by Neil Sheehan
By the beginning of the 1950s and the return of that everlasting stimulus of innovation, the atmosphere of war in the competition with the Soviets, Dr. Draper of MIT was in the process of taking inertial guidance to its zenith. (Like John von Neumann, Charles Stark Draper gave of his genius to the needs of the U.S. military. When he retired, he chose as his successor to head his Instrumentation Laboratory at MIT a former pupil and one of Schriever’s stars, Brigadier General Robert Duffy.) Schriever had put him under contract to design inertial guidance systems for all three of the Air Force’s ballistic missiles, Thor, Atlas, and Titan. Draper built a prototype for Thor at his laboratory. Copies were then reproduced on production tooling by the AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors, which had begun its existence making the little plugs that sparked off the gasoline in GM’s piston engines and then graduated into the manufacture of precision equipment. Draper’s inertial guidance mechanism was an ingenious contrivance of gyroscopes, accelerometers, and related controls. It calculated the missile’s speed and course from the moment the rocket left the pad. The device instantly compared what it found with the correct course data stored in a computer that had also been installed in the missile. With Thor, the course data was basic. It consisted of an azimuth, or compass bearing, that pointed to the target and the distance of the target from the launch point. The inertial guidance mechanism then issued commands that took the rocket to the proper speed and angle, cut off the engines, and launched the warhead at the precise moment required for an accurate flight to its destination.
The greatest fear Jacobson and Mettler had before the first inertial guidance test was that the old-fashioned vacuum tubes, still being used for the circuit connections in the missile’s primitive computer, might not withstand the stress of launch. Their worry may have been justified, because 107 seconds after Thor 112 lifted up and away from the pad on December 7, 1957, it suddenly lost stability, began to veer inland, and had to be blown up by the range safety officer. Two days later, they tried again and this time they could not have asked for a better outcome. The inertial guidance took Thor 113 aloft on a perfect flight and sent the warhead down the Caribbean island chain to splash unerringly into the ring of hydrophones near Antigua. To further test the guidance system and to be certain the fuselage of the missile was sturdy enough to withstand turbulent crosswinds if the crew had to launch during a storm, they programmed the computer to put the rocket through several violent maneuvers before the inertial guidance asserted itself for a smooth flight to the target. The test was a complete success, the sole casualties the two decorative fins Thiel had tacked on the base of Thor to distinguish it from Jupiter. Both were torn off by the whiplash turns of the rocket. Someone asked why they were bothering with fins anyway. There was no need for them and so Thiel’s attempt at a distinctive feature for his rocket child was eliminated on future Thors coming through the Douglas production line.
After several more test launches in July and early August 1958, a decision had to be made. Was Thor ready to be deployed in England? Mettler and Thiel wanted to continue perfecting the missile. Jacobson said no. In this post-Sputnik era, just as Schriever felt pressure coming down from the White House, so Jacobson sensed the same pressure, if usually unspoken, from Schriever. The engine had been upgraded to 150,000 pounds of thrust. They had achieved a reasonable percentage of reliabilty and an average accuracy of about five eighths of a mile. “That’s it,” Jacobson remembered saying. “What we have is good enough. It performs its mission now. We don’t need to do any better. Don’t go fiddling with it.” Schriever gave his assent and Jacobson ordered the rocket’s configuration frozen. With the final changes from these tests, they had readied the IRBM that Douglas would now begin turning out on its production line for England. Test-launching continued through 1958 and 1959 and into early 1960, but these launches were made to retroactively fix flaws discovered in Thor after deployment got under way. The first Thor landed in Britain aboard a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) C-124 Globemaster on August 29, 1958.
59.
JAMIE WALLACE’S THOR SHOW
The officer most responsible for this alacrity was an Air Force major of short stature, Texas-size energy, and a modest, precisely clipped mustache named Jamie Walker Wallace. As his three quintessentially Scottish names (William Wallace, the hero of Scotland’s first struggle for independence, was executed by Edward I of England in 1306) announced, his ancestry was hardly pacifist. Born in 1921 in Bolivar, a small town north of Fort Worth in north Texas, the son of two teachers, he had flown 209 missions as a fighter pilot in the Pacific, shot down three Japanese planes, and won three Distinguished Flying Crosses and numerous Air Medals. According to Jamie, no one could do anything finer for a man than to let him fly a fighter plane in combat. “Hell, we’ve already died and gone to Heaven,” he would say with a laugh. After the war and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, he had gone into guided missiles, working on the Matador cruise type for several years. That experience had made him a marked man for Schriever. One day in the fall of 1955, Wallace was walking down the stairs at the Air Research and Development Command in Baltimore. He was assigned then to the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (still commonly referred to as Wright Field) in Dayton, engaged in further experimentation with the 650-mile-range Matador, and was at this senior headquarters in Baltimore on a related matter. He noticed a tall brigadier coming up the stairs with a shorter civilian walking beside him. Jamie recognized the civilian as Trevor Gardner from his photographs in Air Force publications. Wallace did not recognize the brigadier and later would never ask and so would never discover how Schriever had learned who he was. In those days, officers did not wear nametags on their uniforms. As they saluted and were about to pass one another, the general stopped him and inquired, “Are you Wallace?” He answered yes and was stunned by the general’s reply. “Go back to Wright Field and report to me in California,” Schriever said, and resumed his climb up the stairs with Gardner.
Wallace went into the office of a friend at the bottom of the stairs and asked who that brigadier was. The friend identified Schriever and asked Jamie what he was going to do. “I have the sneaking suspicion I ought to go to Wright Field, sell my house, and report to him in California,” Wallace said. “Good boy,” the friend advised. After he had returned to Ohio, Jamie found out that he had just been “selected” for reassignment to Schriever’s operation and there was no way he could avoid the posting even had he wanted to do so. The house sold at a modest profit, which made Jamie’s wife, Genevieve, a lively Texas woman who went by the nickname Gee, happy, and the Wallace family climbed into their sedan and set out for California. They arrived in January 1956, a few months after Bennie’s expanding WDD organization had outgrown the Schoolhouse and shifted to a leased office complex called Arbor Vitae, which Ramo-Wooldridge had acquired near Los Angeles International Airport. The move had the advantage of placing both organizations together. Jacobson immediately snatched up Wallace for his test operations division and, after Schriever had to relieve Hall and draft Jacobson to rescue Thor, Jake tasked Jamie with putting together the ground support equipment they would need to field the IRBM.
This was a road familiar to Wallace. He had walked down it with Matador and this time he also had able help from Ramo’s organization and Douglas. Everything was designed to be dismantled for transport by air and erection on site in England. The shelter to protect the missile from the corrosive English weather was brilliantly simple. It sat on railroad tracks. Its fore and aft sections could be rolled apart in a moment to uncover the weapon and permit the crew to raise the Thor erect into firing position with a hydraulically operated hoist. The concrete launch pad to be laid in England was modest. There was no necessity for a massive pad like those emplaced at Canaveral to withstand repeated firings, because if these missiles were fired in anger there would be one launch and that would be it. Tanks for the liquid oxygen and the RP-1 kerosene were each placed off to
one side at a safe distance, with protective concrete blast walls to be erected around them in case of an accident. Fueling lines ran to the missile. A panoply of related equipment was arranged at spots where it would be needed. The launch control center, which housed the launch crew and the consoles of instruments for the countdown and firing, was just a trailer for a tractor-trailer truck, so that it could be hooked up and hauled into place.
In October 1957, as Jacobson was beginning to get Thor to fly properly at Cape Canaveral, several officers working with him urged that he follow through with earlier plans to hold what is called a Development Engineering Inspection for the missile in California that December. Jake put Wallace in charge and Jamie turned the event into what might more aptly have been called “The Thor Show.” The official purpose of a DEI is to gather everyone involved in the creation of a weapon system, from military project officers to contractors, and to lay out the entire project in order to make certain that all is ready and working. Inevitably, such events generate promotion for the new weapon within industry and the military community, and those officers recommending that Jacobson stage the inspection understood this. Wallace wanted something quite beyond the ordinary. He wanted promotion on a grand scale. He told Jacobson that if he could he would hold the DEI on the Twentieth Century-Fox soundstage in Hollywood. When Jacobson laughed at him, he said he was joking only because it was impossible.
He had to settle instead for the better part of a city block at a Douglas Aircraft facility in the west Los Angeles district of Venice. The place already had an auditorium that was perfect for the briefings. Jamie now proceeded to have a twelve-foot-high plywood fence put up around much of the block to create a large enclosure. Within it he set up a Thor launching site virtually the same as one that would appear when deployment occurred in England, if on a somewhat smaller scale. A real Thor missile was trucked in and installed on a hydraulic hoist to lift it erect as would be done for firing. There were the tanks for the RP-1 and liquid oxygen, naturally empty; a control center for the launch crew with instrument consoles; the whole nine yards.
The event was scheduled for three days, from December 10 to 12, 1957. It lasted two weeks. About 300 visitors were initially expected and about 3,000 showed up. In retrospect, the number was not surprising given the wideness of the net Wallace cast with Jacobson’s and Schriever’s approval. Invitations were sent to thirteen different institutions and commands, including the generals on the Air Staff at the Pentagon; the ARDC in Baltimore; SAC at Offutt Air Force Base; the Special Weapons Command at Kirtland; the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson; the Air Matériel Command, also at Wright-Patterson; the Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; even the Alaskan Air Command. Wallace also sent invitations out to the scientific community and naturally to Douglas and the other firms like Rocketdyne and AC Spark Plug that were building Thor and had a serious role to play in the exercise. The VIPs were guided about in groups or, for those who wished it, driven in four-seater electric golf carts with a “Missile Express” sign on the front. An aging Theodore von Kármán was chauffeured over from Pasadena and reverentially received and briefed. After a while, Jamie stopped counting the two-and three-star generals. “We brought them in by the planeload,” he said later with happy exaggeration. Tommy Power, who now wore four stars, having succeeded LeMay that July as commander-in-chief of SAC, led the lot. (LeMay had moved up to vice chief of staff under White.) Power posed for photographs with the nabobs of the aircraft industry who also came, such as Donald Douglas, Jr., the current CEO of Douglas Aircraft, and his retired father, Donald Sr., attired in a gray homburg and dark pinstriped suit as sveltely tailored as the fuselage of a new jet fighter plane. Even though Power had left ARDC he continued to regard Thor as one of his projects and it still was, because SAC would be responsible for manning the American element of the Thor sites once the missile was deployed to England.
With this many people coming and going, security was, in effect, thrown to the winds. While everyone who entered needed a security clearance and a pass, it would hardly have been difficult for a squad of Soviet intelligence officers to forge passes and wander about unnoticed among 3,000 people. Jamie didn’t give a damn and neither did Jacobson and Schriever. If this was the price of attention, so be it. Wallace noted afterward that the only secrets worth keeping were in the nuclear warhead and he didn’t happen to have one of those on the lot. It was impossible, in any case, to hide what was going on. One of Wallace’s favorite circus tricks for the VIPs was to hoist the Thor straight up into its firing position, which put the 64.8-foot-high missile clearly in view from the street. The visitors seemed to particularly enjoy this and he estimated he must have had it raised and lowered fifty to sixty times. A group of little boys from the neighborhood noticed and began regularly pelting the Thor with pebbles every time it rose. Jamie went to the prettiest of the Douglas secretaries assigned to the DEI and asked her to get a paper bag of candy and go out and tell the boys she would give them a fresh bag every morning if they would leave the missile alone. The bribe worked.
Yet there were no inquiries from the news media. No one, other than the neighborhood boys, seemed to pay any attention. Jamie attributed this general lack of curiosity to the fact that they were holding the DEI in Los Angeles, the filmmaking capital of the world. In any other community, he was convinced, the sight of a twelve-foot-high fence around much of a city block with a tall missile going up and down inside and lots of uniformed men with stars arriving and departing in Air Force staff cars would have had reporters knocking at the gate and calling on the phone. “Not in Los Angeles,” he said. “I’ll make you a bet that most of the people thought somebody was running a goddamn movie set.”
Most senior Air Force officers who accepted the invitation to the DEI probably did so out of curiosity, because Thor was the service’s first ballistic missile. But what they saw, they seemed to like. Jamie got the impression that they had garnered some across-the-board support, not only for Thor, but for the missile program as a whole. While Power was a long-ago convert, they picked up several new high-level allies, the most important of whom was Lieutenant General Clarence “Wild Bill” Irvine, the deputy chief of staff for matériel. Irvine was a sturdy, broad-shouldered man. He probably had more time in service than any other general in the Air Force because he was a “mustang” who had clambered up from the ranks. He reached back to the First World War, when he had begun his career as a sergeant pilot while such noncommissioned flying positions still existed. Professionally, he was an effective air leader and a first-class executive. He had been one of LeMay’s favorite wing commanders, picking up the boss’s affectation of a stogie clenched between his teeth. In private, despite his passage into middle age, he remained a womanizing rogue who probably would have been drummed out of the no-hanky-panky Air Force of later generations. From Jake’s and Jamie’s point of view he became a friend of immense value, because as deputy chief of staff for matériel on the Air Staff, Irvine was in charge of procurement and had genuine clout. He told them to call him or to come and see him at the Pentagon whenever they had a problem.
The serious side of the DEI was not confined to winning high-placed benefactors. The auditorium was in constant use as representatives of all of the firms involved with Thor, Jake and Jamie and their Air Force colleagues, and Mettler and Thiel and the Ramo-Wooldridge team gave briefings and were briefed, examining and reexamining obstacles. Jamie’s reproduction of a Thor launching site enabled them to examine physically—not just on paper—every element of the weapon system. Where a piece of equipment that was supposed to exist was missing, either because it had not yet been manufactured or because someone had forgotten to order it, a box was prominently marked and put in its place, so that an order would be issued and the piece installed. The same physical tracking procedure was followed for wiring connections, valves, pipes—everything. There was no time to lose.
60.
THE BIGGEST AIRLIFT SINCE BERLIN
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The British were amenable to accepting Thor as soon as possible because a deterrent was needed against the increasing threat of Soviet medium-and intermediate-range missiles. Britain had its own IRBM, Blue Streak, in development, but the missile was five years in the offing. (It was canceled after the full deployment of Thor.) Britain was already under threat from the first Russian ballistic missile with an appreciable range, the R-5 (NATO: SS-3 Shyster), which had first achieved its full-scale flight of 800 miles in 1953 and been deployed with a nuclear warhead in 1956 and 1957. While classified as a medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) and modest in reach by subsequent measurements, the R-5 had ample mileage to strike England across the North Sea from launching sites in Soviet-occupied East Germany. A much more substantial danger was the R-12 (NATO: SS-4 Sandal), the first of the Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles with a span of 1,250 miles. Deployed around 1958, it was intended to obliterate American and British air bases throughout the United Kingdom and Europe and, fired from the edges of the far-flung Soviet empire, those it could strike in the Middle East and Asia as well. And although its existence was not yet confirmed, the Soviets were in the process of readying a second and more formidable IRBM. This was the R-14 (NATO: SS-5 Skean), which could hurl its nuclear warhead 2,500 miles and would be deployed as early as 1960.
Not long after that first Thor landed in England on August 29, 1958, Jamie Wallace organized the biggest airlift since Berlin in 1948 to send over the other fifty-nine Thors and the related ground support equipment as fast as everything came off the production lines. With Wild Bill Irvine running interference and intimidating the Military Air Transport Service into scheduling the planes for him, Wallace virtually commandeered MATS for about three months, staging some 1,180 flights out of Long Beach Airport, then a semipublic facility that was actually the airfield for the Douglas Aircraft Company facility there. The racket of the MATS four-engine C-124 Globemaster transports landing and taking off day and night aroused so much protest from residents in adjoining neighborhoods that Jacobson and Wallace had to round up a passel of public relations types from Air Force detachments on the West Coast. They set the PR people to knocking on doors within ten miles of Long Beach Airport, explaining that the Air Force was engaged in flying vitally needed military equipment to Europe and their forbearance would be appreciated. As such assertions went unquestioned at the height of the Cold War, the good citizens of Long Beach were pacified.
