The Warning Siren
(See Cover)
At an air base in central Japan one day last week, a heavy spring rain swept across the runways and drummed on the roof of a large corrugated metal shed. Inside, the leather-jacketed crews for ten U.S. Air Force B-29s crowded into the briefing room. "Gentlemen," said the major, as he laid his pointer on a ten-foot map of Japan and Korea, "our target for tonight is the rail bridge at Sinhung." Said the captain: "You'll each be carrying forty 500-pound bombs with nose fuses . . . Flak is expected to be meager until the release point. We don't believe it is radar-controlled and we don't think it will be accurate." Said the colonel: "We clobbered them at the Sinanju bridge. I hope we do the same tonight."
The old Superforts, already loaded up, glistened dully through the downpour as the crews jogged out for the preflight check. In their orange baseball caps, the crews themselves glistened dully, too. Most of them were reserves, and like their planes they were ten years older than in the glamour days of World War II. There was little of the "tiger" (Korea equivalent for "eager beaver") about them. They were cool, experienced, careful, sometimes sardonic. They liked to call themselves the "Christmas help," and they liked to point out that the average B-29 in the outfit was carrying the fathers of ten children.
Dusk was fading as the radar operators and bombardiers mumbled over slide rules and fed a mass of specifications on target, course and weather into their mysterious banks of electronic panels. Then the B-29s coughed into life, wheeled ponderously down the feeder taxiways to thunder off into the rain at three-minute intervals.
Seven hours and 50 minutes later, the first pair of landing lights broke through the wet darkness. One by one the ten Superforts touched down, with a chirp of tires, between the yellow field lights edging the runway. Their report: "Mission accomplished."
Sideshow War. Technically the mission was a success: ten planes used up 40,000 gallons of high-octane gasoline to drop 100 tons of high explosives by radar through the clouds on a tiny bridge span. Yet, in Korea the U.S. Air Force was expending precious planes, crews, pilots and supplies in a war that was only a sideshow. And even in that sideshow war, the aging U.S. B-29s have been driven from the daytime sky, are forced to fly by night because they are relics of World War II within range of an enemy air force designed precisely for World War III.
There was one man in Washington who heard this warning siren loud & clear, but heard it as just one more note in an alarm from U.S. airmen all over the globe. From the reports on his broad mahogany desk in the Pentagon, General Hoyt Sanford Vandenberg, Air Force Chief of Staff, could see an air-power crisis closing on the U.S. at jet speed, while the U.S. was buzzing along in a B-29 frame of mind. "We are tempted to retreat from one fading hope to another," said Vandenberg two years ago, "without subjecting ourself to the discipline of facts." In 1952, the facts demanded an even more rigorous discipline. Items:
P: The U.S., four years after starting rearmament, is still without a minimum adequate air defense against atomic attack by the U.S.S.R.
P: In Eastern Europe, the Russians now have enough jet fighters, fighter-bombers and heavy bombers to seize control of the air over continental Europe, and to cover and clear the way for the Red armies on any forward lunge.
P: In the Far East the Russians have equipped the Chinese Communist air force with 1,500 airplanes (including 900 jet-powered MIG-iss), to create for China, in a matter of months, the world's fourth largest air force (after the U.S.S.R., the U.S., Britain). Together, the Russians and the Chinese now have in Asia enough planes and ready-built bases (from Manchuria to Indo-China) to seize control of the air throughout the Far East, including the air over Japan.
P: Since the end of World War II, the Russians, decisively moving their military planning into the jet age, have staked top priorities and tremendous resources on gaining air superiority. In six years they have turned out 25,000 new military planes, more than half of them jets. By 1954, the Russians will have an air force of 20,000 first-line combat planes, nearly all jets.
Two Jobs for One. The one big plus on the U.S. side of this gloomy ledger is the long-range atomic striking power of the U.S. Strategic Air Command. Because of the early U.S. lead in producing atomic bombs and atomic carriers, Hoyt Vandenberg could say, as recently as May 1951: "Today the United States is relatively safe from air attack." But it is a plus that is being rapidly dissipated.
"Because we are relatively safe from air attack today," Vandenberg continued, "an air force of a certain size can protect the U.S. and keep the balance of power in our favor. Today we have only one job that we would have to do if we got into a major war with Russia, and that is to lay waste the industrial potential of that country. Tomorrow, when they have developed their long-range air force and they have their atomic weapons, we have two jobs. We would have to put into first place the job of destroying the Russian air potential that could utilize atomic bombs against the U.S., and then lay waste the industrial potential. Today the air defenses of this country are about adequate. Tomorrow they will not be nearly adequate enough."
As of today, the U.S.: P: Could mount and sustain an intensive atomic attack on the Russian heartland for about two months. <
Under present plans, U.S. air power will remain about where it is until next year. Then it will rise steadily as jet B-47s begin to replace the old piston-powered B-29s and B-50s. Defensively, the U.S. today probably has sufficient air defense to cut down a concentrated attack on the U.S. Strategic Air Command bases and atomic installations. But it cannot now defend the nation against raids on U.S. cities. The best estimate today, based on the sketchiest intelligence, is that the Russians have not a sufficient supply of atomic bombs to make a sustained atomic offensive against the U.S. and destroy its industrial potential. But even the most hopeful reader of such reports as trickle out of Russia agrees that the U.S.S.R. will have an atomic stockpile to back up such an offensive
by 1954.
Point of Peril. In view of these estimates (which would be disastrous if wrong), the Joint Chiefs of Staff have hopefully fixed 1954 as the U.S. "peril point." To prepare the U.S. for that moment, the JCS last fall belatedly fixed a minimum goal: an air force of 143 wings (126 combat, 17 transport) by 1954, designed to 1) protect the nation against the first shock of attack and 2) hold off the attackers until the U.S. can build to full war strength. It was against this professional estimate of the situation that the President of the U.S. set his opinion and cut the 1953 Air Force budget. Its effect: a postponement to 1955 of the date on which the U.S. can achieve its 143-wing air force (see chart). It was after this decision that the House of Representatives, also weighing politics against the military estimate, slashed the 1953 Air Force budget still further, and pushed the 143-wing date to 1957--or beyond. In trying to get the Senate to undo the House's damage, Air Secretary Finletter testified last week: "[The President's] decision was made for fiscal reasons, and from the military point of view contains an important element of risk." The House cuts, he added, will "endanger the safety of the country."
The fact that the U.S. now faces such a guessing-game future is the product of many miscalculations and many failures--the pell-mell postwar demobilization which plunged the most powerful air force in history to a strength of two fully operative combat groups by 1946; the persistent misreading of Russian capabilities and intentions; the failure to understand the implications of the revolutionary combination of jet air power, atomic weapons and electronic controls. The fact that there is now a plan calculated to reassert U.S. power is primarily a result of the Air Force's fierce campaign for recognition of its new, predominant position in the U.S. arsenal.
Rung by Rung. When Hoyt Vandenberg took over as Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force, in April 1948, the betting was heavy that he would be able to do little to advance the air power cause. In the office he was a strangely introverted exception in a breed of exuberant extroverts. A West Pointer, he had slowly climbed the Army Air Force ladder in the accepted Army way, rung by rung as tactical man and staff officer. At 49, he looked like a college senior playing the last act in Cavalcade. His handsome face was unlined, his grey-blue eyes were sharp and piercing, and his hair was touched with the proper streaks of distinguished grey at the temples. He was a meticulous dresser and wore decorations and campaign ribbons up to chin level.
But Vandenberg was no swashbuckling flyboy, nor even a purebred believer in the theories of victory-through-air-power. As a wartime commanding general of the tactical Ninth Air Force in Europe, he worked so closely with General Omar Bradley that "Tooey" Spaatz, then senior U.S. airman in Europe, summoned him to London for a chewing out. Roared Spaatz: "You're spending all your time in close ground support and letting the battle for the air go to hell."
Nonetheless, when Spaatz became Chief of Staff of the Air Force, he chose Vandenberg as his No. 2 man. Then, on Spaatz's recommendation, Van was jumped into the top job over two four-star generals and a dozen three-star generals senior to him.
New Atmosphere. Almost as soon as Hoyt Vandenberg sat down in the high-backed maroon leather chair in the air chief's office, a new atmosphere descended on the Air Force. "He is an icy sonova-bitch," as one senior officer put it, "and friendship doesn't mean a thing to him when the chips are down." On occasion, he would fall into brown moods of concentration that lasted for days.
Vandenberg was thinking hard about a new approach to his job. He was a dedicated believer in the new revolution in warfare--the deadly combination of the jet, the atom bomb and the electronic gadgetry which had taken over and whirled air power around in the most drastic mili-tay revolution in history. World War II's brand of precision now looked like old-fashioned trial & error. Henceforth no nation could afford a major misplan or misuse of its air power, if it hoped to survive.
The new air warfare was built on the sum of man's scientific knowledge. It sent researchers checking the reaction of a man's bloodstream and spinal fluid at high altitudes, looking for metals that would stand up under the unprecedented heats of jet engines, feeling the way beyond the sonic barrier into supersonic speeds. Vandenberg took Hap Arnold's World War II scientific advisory group, strengthened it with all the professional scientific brains he could enlist, and made it an adjunct to his own office. He drew in experts in administration and statistics to help add up the figures that no single head could hold. ("If you give the right facts to the generals they make the right decisions," says Harvard Business School's Dr. Edmund P. Learned, Vandenberg's manpower and management specialist.) In a short time the fourth floor of the Pentagon began to look more like a transplanted college campus than the headquarters of a military organization.
Missionary Work. But Vandenberg's biggest problem was to expound the meaning of the new power in air power to the Pentagon and the White House, to convince the nation that the U.S. Air Force had become the first line of defense. First there was some missionary work to do in his own backyard. If the other services were denying the Air Force its rightful responsibility, maybe it was because it too often seemed irresponsible. The prewar airman was bold and brave, and, for his time, precise, but he had managed to sell the public on the idea that he was a woman-chasing, whisky-drinking revolutionary who strapped his airplane to his backside and amused himself, on taxpayers' gasoline, from one end of the country to the other. Even in World War II the comic strips knew him best for the open leather flight jacket and the "50-mission" cap perched precariously on the back of his head.
The Air Force gasped when the new orders began to click out of the Pentagon: salute and discipline will be smartly observed; no flight clothing will be worn away from air bases; dangerously low flying and stunting are strictly prohibited. Vandenberg also took a hand in designing the new Air Force blue uniforms--and issued stern orders on the width of trousers, length of tunics and kinds of shoes to be worn. When an Air Force bulletin advised the use of suspenders instead of belts, airmen at Wright Field dubbed him "old braces for britches." In November 1950, when Vandenberg saw that even his senior officers were ignoring his orders on soldierly neatness, he sat down in cold anger and issued the order that ended an era: "Wearing the cap without the soft roll grommet and front spring stiffening is prohibited."
The Big Squeeze. Outside the Pentagon, as the new chief of staff went to work, the U.S. itself was still retreating, in Vandenberg's phrase, "from one fading hope to another" in its military policy. The President's Advisory Committee on
Air Policy (the Finletter Board) had aptly entitled its 1947 report Survival in the Air Age, and recommended a fast buildup to 70 groups by 1952, on the assumption that it would take the Russians until 1952 to get the atomic bomb. The 80th Congress, which Harry Truman still denounces, overwhelmingly approved the 70 group program. But in early 1948, over the protests of Spaatz and then-Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington, the President of the U.S. announced: "The Air Force needs 48 groups, not 70." The following year he impounded a special $615 million Air Force appropriation voted by the 80th Congress to get jet plane orders rolling.
This vest-pocket veto and Truman's big budget squeeze of the year forced the Air Force to slow its buying of fighters and fighter-bombers, and to concentrate on building up its Sunday punch, the big-bomber Strategic Command. The squeeze also nipped the Navy's plans for building a 65,000-ton supercarrier, which it hoped would put naval aviation into the strategic bombing business. In 1949 the "revolt of the admirals" broke out, a no-holds-barred attack on the Air Force and its 6-36 which developed--on all sides--into the blackest chapter of modern U.S. military history. In the brawling, Hoyt Vandenberg kept his voice low. In his testimony to a congressional committee, he doggedly stated the simple facts: "The only military threat to the security of the U.S. ... comes from the Soviet Union," and the only force that could counterattack the threat at its source was the Air Force's Strategic Air Command.
Balance of Forces. But Vandenberg always stopped short of saying publicly that the Air Force had to have first priority in funds and materiel if it was really to be the first line of defense. This was a deliberate personal decision on his part: he felt that nothing in air power history, from Billy Mitchell's public martyrdom to Tooey Spaatz's pleas to Congress, had achieved its purpose. Van vowed to keep his arguments "in channels" and in the secret councils of the Joint Chiefs. This did not prevent him from making broad public hints of the problem uppermost in his mind--how to break the paralyzing balance-of-forces concept, which parceled out equal funds to all three forces, without regard to missions or requirements.
"A well-balanced team," said Vandenberg in Dallas in 1949, "is not one in which all the players are of equal size or weight . . . [It] is one which is organized and trained ... to counter an opposing team's strength and take full advantage of an opposing team's weakness. This is the kind of balance we want in the forces that defend our nation . . ."
The news of the first Russian Abomb, in September 1949, gave him a powerful talking point in the JCS, but official Washington was slow in reacting to its implications. Then came Korea.
Behind the Lines. Korea caught the Air Force in a war it was badly equipped to fight, and its old enemies made the most of its predicament. They cried that the Air Force had made a mistake in switching to jets, because the old piston-driven Mustangs were the only planes that had the range to get to Korea from Japan and remain on station long enough to furnish ground support. They charged that too much money had been poured into long-range bombers, too little into tactical air support. They complained that the Air Force's tactical air power-- as compared to close-hitting Marine aviation--was useless to the ground forces because it followed the doctrine of disrupting enemy supply lines and troop concentrations behind the lines.
The real facts finally began to filter through. Talk of piston superiority stopped abruptly when an F80 shot down the first MIG-15. The Eighth Fighter-Bomber Group put out of action 504 enemy tanks, 540 flak guns, 441 locomotives, 5,800 trucks in 22 months. Major General Emmett ("Rosie") O'Donnel's 22nd Bombardment Wing proved that a B-29 SAC unit could pack up, carry its own supplies 5,000 miles across an ocean, and be in action five days after receiving its orders to move. And it was obvious that SAC squadrons in the U.S. stood alone against any Russian temptation to seize on the diversionary little war as an excuse to start the big one in Europe.
On a Shoestring. But Korea was (and is) a war to drive the airmen mad. It siphoned off eleven combat groups just when the Air Force was straining to build to the 70 groups which it then deemed necessary for minimum U.S. defense. In Korea air power was forbidden to strike enemy supply dumps across the Yalu or to strike at the menacing buildup of enemy planes and bases. At the MacArthur hearings last year, Vandenberg stepped lightly around the MacArthur issue. But he managed to strike another solid blow for air power.
"While I was and am today against bombing across the Yalu," Vandenberg testified, "it does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that I might not be for it tomorrow . . . Hitting across the Yalu, we could destroy or lay waste all of Manchuria and the principal cities of China if we utilized the full power of the U.S. Air Force . . . But... in my opinion we cannot afford to ... peck at the periphery as long as we have a shoestring Air Force . . . The fact is that the U.S. is operating a shoestring Air Force in view of its global responsibilities."
Profane Blast. The term "shoestring Air Force" irritated Congressmen who had appropriated a total of $35 billion for the U.S. Air Force since 1946. But in terms of the enemy's newly revealed seven-league boots, the point was all too valid. All last summer Vandenberg tried to make the other Joint Chiefs see the peril as he saw it. Sometimes, after a no-progress session, he would come back to his office, hurl his cap on a chair, and let loose a profane blast of despair.
At first the Air Staff wanted 163 wings (as the Air Force now describes them) by 1954, and Vandenberg pleaded for it in JCS meetings. The other members of the JCS balked. For one entire week last fall Vandenberg sat at his desk and glared moodily at the figures. Then one day he strode through the Pentagon's web to the closely guarded sector where the Joint Chiefs of Staff hold their regular meetings. In his quiet, earnest baritone he went over his case again & again for Chief of Staff Joe Collins of the Army, Chief of Naval Operations Bill Fechteler and for the JCS chairman, Infantryman Omar Bradley. The Air Force still wanted 163 wings, but it would retreat to 143 wings and hope for the best. Under the discipline of facts--facts that came hard to non-airmen--the Joint Chiefs decided unanimously that the U.S. Air Force must build to a strength of 143 wings by 1954, the year that by that time had been marked out as crucial.
To do this, the JCS members were finally willing to jettison the old dollar-for-dollar concept of balanced forces; they approved $22 billion of the 1953 Defense Department budget for the Air Force, as compared with the Navy's $13 billion and the Army's $14 billion. By implication--if not by -affirmation--the U.S. had come a long way toward accepting a doctrine most impressively stated by Winston Churchill at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in March 1949. "For good or ill," said he, "air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power, and fleets and armies, however vital and important, must accept a subordinate rank." It was the beginning of the first long-range U.S. military policy since World War II.
Expense & Complexity. But getting JCS endorsement and getting the planes into the air were two different things. Today's planes are incredibly complex and expensive. For example, North American's World War II Mustang fighter cost $50,000 in production, and had 500 electrical connections. North American's F-86 Sabrejet costs $240,000 and has 6,000 electrical connections ("Each of these," moans North American's Board Chairman Dutch Kindelberger, "is a method of connecting one source of trouble with another"). The K-1 electronic bombing system used in the Boeing B-47 and Convair B-36 costs more than a B-17 of World War II. "In aircraft procurement," says Vandenberg, "tomorrow for an air force means two years from today."
Last December the Air Force began placing orders which were calculated to deliver most of the 143-wing Air Force (exception: heavy bombers) by the end of 19 1) heading off a special $4 billion appropriation for 1952, which Congress had half promised the Air Force, and 2) slashing the Defense Department's 1953 budget, cutting the Air Force share from $22 billion to $20.7 billion. Four weeks ago, the House got in its cuts, clamped on the Coudert spending ceiling (TIME, April 21) and left the Air Force some $17.4 billion, and a completion date in the far tomorrow of 1957. Just as serious, the cutbacks and stretch-outs cut down the rate of delivery of new planes in the close future: e.g., the President's cuts will deprive the Air Force of an average of 400 new combat planes per month in 1953 and 1954, and the U.S. will never get up to the peak production rate the Air Force had counted on.
Ready to Go. The Air Force could accept its share of the blame for many mistakes of the past. But it could take much credit for planning the present pattern of first-line U.S. security. Even during the dog days of postwar economy, it wisely planted procurement contracts for the largest possible number of airplane and engine designs, and the plane designs look good all the way back from the production models to the drawing board. After Korea, it worked hard to broaden its production base. In some cases, the Air Force deliberately paid more for planes just to get a new assembly line tooled up: e.g., the first two troop-carrying C-ngs to roll out of the new Kaiser-Frazer plant cost $1,000,000 apiece, as compared with the $314,000 price at the parent Fairchild plant. Said a production engineer last week, expansively waving aside Vandenberg's estimate of two years: "If they say 'go' today, a rate of 100,000 planes a year would be possible in ten months."
The Air Force has just as broad a base of major command talent. General Curtis LeMay, who built SAC into a powerful ready-force, has been moved to Washington as Vandenberg's vice chief of staff (TIME, March 10). Curt LeMay switched jobs with General Nathan Twining, who helped build up SAC's World War II predecessor, the B-29 Twentieth Air Force in the Pacific. Vandenberg is well anchored in Europe with Lieut. General Lauris Norstad, Eisenhower's air chief at SHAPE and commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe; and in the Pacific with Lieut. General Otto P. ("Opie") Weyland, commander of Far East Air Forces.
The airmen are ready too. At air bases around the globe Air Force operational performances are remarkably high, and morale excellent--despite the bad taste of the "stay down" strike of some reservists in the U.S.* Last month, for example, when a fighter-bomber group in Korea was assigned to attack a camouflaged enemy supply dump with its aging F-80s, every clerk, pencil-pusher and chairborne officer turned out voluntarily to help get the planes off.
The Air Force needs only the consent of Congress and the Administration to set in motion its well-trained cadres, the plane designs, the waiting aircraft plants. "Wherever we are, our frontier is above our heads," General Vandenberg once told his fellow airmen at Maxwell Field, "and it extends above and over any aggressor who dares break the peace. There are no barriers between us and any enemy, and the hours that separate us are few. Our job is to be ready to meet an aggressor, at any time, in any strength."
*Last week the Air Force softened its get-tough policy towards the stay-downers, canceled the court-martial sentence (of two years hard labor and dishonorable discharge) of ist Lieut. Verne Goodwin( TIME, April 28), allowed him to resign "under conditions other than honorable."
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