders with 150,000 tons of firebombs. A total of 670,000 j.a.panese civilians were to perish in American bombings, most in LeMay's fire raids. In June, Arnold had asked him when he thought he could end the war. LeMay replied that he would run out of targets about the first of October and by then the j.a.panese ought to be ready to capitulate without the necessity of an invasion. He was wrong about the timing. The awe-inspiring destruction of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiros.h.i.+ma on August 6 and on Nagasaki three days later enabled j.a.pan's emperor, Hirohito, to overrule the fanatical militarist holdouts and announce a surrender on August 15, 1945. Yet LeMay was still the man most responsible for ending the war with such swiftness, for it was he who had reduced j.a.pan to the point where these bolts of nuclear annihilation could immediately snap the will to resist any further.

LeMay's place in the postwar U.S. Air Force as its preeminent combat leader was a.s.sured. In determining the way the bomber arm of the U.S. Army Air Forces had fought in Europe and in the Pacific, he had also made the greatest contribution in proving the new preeminence of air power itself. And that preeminence, coupled with the unlimited potency of nuclear weapons, was to be the deciding factor in forming the military strategy of the United States during the early and middle years of the Cold War. LeMay had been the indispensable man. A message from Carl Spaatz to Arnold a week before the surrender of j.a.pan demonstrated in what regard LeMay was now held. In July, with the Eighth Air Force due to transfer out of Europe and join the war against the j.a.panese, Arnold had persuaded the other chiefs to create a Strategic Air Forces command for the Pacific modeled on the one he had established for Europe in 1944. As in Europe, he put the man in whom he had ultimate faith, Tooey Spaatz, in charge. Spaatz appointed as his chief of staff an officer who had been a captain five years earlier, Major General LeMay, and told him to carry on. His message to Arnold, referring to LeMay's B-29 command with the military message traffic term of Baker Two Nine, explained why: HAVE HAD OPPORTUNITY TO CHECK UP ON BAKER TWO NINE OPERATIONS AND BELIEVE THIS IS THE BEST ORGANIZED AND MOST TECHNICALLY AND TACTICALLY PROFICIENT MILITARY ORGANIZATION THAT THE WORLD HAS SEEN TO DATE.

In October 1948, Hoyt Vandenberg had brought LeMay home from Europe, where he had been commanding general of U.S. Air Force units deployed there, and handed him a languis.h.i.+ng organization called the Strategic Air Command with instructions to turn it into the formidable nuclear striking force it was intended to be. SAC had initially been formed by Spaatz in March 1946 with precisely this objective in mind. It had been so ill-maintained and badly trained over the two years before LeMay inherited it that the SAC of 1948 literally couldn't hit anything under realistic conditions. The jet fighters the United States and the Soviet Union were both fielding meant that the propeller-driven B-29s, then the mainstay of SAC, and the B-50s then entering service, an improved version of the B-29 more easily rigged to carry an atomic bomb, could not survive in the daytime. (The B-36 colossus just coming on line could still bomb in daylight because Soviet fighters could not reach its 40,000-foot alt.i.tude, but that advantage would disappear as Russian jets improved.) The B-29s and B-50s therefore had to strike at night. This was made possible by employing the plane's radar to pick out prominent terrain features or tall buildings, called "target finders," that would show up distinctly on the screen, and then calculating the direction and distance to the drop point.

To demonstrate to the SAC crews precisely how incompetent he suspected they were, LeMay ordered the entire command, approximately 480 B-29s and a sampling of the new B-50s and B-36s, to stage a mock night raid on Wright Field. The nearness of the airfield to Dayton, Ohio, should have given the crews plenty of tall buildings to use as target finders. As they approached Wright Field, the planes would transmit a tone over their radios. It would be picked up by an antiaircraft radar unit at Wright. The bombardier would simulate the release of his bombs by halting the tone. The antiaircraft unit would then calculate from the moment the tone halted and the alt.i.tude, speed, and distance of the plane precisely where the bomb would have landed. Shoddy maintenance kept a lot of the bombers from even getting off the ground that night and forced others to abort and turn back. And of those that did make it to the general vicinity of Wright Field and sent the Bombs Away signal, not a single crew hit the target. The details of SAC's a.s.sault on Wright were immediately cla.s.sified secret to try to hide from the Soviets that they faced a sawdust bogeyman. But every crew learned how dismally it had performed. LeMay had made his point and reformation began.

When Bennie Schriever first encountered him in 1951, LeMay was about to gain the fourth star of a full general and had been back in the strategic bombing business for the better part of three years. He was transforming SAC into an organization that inspired dread in Moscow. As of December 1951 he had tripled its manpower to 144,525 officers and men, including civilian specialists and maintenance personnel, and his aircraft, 1,186 of all types, had grown significantly in numbers and striking power. His three heavy bomb wings were approaching their full complement of thirty B-36s each and he had another approximately 550 B-29s and B-50s organized into seventeen medium wings. Within the near future he would also have two more medium wings of the revolutionary B-47 Stratojet, America's first strategic jet bomber, as the Boeing production lines fed them into his force. A svelte-looking aircraft with its slim fuselage and six jet engines slung on pods under the swept-back wings that were the first fruit of the von Karman team's postwar discoveries in Germany, the B-47 had a top speed of 630 miles per hour, as fast as most fighters of the day, and could climb above 40,000 feet.

Moreover, through a combination of midair refueling from tanker aircraft and overseas staging bases from which his bombers could launch strikes or stop to refuel on the way to raids, LeMay had given his entire SAC force an intercontinental span. The overseas bases encircled the Soviet Union. In most of Stalin's empire, no city or town, no military installation, no industrial plant was beyond the touch of LeMay's hand of destruction. The first of the staging bases were borrowed RAF airfields in England. Engineers were set to work meanwhile reconstructing into permanent SAC installations other disused fields such as Greenham Common, a former paratroop and glider base west of London near Newbury, or Brize Norton amidst the rolling landscape and stone-roofed cottages of the Cotswold Hills farther west in Gloucesters.h.i.+re. The locations west of London were deliberately chosen so that the RAF jet fighters at fields on the other, eastern, side of the English capital could protect SAC's bombers against attacking Soviet aircraft.

When the B-36 with its 3,500-mile combat radius was counted in, everything from the satellite states like Poland, Hungary, and Romania, and all of western Russia as far as Moscow and beyond to the industrial centers of the Urals, was within reach of these English bases, airfields that recalled those from which the B-17s in which LeMay had learned his craft had risen not long before to humble n.a.z.i Germany. The oil wells and refineries at Baku and elsewhere in Azerbaijan in the Soviet Caucasus were vulnerable to SAC bombers staging out of North Africa from the air base abuilding at Sidi Slimane in Morocco. Any targets worth hitting in the Soviet Far East, like Vladivostok with its air and naval facilities, and much of China, where the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung now ruled, were exposed to attacks staged from Guam and Yokota Air Base in American-occupied j.a.pan.

The U.S. nuclear a.r.s.enal, which numbered 549 atomic, i.e., fission, weapons by the end of 1951, did not yet possess quite enough for all of LeMay's bombers, but that shortcoming was being remedied. The Sandstone series of nuclear tests at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific in April and May of 1948 had led to the development of a more advanced plutonium bomb, the Mark 4, which, at 31 kilotons, exceeded the blast of the Nagasaki weapon by approximately 10 kilotons. The Atomic Energy Commission geared up its facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Was.h.i.+ngton, and elsewhere to ma.s.s production. LeMay was also hoping that his aircraft would soon be armed with the hydrogen bomb, which, in 1950, President Truman had ordered the AEC to create through the laboratory it now controlled at Los Alamos.

SAC was no longer the b.u.mbling organization LeMay had been given in 1948. He honed his combat crews and subordinate commanders with the training techniques he had devised for use against the Germans and the j.a.panese. He inst.i.tuted practice bombing compet.i.tions. To further motivate his men, he w.a.n.gled the authority, a privilege extended only to SAC, to award spot promotions for outstanding performance, as high as lieutenant colonel in the officer grades and technical sergeant and master sergeant in the enlisted ranks. The awards were usually given to an entire crew at once in order to encourage teamwork. For example, a command pilot who was a captain could go to major, his co-pilot from first lieutenant to captain, and everyone else in the crew could also jump one rank ahead of their peers. If their proficiency fell, LeMay would take away the promotions. By 1951, LeMay's force was ready to go. The atmosphere of the time reinforced the motivation. These were the years when anti-Communist fervor ran so high that some of the citizenry did not think it insane to repeat the slogan "Better Dead Than Red!"

LeMay's SAC had, in fact, become the centerpiece of America's national strategy. The concept underlying it had originally evolved out of Truman's short-lived confidence in an American atomic monopoly-the same source of his and Jimmie Byrnes's abortive attempt to intimidate Stalin with their postwar atomic diplomacy-and out of his concern to avoid deficits, curb inflation, and prevent the American economy from being undermined by profligate military spending. If the United States alone possessed the bomb and the means to deliver it through a long-range strategic bomber force, there was no need to burden the American economy with the huge expense of large ground forces to match the Red Army and with major naval forces for a prolonged war with the Soviet Union. The bomb would render any war with Russia short and decisive.

Truman demonstrated his determination to hew to this strategy when it put him on a collision course with the Navy and set off the "Revolt of the Admirals" in 1949. That April he and his secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, canceled the Navy's planned "supercarrier," the USS United States United States, in favor of more adequate funding for the B-36. The Navy had been counting on construction of this imposing s.h.i.+p, the model for the majestic aircraft carriers that were to be built in later decades to handle modern jet aircraft, to keep it on a par with the Air Force. The secretary of the navy, John Sullivan, resigned and Truman and Johnson sacked Admiral Louis Denfeld, the chief of naval operations, to quell further opposition within the senior ranks.

Soviet acquisition of the bomb in 1949 did not negate the economic rationale for the strategy. The end of the monopoly simply meant that the United States would have to outpace the Russians constantly in the size and power of its nuclear a.r.s.enal and the means to deliver an annihilating a.s.sault. The same economic motivation then led Dwight Eisenhower to adopt and elaborate on the strategy after his election in 1952. The surge in military spending for conventional armaments brought on by the Korean War, and the need to arm the new West German state and rearm Was.h.i.+ngton's European allies for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance Stalin had clumsily provoked, peaked after his death in 1953 cleared the way for a truce in Korea that July. To achieve what he called "security with solvency," Eisenhower resumed Truman's policy of restricting spending on the conventional military in favor of reliance on the intercontinental reach of LeMay's nuclear bombers.

The Eisenhower administration's official euphemism for the strategy was "The New Look," taken from a women's fas.h.i.+on line exhibited by Christian Dior in the late 1940s. (Some in the administration also favored a catchy phrase for the strategy that was tinged with a bit of gallows humor-"a bigger bang for a buck.") It soon became more appropriately known as Ma.s.sive Retaliation, after Eisenhower and his stridently anti-Communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, made clear that a Soviet a.s.sault on West Berlin, for instance, or on any of America's allies, would result not merely in a local defense under NATO, but in an all-out response of America's nuclear might. Eisenhower and Dulles reasoned that the threat would curb military adventurism by the Soviets on the periphery of their empire and deter the Russians from launching a general war with their own growing nuclear a.r.s.enal. And if general war did occur, SAC would be the fist that delivered the knockout blow of a nuclear holocaust.

The strategy entailed previously unimaginable civilian casualties, but this does not seem to have bothered anyone in authority. The prospect certainly did not disturb LeMay Having had to inflict a cruel death by fire on hundreds of thousands of j.a.panese civilians in order to destroy j.a.pan's industry and render the country prostrate and ripe for surrender appears to have calloused him morally. Taking human life on a horrendous scale once apparently made it easier for him to contemplate taking it on a far more horrendous scale the next time. It was therefore not that difficult for him to go from anonymous j.a.panese men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands to the planned killing of tens of millions of anonymous civilians in the Soviet Union, the East European states, and China. The same could be said of the other military leaders of his generation who had not had LeMay's personal experience and of the civilian politicians above them. The RAF campaign of nighttime "city busting," culminating in the slaughter at Dresden in February 1945, when a city filled with refugees was struck by both British and American bombers and from 36,000 to 136,000 civilians killed (no one has been able to estimate the number accurately), along with the incineration of j.a.pan, inculcated the a.s.sumption that strategic bombing entailed ma.s.sive civilian casualties as an unavoidable consequence. By 1954, when LeMay would have 1,500 atomic bombs at his disposal, the estimate was that 60 million people would be killed and 17 million injured within the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China if SAC was unleashed. A chilling phrase began to appear in the lexicon of advocates of strategic nuclear bombing: "to kill a nation."

Ma.s.sive Retaliation as a national strategy also confirmed the primacy of the Air Force among the services and raised LeMay's Strategic Air Command to ascendancy within the Air Force itself. While Eisenhower reduced the overall strength of the military establishment by nearly a million men, inflicting most of the cuts on the ground forces of the Army but also shrinking the Navy and the Air Force as a whole, he encouraged SAC to grow. By 1957, when LeMay was to depart after nearly nine years to go to Was.h.i.+ngton as vice chief of staff, his creation would number 224,014 officers, enlisted men, and civilian support personnel. One hundred and twenty-seven of the B-36s would linger, but not for long. The rest of the propeller-driven fleet, the B-29s and B-50s, would have become a memory. In their place, lavish spending would have immensely enhanced the air power they had represented. SAC would field 1,285 B-47 medium jet bombers in 1957 and almost 250, with many more to come, of the new eight-engine B-52 jet Stratofortresses Boeing had begun delivering two years earlier to const.i.tute the heavy bomb wings. (The tanker shortage had also long been solved after hundreds of KC-97s had flowed into SAC's fleet by the end of 1953 and into 1954 to form new refueling squadrons that would meet the bombers going out and coming home.) When LeMay took command of SAC in 1948 his t.i.tle was the ordinary one of commanding general. By 1955 the ordinary would be exalted to commander-in-chief. The letters and memoranda LeMay exchanged with his superior, General Nathan Twining, who was to succeed Vandenberg as chief of staff in mid-1953, reflect the unique status he held within the Air Force. It was customary for ranking generals to address each other in the familiar Dear Nate, Dear Curt manner, but LeMay's side of the correspondence, preserved with Twining's in the archives of the Library of Congress, goes one step further. It has the tone of a man addressing an equal, not a senior.

INTO THE LION'S DEN Ageneral Bennie Schriever once worked for paid him an unusual compliment in an efficiency report: "He is not afraid of anybody." In crossing Curtis LeMay, however, Schriever was placing himself in peril of being crushed by a t.i.tan of his profession. And in their first encounter, he looked decidedly foolish. It was one of the few occasions in his life when he came up with a genuinely harebrained scheme. At the time, in early 1951, Bennie was working in a preliminary job General Saville, the deputy chief of staff, development, had given him when he brought him back to the Pentagon after graduation from the National War College. He was made an a.s.sistant to evaluate R&D projects, deputy to a remarkably imaginative scientist from MIT named Ivan Getting. An electrical engineer and physicist, Getting had won a Medal of Merit, the highest decoration the president could then award a civilian for military work, for his achievements in radar design at the Radiation Laboratory during the Second World War. After the outbreak of the Korean War, Saville had persuaded Getting to take a leave from MIT and come down to the Pentagon as his princ.i.p.al a.s.sistant to sort out R&D enterprises.

LeMay complained that, although SAC was the most important element of the Air Force, it wasn't receiving enough attention from Saville's department. Saville pa.s.sed the complaint on to Getting, who in turn pa.s.sed it to Schriever. One of the issues at the moment was how to disperse SAC's bases in order to make them as survivable as possible. Stalin's only long-range bombers, his Tu-4 copies of the B-29, might carry just enough gas for a one-way trip to only some of America's cities, but one still had to guard against the contingency, however remote, that he might order his air force to attack anyway. This was one of the reasons SAC headquarters had been moved from Andrews Air Force Base near Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., to Offutt Air Force Base just outside Omaha, Nebraska (the base had originated as a cavalry post during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century), when LeMay a.s.sumed command in October 1948.

Schriever took a look at the map and it struck him that all of the waterways running through the American continent and others along its edges like the Chesapeake Bay provided an obvious means of dispersal. If floating SAC bases were established on them the aircraft could be s.h.i.+fted as often as desired. The catch was that the bombers would have to be equipped with pontoon landing gear in order to land and take off on water. This was theoretically possible, but the additional weight would reduce range and the pontoons would create drag that would also reduce speed. Getting should have recognized the proposal as impractical and General Saville certainly should have known that it would appear absolutely wacky to a bomber man like LeMay. Unfortunately, neither had his common-sense radar turned on and Bennie and Getting flew out to Omaha to present the scheme to LeMay.

Getting sat beside the general and his senior staff officers while Bennie set up his charts on an easel in front and flipped through them as he gave his presentation. LeMay reacted with mutterings of disgust and ridicule and, at the end of the briefing, took his cigar out of his mouth, leaned forward, and asked with sarcasm, "Did you say your name was Schriever?" Then he left and Bennie folded his charts and he and Getting left too, right back to Was.h.i.+ngton.

Later that year Saville retired and Getting went off to take a high-level position in the electronics industry. Donald Putt, the technology-oriented student of von Karman, stepped into Saville's place as deputy chief of staff, development, and promoted Bennie to be his a.s.sistant for development planning. Because the job entailed literally planning the future of the Air Force, Bennie had to deal with LeMay. He found, however, that when he returned to Omaha with sensible advice or proposals, LeMay wouldn't listen on these occasions either.

The obstacle doesn't seem to have been that first silly episode. If LeMay remembered it, he never mentioned it. The problem was that Curtis LeMay had become an altered man. The young colonel who had been so open-minded and keen to learn that he had risked personal humiliation by convening all-ranks, freewheeling criticism sessions in the mess hall after a raid on n.a.z.i-occupied Europe had become the four-star general who was no longer willing to hear anything that did not fit his preconceptions. He was the cla.s.sic example of a man made arrogant by power. Years of commanding with unchallenged authority had rendered him rigid. He had become a figure of obsessions and had lost his sense of proportion. His former restraint had also been replaced by a quick temper, a short fuse as it was called in the military, which further inhibited his ability to listen.

The change was conspicuously apparent in his correspondence with Nathan Twining in the mid-1950s. Formed as he was by the gruesome, no-quarter-given air battles with the Luftwaffe in 1943, he was fixated in the belief that the Soviets were also going to build an air force powerful enough to challenge his SAC in a similar death struggle for supremacy of the skies. He had such profound and unquestioning faith in the bomber that he could not imagine someone else might resort to an alternative weapon to rain nuclear fire on an opponent. The fixation resonated in a March 21, 1955, memorandum to Twining and in a covering letter of the same date. Both a.s.sessed with uninhibited criticism a plan by Twining's headquarters that laid out a proposed structure for the Air Force through 1965. "Before 1965 Soviet Forces will probably attain a delivery capability and a [nuclear] stockpile of sufficient size and configuration to completely destroy any selected target system within the U.S.," LeMay stated on the opening page of his memorandum. Some of this "delivery capability," he conceded, may consist of future Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, but he was convinced that the predominant element would be intercontinental bombers. (The prototype of the first strategic bomber of original Soviet design, not a copy of the B-29, had been detected in 1954. It was the Miasishchev Mia-4, dubbed the Bison by NATO intelligence, with swept-back wings and four jet engines.) Therefore, he emphasized again and again in the memorandum and in the covering letter, the Air Force had to structure itself so that its "primary objective ... should be to win the battle against Soviet Air Power." This meant a bigger and better SAC because "the bomber airplane is the best delivery vehicle" to triumph in this "battle against Soviet Air Power," a phrase he repeated constantly. He a.s.serted that his bombers would catch the Russian planes on the ground and destroy them and their bases as well as the industries that produced them. He wanted 1,440 of the new B-52s by 1965. To keep this bomber fleet aloft with midair refueling, he asked for 1,140 of the forthcoming Boeing KC-135 four-engine jet tankers, which were to replace the propeller-driven KC-97s. (The KC-135, ample-bodied to carry as much aviation fuel as possible, initiated one of the most spectacularly successful commercial spinoffs from military hardware. The entrepreneurs in Seattle saw in its dimensions a pa.s.senger jet and with the installation of seats and other civilian accoutrements it became the famous Boeing 707 jetliner, over a thousand of which were sold to American and foreign airlines. The plane transformed international air travel.) With the cost of this stupendous bomber and tanker fleet in mind, he objected to the number of jet fighter-bombers and air superiority fighters the Air Force planned to buy to fulfill the Tactical Air Command's mission of providing close air support over a battlefield for Army ground troops. a.s.sisting the Army was not a mission that interested LeMay. He even argued that the bomber was the best weapon to neutralize any ICBMs the Soviets might field by 1965 because of its ability "to destroy their launching sites as a matter of high priority." (Since it would take hours for SAC's bombers to reach the launching sites and only half an hour for a Soviet ICBM to reach its target in the United States, the logic of bombing empty launching sites hardly seems to follow.) LeMay's attachment to the bomber and his fixation on winning the air battle he antic.i.p.ated with a Soviet version of SAC led him to what was perhaps his most astonis.h.i.+ng proposal to Twining. He wanted to abolish conventional armaments and go entirely nuclear. "Atomic and thermonuclear weapons have made conventional weapons obsolete, and the United States should cease stockpiling of conventional weapons," he wrote. "The expense of developing and maintaining a limited conventional capability in the face of the critical need for skilled personnel and resources to man and equip strategic units can no longer be justified." He proposed henceforth to use only nuclear weapons in wars both big and small. In other words, it was just as appropriate to let fly with nuclear weapons in a small-scale war like the recent conflict in Korea as it was in a full-scale one with the Soviets. "The distinction between localized and general war is political rather than military," he said, and the United States should "always use the best weapons available in either general or limited war."

There was a further advantage to moving straight to nuclear weapons in small wars, he maintained. They would bring quick victory and, apparently with the example of Korea in mind, avoid having the war drag out and public opinion turn against it. Therefore, "to insure the favorable outcome of a localized war in a short period of time, it was necessary that any political or psychological restraint in employing atomic weapons be erased." Precisely what Twining thought of LeMay's proposal is unknown and there is no record of a reply in the correspondence. Presumably he understood, as the changed LeMay did not, that for the U.S. Air Force to publicly advocate something like this would set off a political firestorm at home and abroad of nuclear dimensions.

His memory of those terrifying skies over Germany was also the root cause of LeMay's most striking loss of a sense of proportion-his unquenchable desire for more and more megatons of nuclear explosive to drop on his Soviet opponents and more and more bombers with which to loose it. (A megaton is the equivalent of a million tons of TNT.) He feared that when war came, unnerved crews would not strike with the accuracy they attained in practice exercises in peacetime. Some planes would also not find their targets because of navigational errors, others would be shot down, still others would turn back because of mechanical failures. The answer was to make up for these errors and omissions with bigger and bigger bombs and enough planes to double and triple the number of strikes programmed for a single target.

He was extremely pleased in late 1954 to get the first practical hydrogen bomb, designated the Mark 17, a "weaponized" version of a dry thermonuclear device, fueled by lithium deuteride, which the Los Alamos laboratory had set off at Bikini Atoll earlier that year in a test called Romeo. This first "droppable" H-bomb weighed 42,000 pounds, which meant that only a B-36 in the current SAC fleet could carry it, but it exploded with a doomsday blast of eleven megatons, the equivalent of 524 Nagasaki, first-generation plutonium bombs, and 880 times the force of the smaller atomic bomb that had devastated Hiros.h.i.+ma. LeMay began pressing right away for lighter hydrogen bombs of equal or greater megatonnage. With them he wanted to turn his B-47s, which had a 25,000-pound payload, into thermonuclear bombers and fit more than one hydrogen bomb into the new B-52, with its 43,000-pound capacity (soon increased to 50,000), in order to obliterate multiple targets. When the Mark 21 hydrogen bomb, which weighed 15,000 pounds and yielded 4.5 megatons, appeared in 1955, he immediately mated it to the B-52 as the central component of SAC's striking power for the next couple of years. The Mark 21's "bang" did not satisfy LeMay, however, and so he pressed for an upgrade. This was to be the Mark 36, which would be produced the following year. It was somewhat heavier than the Mark 21 at 17,500 pounds, but yielded more than twice the force when it exploded.

In another memorandum to Twining that November of 1955, LeMay raised the ante on bombers. He now said he needed approximately 1,900 B-52s and some 1,300 KC-135 jet tankers to midair refuel these bombers by 1963. by 1963. (Eisenhower was eventually to cap B-52 production at 744 aircraft by the fall of 1962, a decision the Kennedy administration was to uphold, with the comment: "I don't know how many times you can kill a man, but about three should be enough.") Nor did LeMay succeed in persuading the Eisenhower administration to build an H-bomb, except for the original Mark 17, beyond ten megatons, but not for lack of trying. In 1953, he asked the Nuclear Weapons Panel of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board to look into the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb of twenty megatons or greater, an idea Eisenhower is said to have vetoed as beyond common sense. The ma.s.sive megatonnage and the doubling and tripling on targets was to lead to fantastic overkill. SAC was to end up programming for Moscow alone more than twenty-five megatons. Pressure from LeMay was to be the major impetus in driving the yield of the American stockpile of nuclear warheads up to the record 20,491 megatons peak it was to reach in 1960, enough to provide each of the approximately 180 million inhabitants of the United States at the time with bomb material equivalent in explosive force to 110 tons of TNT. (Eisenhower was eventually to cap B-52 production at 744 aircraft by the fall of 1962, a decision the Kennedy administration was to uphold, with the comment: "I don't know how many times you can kill a man, but about three should be enough.") Nor did LeMay succeed in persuading the Eisenhower administration to build an H-bomb, except for the original Mark 17, beyond ten megatons, but not for lack of trying. In 1953, he asked the Nuclear Weapons Panel of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board to look into the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb of twenty megatons or greater, an idea Eisenhower is said to have vetoed as beyond common sense. The ma.s.sive megatonnage and the doubling and tripling on targets was to lead to fantastic overkill. SAC was to end up programming for Moscow alone more than twenty-five megatons. Pressure from LeMay was to be the major impetus in driving the yield of the American stockpile of nuclear warheads up to the record 20,491 megatons peak it was to reach in 1960, enough to provide each of the approximately 180 million inhabitants of the United States at the time with bomb material equivalent in explosive force to 110 tons of TNT.

While LeMay wished to be absolutely certain that enough planes got through with enough big bombs to "kill" every target on his list, it is clear from his correspondence and statements over the years that he also simply wanted to blast the Soviet Union, and any targets he thought worthy of his attention in Eastern Europe and China, with as much explosive force as he could muster. He apparently did not understand how different in nature nuclear weapons were from the conventional explosives he had dropped on n.a.z.i-occupied Europe. He seems to have thought of hydrogen bombs essentially as just vastly more powerful bombs. He had a pitiless, smug vision of what he was going to do to the peoples of the Soviet Union with them, a vision he described in a lecture to the National War College in April 1956: Let us a.s.sume the order had been received this morning to unleash the full weight of our nuclear force. (I hope, of course, this will never happen.) Between sunset tonight and sunrise tomorrow morning the Soviet Union would likely cease to be a major military power or even a major nation.... Dawn might break over a nation infinitely poorer than China-less populated than the United States and condemned to an agrarian existence perhaps for generations to come.

What LeMay did not realize was that if he ever launched the war for which he had prepared, the result would be national suicide. It would hardly matter should the Soviet Union fail to strike the United States with a single nuclear bomb. If he dropped all of this megatonnage on the Soviets, the American people would perish too. And he would also be condemning to an agonizing perdition the peoples of Canada, Europe, and most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere through the Middle East and Asia. The puny, by comparison, bombs that had shocked the world in demolis.h.i.+ng Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki had been fused to burst in the air. (The Little Boy Uranium-235 bomb dropped on Hiros.h.i.+ma had been detonated at 1,900 feet above the courtyard of one of the city's hospitals.) The air burst technique had been deliberate in order to focus the maximum pressure and heat of the bomb's blast on the buildings and people below, obliterating both in an instant. While there was extensive radiation, it did not extend far beyond the area covered by the blast, because comparatively little dirt and debris was blown up into the atmosphere.

LeMay, however, as he wrote to Twining, was going to fuse a lot of his monster bombs for ground or near-ground bursts to be certain of crus.h.i.+ng underground bunkers and so-called hardened targets, such as concrete revetments with thick overhead cover used to protect aircraft. These ground-level bursts would hurl ma.s.sive amounts of irradiated soil and the pulverized remains of masonry and concrete structures high into the upper atmosphere. The clouds of poisoned soil and debris would spread as they were carried around the earth by the upper atmospheric winds. One result would be a nuclear winter, a catastrophic change in climate of unknown duration, with frigid temperatures at the height of summer, because the dirt in the upper atmosphere would block out the sun's rays. Agriculture, on which human beings depend for sustenance, would become impossible. Most animal and bird life would be extinguished because the plants, shrubs, and trees on which so many of these creatures depend would also die from the cold and lack of sunlight, without which plants cannot perform the photosynthesis process that nourishes them. And as precipitation brought down the irradiated particles, humans and animals and birds would be stricken with fatal radiation sickness. The water resources would be contaminated too as this deadly residue from LeMay's thermonuclear devices was gradually absorbed into them. Civilization as we know it in the Northern Hemisphere would cease to exist.

To give the man his due, he created a force that posed a formidable deterrent to Soviet military adventurism in Western Europe, had the Soviet dictator been so inclined. That Stalin had no intention of launching such adventures, as was revealed with the opening of the Soviet Union's archives after its collapse in 1991, did not negate the fact that the threat was perceived as real by Americans in the early 1950s. And the promise of overwhelming retaliation from SAC undoubtedly kept Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, from being more rash than he was. LeMay's deterrence mission was thus a legitimate one, given the thinking of the period. Although he would later express regret that the United States missed an opportunity in the early 1950s to unleash SAC and destroy the Soviet Union at what he believed would have been little or no cost to itself, there is no evidence that LeMay actively sought to provoke what was referred to at the time as "preventive war."

He was subsequently to be accused of this because he ran SAC spy flights along the edges of Soviet territory and an occasional flight that deliberately penetrated Russian airs.p.a.ce and flew over outlying regions to conduct photoreconnaissance. The espionage flights along the periphery, called "spoofing," were a ruse to gather information on Soviet air defenses by tricking the Russians into turning on their radars, scrambling fighters, and activating their radar jammers. LeMay was perpetually worried about the Soviets jamming the radar in his bombers, without which the planes could not bomb at night. The spy flights enabled SAC to stay abreast of this capability and teach crews to switch the bomber radar frequencies to alternates the Russians might not be jamming. Time and the release of secrets also absolved him on the penetrations of Soviet airs.p.a.ce for photoreconnaissance. Truman and Eisenhower gave permission for the flights because of reports of Soviet aviation buildups. Both presidents feared a sneak attack, a nuclear Pearl Harbor, from which the United States would not be able to recover.

LeMay did a.s.sume that if war with the Soviet Union appeared imminent, he would be released to launch a preemptive strike with the bolts of nuclear lightning held in a mailed fist on SAC's unit patch. "The United States cannot under any circ.u.mstances suffer the first blow of having bombs fall on this country," he remarked in his March 21, 1955, memorandum to Twining. "Therefore, Soviet action short of general war could force the United States to initiate an offensive." Again, this position did not differ radically from the presidential one. While Truman and Eisenhower would have been far more reluctant than LeMay to order a general nuclear a.s.sault, both presidents, and their successors throughout the Cold War for that matter, consistently refused to abjure the first use of nuclear weapons.

The bomber gap episode helped confirm LeMay in his conviction that his opponents were seeking to imitate him. In a fly-past in Moscow on July 13, 1955, their Aviation Day, the Soviets showed off their new four-jet Mia-4 Bison bombers. American military attaches counted nine bombers in the first formation, then ten in the second, then another nine in the third. Air Force intelligence, eager to create pressure for higher production of B-52s, immediately concluded that if the Soviets were willing to display twenty-eight Bisons, they must have twice that many in service. Citing their estimate of Soviet production capacity, Air Force intelligence officers also predicted that the Russians would have a fleet of 600 to 800 Bisons within four to five years. This prediction and reports of Andrei Tupolev's four-engine turboprop Tu-95 Bear bomber, which was to enter Soviet service in 1956, set off an outcry in the United States of a bomber gap that would negate SAC.

LeMay made the most of it. In testimony before the Air Force Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Armed Services in April and May of 1956, he claimed that unless appropriations for B-52s, then coming off the Boeing a.s.sembly lines at six aircraft a month, were increased, the Soviet Union would achieve air superiority over the United States. By 1960, he said, "the Soviet Air Force will have substantially more Bisons and Bears than we will have B-52s.... I can only conclude then that they will have a greater striking power than we will have." Congress voted an additional $1 billion (in these years before the severe inflation set off by the Vietnam War a substantial sum of money) for the Air Force budget in fiscal 1957 and again in fiscal 1958. While LeMay, who had become adept at manipulating legislators, was hyping his testimony to extort more funds, his top secret correspondence with Twining, where he had no reason to conceal his true feelings, demonstrates that he really did believe the Soviets were attempting to match his SAC. "As you know," he wrote in a June 1956 memorandum to Twining, "the first enemy targets that would have to be destroyed are the bases of the Soviet long-range air force. Destruction of these targets is the number one task of the Strategic Air Command."

The CIA, which had no budgetary interest, discovered that the Russians were turning out far fewer Bisons and Bears than the Air Force contended. The a.n.a.lysts in its economic intelligence section did so by studying the tail numbers on the Soviet bombers and matching these to known Soviet production schedules. The Soviets had apparently displayed all of the Bisons they had on July 13, 1955. Some civilian intelligence a.n.a.lysts also guessed, but could never prove, that the Soviets might have flown the nine-plane formation by twice to further impress the American military attache