A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

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

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

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

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

  7.

  STAYING THE COURSE

  This time he was off to Panama. As it gradually geared up, the Air Corps had begun accepting applications from Reservists to return to active duty flying status. Schriever applied and was sent to Albrook Field on the Pacific side of the Canal Zone. Before going he had to agree to revert from first lieutenant back to second to save the Air Corps money on his salary. Golf came to his assistance again. The game is, as Schriever once shrewdly observed, “the finest avenue for meeting the right people.… It is a friend-making game.” Older men who are not particularly adept at golf often like to play with a younger and highly skilled golfer because they can learn from him and a handicap system allots them a set number of strokes in their favor in advance. They can enjoy themselves by participating in some fine golf without being ashamed of their scores at the end of the game.

  Brigadier General George H. Brett, the Air Corps commander for the Zone, whose headquarters was at Albrook, was that kind of a golfer. Brett was another of the band of original Army aviators. A 1909 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute at a time when only West Point graduates could obtain direct commissions in the small Regular Army, Brett had accepted what he could get, a second lieutenant’s commission in the Philippine Constabulary, a colonial model force manned by Filipino enlisted men and officered by Americans. It had been formed to enforce tranquillity in America’s new imperial possession in Asia. Brett had seen quite a bit of action against the independence-minded Moros, the Muslim inhabitants of Mindanao, before he was able to win a commission in the cav
alry of the Regular Army and then, in an adventurous move, become a pilot in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, the precursor of the Army Air Corps, just as the First World War was erupting in 1914. Over the decades since, he had gradually wound his way up through the officer ranks to the star he now wore as commander in the Canal Zone. He was currently interested in improving his golf game and word of Schriever’s aptitude at his avocation had preceded him to Panama. Brett asked Bennie if he would like to serve as one of his two aides. The career opportunity was marvelous because of all a young officer can learn working directly for a general (the job also paid an additional $10 a month).

  It led to marriage as well when Brett sent Bennie to the Atlantic side of the Canal one day early in 1937 to meet his twenty-year-old daughter, Dora, who was arriving on an Army transport ship to rejoin the family after staying with friends in Washington. Schriever walked up the gangplank still a bit drowsy because he had risen in the wee hours to cross the Canal Zone and be on time for the ship’s 5:00 A.M. docking. His drowsiness dissipated at the sight of the pretty young woman with a figure to remember and curly blond hair. They got acquainted over a breakfast of ham and eggs in the ship’s dining room and were soon in love.

  In 1935 and again in 1937 Schriever had applied for one of the few Regular Army commissions given out each year and had been turned down both times. A Reserve second lieutenant was in too precarious a position to take on the responsibility of a wife and the family that presumably would follow. He could have been deactivated at any time. And so he requested deactivation himself in order to marry Dora. That August of 1937, he sailed from Panama to take a job as a co-pilot with Northwest Airlines, flying the Seattle to Billings, Montana, run. The aircraft was the Lockheed Electra 10, advanced for its day in that it had an all-metal fuselage and twin radial engines, and was aptly named because it could carry ten passengers. Bennie’s additional duties as copilot were to load and unload the sacks of mail and hand out sandwiches in box lunches to the passengers. He and Dora were married on January 3, 1938, at Hap Arnold’s home in Washington.

  By now Arnold was a brigadier general and assistant chief of the Air Corps, soon to become its head when the current chief, Major General Oscar Westover, was killed in the crash of a plane he was piloting that September. Hap and Bee Arnold were close friends of the Bretts. Dora’s parents did not come up for the ceremony because there was as yet no airline service from Panama and the journey by ship was time-consuming and burdensome. Arnold gave away the bride.

  Schriever was currently making an excellent salary of about $250 a month as a co-pilot with Northwest. The prospect was that he would double that to the fabulous Depression-era salary of $500 a month in the not distant future when he became a reserve lead pilot, or “reserve captain” as the position was designated in the airlines. Dora therefore had every reason to feel content as they set up housekeeping in Seattle.

  Then Hap Arnold flew out to Seattle in March to confer with the president of Boeing. He arranged a foursome at golf and invited Bennie as one of the players. Arnold rarely played golf and his purpose in setting up the game became clear as soon as it was over. With war appearing more and more inevitable in Europe, the Air Corps was finally being allowed to award Regular commissions to sizable numbers of Reservists. A competitive examination was scheduled for that August. “Bennie,” Arnold said as they were changing in the locker room afterward, “I hope that you’ll take the exam for a Regular commission.” He explained that he wanted to create an all-weather air arm and therefore needed to get as many airline pilots who were Reservists as possible back into the Air Corps on a permanent basis, because they had the knowledge and experience for instrument flying. Decades later, Schriever remained astonished at Arnold’s ability to look into the future. “Arnold was sitting there in 1938, long before we were in the war, saying he wanted an all-weather air force. That was truly visionary. By the end of the war, we had the capability. When the Soviets blockaded Berlin in 1948 and we had to stage the airlift, we had mechanical failures and we had crashes but we rarely had to cancel a flight because of the weather.”

  Dora was opposed to his taking the examination. If he was accepted as a Regular, he could not reenter at his Reserve rank of first lieutenant. He would have to start all over as a second lieutenant at the bottom of the seniority list. With flying pay and a housing allowance, the cut in income would not be that serious compared to his current salary of $250 a month at Northwest, but it would be half what he would soon be earning there. As a daughter of the regiment, Dora was also acutely aware of the constant moves, the separations, and the dangers of military life. With Northwest there was stability: even when Schriever overnighted in Billings, he was back home the next day in Seattle. She did not make a major issue of her opposition, however, and there was no stopping him in any case. Bennie Schriever was not going to give up the Air Corps to fly to Billings via Spokane.

  On October 1, 1938, at Hamilton Field near San Rafael, just north of San Francisco, he held up his right hand again and took the unusual oath that American officers take when they accept their commissions—not an oath of allegiance to the president as commander-in-chief, not an oath of loyalty to the nation, but rather a vow to uphold an ideal of liberty and republican government embodied in law. Schriever swore that, as a second lieutenant in the Air Corps, Regular Army, “I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.… I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” Of the 188 men in his group who were accepted, about two thirds were airline pilots. Hap Arnold had apparently passed the word to the examining board as to whom he wanted.

  8.

  A FORK IN THE ROAD

  He was initially assigned to a bomber squadron at Hamilton Field. The Schrievers’ first child, Brett Arnold—Brett for his grandfather, Arnold for Hap—was born on March 23, 1939. In the meantime, George Brett returned to the States to take over the Matériel Division, predecessor of the Air Matériel Command, the Air Corps’ research and development center, with its testing facilities and laboratories at Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio. Bennie had often told his father-in-law of his ambition to attend the Engineering School there, the Air Corps’ senior technical school, which gave those officers selected a year’s course in general aeronautical engineering. The school had been temporarily closed, but was due to reopen soon. Brett needed test pilots who could handle the variety of aircraft being evaluated at Wright Field as American industry revved up production. His wife, Mary, also could not enjoy a grandson who was more than half a continent away. Brett contacted Arnold, since promoted to major general and chief of the Air Corps, and asked to have Bennie assigned to him as a test pilot. Arnold assented. To make certain that transfer orders would be issued expeditiously, Brett followed up on August 28, 1939, with a “Dear Duncan” letter to Lieutenant Colonel Asa N. Duncan, one of Arnold’s assistants at his office in Washington. He opened by telling Duncan he had just received a note from Arnold saying that Arnold would approve Lieutenant Schriever’s transfer from Hamilton to Wright Field:

  As you know, the boy is my son-in-law and Mrs. Brett is very anxious to have them come to Dayton at this time. In addition thereto, Lieutenant Schriever has all the qualifications of one of the officers I am very anxious to get into the Flight Test Section. He is a technical engineer, has had a year with the airlines on one of the toughest runs in the United States, has had about two and a half years’ active duty as a Reserve officer, and has now been on duty at Hamilton Field for approximately one year.

  If possible I would like very much to have him sail from San Francisco sometime the first part of October as they have a small baby and we would like to have the baby here before the cold weather sets in.

  (Air Corps families moved then by ship and rail, not in aircraft.)

  Except for the fact Lieutenant Schriever fits in very well with the qualifications for the Lieutenants I have asked for duty with the Flight Test Section, all the oth
er reasons are on account of a doting grandmother.

  The copy of the letter that went into Schriever’s personnel file was marked “OK” and initialed by Arnold. The appointment was justifiable enough, but there was one fib, perhaps unintentional. His bachelor’s degree in construction engineering from Texas A&M hardly qualified him as “a technical engineer” in any way that related to aircraft. The overt nepotism and easy familiarity of the letter were reflections of the clublike atmosphere in the between-the-wars Army Air Corps, an atmosphere that was soon to dissolve under the hurly-burly of the conflict to come. Schriever was fortunate to have arrived before it did.