Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  Holzkirchen, Germany, 1946: 186 B-17 bombers destroyed without ever having flown a combat mission. Bavarian chicken coops sported B-17 bullet-resistant windows in their aluminum sheds constructed from the wings of those hapless B-17s.

  Disarmament proceeded at a rapid pace after the surrender of the Japanese. The 12th Air Force inactivated on August 31, 1945; the 15th that September; and the famed 9th Air Force followed suit in December 1945. The 8th Air Force had been transferred to the Pacific region under the command of General Spaatz, who by this time had received his fourth star. At year’s end, the US Air Force in Europe was down to 64,349 officers and men, and the number of airfields was down from 152 to 31 with a commensurate reduction of combat aircraft. The US Army in Europe followed a similar regimen and quickly lost its combat capability, turning into a police-type occupation force.7

  General Henry H. Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Forces, certainly understood that the overwhelming combat capability he had amassed during the war years consisted almost totally of dated equipment largely designed in the 1930s. As a matter of fact, he had a brigadier general assigned at Headquarters USSTAF/USAFE whose only job was to track and report the weekly total of military aircraft destroyed or transferred to the United States or its allies. “Possession of large stocks of war equipment at the end of a war affords a serious temptation to continue to use that equipment in training peace time forces.

  “We must depend on scientific and technological advances requiring us to replace about one-fourth of our equipment each year…. The Weapons of today are the museum pieces of tomorrow. So, tomorrow, the B-29, the Superfortress of today, will belong in the Smithsonian Institution, with the Wright and Lindbergh planes, its place on the line to be taken by bombers that will carry 50 tons of bombs, planes with jet or rocket motors capable of flying around the world at supersonic speeds.”

  General Arnold was not displeased with seeing yesterday’s air power vanish—hoping to replace it with air power of the future, the jet-powered fighter and bomber, “manless or remote controlled radar or television assisted precision military rockets.” Looking to the future, as early as 1944, General Arnold had tasked his technical adviser, the Director of the Army Air Forces Scientific Advisory Group, Dr. Theodore von Karman of the California Institute of Technology, “to investigate all the possibilities and desirabilities for postwar and future war’s development as respects the AAF.” Dr. von Karman, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, didn’t waste time, assembled a group of the finest scientists available, including many immigrants like himself, and by December 1945 presented General Arnold with his findings and recommendations in the form of a concise and simply worded study titled “Toward New Horizons: Science, the Key to Air Supremacy.”

  The study, in the simplest of terms imaginable, yet visionary, called for the achievement of “supersonic flight, pilotless aircraft, all-weather flying, perfected navigation and communication, remote-controlled and automatic fighter and bomber forces, and aerial transportation of entire armies…. A global strategy for the application of novel equipment and methods, especially pilotless aircraft, should be studied and worked out…. As new equipment becomes available, pilotless aircraft units should be formed and personnel systematically trained for operation of the new devices…. The men in charge of the future Air Forces should always remember that problems never have final or universal solutions.”8

  Arnold’s and von Karman’s vision for the future of a United States Air Force using supersonic aircraft, precision-guided munitions, even fleets of unmanned aircraft, was not to go unopposed. Of all people, Dr. Vannevar Bush, vice president and dean of engineering at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 as chairman of the National Defense Research Committee, later renamed the Office of Scientific Research and Development, was charged to “coordinate, supervise and conduct scientific research on the problems underlying the development, production, and use of mechanisms and devices of warfare, except scientific research on the problems of flight.” That latter caveat exempting “research on the problems of flight” in effect set it aside to be pursued by Dr. von Karman and General Arnold, which rankled Bush. Bush had a low opinion not only of foreign scientists, meaning Dr. von Karman and the group of scientists he had assembled, but especially of military officers—meaning General Arnold and his attempts to define the requirements for a future air force. As an example, in his book Modern Arms and Free Men, Bush scoffed at the development of “guided missiles spanning thousands of miles and precisely hitting chosen targets. The question is particularly pertinent,” he asserted, “because some eminent military men,” meaning Arnold, Spaatz, and others, “exhilarated perhaps by a short immersion in matters scientific, have publicly asserted that there are. We even have the exposition of missiles fired so fast that they leave the earth and proceed about it indefinitely as satellites, like the moon, for some vaguely specified military purposes. All sorts of prognostications of doom have been pulled from the Pandora’s box of science, often by those whose scientific qualifications are a bit limited.”9 Quite a mouthful for a scientist of the stature of Dr. Vannevar Bush, and a warning to proceed with caution to those doing “research on the problems of flight,” because Bush had significant influence in high places. However, what was really going to inhibit the prognostications of von Karman and Arnold more than Bush and his allies was the big bully on the block—the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project, coincidentally, fell under Bush’s purview—but no one knew, neither Bush nor Arnold nor von Karman, how instrumental the bomb was going to be in shaping the future air force.

  As early as 1942, General Arnold had attempted to bring jet aircraft into the Army Air Forces’ inventory. The Bell XP-59 flew for the first time in 1942, as did the German Me 262. The Bell Aircomet was anything but a comet, and proved to be a major disappointment. Nathan “Rosie” Rosengarten, a Wright Field flight test engineer, in his evaluation of the Aircomet, noted: “It could hardly be considered a combat airplane—at best it was a good safe airplane, a training vehicle for indoctrinating pilots into the jet age.10 That’s not what General Arnold had in mind when he turned to the Bell Aircraft Company to build him a combat jet to take on the German Me 262 jet fighter.

  Only fifty P-59 Aircomets were built before the project was abandoned. Colonel Kenneth Chilstrom, then a major and chief of fighter test operations at Wright Field, can claim the honor of crashing the first American jet, a YP-59, on February 16, 1945.

  Arnold turned to Clarence “Kelly” Johnson at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, the innovative designer of the twin-tailed P-38 fighter. A contract was signed for one XP-80 jet fighter in June 1943 to be delivered in 180 days for testing at Muroc Field, later renamed Edwards Air Force Base, in the desert of southern California. That first XP-80 arrived at Muroc on November 13, 1943, 150 days after the contract was signed. Some additional YP-80 test aircraft were procured, and soon thereafter the Army Air Forces ordered five hundred P-80s, betting on the come, eventually increasing the contract to one thousand. In July 1944, a German Me 262 made its combat debut, attacking an RAF Mosquito, and two Me 163 rocket planes attacked a formation of P-51 fighters. The United States still didn’t have anything on the tarmac to match the Germans, yet things appeared to be looking up—but this was about as good as it was going to get. In October 1944, an RP-80 crashed, killing its test pilot. To reassure the combat crews in Europe that, yes, we too are developing a jet-powered fighter aircraft, the decision was made to send four YP-80As to Europe for demonstration flights. In January 1945, one of the four exploded in flight, killing Major Fred Borsodi, a Wright Field test pilot. A second P-80 was diverted for engine testing at a British facility. The remaining two flew several demonstration flights with the 15th Air Force in Italy. That was it. As the war in Europe ended on VE Day in May 1945, there were no American jet fighter squadrons sitting on airfields ready for combat. The P-80 continued to have
more than its share of setbacks. In July 1945, a production P-80A crashed on takeoff, killing the pilot. That August, a YP-80A exploded, killing its pilot. And on August 6, 1945, Major Richard Bong, America’s top ace and Medal of Honor holder, died in a P-80, again on takeoff. The public and most anyone else knew very little about German or American jet programs—but Bong’s death resulted in an outcry that jet flying was much too dangerous and should be stopped. It took all the imagination of General Arnold to keep the P-80 program alive and continue funding for the Army Air Forces to have a chance to enter the jet age. In time, the P-80 made a limited contribution during the Korean War of 1950–1953, but it is best remembered by generations of flyers as the T-33, the trainer version of the P-80, on which American flyers and our allies cut their teeth in the 1950s and 1960s.11

  A T-33 trainer version of the P-80 on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia.

  The P-59/P-80 experience, while World War II was still in progress, had General Arnold searching for solutions. With the help and guidance of his technical adviser, Dr. Theodore von Karman, General Arnold had his European air commander, Lieutenant General “Tooey” Spaatz, develop plans for the acquisition of advanced German technology as soon as the war came to a close—known as Operation Lusty. Under Operation Lusty, led by a capable and out-of-the-box thinker, Colonel Harold E. “Hal” Watson, later Major General Watson, the United States acquired all that was wanted and tasked by the Wright Field scientific establishment. Aside from several Liberty ships stuffed with everything from advanced wind tunnels to jet and rocket planes, and a thousand tons of technical papers, Watson had thirty-eight former enemy aircraft loaded onto a British aircraft carrier, HMS Reaper, which arrived in Newark, New Jersey, on July 31, 1945. Among the German aircraft were ten Me 262 jet fighters, three He 219 night fighters, two Dornier 335 push-pull fighters, four Arado 234 jet reconnaissance bombers, one Dh 243 Doblhoff jet helicopter, nine FW 190 fighters, and others.12 Watson was appalled by how far behind the United States was in aviation technology compared with the Germans and vowed that he would do whatever it took to ensure this is never going to happen again. The result was the establishment of the National Air Technical Intelligence Center (NATIC), of which he was the first commander, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, later renamed the Foreign Technology Division (FTD), which I had the privilege to serve in. The former FTD is currently known as the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC). Name changes for the center have been prolific in the past, and will probably continue to occur in the future—to what purpose I do not know.

  HMS Reaper in Cherbourg harbor, France, July 1945, loaded with German aircraft. Cocooned Me 262s in the foreground.

  Probably more important than the actual delivery of German jet-powered aircraft was a meeting arranged by Colonel Donald Putt, later Lieutenant General Putt, between Dr. von Karman and Germany’s Dr. Adolf Busemann. Don Putt, like Hal Watson, was assigned to the Exploitation Division at Headquarters USSTAF, the later USAFE. It was Putt who, in April 1945, would lead a group of Exploitation Division personnel to a totally unknown German research laboratory just captured by General George Patton’s troops. Hurrying to get there before the British, because the Hermann Goering Aeronautical Research Center at Völkenrode, near Braunschweig, was located in what would become the British Zone of Occupation—and the Brits would have every right for its exploitation, not the Americans. The center’s facilities, located in a forest, were so expertly camouflaged that from the air it appeared to be no more than an ordinary farmstead. After surveying the facility and talking to some of its senior research staff, such as Professor Dr. Busemann, an expert in wind tunnel testing and jet aircraft design, Colonel Putt decided this was something Dr. von Karman needed to get involved in. Putt was a former student of Dr. von Karman’s in 1938 at Caltech, where he studied to obtain his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. Putt was sent to Caltech after recovering from injuries suffered in an aircraft accident in 1935. He was the copilot on a flight crew testing the new X-299, which would become the B-17 bomber of World War II. The aircraft, rather than using wooden shapes to lock the aircraft’s flight controls when parked, such as the rudder, flaps, ailerons, and elevators, used a mechanical locking device. The crew, in a hurry, this was before checklists, forgot to unlock the flight controls, and the aircraft on its takeoff roll went into a vertical climb, did a wing-over, and crashed, killing many of its crew. Putt survived with serious injuries and after recovering found himself studying under Dr. von Karman at the California Institute of Technology.13

  Dr. von Karman was leading a group of scientists through varied German research establishments when he received an urgent call from Colonel Donald Putt, his former student, to come to Völkenrode immediately. “Just before I went overseas in 1944,” Putt recalled, “I was running a jet bomber competition at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. It included the B-45, B-46, B-47 and B-48. All were straight wing aircraft, very conventional looking.” At Völkenrode, Putt’s ATI (Air Technical Intelligence) team found wind tunnel models with swept-back wings. Busemann and von Karman knew each other well from pre-Hitler days when both worked at the same research laboratory in Trier. Now they were to meet again. Also present at this crucial meeting was George Schairer, the chief design engineer of the Boeing Aircraft Corporation. According to Putt, Busemann and von Karman met like two “long-lost buddies.” Their greetings were mutually cordial. “Busemann,” von Karman asked as the meeting progressed, “why the swept wings?” Busemann explained: “By sweeping the wings you fooled the air into thinking that it was not going as fast as it really was, or not so fast as the airplane itself was moving through the atmosphere, and therefore, you delayed the onset of compressibility drag. When you get close to the speed of sound, drag just takes off and goes up like that [moving his hand up vertically], but by sweeping the wing back and fooling the molecules of air, they don’t think they are going so fast, and you delay that great rise of the drag curve.”

  Professor Dr. Adolf Busemann pointing at the 35-degree wing sweep of the F-86 fighter.

  This was a revolutionary concept, at a time when many scientists still believed that what they had dubbed the sound barrier could not be penetrated by aircraft. Colonel Watson, while getting his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1940, wrote his thesis on the very subject: “Why Man Will Never Be Able to Fly Faster than the Speed of Sound.” George Schairer listened intently to the conversation between Busemann and von Karman, two of the world’s leading scientists in matters aeronautical, and immediately after the meeting wired his company to hold up on the design that was to be the B-47 bomber until he got home.14

  The B-47 bomber took the US Air Force into the jet age, and it became the design baseline for the 707 airliner, which led to the KC-135 jet tanker and to subsequent Boeing Company commercial aircraft designs. The B-47 put Boeing on the road to becoming one of the world’s premier military and commercial aircraft companies. Dr. von Karman wrote to General Arnold that “probably 75 to 90 percent of the technical aeronautical information in Germany was available at this establishment and that information on research and development which had not previously been investigated in the United States would require approximately two years to accomplish in the United States with the facilities available there.” Dr. von Karman further noted that “the information on jet engine development available at this establishment would expedite United States development by approximately six to nine months.” This was important information for an Army Air Forces chief who was struggling with the introduction of America’s first jet fighter, the P-80.15

  A B-45A bomber of the 47th Bomb Wing on the flight line at RAF Sculthorpe in County Norfolk, England, during an open house in 1954. Note the glass nose of the aircraft; the reconnaissance version had a solid nose.

  As a result of the Busemann–von Karman meeting, the B-47 had swept-back wings and podded engines hung beneath its wing
s, like the Me 262. Hanging the engines below the wings provided easy access, unlike engines built into an aircraft’s wing. Other aircraft manufacturers soon followed suit, and the F-86 fighter incorporated not only the 35-degree wing sweep but leading edge slats as well, and other innovative features gathered from German scientific data were incorporated into its design. Plans for the production of America’s first jet bomber, the B-45, were ongoing, and the decision was made to go ahead with a limited production run of 140 aircraft, 33 of them built as RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft. More than 2,000 B-47 and RB-47 aircraft were built to replace the limited number of B-45 jet bombers and dated, conventionally powered aircraft such as the B-29, B-50, and B-36. The RB-45C would fly some of the most daring reconnaissance missions of the Cold War era, until it was replaced by the RB-47E/H reconnaissance aircraft.

  THE PEACE THAT WOULDN’T TAKE (1947)

  I think the Russians felt we were very foolish to demobilize as fast as we did. I don’t think we would have had a Cold War if we’d kept a strong army in Europe in 1945.

  —Lucius Clay, in Jean Edward Smith, Lucius Clay: An American Life

  The partition of Germany into four occupation zones soon revealed that the western border of the Russian zone of occupation did not welcome trespassers; and the same lack of Russian cooperation became evident in the equally divided city of Berlin. As early as March 5, 1946, former prime minister Winston Churchill, in a presentation at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, said: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest … all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject … not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.” If there is such a thing as a specific event or occurrence to mark the beginning of the Cold War, this might be it—or maybe not. Certainly it wasn’t recognized as such at the time. On August 9, 1946, a European Air Transport Service C-47 on the Vienna–Udine, Italy, run strayed into Yugoslav airspace and was fired on and forced down by Yugoslav fighters. Ten days later, another C-47 was shot down in the same area. From then onward, USAFE F-9/RB-17s, capable of defending themselves against attackers, flew the endangered route.16 A Communist-inspired insurrection in Greece soon followed, making Western statesmen uneasy. President Harry Truman, supported by a remarkably capable team of men including Dean Acheson, Clark Clifford, George Kennan, and General George Marshall, put in place a proactive foreign policy to thwart Communist expansion. The Strategic Air Command (SAC), established on March 21, 1946, as one of three major combat commands of the Army Air Forces, initiated a series of deployments with B-29 bombers to Giebelstadt and Fürstenfeldbruck Air Bases in Germany—the same aircraft type that in 1945 had bombed Japan into submission dropping two atomic bombs. A hint to the Soviet Union and its aggressive tactics in Europe.