www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,936744,00.html

"Break up the Joint Chiefs"

Monday, Dec. 23, 1957

As Chief of Staff, U.S. Army (1945-48), five-star General Dwight Eisenhower was one of the chief architects of the National Security Act of 1947, which set up the separate U.S. Air Force and was also designed-though with numerous compromises-to "unify" the armed services. As President of the U.S., Dwight Eisenhower has a better basic knowledge of how the services work than any President in modern history. Yet, paradoxically, one of the soft spots of his Administration record is that, during the regime of Defense Secretary Charlie Wilson, Ike let Pentagon administration get out of hand.

At his conference with legislative leaders last fortnight the President sat fuming while Congressmen asked sharp questions-and got limp answers from Pentagon officials-about interservice rivalries, overlapping missile programs and the whole organizational foul-up that makes it almost impossible to trace responsibility for any kind of failure in U.S. defense. No sooner had the congressional leaders left the White House than President Eisenhower called Defense Secretary Neil McElroy, into his office. His orders: find the right answers to the Pentagon's problems and put them into effect. Said the President: "You have a free hand."

More & Better.

It was not all that simple: before Neil McElroy could attack the Pentagon's problems he had first to know and understand them himself. And the same organizational tangle that brought on Ike's order is still working against McElroy-or his three subordinate service secretaries, or the 30 assistant and deputy secretaries-achieving the required knowledge and understanding. Never has that fact been more bluntly put than last week, when the Army's tough, brainy research and development chief, Lieut. General James M. Gavin, appeared before the Senate Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee.

Neil McElroy, said Paratrooper Gavin pointedly, is "the most able man who has come to that office [Secretary of Defense]." But McElroy needs more and better "professional military advice" than he has been able to get under the Pentagon system from the Joint Chiefs of Staff -or from assistant secretaries whose regimes, said Gavin, have lasted "somewhat on the order of a year and a half."

The Joint Chiefs of Staff is a sort of command-by-committee system (Gavin later emphasized that he was not talking about the individual competence of the present chiefs) and is not enough. Said Jim Gavin: "He [McElroy] needs more advice than the Joint Chiefs of Staff give him. I think really what is needed now is a competent military staff of senior military people working directly for the Secretary of Defense. I would have them take over the functions of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I would have the military staff organized to handle operations, plans, intelligence, and in fact break up the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Such a career staff, said General Gavin, should be drawn from all services, but should be "completely integrated across the board." Said Gavin: "The thing that disturbs a number of people, and I am included, is that there is no operational staff within the Department of Defense, and in the event of war it would have to be reorganized."

(2 of 2)

First Things First.

At no point did Gavin actually advocate a "general staff system"-which conjures up images of Prussianism to many a skittish Congressman-and to all devout Navymen. But that was precisely what he was urging, just as retired Air Force General James Doolittle had urged a fortnight before when appearing before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee. In the minds of Jim Gavin and Jimmy Doolittle, and in the opinion of others among the nation's best military thinkers, Neil McElroy cannot even begin to solve the Pentagon's problems until he has a general staff, whatever it may be called. Their argument: only a general staff, standing above violent service loyalties and ambitions, can work out a single, integrated, sensible U.S. defense plan. And only within the context of a single, integrated, sensible defense plan can Neil McElroy start using his free hand to tackle the subsidiary problems. Among them:

ROLES & MISSIONS.

If he is to head off an interservice blow-up that will make past squabbles seem like mere brush fires, McElroy must redefine obsolescent service roles and missions assignments (air to the Air Force, sea control to the Navy, land to the Army) in the light of missile strategy, to which old geographic concepts no longer apply. Outer space, by present definitions, belongs to no single service; neither does defense against enemy space missiles. Neither, for that matter, does the missile itself. All the services are rushing in with proposals, claims, bids.

ADMINISTRATION.

The Defense Department must find a way to become an operational as well as a policymaking body in such grey areas as missile development. McElroy has promised a single manager for new space programs. Another critical problem is the increasing demand for an effective missile "czar," since neither Missile Director William Holaday nor Presidential Science Adviser James Killian has yet fulfilled that role.

EXPENDITURES.

McElroy's predecessor, Charlie Wilson, let costs get so far out of hand that he was forced to call an abrupt halt to military procurement before the end of fiscal 1957. He also had to reduce procurement programs for 1958 to an extent that caused havoc in the airframe industry. McElroy will probably have about $2 billion more than Wilson to spend, will have that much bigger a problem in trying to control the spending.

LIMITED WAR v. GENERAL WAR.

During Wilson's regime, big-war thinking dominated U.S. military policy and procurements. But there is a rising clamor for the U.S. to prepare itself equally for small, limited wars; the Army especially is driving hard for the men and equipment, including airplanes; is already on the way to having an air force of its own.

In his brief time in office, Neil McElroy has indicated that he may be a strong Defense Secretary. He will have to be: his is the awesome job of making up for past mistakes while presiding over the orderly and economical phasing-in of an entire new military technology, without weakening U.S. forces in being.

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,867921,00.html

"A Real Big Brawl"

Monday, Nov. 11, 1957

Into Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel last week crowded 2,000 delegates to the third annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army, a private organization made up of Army and ex-Army men and a loud-speaking outlet for top-level Army propaganda. On hand to stir them on were the Army's senior commanders, striving both by indirection and by extraordinarily blunt talk to overturn Defense Department policy and win for the Army a major place in the missile world. Displayed around the hotel ballroom were Army missiles and parts of missiles; at the entrance a placard blazoned the Army's basic doctrinal claim to render the Air Force obsolete. "In the missile era," read the placard, quoting the Army's Lieut. General James M. Gavin, "the man who controls the land will control the space above it."

Jupiter & Zeus.

Continental Army Command's General Willard G. Wyman contributed a stinging attack against the Defense Department's "arbitrary," "rigid" and "dangerous" ruling that Army missiles must be limited to 200 miles ground-to-ground and 100 miles ground-to-air (TIME, Dec. 10).

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Short-Range Army Honest John Unguided Rocket

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpJeyiDLPXA

The MGR-1 Honest John rocket was the first nuclear-capable surface-to-surface rocket in the US arsenal. Designated Artillery Rocket XM31, the first such rocket was tested in 1951 and deployed in January 1953. The designator was changed to M31 in September, 1953 and were deployed in Europe several months later. It is important to note that alternatively, the rocket was designed to be capable of carrying ordinary high-explosive warheads, even though that was not the primary purpose for which it was envisioned since it lacked guidance accuracy to make small warheads effective.

The M31 consisted of a truck-mounted, unguided, solid-fueled rocket transported in 3 separate parts. Before launch they were combined in the field, mounted on an M289 launcher and aimed and fired in about 5 minutes. The rocket was originally outfitted with a W7 dial-a-yield nuclear warhead with a yield of up to 20 kilotons and later a W31 warhead with a yield of up to 40 kt. It had a range between 5.5 km (3.4 miles) and 24.8 km (15.4 miles).

In the 1960s Sarin nerve gas cluster munitions were also available for Honest John launch.

There were 2 versions: * MGR-1A had a range of 48 kilometers, takeoff thrust of 400 kN, takeoff weight of 2720 kg, diameter of 580 mm and length of 8.32 m. * MGR-1B had a range of 37 kilometers, launch thrust of 382 kN, launch weight of 2040 kg, diameter of 760 mm and length of 7.56 m.

Production of the MGR-1 variants finished in 1965 with a total production run of more than 7,000 rockets. The system was replaced with the MGM-52 Lance missile in 1973, but was deployed with NATO units in Europe and U.S. Army National Guard units as late as 1982.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1GF2kii9Hk

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Army Secretary Wilber M. Brucker decorated the Redstone Arsenal's most famous missile scientist, ex-German Missileman Wernher von Braun, boosted the Army's claim that its 1,500-mile missile Jupiter is superior to the rival Air Force Thor and is in fact "the most advanced guided missile yet produced in the free world."

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULeMVjbsKb8

Army Chief of Staff General Maxwell Taylor staked Army's claim to the next but faraway great step in weaponry, the defensive missile system to stop the attacking missile. He plugged hard for an Army project called Nike Zeus-"which already partially exists in the form of research-and-development components"-as the basis for an anti-missile missile program, thus by inference downgrading the rival Air Force Wizard anti-missile project (as well as an Air Force Pentagon-corridor campaign to put the Army out of the defensive antiaircraft missile business altogether).

Most strident Army performance of the week came from Lieut. General Stanley Mickelson, retiring chief of Army's Air Defense Command. So sharp was Mickelson's original speech that the Defense Department would not let him deliver all of it; the draft, however, had already been distributed to newsmen. Bitterly, the Mickelson text scorned the Air Force, derided the concept of airpower. Said the Army's General Mickelson, echoing a favorite line of the Army's General Gavin: "The Army points the way for America to shed herself of any stigma of the theory of mass destruction of civilian populations."

"Those Bastards."

Meanwhile, back at the Pentagon, the Air Force contingent was under direct orders to keep cool and dignified, to blow-off only in private. "Those bastards," said one high Air Force officer in private, "can't win in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where they ought to take their case, so they went to the public. They're not going to get away with it. It isn't going to do them any good. It's going to be a real big brawl."

All in all, in a time of national crisis, it was quite a week for interservice rivalry. And quite a warning to the Commander in Chief that appointment of a tough, top boss for the missile program could not be long delayed.

www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,825005,00.html

Let the Army ...

Monday, Jun. 24, 1957

The failure of the first Air Force test Atlas gave underdog Army spokesmen new confidence in the bitter interservice fracas on U.S. missile dominance. Against Atlas's crash and the Air Force's bug-ridden 1,500-mile Thor missile, the Army touted its own relatively successful 1,500-mile Jupiter (TIME, June 10) and the new low-level-surface-to-air Hawk, made its boldest pitch yet for operational control of intermediate-range missilery (1,500 miles) now assigned to the Air Force.

Hawk SAM on all-terrain tracked carrier

Chief architect of the new approach is tough Lieut. General James M. Gavin, Army Research and Development boss, who before a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee last week flung a basic reverse-twist challenge to Air Force doctrine: "In the missile era, the man who controls the land will control the space above it. The control of land areas [rather than air] will be decisive." In effect, ex-Paratrooper Gavin was arguing that the Army, instead of the Air Force, should be assigned to the area defense (as well as point defense) of the U.S. against Soviet ICBM attack. The Army, said Gavin, is better oriented for the air-defense job of the future: "We want 100% air defense and we consider this attainable. There has been no schizophrenia in the Army about how to get an air defense. We haven't worried about [jet] interceptors. We have gone after missiles . . . Very little, if anything, is going to get through us."

U.S. Army got America into Space, NOT NASA: First American Satellite in Orbit but could have beat the Russians had DoD Not Interfered, Army rockets put first American astronauts into space

www.redstone.army.mil/history/systems/redstone/welcome.html

On 10 July 1951, the Office, Chief of Ordnance (OCO) formally transferred research and development responsibility for the REDSTONE project to Redstone Arsenal. The OCO officially assigned the REDSTONE missile its name on 8 April 1952. Also known as the Army's "Old Reliable," the REDSTONE was a highly accurate, liquid propelled, surface-to-surface missile capable of transporting nuclear or conventional warheads against targets at ranges up to approximately 200 miles. First deployed in 1958, the REDSTONE was the forerunner of the JUPITER missile. On 31 January 1958, the REDSTONE was used as the first stage in the launch vehicle used by the Army to orbit the EXPLORER I, the Free World's first scientific earth satellite. A modified REDSTONE carried CDR Alan B. Shepard, Jr. on his historic suborbital flight on 5 May 1961.

PROJECT "Mercury 7" Astronauts at Redstone Arsenal Meeting before Launches

With the deployment of the speedier, more mobile [smaller, solid-fuel] PERSHING missile system in 1964, the REDSTONE missile system was ceremonially retired at Redstone Arsenal on 30 October 1964.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7YABPisFGE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ba2KS3_FY0

Pershing was a family of solid-fueled two-stage medium-range ballistic missiles designed and built by Martin Marietta to replace the Redstone missile as the United States Army's primary theater-level weapon. It was named for General of the Armies (6-Stars) John J. Pershing. The systems were managed by the U.S. Army Missile Command (MICOM) and deployed by the United States Army Field Artillery Corps.

Pershing IA

In 1964, a series of operational tests and follow-on tests were performed to determine the reliability of the Pershing 1. The Secretary of Defense then requested that the Army define the modifications required to make Pershing suitable for the quick reaction alert (QRA) role. The Pershing 1A development program was approved in 1965, and the original Pershing was renamed to Pershing I. Martin Marietta received the Pershing 1A production contract in mid-1967. The 2^nd Battalion, 44^th Field Artillery received equipment at Fort Sill in 1969. Project SWAP replaced all of the Pershing equipment in Germany by mid-1970 and the first units quickly achieved QRA status.

Pershing 1A was a "quick reaction alert" system and so had faster vehicles, launch times and newer electronics. The total number of launchers was increased from eight to 36 per battalion. It was deployed from May 1969 and by 1970 almost all the Pershing I systems had been upgraded to Pershing IA under Project SWAP. Production of the Pershing IA ended in 1975 and reopened in 1977 to replace missiles expended in training. In the mid-1970s the Pershing 1A system was further improved to allow the firing of a platoon's three missiles in quick succession and from any site without the need for surveying. 754 Pershing I/IA missiles were built with 180 deployed in Europe.[8]

The battalions in Europe were reorganized under new tables of organization and equipment (TOE); an infantry battalion was authorized and formed to provide additional security for the system; and, the 56^th Artillery Group was reorganized and redesignated the 56^th Field Artillery Brigade. Due to the nature of the weapon system, officer positions were increased by one grade: batteries were commanded by a major instead of a captain; battalions were commanded by a colonel and the brigade was commanded by a brigadier general.

The erector launcher (EL) was a modified low-boy flat-bed trailer towed by a Ford M757 5-ton tractor. The erection booms used a 3,000 psi pneumatic over hydraulic system that could erect the 5 ton missile from horizontal to vertical in nine seconds. The PTS and PS were mounted on a Ford M656 tractor. Launch activation was performed from a remote fire box that could be deployed locally or mounted in the battery control central (BCC). One PTS controlled three launchers-- when one launch count was complete, ten large cables were moved to the next launcher.

A repackaging effort of the missile and power station was completed in 1974 to provide easier access to missile components, reduce maintenance, and improve reliability. A new digital guidance and control computer combined the functions of the analog control computer and the analog guidance computer into one package. The mean corrective maintenance time was decreased from 8.7 hours to a requirement of 3.8 hours. The reliability increased from 32 hours mean time between failures to a requirement of 65 hours. In 1976, the sequential launch adapter (SLA) and the automatic reference system (ARS) were introduced. The SLA was an automatic switching device mounted in a 10 trailer that allowed the PTS to remain connected to all three launchers. This allowed all three launchers to remain "hot" and greatly decreasing the time between launches. The ARS eliminated the theodolites previously used to lay and orient the missile. It included a north seeking gyro and a laser link to the ST-120 in the missile. Once the ARS was set up, a cold missile could be oriented in a much shorter time.

MILESTONES

20 November '44 Ordnance Department entered into a research and development contract with the General Electric Company for study and development of long-range missiles that could be used against ground targets and high-altitude aircraft. This was the beginning of the HERMES project.

June '46 General Electric began a feasibility study of the HERMES Cl which later formed the basis for early REDSTONE missile research.

1 June 49 Redstone Arsenal was reactivated from standby status as the site of the Ordnance Rocket Center.

28 October '49 The Secretary of the Army approved the transfer of the Ordnance Research and Development Division, Sub-Office (Rocket) at Fort Bliss, Texas, to Redstone Arsenal. Among those transferred were Dr. Wernher von Braun and his team of German scientists and technicians who had come to the United States under "Operation Paperclip" during 1945 and 1946.

15 April '50 After its transfer to Redstone Arsenal, the aforementioned sub-office was redesignated the Ordnance Guided Missile Center.

10 July '50 Office, Chief of Ordnance directed that the Ordnance Guided Missile Center conduct a preliminary study of the technical requirements and possibilities of developing a 500-mile tactical missile that would be used principally in providing support for the operations of the Army Field Forces. 11 September 50 Ordnance Department directed that the HERMES contract with General Electric Company be amended to transfer responsibility for the HERMES Cl project to the Ordnance Guided Missile Center.

10 July '51 The Office, Chief of Ordnance formally transferred the responsibility for conducting the research and development phase of the HERMES Cl project to Redstone Arsenal

1 April '52 The Office, Chief of Ordnance (OCO) disapproved Redstone Arsenal's proposed development plan for what would become the REDSTONE missile. The arsenal had intended to implement the manufacturing program for these missiles by creating an assembly line in its own development shops. The OCO, however, required that the development effort be done by a prime contractor. Nonetheless, delays in the acquisition of production facilities for the prime contractor caused Redstone Arsenal to fabricate and assemble the first 12 REDSTONE missiles along with missiles 18 through 29.

8 April '52 The REDSTONE missile system officially received its popular name. Previously, this missile was known at various times and places as the HERMES Cl, MAJOR, URSA, XSSM-G-14, and XSSM-A-14.

October '52 Chrysler Corporation issued a letter order contract to proceed with active work as the prime contractor on the REDSTONE missile system. This contract was definitized on 19 June 53.

20 August '53 The first REDSTONE research and development missile was flight tested.

15 June '55 Chrysler Corporation received the first industrial contract for the REDSTONE.

1 February '56 Responsibility for prosecuting the REDSTONE program was transferred from Redstone Arsenal to the newly activated Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA).

15 April '56 The first REDSTONE missile battalion, the 217th Field Artillery Missile Battalion, was formally activated at Redstone Arsenal.

19 July '56 The first REDSTONE missile to be fabricated and assembled by Chrysler Corporation was flight tested.

20 September '56 JUPITER-C Missile RS-27, a modified REDSTONE, achieved the first deep penetration of space with an altitude of more than 680 miles and a range of over 3,300 miles.

8 August '57 JUPITER-C Missile RS-40 a modified REDSTONE, was successfully launched. Its nose cone was the first to be recovered from outer space. The nose cone carried the first missile mail ever delivered over intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) range.

9 September '57 The 40th Field Artillery Missile Group, the first heavy missile group organized in the U.S. Army, was transferred from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Redstone Arsenal.

2 October '57 The first REDSTONE missile firing in which troops actually participated occurred.

4 October '57 The U.S.S.R. launched SPUTNIK I.

8 November '57 The Secretary of Defense directed that DA modify two JUPITER-C missiles (modified REDSTONEs) and attempt to place an artificial earth satellite in orbit by March 58.

31 January '58 ABMA successfully launched JUPITER-C Missile RS-29, a modified REDSTONE, which placed EXPLORER I--the first U.S. satellite--into earth orbit.

16 May '58 The first successful troop launching of a tactical REDSTONE missile occurred at Cape Canaveral , Florida.

June '58 The REDSTONE became the first large U.S. ballistic missile to be deployed overseas, joining the NATO Shield Force.

2 June '58 The first overland firing of a large U.S. ballistic missile by combat troops occurred. A REDSTONE was successfully launched by the 40th Field Artillery Missile Group (Heavy) at White Sands Missile Range.

31 July '58 A REDSTONE missile was fired to an altitude in excess of 200,000 feet and a nuclear device of a megaton was detonated. This was the first such accomplishment by the United States.

24 October '58 The REDSTONE underwent static firing at White Sands Missile Range, the first time such a test had been conducted there.

November '58 The last REDSTONE research and development missile was flight tested. Of the 37 missiles flight tested for research and development purposes, 27 were successfully launched.

16 January '59 NASA issued a request to ABMA for eight REDSTONE missiles to be used in PROJECT MERCURY.

15 March '60 A REDSTONE missile successfully fired from White Sands Missile Range lofted a "flying TV station" for the first time.

10 June '60 The REDSTONE missile was launched over the largest trajectory ever attempted over land (120 miles).

19 December '60 MERCURY-REDSTONE 1 (MR-1) was successfully launched, proving the system's operational capabilities in a space environment.

31 January '61 The second MERCURY-REDSTONE (MR-2) test flight carried a chimpanzee named Ham into space.

5 May '61 MERCURY-REDSTONE 3 (MR-3) carried Commander Alan B. Shepard, Jr., on his historic suborbital flight.

21 July '61 The last MERCURY-REDSTONE flight carried Captain Virgil I. Grissom to a peak altitude of 118 miles and safely landed him 303 miles downrange.

25 June '64 The REDSTONE missile was classified as obsolete.

30 October 64 In a ceremony on the parade field at Redstone Arsenal, the REDSTONE missile was ceremonially retired.

December '64 The initial REDSTONE production contract awarded to Chrysler in October 52 was closed out.

www.redstone.army.mil/history/explorer/explorer.html

Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency revealed in a speech at the Army Science Symposium at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, during July 1957 that practically all components necessary for a successful satellite launch were available at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency. These components, he said, were left from the earlier Project Orbiter and were also available from the Jupiter-C reentry test vehicle program. He also indicated that the Army Ballistic Missile Agency had an orbit evaluation program, first projected by the Guided Missile Development Division in 1954. It consisted of a computer program that would provide scientific data on the oblateness of the earth, on the density of the upper atmosphere, and on high altitude ionization.

Among other things Dr. Stuhlinger noted in his speech was his observation that the 300-pound payload of the Jupiter-C reentry test vehicle missile could be converted to a fourth rocket stage plus an artificial earth satellite. In stating that the projected program had also included studies on high atmospheric conditions, on ionized layers of great altitudes, on the lifetime of satellites, on the earth's field of gravity, on mathematical studies of orbiting satellites, on recovery gear, on protective coverings for nose cones, and on radio-tracking and telemetering equipment (such as the highly sensitive micro-lock, a small continuous wave-radio transmitter developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratories for Project Orbiter), Dr. Stuhlinger added strength to the rumors, rife at that time, that the Department of the Army was engaged in an unauthorized satellite project. Because of these rumors, the Secretary of Defense ordered the Department of the Army to refrain from any space activity. Following this, the Department reaffirmed its close cooperation with Project Vanguard and denied that any of its research programs interfered with the intended tactical uses of the Redstone.

Then, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I on 4 October 1957. A month later, the Soviet Union orbited a second, larger satellite. In this country, Project Vanguard faltered when it experienced repeated failures- The Secretary of the Army then submitted a proposal for a satellite program to the Secretary of Defense [Wilson] during October. He pointed out that eight Jupiter-C missiles were available and with slight modification would be capable of launching artificial satellites. He suggested that the Department of the Army be authorized to pursue a 3-phase satellite program using these Jupiter-C missiles. The first phase of the proposed program provided for launching two Jupiter-C missiles in which the nose cone would be replaced by a fourth stage containing instrumentation that would be packaged in a cylindrical container-the satellite. In the second phase of the proposed program, the Army would launch five of the Jupiter-C missiles that would orbit satellites equipped with television facilities. The third and last phase of the proposed program also involved the launching of a Jupiter-C. In it, the nose cone would be replaced by a 300-pound surveillance satellite.

On 8 November 1957, the Secretary of Defense directed the Department of the Army to modify two Jupiter-C missiles and to attempt to place an artificial earth satellite in orbit by March 1958.

And it was the U.S. ARMY's IRBMs that were deployed first overseas with nuclear-warheads to smother any idea of the Soviets invading and taking over Europe. It was U.S. ARMY Jupiter IRBMs that deployed to Turkey and Italy (in stupid fixed sites by the moronic pampered USAF instead of the tactically sound mobile means designed by the Army) that were there as bargaining chips to get the Soviets to back down and take their IRBMs out of Cuba, preventing the world from being drawn into World War III.

Had it not been for the U.S. ARMY been ready in both conventional and nuclear forces despite the efforts of Secretary of Defense Wilson and Ike's disastrous "New Look" policies, we would have not just lost Korea, we would have had only USAF massive retaliation nuclear bombers to counter Soviet aggression, and if used we probably wouldn't even be here today.

Two months after retiring as the U.S. Army's Director on Research and Development, Lieutenant General James M. Gavin delivered his own atomic bombshell in response to setbacks in Korea, Hungary and the Soviets beating us into space with the Sputnik satellites; the masterpiece War & Peace in the Space Age. Mrs. Jean Gavin tells me that he dropped everything else he was doing in early 1958 and wrote the book from sun up to sun down, as a devoted Army wife she finally got to a chance to work on her golf game. Frustrated that America's defense was being thwarted by institutionalized complacency, General Gavin had had enough of suffering in silence and decided it was time to blow-the-whistle with an immediate after action review (AAR) on the battles going on within the newly formed but flawed Department of Defense (DoD) in order to save the day and find a way to win. This was the trademark of Gavin all through his life as a situational leader--- fighting for his family, his Paratroopers, his army and his citizens; a struggle to assess the situation and meet immediate demands, then learning how to get ahead and stay ahead by daring to change the situation and stack-the-deck in our favor.

Historical Significance

Without Gavin's book, America's post-WW2 defense establishment cannot be understood.

Gavin was there when DoD was born in 1947 and fought for its first decade to not fall into a defeatist, institutionalized rut that its still in today. We got lucky because the Soviet Union imploded economically in 1989, but that luck was engineered because just enough of Gavin's ideas were adopted after he had left the scene to prevent a take-over of Europe---of course no credit was given to him for this since he dared reveal the Pentagon's "dirty laundry" to the light of public scrutiny. Gavin's unselfishness to do what it took to force DoD to change was a gamble that saved America and the free world but at the cost of him becoming Secretary of Defense. The book is a blueprint for reforming DoD and was an obvious prima facie case for Gavin to be the next administration's SecDef to reform that organization into what is should be and still needs to be.

Gavin reveals the startling revelation that the U.S. Army had wanted to and had the ability to launch the first satellite into space long before the Russians did it but DoD civilian mandarins and the ruling U.S. Navy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not want the Army to get the money and the glory so America as a whole suffered a severe strategic defeat. When America finally did put a satellite into orbit, it was on an Army rocket. When it put a man into space, it was on an Army rocket. The U.S. Army created America's ballistic missiles yet DoD ran by the USAF mafia took this role/mission away and gave the fruit of the Army's labor to the USAF when they finally admitted their manned heavy bombers might not get through to reach the Soviet Union in an all-out nuclear war. John S. Brown writes in the September 2006 issue of Army magazine:

"Revolts" against civilian superiors by generals and admirals have been infrequent, and rarely have gone well or accomplished much. An exception lies in the resignations of Generals Matthew Ridgway, Maxwell Taylor and James Gavin to protest the Eisenhower administration's "New look," which threatened to gut the Army and rely upon strategic weapons alone to keep the peace. Each of these three wrote a thoughtful book-Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway; The Uncertain Trumpet; and War and Peace in the Space Age, respectively-outlining their visions of what the defense paradigm should look like. Collectively considered, these became the basis for the full spectrum "flexible response" that served us so well through the rest of the Cold War.

"Flexible Response" to prevent Eisenhower/Nixon republican disasters after Korea, namely Indochina, Suez, Hungary, Lebanon, Quemoy, Tibet and Laos based on a non-working nuclear doomsday deterrent propelled JFK to the White House. General Taylor became his confidant and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff but Ridgway remained in retirement.

Gavin Paid a Heavy Price for Writing the Book

Why didn't President John F. Kennedy appoint Gavin to be SecDef but instead made him Ambassador to France?

The answer, I believe is this book scared many influential people with its many sound but drastic ideas, threatening their military, industrial, congressional and think-tank (MICC-TT) rackets. If Gavin were SecDef, he'd turn the Pentagon around from a bloated, financially wasteful boondoggle back into a lean, efficient and effective Department of War---and this scared the socks off an America weary of the sacrifices of WW2 and who wanted to get back to the suburbs with the G.I. educational bill, work and making babies. The air force's siren's song was (and still is) that if America just paid for big, heavy bombers that could drop nuclear weapons on the enemy's civilian cities (allegedly "Strategic" Bombing), we'd scare all potential enemies to leave the baby boomers alone by this threat of mutually assured suicide. All the monies saved by not having to pay for amies and navies--just air forces---could go instead to paving inter-state highways, shopping malls and schools for the suburbanites. The problem is that don't-attack-or-else-I-will commit-suicide is an empty bluff as we surely would not kill ourselves for other countries and it doesn't stop the enemy from attacking with non-nuclear means as the "asymmetric" aggressions on South Korea in 1950 and Hungary in 1956 proved. Gavin's first sin was to call for more expenditures to field a flexible, small wars force to fight these "limited" wars when the MICC-TT racketeers only wanted to waste billions on "general wars" aka mythical WWIIIs that would be somehow prevented by threat of East-West national suicides. DoD wanted to spend, spend and spend on its mythological wars while ignoring the actual wars raging in the present. Does this sound vaguely familiar?

In 20-20 hindsight, what spoiled Gavin's chances for SecDef more than even daring to spend monies on the army and navy for small wars less than WWIII, was the "N" word---NUCLEAR.

People are scared to death of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear = death = certainly.

Ending of the 1965 movie, Dr. Strangelove

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gb0mxcpPOU

In contrast, Gavin, the great humanitarian, first wants wars to take place on BATTLEFIELDS not against civilians in cities. Next, to close-the-door to Soviet asymmetric attacks exploiting our unreadiness to fight on battlefields he sees small, air burst nuclear weapons as the certainty-of-death provider that coupled with early guidance means can even the odds in our favor if the communists---who can crack the whip on their population gang up on the west with superior numbers of men, tanks, airplanes and ships. If all possible doors of aggression are closed, Gavin instructs us that this means tactical violence can be avoided, we can attain our goals by not fighting which is the aim of sound STRATEGY. To do this, Gavin wants small, tactical nukes on everything; nuclear surface-to-air missiles to clear the skies of Soviet aircraft and incoming ballistic missiles, nuclear bazookas to wipe out Soviet tank formations, mobile, nuclear ballistic missiles to demolish their command and control, supplies and reserves and to even drop into the water to erase missile-firing submarines threatening the American homeland. He wants small nukes to be the "kentucky windage" to take up the slack for any missile guidance imprecision to get a sure effect, and in terms of anti-ballistic missile defense it still is the only "Star Wars" defense that we know will work, the American public was and still is not willing to accept the radiation to avoid blast and heat deaths. This is simply too many nukes in too many places for the American public to accept however desirable from a military point of view, so Gavin was too radical in the eyes of the JFK administration that wanted to bean count with Harvard Business theory men like Robert MacNamara, and we all know the disaster this brought on a few years later in Vietnam.

As Gavin left the service, small, mobile tactical nuclear ballistic missiles were indeed fielded by the U.S. Army into Europe and many have come to the conclusion that these were the things that actually prevented the Soviets from swarming through Fulda Gap; vindicating his vision just enough and long enough for the wall to go down.

Book Not Understood

The next question is, why was this booked ignored by the general public though highly influential in the inner circles of the Pentagon and the Washington beltway?

How many ideas (concepts) can you hold in your head at one time?

The majority of the human beings in the world are LINEAR, thinkers. They can only hold 1 idea in their head at any time and this makes them easily steered by the unscrupulous to do their bidding. Not thinking and having blinders on, brings on a certain type of complacent comfort even if it means certain death arriving after living an unfulfilled life. At the time of Gavin's youth, President Teddy Roosevelt saw this coming and secured major American land areas from urbanization in order to challenge ourselves so machines are misdirected into subsidizing too much comfort and convenience.

Gavin, a man who welcomed challenges, who welcomed problems---could hold many ideas in his head at the same time as a NON-LINEAR thinker. A problem that defies an easy, singular solution that requires multiple solutions does not depress Gavin, he wades into the situation and starts shooting "bad guys" with innovative means, assembling a PATTERN for success. Clearly, Gavin had read British General Francis Tucker's book, The Pattern of War and adopted his concept that wars can be seen as having distinct personalities if one can stand back and objectively fathom the many ideas at work and sort them out. War and Peace in the Space Age is clearly Gavin sorting out for the reader the current and future pattern of war---IF---and this is a big IF---the reader can keep several ideas in his head simultaneously. If he cannot, the book will scare the living feces out of him or her. Too complicated and too terrifying. Gavin realizes that war has indeed gotten far too complex and points out that having civilians without ANY military experience running DoD is a fatal error and events since 1958 grow in tragic intensity highlighting this systemic disease that must be corrected.

One way the linear dismiss the book is by wrongly concluding that its "dated" because Gavin uses nuclear weapons on many of his innovative war means and the book's title "Space Age" is too happy 1950s-ish. The facts are that Gavin only uses nukes to compensate for early guidance means lacking pinpoint impact into their targets, a situation not true today thanks to microprocessor chips (computers). Every time you read the word "nuclear" in Gavin's book, replace it with "precision guided warhead" unless some large area explosive effect is needed and you will quickly see that his book is spot-on in relevancy and prescient in its dire warnings for today and in the future. This concept book should be re-printed perhaps with a new title, "War and Peace in the Guided Missile Age" and made required reading for every officer and NCO in the U.S. military.

To my surprise, the book after the initial warning morphs into a mini-autobiography where Gavin reveals how he came to be the over-achieving and unsung superhero of the 20th century, working behind the scenes on our behalf. War and Peace in the Space Age is actually an autobiography-concept book.

Part 1 Autobiography: The Man

Gavin gets it. The enemy is death and death is hastened by COMPLACENCY. If you stay still, you stop growing. You stop, you die. True in life as in war. To live you have to keep moving, to keep growing and challenging yourself. Born in 1907 to two Irish-American parents who had just gambled everything to come over from Europe, he was orphaned at the age of two. The pioneer spirit of his parents was not in vain, as he was adopted by the Gavin Irish-American family in Pennsylvania. However, as he grew up in a harsh and strict environment he soon learned that America in the 1910s had stopped expanding westward and in his area had settled into a deadly complacency mining coal. The lack of mobility in thought and life from the crowded cities of the old world of Europe had returned. Gavin fought against it even at an early age. He sold newspapers everywhere and anywhere, he worked at a barbershop, he ran a gas station when the industrial age brought on the automobile. On his time off, Gavin marched himself over the next mountain to see what the countryside of his part of the earth offered in natural beauty. He finds books in an old church and reads every one. Yet, filled with all of these possibilities, when he returned on foot back to his coal-mining town, he simply could not get ahead within the narrow parameters there to improve the lot of his family or even get a high school education past grade school. In an amazing act of wisdom and courage, Gavin realized at 17 years old that no amount of stay-in-your-lane struggle (what we call "FIDO" in the Army) would achieve victory and decided like his parents to risk it all and move to New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket to find and if necessary make a winning situation, to Get It and Drive On (GIDO).

Saving the Gavins

First thing Gavin does in New York is to illegally enlist under-age into the Army. This is an important case illustrating how society can set up rackets which outsiders cannot win. Underage, Gavin would need his step parent's permission to join the Army and he candidly reveals that they would not support him in this with a mere signature because it would mean tacit admission that their complacent lifestyle in coal country was lacking. Don't get me wrong, America needs coal. However, it doesn't need coal at the cost of destroying the lives of the miners needed to get it. You could say Gavin should have waited another year til he was 18, but to say this would to show a lack of empathy and understanding for people locked into no-win situations. That's not how the human spirit and life works. There is no guarantee that in a year Gavin would have still had the courage or opportunity to reinvent himself by fleeing to New York City. You could say, "of course Gavin would have had the courage a year later". You will read later, that even the always battling-against-the-odds, Gavin can "run out of gas". During the tests for Admission into West Point, he couldn't remember any Shakespeare plays and turned in a blank essay. An unsung hero gave him a break, Lieutenant Black conducting the test ordered him to go back and write something which Gavin did and it was just enough to get him appointed to the U.S. Military Academy. Who is to say that if Gavin did not get into West Point that he wouldn't have reached the end of his rope and gone back to his coal mining home town or some other walk of life and how many men would have died because of it? Gavin reminds me very much of Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey in the great post-WW2 1946 movie, "Its a Wonderful Life", except for his greatest common denominator effect to come to pass, he has to go into the service like Bailey's brother does in the story. Also notice I said opportunity---who is to say, the lonely and unloved orphan wouldn't have fell in love with a girl, married and got her pregnant, locking him into fatherhood and immediate financial demands? My mom was an orphan and all her life it affected her ability to love and be loved. To be abandoned by your parents or by world circumstance is and incredibly demoralizing start in the world that requires immense personal courage to overcome.

The lesson to learn here for America today is that EVERY high school graduate needs to leave home and neighborhood and do two years of national service to open their minds and build character to all the positive possibilities of life and not just go into being a worker/consumer. The racketeer powers-that-be certainly do not want this, but this is what America needs if it is to survive beyond the 21st Century.

So Gavin bends-the-rules in order to win and joins the Army as an enlistedman, learning the fundamentals of foot infantry combat techniques in the 1920s. Sometimes the rules have to be bent and the prevailing groupthink refused and Gavin offers an excellent poem on how mankind owes a lot to men who disobey for the common good. Gavin sends home the majority of his meager Army paycheck to his step-parents back home. He spends hours of his time in the library reading to learn more about life and the world and gets accepted into West Point as a self-taught man without benefit of high school.

Saving the Army

At West Point, lacking High School Gavin is in severe catch-up mode, self-teaching himself math late at night but is strong in History so he focuses on his weak areas. He catches up then gets ahead, then climbs to the top few of his class. He then is posted to flight school where he slams into a can't do situation where those running the show want nearly everyone to fail. Gavin, has enough inner confidence now to realize it was not his fault and shrugs off a formal school failure that would end many's careers today. Moreover, he did not retaliate against aviation because of a personal set-back and became the most important post-WW2 Army aviation proponent without letting his lack of being a pilot make him feel unworthy or unqualified for some strange reason. Later, Gavin would become a qualified pilot and rightly call on as many officers as possible to be able to fly to spread ownership of Army Aviation throughout the organization so its fully valued by all parts not become an elitist club, which is yet another wisdom the Army has ignored to our ruin since 1983 when Army Aviation as a separate branch unto itself was created.

Gavin attends other service schools to get a broad mind on war, which is yet another good idea even the cash-strapped Army of the '30s could do and we need to do today. During tactics discussions, the idea of motorizing infantry in wheeled trucks was examined and found wanting. Thousands of men packed in trucks would extend for literally hundreds of miles in bumper-to-bumper traffic and be an extremely vulnerable target. The conclusion was the infantry would be better off walking then in vulnerable, road-bound wheeled trucks yet here we are today with the Stryker/Humvee truck non-sense with thousands of Americans dead/wounded in Iraq/Afghanistan being blown up along roads/trails that we knew to avoid way back in the 1930s. Gavin in his later 1954 article in Harper's magazine "Cavalry and I don't Mean Horses" would condemn the road-bound nature of the garrison complacent Army in the Korean war debacle and call on air-transportable, light tracked armored fighting vehicles like the Ontos assault gun and M113 armored personnel carrier to be created.

Gavin is appointed to teach tactics at West Point and he sees the build-up of Nazi Germany through intelligence reports into a cross-country mobile, tracked mechanized army and air force working together far superior to the warmed-over WW1 style foot-slogging doughboys backed by artillery mentality of the U.S. Army. He realizes that just catching up to the Germans by copying their war machines would leave us always a step behind and when we actually enter the war we could indeed lose it. Gavin was yet again now in a race to keep up and get ahead and change the situation to enable victory as he had done before when he left his coal mine town, self-taught himself to get into West Point and struggled as a cadet to survive, then thrive to graduate high in his class. Now it was not himself that was dangerously behind the power curve, it was the U.S. Army and drastic measures were in order once again.

Saving the Paratroopers

Looking over the German mechanized infiltration style of "lightning war" (blitzkrieg), the decisive factor was that their attacks preceded by parachute and glider troops landing deep behind enemy lines and disrupting the enemy's control of the situation and opening up key terrain points for the tracked tank forces backed by close air support aircraft to pour through. Stonewall Jackson had done the same thing in the U.S. Civil War which resembled WW2 when it was fought with mobility more so than WW1 when it was fought with frontal assaults. Gavin again the gambler, puts in his paperwork to get assigned to the U.S. Airborne being formed at Fort Benning, Georgia but is denied by a typical bureaucratic narrow-minded seeing only the local situation, technicality. Gavin bends the rules and pulls some strings knowing what is at stake even if no one else knows what he must do. He gets into the Airborne and promptly writes the "book" on how to conduct parachute MANEUVER operations, not just seize and hold terrain objectives but to defeat enemy forces far ahead of the main body as a defacto "cavalry". The father of the American Airborne is really not Lee or Ryder, its Gavin. He has his men march mercilessly for 10, 20 miles, stop and think they are to rest, then has them move again to learn how to think well under pressure and confusion. He has the men jump with ALL their equipment to be ready to fight and not to land without their weapons and rely on finding containers which killed many German Fallschirmjaeger on Crete in 1941. He reveals that American 75mm pack howitzers were bundle dropped from under C-47s in 9 separate pieces with their own cargo parachute but connected together by a rope so they all landed together for rapid assembly into firing order. His preparation of his Paratroopers to fight with small unit initiative in non-linear situations was first put to the test on Sicily in 1943.

Knowing he would face German Mark VI Tiger heavy tanks, Gavin secures the use of top-secret 2.36" Bazooka rocket launchers to bolster his pack howitzers. After assembling his men after a scattered night jump, he barely holds onto Biazza Ridge as the bazooka rockets often bounce off the German tanks. Those brave men who knock out a German tank with a bazooka get a patch he designed but behind the scenes Gavin is irate that so many of his men had to die due to inadequate weapons because America was asleep before the war. The Germans, capture some bazookas and improve it by increasing its size and begin using their versions on our weakly armored M4 Sherman tanks. Gavin points out that we keep the pathetic bazooka as-is even into the Korean war where in 1950, it bounced off the 100 Russian T-34/85 medium tanks leading the North Korean invasion. The Germans field a disposable anti-tank rocket launcher, the Panzerfaust and Gavin's men get their revenge by capturing truckloads of them and printing instructions in English so they used them against the Germans to knock their tanks out--another little-known secret of why the American Airborne was so more effective than other less imaginative units. The lesson that we should aggressively capture and use enemy weapons against them especially in non-linear situations where our ammunition supplies may not get through is still unheeded in the U.S. Army.

Gavin creates Pathfinders to improve parachute drop accuracy by radio beacons, colored infared lights and radar, a practice that today has resulted in pin-point accuracy that critics of 3D maneuver warfare refuse to admit. The dispersal of men on the desired location is actually a good thing making them harder to engage. Later battles covered in detail in his previous book, Airborne Warfare reveal his frustration with their foot immobility and inability to defeat enemy tanks. Gavin has gliders land 57mm anti-tank guns towed by jeeps (light, unarmored wheeled trucks) but these take time to get ready to fire unlike a light tank with a turret or an assault gun in the hull. Gavin offers the opinion that the "Bridge Too Far" offensive failed because two allied officers lost battle maps to the Germans who then swarmed against the British Airborne's drop zones west of Arnhem over the roads leading to them. He also says that if we had spent less money on B-17 heavy bombers trying to incinerate German citizens and factories and had more C-47 transports we could have landed all of the British Airborne on the first day and got to Arnhem in full force instead of just LTC Frost's battalion as the later units had to wait to jump in on the succeeding days and were then blocked by the Germans.

As the Russians close in from the east, Gavin is ordered to cross a river to take ground before the Russians get there, but he is not ready and needs more time to get his assault boats. General Dempsey says there is no time and he would provide LVT-4 "Buffalo" amphibious armored tractors to lead his men across, which gives Gavin his first taste of the flexibility of having your own tracked armored mobility can provide. What is still a huge mystery is why these amtracks, landing craft and glider-delivered light tanks and Bren gun tankettes with 75mm pack howitzers were not used at Arnhem to break through even in spite of the Germans knowing our plans?

Saving America

As WW2 ends, Gavin runs into the victorious Russians who are already imbued with the communist "party line" that they had single-handedly won the war all by themselves. Try finding pictures before 1989 of American supplied equipment in Soviet "Great Patriotic War" markings. Gavin points out for the communist system to work and have its people deny themselves creature comforts to feed war production they have to be consistently lied to by government controlled press. Soon we are no longer allies but mortal enemies. The atomic bombs are dropped on Japan and we occupy the home islands lest the Russians barge in. Americans eager to embrace peacetime complacency are fed the lie from their own air force that air bombing ended the war with Japan when clearly it was maneuver that surrounded Japan that coupled with Russia declaring war on them and expelling their army from Manchuria that made them surrender.

Gavin points out how the points system (pardon the pun) began to rip the competent get-the-job-done men out of the Army, leaving combat-less men with M24 Chaffee light tanks in storage at the outbreak of the Korean war where Task Force Smith flown in by measly C-54s was over-run by T-34/85 medium tanks when their 2.36" bazookas failed. Gavin criticizes the lack of USAF airlift as a key factor but we know now today that there were C-124 Globemaster IIs and C-119 Flying BoxCars available to fly in M24 Chaffee lighttanks as well as a Navy Landing Ship Tank that delivered dozens of wheeled trucks and towed artillery pieces to TF Smith. The fault was also the Army's for wanting to fight WW1 style with foot/truck infantry-artillery when cross-country mobile light tanks were available and could be delivered.

Another revelation in the book was that during the Korean war, Gavin and his VISTA group participated in General MacArthur's Inchon landings and investigated why the Army was notgetting close air support from the USAF's jets while the USMC and USN had some prop plane F-4U Corsairs and A-1 SkyRaiders to save the day. Gavin's VISTA group report called on the USAF to get several hundred C-124s long-range and C-123 short-range transports and the Army to get 9-ton Ontos light tracked assault gun/reconnaissance vehicles that could easily be carried en masse inside them to form a "Sky Cavalry", but the report's measures were not adopted.

Part 2 Concept Book: The Vision

Limited wars need specialized forces

Gavin understands that limited wars need QUALITATIVELY superior forces not just large war forces in smaller amounts. This is a reality that today is not understood nor accepted by our "full spectrum" racketeers who insist that any Soldier or marine can do small, sub-national conflicts well. Gavin laments that when we are not fighting with nuclear weapons or to take a nation-state military down in formal battle we fight unconventional enemies poorly. Gavin is implying that the Army's lighter forces should tackle these limited wars but as the years have played out these tend to be narcissistic egomaniacs who over simplify war to what they can carry in their hands and lack the willingness to use technology and machines (tanks and airplanes etc.) to get the qualitative edge we need.

America must pioneer the high ground of Space and not become complacent

Clearly ahead of his time, Gavin sees space as the overarching physical medium for earth war and wants space militarized by the United Nations so it doesn't become a free-for-all for control.

Gavin was ready to put satellites into orbit first but the selfish Navy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Radford conspired with the Secretary of Defense Wilson to sabotage America's space program out of inter-service back-stabbing.

I disagree with Gavin that interservice rivalry is not a problem when clearly he shows it is.

Totalitarian Sovs are more focused

Its refreshing to read Gavin because he's not such an American cheerleader that he cannot see some virtue in what the enemy does. Gavin notes that in totalitarian regimes the powers of the people can be focused by force to get benefits stronger than free countries floundering without consensus, but he warns that this forced unity is not even close to the powers of unity that free people can create if they can be convinced to work together.

We can come up with better ideas through freedom if we challenge ourselves

America is at its best when physically challenged--Gavin wants us to conquer and explore space and not become selfish consumers. He's right about human nature and has no illusions of America being any different than other peoples if we do not challenge ourselves.

4th Dimension of Strategy Means Winning Without Fighting

Gavin explains how actual war is about getting your will accomplished and this is best done without fighting through the mind. This 4th dimensional warfighting is way above the understanding of today's hate-filled morons who just want to kill ragheads as if murdering enough of them will somehow destroy their IDEAS which are actually bullet and bomb-proof. Gavin wants the greater ideas of freedom to win over by merit not by force alone.

Sovs asymmetric ploys

Its fascinating that Gavin suggests that in this 4th dimensional warfare that the Soviets might have actually egged us on to waste billions on bombers which they knew they could shoot down. If applied today its possible that the enemies of America have egged on our Army and marines to buy sexy wheeled trucks which they can easily blow up by laying a bomb in the road. Americans who think smugly that we are so superior to all the people's of the earth cannot even fathom that our enemies may actually be several moves ahead of us in their actions.

Pre-emptive war immoral: Gavin Nails the Neocons Before they were even CONceived

On pages 250-251, Gavin explains liberal and conservative "Cold War" attitudes and thinking which amazingly predicts the sick attitudes of today's neo-conservatives (neocons) which are really Leo Strauss marxists in democratic sheep's clothing. Since they don't give a damn about people in general; their attitude is kill them before they kill us (pre-emptive war); and have no interest whatsoever in security assistance or any assistance to prevent nation-states from falling into chaos by tangibly solving social ills. Straussians believe that the common people need to be fed a national myth to keep them docile as documented by BBC film maker Adam Curtiss in his series "The Power of Nightmares".

Part 1: "Baby, Its Cold Outside"

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=881321004838285177

Part 2: The Phantom Victory

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4602171665328041876

Part 3: The Shadows in the Cave

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2081592330319789254

In a previous series, "The Trap" he showed how the neocons to contain communism set up sham democracies to actually keep dictatorships in power while keeping the populace docile with consumerism. Curtis explains how consumerism is manipulated by corporations in his epic series "The Century of the Self" in 2002 broadcast by the BBC as a four-part series. The series tracks how American elites have aggressively used the modern behavioral sciences to persuade, coerce and manipulate the American public into accepting the corporate-government world's version of events as their own.

Part 1: Racketering corporations see people as just emotional, irrational idiots not thinking citizens as per Freud, they go on a binge of consumption and great depression follows

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8953172273825999151

Part 2: FDR saves country but consumerism is re-engaged after WW2 to scare people into building MICC-TT, Freud's daughter stresses social conformity to suppress irrational desires, business provides social conformity products.

This video focuses on one of the most skillful and amoral expert of all the experts in mass manipulation, Edward Bernays. Bernays got his first taste of the power of propaganda during World War I. He advised US presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Einsehower and served numerous corporations and business associations. One of his biggest fans was Hitler's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, a fact about which Bernays bragged proudly.

In this clip, we see a pattern that Bernays used over and over again: turn a harmless entity into a fearsome enemy through lies and manufactured news items. Then use the "threat" to justify attack. The subject of this video is Bernays campaign against the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1953, but you'll have no trouble seeing that this very same method is being used today (Iraq).

www.guba.com/watch/2000915704

Part 3: Sick of conformity and manipulation by corporations, public wants their desires let loose during wild 60s, society's inhibitions are cause of misbehavior, self fulfillment becomes the goal, instead of society classes, corporations pander to the psychological categories of people

www.guba.com/watch/2000915747

Part 4: Give the People What They Want---Public deceived into thinking products will satisfy them, Corporations and Governments get Control; their elected officials are "products", too consumer-based politics pandering to the mob's primal desires, internally-driven bringing about greater and greater physical reality disconnect--possible ecological collapse as we over indulge and consume, destroying spaceship earth; irrational consumers no longer rational citizens abrogating their social fabric to corporations who have no loyalty to them to provide them jobs out-sources product construction to overseas slave labor to increase profits; disaster coming unless we BOYCOTT their products and make them produce ECOFRIENDLY PRODUCTS BUILT BY US and we demand what's BEST not racketeering thru government intervention thru elected officials we elect not bought by the corporations

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1122532358497501036

After this shamocracy failed in post-communist Russia, they installed a phony "democracy" in Iraq hoping that having an influx of outsider corporations coming in to govern would set up a consumerist society. The Iraqis are not satisfied with a Shia FACTIONOCRACY and certainly not with their nation being a vassal state to American corporations to exploit.

THE TRAP

Part 3: Kissinger backing of brutal dictators in order to contain communism, neocons think we should instead expand negative freedom at gunpoint to roll-back communism, armed struggle + bureaucratic shia islam = freedom? wtfo?, reagen neocons export sham democracy (like in Iraq today), a falsade placebo for the people

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAqE0J15lGE&NR=1

Part 4: Reagen admin lying about Sandanistas having chemo weapons from Sovs etc., liberal democracy hubris, Soviet collapse results in economic collapse

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzlR5DMLfF8

Part 5: Yeltsin restores order by force, corporations owned by racketeers have Yeltsin in hock, Putin takes charge, imprisons the robber barons, negative consumerism liberty failed in Russia, neocons back in power lying to America to get them to war

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ghvI2R1tM8

Part 6: Bremer fires all capable people like Pol Pot did except without murdering them to get clean slate, country given over to foreign corporations to be governed, massive corruption, typical falsade democracy like during Reagen era, no social contract, rebellion began, we become the French and start torturing/coercion, pre-emptive war manifests as pre-emptive crime arrests, our so-called freedom aka consumersim is not going to hack it in the future

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZuFpWii2jg

Clearly, General Gavin did NOT advocate exporting shamocracy around the world but REAL, representative democracy that would result in American corporations losing their defacto colonial empires where resources are plundered and people work in sweat shops as slaves. This kind of "freedom" requiring real social change and reforms obviously took too much effort and harmed the corporate masters and mentality of the fuck-you neocons so they decided a sham form of freedom, based on consumerism is that all that is needed to placate the masses.

Gavin's brilliant and moral outlook on societal reform is best seen in his 1968 book, Crisis Now which clearly advocates engaging in direct solving of people's problems not shutting them up with consumer goods.

Surevillance Strike Complex

The main idea of his book is that space offers the ultimate "observation post" to direct fire--possibly nuclear fire on the people below and Gavin as a former artillery enlistedman understands this. Gavin is proposing a surveillance strike complex (SSC) a comprehensive system where we can see all our enemies from space, air, land and sea and be able to express mail a nuke by a guided missile if need be.

Guidance/nukes, Mobile Ballistic Missiles

Gavin fully understands that a mobile missile like the German V-2s were impossible to counter-target and joined this with guidance to make the world's first precision guided surface-to-surface missiles under his tenure as Army Research & Development Chief. He wants this mobility for SSMs to be even greater through the use of transport aircraft though the USAF is luke-warm to anything but manned bombers and fighters.

SHE--not nukes labels show relationship or you lose the relationship in minds of the linear

Nuclear weapons are really super high explosives (SHE), Gavin understands this but isn't terrified of them and wants to use small nukes to gain certainty of target destruction. Perhaps had Gavin used SHE instead of "nukes" he would not have scared readers and been more "safe" as a Secretary of Defense.

Strategic Use of Terrain

To evade the reach of the SSM, Gavin proposes we look out to Africa and spread our mobile missile forces out to there and at the same time improve relations with those countries. Had we kept with mobile SSMs in this way we could have blocked Soviet communist inroads to these countries, many of whom still suffer economically to the present day. Gavin's book explains why the USAF is averse to mobile missile basing since be on your toes requires an alertness that a static location should have but seems to not need and can be manned like a 9-to-5 job--which is how America's ICBMs are operated today.

SkyCavalry

Gavin's Sky Cavalry is clearly not just foot-sloggers from helicopters. Gavin wanted VTOL fixed-wing aircraft delivering track-laying vehicles not victims from vulnerable, slow helicopters. Those that want to buy into cliches' and have never read General Gavin's actual words are quick to pin the helicopter air-mobile initiative on him when he was never satisfied with it and complacent with it or anything else. Those that persist with helicopters in the Army disgrace General Gavin's memory and fail to live up to his vision.

Everything Mobile and Armored

An adjunct to the understanding of how lethal the non-linear battlefield is, General Gavin WANTS EVERYONE IN TRACKED ARMOR starting with his baseline M113. Gavin discovers while commanding in Germany that the tracked armored vehicle forces are the only ones with the mobility to disperse and concentrate as needed with protection from nuclear bomb blast, heat and radiation effects. That the Army has still failed to do this, 6 decades later is inexcusable.

DoD is clueless and must be reformed: Clueless civilian mandarins

Gavin explains how the 1947 act creating the Department of Defense (DoD) has been a complete disaster--the people running the Pentagon are clueless. The Joint Chiefs only care abouty their service and the civilians over them have no basis for an educated military opinion of their own. The civilian secretaries are usually taken from business which means they are inclined to racketeer junk for pork. Gavin just doesn't curse the darkness--he offers a tangible solution: provide the civilian secretaries military officers freed from towing their service party line. Of course, his sensible ideas were rejected.

The MICC-TT racket

Towards the end of the book, Gavin points out that economic greed is driving what weapons DoD buys not what's best for the troops and the nation for our defense. The creation of DoD has been to create a permanent war footing to keep the corporations fat and happy--a military, industrial, congressional, think-tank complex. (MICC-TT). Racket Theory explains how DoD is misrun.

Inter-Service Rivalry with Service Chiefs

While describing DoD's basic corruption, Gavin states there is no interservice rivalry problem then goes ahead explains why there is. He is a very patriotic American and he wants to believe the best in his fellow serviceman but the facts show otherwise. Perhaps if he considered racket theory he'd have been less bitter upon retirement. Essentially, most people who join our military are not warrior enthusiasts like Gavin with a sense of adventure, most are weak ego and greedy types who want a sure lifestyle where everything is laid out for them, best described by British Army Engineer and Psychologist, Dr. Norman Dixon in his 1976 book, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. I wonder if Gavin ever had a chance to read his book?

The conclusion on Gavin's book, WAPITSA is clear:

GENERAL GAVIN WAS THE GREATEST MILITARY THINKER AMERICA HAS PRODUCED TO DATE.

He deserves to be known as this and more than just a gun'em down troop commander. If the majority of his papers were to be published and made known this would become evident. Reading WAPITSA would be a great way to begin RIGHT NOW--look below--the entire book is below for you to read.

Be Inspired. Enjoy.

I. DUTY WITH THE NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION.........135
J. THE NEW LOOK.........150
K. CONGRESS AND DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE POLICIES.........157

Chapter 6: Soviet Military Philosophy: "We Will Bury You".........180
Chapter 7: The Decade of Decision: 1955-1965.........199

A. WHAT ARE WE FOR?..........199
B. TACTICS IN AN EARTH WAR..........211
C. STRATEGY AND SPACE.........230
D. ORGANIZATION FOR DEFENSE...........257

Summary-A Strategy for Peace...........288

Index...........291

MAPS

1. Defense of Europe--Africa (following page).........276
2. Defense of Asia (following page).........278
3. Defense of America (following page)..........284

About the Soviet surface-to-air missiles much less is known.

Surface-to-air missiles were displayed in the Fortieth Anniversary Parade in Moscow on November 7, 1957. They were of good size, mobile, and capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.

There is no doubt that the Russians have them in operational numbers. As for an opinion on their effectiveness, in an interview with Mr. Reston of the New York Times, which appeared in that newspaper early in October of 1957, Mr. Khrushchev had this to say: "Bombers lack both height and speed for modem combat and are vulnerable to attack by rockets." And in the same newspaper, on November 16, he was reported as saying:

"In spite of what American officials say, bombers are useless compared to rockets. How many bombers can get through and actually deliver hydrogen bombs?" He was later credited with the remark that bombers belong in a museum.

Now. if this was rather sanguine of Mr. Khrushchev, it is understandable. He has had to carry forward his scheming designs under the ever-present shadow of the United States Strategic Air Command. His relish at being in a position to predict its early deterioration is understandable, although perhaps overly enthusiastic. Nevertheless, most scientists would agree that the end of the manned bomber is now clearly in sight. Obviously, a policy based upon massive retaliation by manned bombers will require early revision. Either the policy will have to be revised or we will have to step up missile production so as to have, at an early date, an arsenal of combat-ready, mobile. intermediate and long-range missile systems.

Let us examine, through the limited evidence that has been made available to the public, where we stand in the ICBM race.

Testifying before the Johnson Committee in November of 1957.

Dr. Edward Teller, in reply to a question whether or not the Russians had an intercontinental ballistic missile. stated: "Well,

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I certainly do not know, I cannot say with complete certainty, but I would like to say this: that they have said that they have the weapon. There is every reason to believe that they have it at least in the state where they have constructed it and tested it."

Testifying before the same committee a month later, Dr. Wemher von Braun, upon being queried on whether or not the Russians could put a "hydrogen warhead on the city of Washington," stated: "I would think so. Yes, sir." And on January 23,1958, General Dwight Beach of the Army testified that the Soviets could have an ICBM capability in July of 1958, although a very limited one.

Little has been released of a factual nature on the U.S. ICBM program, although it is a matter of general knowledge that it will be several years before we have an ICBM capability of any significance. This suggests that we are now entering a missile-lag period in which the Soviets will have a steadily increasing ICBM striking capability that we will be unable to match for several years, thus making missile "retaliation" as such, by us, rather meaningless-meaningless except for such shorter-range missiles as IRBMs that we may be able to deploy and maintain on foreign. soil or in foreign waters. These will also seriously lag the Soviet capability in the same ranges.

The Soviets now have shorter-range missiles (seven hundred mile and twelve hundred mile) and their threat at the time of the Suez crisis was not an idle boast. Appearing on "Capitol Cloakroom," a CBS radio broadcast, on December 10, 1956, the Honorable C. Douglas Dillon, then the U.S. Ambassador to France, made quite clear that in his opinion it was the Soviet threat that upset British-French plans to go through with the Suez operation. If this is true, then it was missile diplomacy at its best, and we shall be exposed to more of it as we get farther into the period of "missile lag." There is another significant factor in this missile equation:

the anti-ICBM missile, or the antimissile missile. Testifying

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before the House Armed Services Committee on January 22, 1958, Major General John P. Daley of the Army stated:

To summarize my remarks on the Nike-Zeus [the Army's anti-ICBM missile], the Zeus development is on high priority and we believe that a significant capability could be gotten against ballistic missiles by 1962 if deployment is accelerated.

Thus we will not have a missile to use in defense against a Soviet attacking missile for a number of years either.

This is a situation that we should be frank to recognize, and we should realize that this imbalance, for its duration, will be in the favor of the Soviets. How long will it last? For at least three, and more likely for five years, depending entirely upon the effort we are willing to make to reduce it. The Soviets have already announced their intention of increasing their present margin of lead over us. We are in for a hard pull and no sugarcoated reassurances of our superiority will help us. Only hard work and courage will help. Of interest is a British view of this situation as recently described in The New Statesman: "The Gaither Report has revealed that, irrespective of any efforts which America may now make, the Soviet preponderance in advanced weapons has reached such an absolute stage that America's national survival will depend, until 1961 at least, on 'Russian benevolence.'" Benevolence has never been conspicuous among the traits of the Communists; it is as rare as Khrushchev's shrimp's whistle.

Instead of benevolence we may expect repeated urgings to accept invitations to summit conferences. These will be accompanied by proposals that the West disband NATO, SEATO, and the Baghdad Pact, and by allegations that such alliances threaten the peace-loving workers of the Soviet Union. There will be proposals that we not arm Germany with modern arms, that all nuclear weapons tests be brought to a stop, and that we join the Soviets in the search for new ways to peace. While these things are happening the Russians will make every effort to widen the margin of advantage that they enjoy in the missile

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space race. If we decline to attend a summit conference we may expect Russian proposals to other Western powers to attend without us in the cause of lasting peace. Within the councils of the West there will be increasing talk of the need for some form of disengagement. This will be accompanied by frantic diplomatic efforts to find a formula that would provide us with the security that the military-power imbalance denies us. As disillusionment and discontent grow among our allies they will' become increasingly critical of us. At home, in the United States, there will be talk of withdrawal, reducing foreign aid, and a marked trend toward isolationism. Our position will become very difficult indeed, as it always does when a nation leads from weakness. I am not saying that these things will happen but they certainly may happen unless we wake up and do something about the missile lag.

The "missile lag" so far described pertains to the United States itself. Let us briefly look at the situation overseas, where there are many vital installations, two field armies, and extensive Air Force and Navy deployments. The Soviets, by their admission, have had a mid-range missile, on the order of 400-750 miles, in their inventory since 1956. On November 7, 1957, they paraded a missile through Red Square that was capable of firing hundreds of miles: Its exact range is uncertain but there is no doubt that it is of far greater range than any ballistic missile the Western Allies now have deployed, for instance, the Corporal, with a range of seventy-five miles. Thus, they are in a position today to give immediate tactical missile support to their forces operating in the Middle East and in Europe. And under the protection of their own surface-to-air missiles they can continue this support without fear of decisively harmful retaliation by manned aircraft.

The development of a missile with a range of five hundred miles was undertaken by the United States Army in 1951. Approval granted to the Department of the Army to go ahead with it at that time was later withdrawn by the Department of De-

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fense. By a memorandum of November 26, 1956, the Army was limited to a range of two hundred miles in its tactical surface-to-surface missiles. There have been no restrictions placed on the characteristics of the missiles of the Navy, Marine Corps or Air Force. Only the Army so far has expressed a need for a mid-range surface-to-surface missile. Nothing was done to correct this situation until early 1958, when the Army's program was again authorized. Such missiles should become operational, in quantity in the early sixties.

The problem of defense against mid-range missiles and the longer-range IRBM (fifteen hundred miles) is far more difficult than that of defense against an ICBM. This is due to a number of factors, principally the very quick identification and reaction time required in the defensive system. There has been a program to develop such an antimissile for several years but it has not been given sufficient money and we will be well into the 1960's before it is available for deployment. Thus the "missile lag" at home is matched by a "missile lag" overseas and for the first time in our history we have field armies deployed overseas confronted with weapons against which they can neither retaliate nor defend themselves.

The one bright spot in this otherwise somewhat gloomy picture is the 1959 availability of Jupiter and Thor in some quantity, and the availability of the Navy submarine-launched Polaris several years later. The deployment overseas of Jupiter and Thor should begin in 1958. It will be several years, however, before they are available in adequate numbers and are of adequate reliability. In addition, we must realize that they are the Model Ts of the missile age and we must find ways and means of improving their mobility and reliability. Particular attention must be given to their mobility-they should be entirely mobile.

Tactically, Maginot-Line-like missile-launching facilities offer little promise of dealing effectively with the highly mobile Soviet missiles that they will be matched against. There is an alarming tendency to think of the operational employment of missiles in

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terms of static facilities such as airfields, and blockhouses and bunkers reminiscent of the Maginot Line. Unless we intend to make the same mistake the Germans made with the first V-2 launching sites, we had better plan on mobile missile systems now. They must be mobile to be effective.

There is also a disturbing tendency to become so preoccupied with missiles as to overlook the mobile ground handling equipment, and target acquisition and reconnaissance drones so essential to missile warfare. The latter problem is far from being solved. The assumption is made by many that missiles merely replace bombers and fighter-bombers, and that target information will still be obtained through the use of manned reconnaissance aircraft. This simply is not so. If manned bombers cannot live within the range of enemy missiles, manned reconnaissance craft cannot live there either.

We have an impressive unsolved technical task ahead of us if we are going to have combat-worthy missiles systems. A strange exchange took place at one of the weekly press conferences of the President in Washington on May 8, 1957. Martin J. Arrowsmith of the Associated Press asked the question, "Why should not the Army extend its ballistic missile program to ranges of 1,500 miles, to meet the requirements for tactical missile support. . . ?" The answer was given, «Now, just why or when or what reasons they assign any particular missile, any particular type to one service, is not always readily apparent, but I would say this, just from a knowledge of the Army: Why would the Army want a 1,500-mile missile itself, because the first requisite of using that kind of weapon is that you have very good observations to find out whether it is doing the job you thought it was. The only way that you can find that out would be with an Air Force that could penetrate at least 1,500 miles into the enemy territory, and that puts you right square into the Air Force business." The question referred to "tactical missile support," and the operational concept for such support is to deploy the missiles

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far to the rear, perhaps a thousand miles or more, depending upon the terrain and the depth of the enemy army's tactical missiles. In any case observation must be provided by an unmanned reconnaissance vehicle; for a short-range missile it will be a recoverable drone and for an ICBM it will be, in time, a satellite. Development of both of these is lagging behind the missile program and there is a real probability that when our IRBMs are deployed there will be no reconnaissance systems to support them for some time. One thing is certain, manned reconnaissance aircraft will not be able to fly against the Soviet surface-to-air missile displayed on November 7, 1957.

An analysis of the foregoing, I believe, begins to explain the reason for the widespread concern in political-scientific-military circles for our immediate security. As expressed by Marshal of the RAF, Sir John Slessor: "We should be in mortal danger if Russia were to get ahead of us in the means of defense against the manned bomber, for instance, or in the development of the really long-range guided missile that will replace it." [2] We are in mortal danger and the "missile lag" does portend trouble--trouble of a perilous nature. Under a canopy of fear thrown up by a growing awareness of the Soviet margin of advantage we will be subject to steadily increasing pressures. In the pattern that Lenin described so well, the pressures will be economic and political, and military force will be used only when necessary, but when necessary it will be applied "ruthlessly." Lenin liked to use the word "ruthless," both in describing international military policy and in dealing with internal political policy within the Communist party itself. Whether in a limited action or general war there will be no hesitancy, no moral scruples-force will be applied ruthlessly. The pattern that we have recently seen of the Communists supplying arms to the Algerian Nationalists will be repeated in other areas. Arms support, followed by economic, technical, and political penetration, is the harbinger of armed intervention-if armed intervention proves really neces-

_________________________________________________________

2. The Great Deterrent, Sir John Slessor.

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sary. Regardless of the means required, the goal will be sought, always with due care to avoid giving us an issue worthy of a Washington-Moscow missile exchange.

A much discussed topic today is limited war and much of it, I fear, is wishful thinking. For a limited-war [ED: conventional nation-state war or sub-national conflict] concept is only valid within an impressive over-all capability to wage general war [ED: nuclear nation-state war]. No opponent will ever accommodate us to the extent of allowing us to fight a limited war merely because that is what we want to fight, and, more significantly, because that is all that we are capable of fighting. Actually, a nation dare not risk a limited undertaking without possessing the obvious capability of fighting a general war. And to the extent that we have the latter capability we may indulge ourselves in the former. This applies to both the U.S. and the USSR.

Much of our talk about limited war is retroactive in nature.

Ten years too late we have come to realize that we should have had a limited war capability at the time of Korea-which we lacked. It was assumed by many that a limited capability was but a small part of a general-war capability, and that if we could fight a general war we could certainly fight a limited war. Deputy Secretary of Defense Quarles has said that "if we have the strength required for global war we could certainly meet any threat of lesser magnitude." This is not true, for limited war in its own way is a highly specialized form of combat, more specialized than general global war. It is as though one were to compare skillful surgery to a killing blow. The first requires special instruments applied with restraint, quickly and accurately, the latter a bludgeon with only one object, complete destruction.

To assume that SAC can deal effectively with every type of limited action is the same as to assume that since a tank battalion can be used to control extensive land areas, one tank can be used to catch a pickpocket or car thief. To win limited war requires special weapons, equipment and techniques. These may be useful, and probably would be, in general war but the contrary is not true; the Strategic Air Command would be

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I therefore asked my Deputy to go to the Army's Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Alabama, and talk to General Medaris and Dr. von Braun about the feasibility of a satellite interceptor. He did so on June 21, 1957, and reported that they would undertake a study of a satellite interceptor at once. On August 26, 1957, Mr. Khrushchev announced to the world:

A super-long-distance intercontinental multi-stage ballistic missile was launched a few days ago. The tests of the rocket were successful.

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They fully confirmed the correctness of the calculations and the selected design.

The missile flew at a very high, unprecedented altitude. Covering a huge distance in a brief time, the missile landed in the target area. The results obtained show that it is possible to direct missiles into any part of the world. ~

This information was soon confirmed by other intelligence and "it was clear that the Soviets were on the threshold of launching their satellite". The information was studied carefully and, at a meeting of the Army Scientific Advisory Panel on September 12, 1957, I told them that in my opinion, the Soviets would launch their satellite within thirty days.

On October 4, I had lunch with Dr. von Braun and Dr. Schilling at the Redstone Arsenal, at which time we agreed that, based upon all available intelligence, the Soviet launching was imminent. We discussed the situation at some length and we agreed that if a launching took place, two steps had to be taken, as matters of highest national urgency: the development of a satellite to intercept the satellite, and the development of a large, militarily useful satellite. That evening a number of scientists, businessmen and military people were gathered together for dinner in the Officers' Mess at the Arsenal, when the announcement of the Soviet satellite launching was received. I felt crushed and wanted to take a long walk to think the situation over alone. The last thing that I wanted to do was to attend a dinner party. But it was not the time to be antisocial.

After all of our efforts to launch first we had been beaten into space. And, more important, we had no idea what the satellite carried. Even now, we realize that we may never know.

http://news.aol.com/story/ar/_a/secrets-of-sputnik-emerge-50-years-later/20071001145509990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001

Secrets of Sputnik Emerge 50 Years Later

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, AP
Posted: 2007-10-01 17:38:13

Filed Under: Science News, World News

MOSCOW (Oct. 1) - When Sputnik took off 50 years ago, the world gazed at the heavens in awe and apprehension, watching what seemed like the unveiling of a sustained Soviet effort to conquer space and score a stunning Cold War triumph.

A Soviet rocket carrying the satellite Sputnik blasts off on Oct. 4, 1957, from Kazakhstan. Fifty years later, scientists involved with the launch have shed some new light on the event, which stunned the world and opened the space age.

But 50 years later, it emerges that the momentous launch was far from being part of a well-planned strategy to demonstrate communist superiority over the West. Instead, the first artificial satellite in space was a spur-of-the-moment gamble driven by the dream of one scientist, whose team scrounged a rocket, slapped together a satellite and persuaded a dubious Kremlin to open the space age.

And that winking light that crowds around the globe gathered to watch in the night sky? Not Sputnik at all, as it turns out, but just the second stage of its booster rocket, according to Boris Chertok, one of the founders of the Soviet space program.

In a series of interviews in recent days with The Associated Press, Chertok and other veterans told the little-known story of how Sputnik was launched, and what an unlikely achievement it turned out to be.

Chertok couldn't whisper a word about the project through much of his lifetime. His name, and that of Sergei Korolyov, the chief scientist, were a state secret. Today, at age 95 and talking to a small group of reporters in Moscow, Chertok can finally give full voice to his pride at the pivotal role he played in the history of space exploration.

"Each of these first rockets was like a beloved woman for us," he said. "We were in love with every rocket, we desperately wanted it to blast off successfully. We would give our hearts and souls to see it flying."

This very rational exuberance, and Korolyov's determination, were the key to Sputnik's success.

So was happenstance.

As described by the former scientists, the world's first orbiter was born out of a very different Soviet program: the frantic development of a rocket capable of striking the United States with a hydrogen bomb.

Because there was no telling how heavy the warhead would be, its R-7 ballistic missile was built with thrust to spare - "much more powerful than anything the Americans had," Georgy Grechko, a rocket engineer and cosmonaut, told AP.

The towering R-7's high thrust and payload capacity, unmatched at the time, just happened to make it the perfect vehicle to launch an object into orbit - something never done before.

Without the looming nuclear threat, Russian scientists say, Sputnik would probably have gotten off the ground much later.

"The key reason behind the emergence of Sputnik was the Cold War atmosphere and our race against the Americans," Chertok said. "The military missile was the main thing we were thinking of at the moment."

When the warhead project hit a snag, Korolyov, the father of the Soviet space program, seized the opportunity.

Korolyov, both visionary scientist and iron-willed manager, pressed the Kremlin to let him launch a satellite. The U.S. was already planning such a move in 1958, he pointed out, as part of the International Geophysical Year.

But while the government gave approval in January 1956, the military brass wanted to keep the missile for the bomb program, Grechko, 76, said in an interview. "They treated the satellite as a toy, a silly fantasy of Korolyov."

The U.S. had its own satellite program, Grechko said. "The Americans proudly called their project "Vanguard," but found themselves behind us."

The Soviet Union already had a full-fledged scientific satellite in development, but it would take too long to complete, Korolyov knew. So he ordered his team to quickly sketch a primitive orbiter. It was called PS-1, for "Prosteishiy Sputnik" - the Simplest Satellite.

Grechko, who calculated the trajectory for the first satellite's launch, said he and other young engineers tried to persuade Korolyov to pack Sputnik with some scientific instruments. Korolyov refused, saying there was no time.

"If Korolyov had listened to us and started putting more equipment on board, the Americans could have opened the space era," Grechko said.

The satellite, weighing just 184 pounds, was built in less than three months. Soviet designers built a pressurized sphere of polished aluminum alloy with two radio transmitters and four antennas. An earlier satellite project envisaged a cone shape, but Korolyov preferred the sphere.

"The Earth is a sphere, and its first satellite also must have a spherical shape," Chertok, a longtime deputy of Korolyov, recalled him saying.

Sputnik's surface was polished to perfection to better deflect the sun's rays and avoid overheating.

The launch was first scheduled for Oct. 6. But Korolyov suspected that the U.S. might be planning a launch a day earlier. The KGB was asked to check, and reported turning up nothing.

Korolyov was taking no chances. He immediately canceled some last-minute tests and moved up the launch by two days, to Oct. 4, 1957.

Korolyov with first man in space, Colonel Yuri Gagarin

"Better than anyone else Korolyov understood how important it was to open the space era," Grechko said. "The Earth had just one moon for a billion years and suddenly it would have another, artificial moon!"

Soon after blastoff from the arid steppes of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, the satellite sent out what would be the world's most famous beep. But the engineers on the ground didn't immediately grasp its importance.

"At that moment we couldn't fully understand what we had done," Chertok recalled. "We felt ecstatic about it only later, when the entire world ran amok. Only four or five days later did we realize that it was a turning point in the history of civilization."

Immediately after the launch, Korolyov called Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to report the success. Khrushchev's son, Sergei, who was alongside his father at the moment, recalled that they listened to the satellite's beep-beep and went to bed.

Sergei Khrushchev said that at first they saw the Sputnik's launch as simply one in a series of Soviet technological achievements, like a new passenger jet or the first atomic power plant.

"All of us - Korolyov's men, people in the government, Khrushchev and myself - saw that as just yet another accomplishment showing that the Soviet economy and science were on the right track," the younger Khrushchev, now a senior fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies, said in a telephone interview.

The first official Soviet report of Sputnik's launch was brief and buried deep in Pravda, the Communist Party daily. Only two days later did it offer a banner headline, quoting the avalanche of foreign praise.

Pravda also published a description of Sputnik's orbit to help people watch it pass. The article failed to mention that the light seen moving across the sky was the spent booster rocket's second stage, which was in roughly same orbit, Chertok said.

The tiny orbiter was invisible to the naked eye.

Excited by the global furor, Khrushchev ordered Korolyov immediately to launch a new satellite, this time, to mark the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

"We didn't believe that you would outpace the Americans with your satellite, but you did it. Now you should launch something new by Nov. 7," Korolyov quoted Khrushchev telling him, according to Grechko.

Working round-the-clock, Korolyov and his team built another spacecraft in less than a month. On Nov. 3, they launched Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,118 pounds. It carried the world's first living payload, a mongrel dog named Laika, in its tiny pressurized cabin.

The dog died of the heat after a week, drawing protests from animal-lovers. But the flight proved that a living being could survive in space, paving the way for human flight.

The first Sputnik beeped for three weeks and spent about three months in orbit before burning up in the atmosphere. It circled Earth more than 1,400 times, at just under 100 minutes an orbit.

For Korolyov there was bitterness as well as triumph. He was never mentioned in any contemporary accounts of the launch, and his key role was known to only a few officials and space designers.

Leonid Sedov, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences with no connection to space program, was erroneously touted in the West as the Father of Sputnik. Korolyov, meanwhile, was only allowed to publish his non-sensitive research under the pseudonym "Professor K. Sergeyev."

Khrushchev rejected the Nobel committee's offer to nominate Korolyov for a prize, insisting that it was the achievement of "the entire Soviet people."

Sergei Khrushchev said his father thought singling out Korolyov would anger other rocket designers and hamper the missile and space programs.

"These people were like actors; they would all have been madly jealous at Korolyov," he said. "I think my father's decision was psychologically correct. But, of course, Sergei Korolyov felt deeply hurt."

Korolyov's daughter, Natalia, recalled in a book that the veil of secrecy vexed her father. "We are like miners - we work underground," she recalls him saying. "No one sees or hears us."

The Soviet Union and the rest of the world learned Korolyov's name only after his death in 1966. Today his Moslades so long denied them.

"The rivalry in space, even though it had military reasons, has pushed the mankind forward," said Valery Korzun, a cosmonaut who serves as a deputy chief of the Star City cosmonaut training center. "Our achievements today are rooted in that competition."

In the end, it was the Americans who won the race to the moon, nearly 22 years later. Khrushchev wasn't interested in getting there, his son says, and the effort made under his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, was underfunded and badly hampered by rifts between Korolyov and other designers.

"We wouldn't have been the first on the moon anyway," Grechko said. "We lost the race because our electronics industry was inferior."

Today, even as Sputnik recedes into the history books, its memory still exercises a powerful grip. In August, when a Russian flag was planted on the sea bed at the North Pole, the Kremlin compared it to Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon - an indication, perhaps, of how much Russians still treasure that first victory in space.

I turned to the president of one of our large business corporations who was present and told him how disturbed I was, and he replied: "Oh, it's nothing at all, nothing at all. It doesn't

___________________________________________________________

Excerpt from text of Soviet statement, New York Times, August 27, 1957.

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amount to a thing." That disturbed me almost as much as the satellite launching itself, but I didn't realize until the next day that this opinion was shared by many. The reaction varied from Secretary Wilson's "a neat scientific trick" to other's "a silly bauble," "a hunk of iron," and Madame Cafritz' observation as reported in the Washington Post on October 7, 1957: "The satellite is very appropriate for Russia to have because she has so many of them." Fortunately, there were some who realized at once the importance of it. Senator Henry M. Jackson, in the New York Times of October 6, 1957, described the Soviet launching as "a devastating blow to the prestige of the United States." In the following month, Dr. Edward Teller, testifying before the Johnson Preparedness Subcommittee, said:

Others testifying before Congress stated that it was the most significant military event of our time, which is exactly what it was.

Before leaving the satellite, I would like to comment on the cost aspects of it. For there are those who will say, "Well, we simply couldn't afford everything, and it would have been wasteful to put money into another satellite program." The facts are that Jupiter C, as was well known, is part of another program and its satellite launchings have cost but a few million dollars. The first cost estimates of Vanguard were in the vicinity of twenty million dollars. Both of these together cost but a small part of another program that was being carried on at the same time. That was the Navaho, an unmanned bomber, which was promptly discontinued by Secretary McElroy

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shortly after he took office. The Navaho had cost seven hundred million dollars before being canceled. The big question is why in the name of heaven was money being spent on such a scale and in such a wasteful manner while we were denying ourselves a satellite. Was it caused by industrial pressure, service interest, or simply poor decision-making in the Department of Defense? Of one thing we may be sure, our failure to launch a satellite first was not due to lack of money in the Department of Defense budget.

Now we can foresee that by the end of the Decade of Decision, 1965, manned space Bight will be here. We will then be ready to undertake manned exploration of the planetary system. The earth will have shrunk, in a military sense, to a rather small tactical theater. It will be entirely possible to launch weapons from any point on the earth to impact at any other point on the earth, exactly as in past combat it has been possible in a tactical engagement to engage directly any opponent with the weapons at hand.

In World War II, for example, a tactical theater was usually thought of as a continent, or a major segment of a continent. By 1965, missiles and satellites will have shrunk the world to such small size that the earth itself will be a tactical theater. We will truly live a hair-triggered existence in a "balance of terror." Everyone will be faced with the threat of immediate death and destruction, if means of guaranteeing peace are not found. Surely this is a grim and forbidding prospect and it is one from which we dare not shrink if we are to survive-not only the Western world but the Soviet world as well.

The challenge with which we are faced is tremendous and the implications of it far-reaching. The very nature of strategy will change, leaving the realm of physical combat and going into full-scale psychological warfare, and leaving the earth's environment and going into space. War, which we have thought of in three dimensions, has now acquired a fourth dimension: strategy. Modern strategy is the fourth dimension of warfare.

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Our organizational structure to deal with these problems needs radical changing, both in the Department of Defense and in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Armed Forces themselves, and the missions they may be expected to perform, will, of necessity, change radically. And by 1965 they will be entirely overlapping in their capabilities. The old definition of functions J based upon land, sea and air will be far outdated. There will I be risks and sacrifices inherent in almost any solutions found '0 these problems, but they must be solved and the beneJicial : results to be gained are well worth the extraordinary effort 1 required to solve them. And the fundamental and essential, ingredient in our thinking and planning absolutely must be, moral courage. Finally, whether we like it or not, the burden of leadership has been thrust upon us. And any failures will not be our failures, alone; they will be the failures of free men everywhere. Leadership and power are inseparable, and the power available today surpasses man's imagination. We must learn to live with that power, and to cause it to serve us and not become slaves to it. This should be the essence of our leadership.

On us the burden falls to lead the nations, out of this frightful wilderness of steel; On us depends the course of that which is;

i To come hereafter-whether freedom was f A stolen dream from Heaven, or is the truth.

On which to found the future of mankind.[5]

________________________________________________________________

5. From My Country by Russell W. Davenport, published by Simon and Schuster, Inc.

I was disappointed and deeply disturbed. I continued to fret over the problem in my mind and I decided that the solution was in the words, "it would be necessary to have an officer of equal ability ordered to this station." Upon the completion of work the following Friday night, I drove to Washington to see a friend in the office of personnel, in the Chief of Infantry's office. He was Major Bill Kean and he was most sympathetic and helpful. We decided that by locating the list of officers that the superintendent had desired for assignment the preceding year, and verifying their availability, I would be able to present him with a suitable replacement. It took several more trips and numerous conferences.

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Both the superintendent and the commandant were most considerate and I was ordered to parachute duty in July.

I started training as a Paratrooper on August 1, 1941. Colonel Bill Ryder was in charge of the school and doing a wonderful job.

An entire new world opened to me. Problems of weapons, equipment, training and tactics all were begging for solution. I graduated from the parachute school in late August and was given command of a parachute company, "C" Company of the 503^rd Parachute Infantry. Shortly thereafter, I was promoted to the grade of major and moved to Battalion Headquarters, and then to the top Parachute Headquarters in the Army, the Provisional Parachute Group, commanded by Brigadier General Bill Lee. I was given the job of S-3 and at once set to work writing the first manual for The Employment of Airborne Forces. On November 21, we staged the first big parachute jump in the history of our country, a battalion jump of the 502^nd Parachute Battalion at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I was senior umpire of the exercise and it was a revelation of the problems involved, both in airborne attack and in defense against airborne attack.

Assignment to the Staff School at Fort Leavenworth followed early in '42. We were in the war then and a high pitch of excitement, muted somewhat by the sober realization that we were personally destined for combat responsibilities, prevailed. Except for the airborne instruction, the courses were excellent and just what we needed, as we were soon to learn in battle itself. The airborne problem in the course consisted of a map exercise in which a parachute platoon jumped on the roof of the First National Bank in Kansas City. I got some wry looks from the faculty and snickers from the class when I asked about a possible use of a parachute division. It was pointed out that this was utterly impossible for many reasons. In the first place, there was no such thing in existence and the problems of equipment, training and control, both in the air and on the ground, had not even been considered. Finally, even if one had a parachute division, it would take twenty-five airfields to enable it to take off, and this was too

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fantastic even to think about-anywhere in the world. Normandy was then two years away.

My feelings were assuaged by a story that an instructor told me of a truck-mobility exercise conducted by the students between World War I and World War II. It was based upon the German invasion of France in World War I. As history now shows, the enveloping right wing of the German Army failed to carry out its role and thus the French left wing, and perhaps the entire army, was saved from annihilation. Analyzing the campaign in the twenties, and on the assumption that the gasoline engine was here to stay and would be used in numbers in war, the students were given unlimited truck mobility to carry out the German attack once again in a map exercise. After loading all of the German troops in trucks and stringing them back on miles and miles of roads, they reached the conclusion that, as the battle was joined, the trucks were a disadvantage and the German Army would have been better off without them. They actually slowed the German attack down. So, the conclusion: foot mobility is better than truck mobility. And now we were encountering the same logic in opposing air mobility.

Whenever a new weapon, or a new tactical method, is introduced, it always looked upon with the gravest suspicion. That is one reason why a study of the History of War is so important, since through it can be seen over the ages the effect on war of such novelties. Such a study shows that the human mind has been slow to grasp the possibilities of the new arrival and to adopt the tactics which will put it to the best use. In fact, as in the case of the [tracked, cross-country mobile] tank, the new arrival has usually been treated as an adjunct to, and clothed in the tactics of, the older arms. [2]

This touches upon one of the most serious problems that will always confront the Republic, the toleration of new ideas and intelligent criticism. For without these two ingredients in our thinking, particularly our military thinking, we will not survive. And now, as we attain maturity in the world family of nations, we must provide leadership, and leadership needs ideas and must

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2. The War on the Civil and Military Fronts, General G. M. Lindsay.

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be able to tolerate criticism. "If our treatment of the honest and skilled dissident is not to be liberal, then the army will be filled with more time-servers than in the past and will stagnate, to the great waste of the nation's treasure and, later, its life" [3] As expressed by Robert G. Ingersoll:

Heady tonic for a Soldier, nevertheless, we should be ever mindful of the need for tolerance toward new ideas. And as technology becomes more dynamic, the more reason to be more tolerant, since new ideas will come at a faster rate. For success or failure in war, and our very survival, will then hang by a thin thread indeed.

But in 1942 we still had time in our favor and the war was far away, although getting closer by the minute. School ended in early April and I returned to Fort Bragg where General Bill Lee had the Airborne Command. We were growing. Fortunately, I was returned to the job of S-3 and thus I was able to start to work at once on an organization for an airborne division. New gliders were becoming available and these combined with parachutes seemed to offer some prospect of combat feasibility for a thirteen thousand-man division. The basic decision was made not to copy the German Crete operation and use regular forces, merely, providing them airlift, but to go all out on a new type of organization and new types of equipment. But the problems encountered were almost beyond belief. Parachute artillery, for example-how were we to get it from plane to firing position on the ground in a few minutes? The project was headed up by a dynamic driving young paratrooper, now a minister, Colonel Shinberger. By breaking the weapon into nine parts, each could be dropped by

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3. The Pattern of War, Lieutenant General Sir Francis Tucker.

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parachute separately. But recovering them from the treetops, ditches, rooftops and wherever they happened to land sometimes took days, if all pieces could be found at all. Schinberger finally tied the parts together with a rope, six under the plane suspended in mid-air and the remaining three in the door-all tied together with the same rope. A Rube Goldberg rig that took a brave pilot to fly. But brave pilots were in abundance-the Troop Carrier pilots of the Air Corps never asked what we were up to, they merely asked what we wanted them to do, and they always came through. My admiration for them increased with each day of the war.

Gavin and his comrades got the idea of equipment containers made into carts from studying the German Airborne victory on Crete in 1941 though not being too dependant on them, by having each Paratrooper jumping in his own equipment using lowering line loads.

About my last act with General Lee was to go to Washington and help select the first division to be made airborne. It was the 82^nd Infantry Division and from it was taken, Eve-like, the nucleus of the 101^st. It was activated that fall. In the meantime, I had been assigned to the 505^th Parachute Infantry, my first regimental command. I looked forward eagerly to solving the tactical problems about which we had theorized so freely in the last year. We went into training at Fort Benning and then moved to Fort Bragg before leaving for Africa in April of 1943.

One of our most troublesome problems had been that of dealing with tanks. It was just so much nonsense to put a division of thirteen thousand men into combat with no ability to stop a tank; they would simply be mincemeat. Just before leaving Fort Benning, I wandered out to the weapons test range one day to look at some new rifle grenades that were supposed to be able to "penetrate tank armor". While there, I noticed a blanket-covered table and my curiosity drew me to it.

One of the test officers saw me coming over and said, "You got, to stay away from that, Colonel, it's a new secret weapon." That really whetted my appetite.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Well, we can't tell you," he said, "but it will punch a hole in any tank living. They call it a bazooka."

"I'd sure like to see it," I said. "I've got a combat regiment and

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we won't be around long, and we sure need an antitank weapon."

"Well," he said, "in that case, I'll let you feel it, but I am not allowed to show it to you."

I walked over and felt the blanket under his watchful surveillance. It felt like a piece of gas pipe about five feet long. But that didn't matter if it could do as he said, stop any tank living.

For that was what we needed more than anything else; a good antitank weapon was essential to combat confidence at that stage of our training. We did not realize it at the time, but our first face-to-face meeting with German Tiger [ED: heavy] tanks of the Hermann Goering Division was not far away.

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Opportunity came on the night of July 9, 1943. I had been designated as the Commander of the 505^th Parachute Combat Team. My command consisted of over three thousand paratroopers, including Infantry, Artillery, Engineers, Medics and Signal Corpsmen. Our mission was to jump on Sicily six hours ahead of the amphibious landing, seize key terrain features, including one airfield, and block the movement of German and Italian reserves toward the beaches.

To me the battle in prospect was the climax of a lifetime of study and preparation: if ideas and new tactical concepts were really the payoff, here was to be the proof. I looked forward to it eagerly, fully confident of the fighting ability of the troopers and sure of the success of the plan. To the troopers it represented their first opportunity to test their mettle against veterans. If training and work-"A pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood" -combined with the best weapons in the world could do it, they had it made. They were confident that they had the best weapons in the world; not only had they been told this frequently, but most of us believe this about most things, American anyway.

Air-landing in Tunisia just one month before, on June 9, 1943, we had time to lose about twenty pounds of weight per man from the combined effects of training, poor rations, and the seasonal siroccos then scorching the African earth. The month's

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time also gave me opportunity to make a night reconnaissance of the drop zones on the island. An RAF pilot from Malta took me in and I saw for the first time the exact drop zones on which we were to land.

The fateful day of July 9, 1943 seemed to rush upon us, so busy were we with last-minute preparations, and almost before we realized it, we were gathered in small groups under the wings of our C-47s ready for loading and takeoff. Appearing from a distance every bit like Strasbourg geese, the airplanes were so loaded with parachute bundles suspended beneath them that they seemed to drag the ground. Because of security restrictions, it had not been possible to inform every trooper of our destination until just before takeoff. Then each was given a small slip of paper which read as follows:

The plan was simple. Taking off from Tunisia in a long column of flights of nine aircraft, we were to fly via the island of Linosa to Malta. There we were to dog-leg to the left, coming in on

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Sicily's southwestern shore. This was an important point-the island was to come into sight on the right side of the approaching aircraft. The orders were that every man would jump even though there might be some uncertainty in his mind as to his whereabouts. No one but the pilots and crews were to return to North Africa.

Individual equipment was given a final and solicitous check and loading began. The equipment consisted of a rifle or carbine, rations, water, knife, grenade, compass, and here and there a bazooka. The latter were most important since they were the only weapons that the troopers were carrying that would enable them to engage German armor on reasonable terms. The pilots were revving up their engines and we were ready to roll down the runway when an airman from the weather station ran up to the door of the plane yelling for me: "Colonel Gavin, is Colonel Gavin here?"

"Here I am," I answered, and he yelled, "I was told to tell you that the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east." He added, "They thought that you would want to know".

Well, I did, but there was nothing that I could do about it.

Training jumps had normally been canceled when the wind reached about fifteen miles an hour, in order that we might minimize injuries. Few of us had ever jumped over twenty-five miles an hour. But there was nothing that we could do about this now. Besides, there were many other hazards of greater danger than the thirty-five-mile-an-hour wind in prospect.

At about this time in my troubled thinking another individual staggered to the door of the plane with a huge barracks bag on his shoulder. He heaved it through the door onto the door of the plane, saying as he did so: "I was told to give this to you or your S-1." I asked, "What in the hell is it?" He replied: "They are prisoner-of-war tags. You are supposed to put one on every prisoner that you capture, and be sure to fill it out properly."

It was no time for argument, when we were within seconds of roaring down the runway and so I merely replied, "Okay." About an hour after departure, the S-1 (Captain Ireland) threw them into the Mediterranean.

We were airborne as first darkness touched the land. The flight was uneventful until Linosa was due. It was not to be seen. Likewise Malta, which was to be well lighted to assist our navigators, could not be seen. Suddenly ships by the score became visible in the ocean below, all knifing their way toward Sicily. Obviously We were off course since our plan called for us to fly between the American fleet on the left and the British on the right. In fact, the Americans told us that we would probably be shot down if we overflew them. We continued on, finally dog-legging to the left on the basis of time calculation. Soon the flash of gunfire could be seen through the dust and haze caused by the preinvasion bombing, and finally the coast itself could be seen off to the right.

Unfortunately many of the planes overflew the Malta dog-leg and the island first became visible on the left, thus causing confusion and widespread dispersion of the troopers. We turned inland; the small arms fire increased; the green light i(,wer the jump door went on and out we went. The reception was mixed. Some of us met heavy fighting at once, others were unopposed for some time, but all were shaken up by the heavy landings on trees, buildings and rocky hillsides.

I managed to get together a small group and start across country, searching for the combat team objective. I had with me Captain Ireland, the combat team S-1, and Captain Vandervoort, the combat team S-3. The cross-country going was rough, but we pressed on. Soon we came face to face with our first enemy.

It happened about an hour after we had landed. I was moving ahead with about twenty troopers. I was leading and Vandervoort was alongside. I had been picking up troopers as I moved along through the shadows in the olive groves, over stone walls, darting across moonlit roads, moving in what I hoped was

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the direction of our objective. There had been occasional bursts of small-arms fire, sometimes quite close, but so far we had not seen an actual enemy. Suddenly there were foreign voices, then the sound of a man whistling some distance away. As he got closer it sounded like "0 Sole Mio." I had my group stay down and I moved up to a stone wall that paralleled the road he was coming along. It was a lone man, walking down the middle of the road, hands in the pockets of his baggy uniform pants, and whistling. After twenty years of military service, I was about to meet The Enemy face to face. I stuck my head up over the stone wall. It seemed like way up, but it was about an inch, just enough to clear my carbine over the top of the wall.

I gave him my best Italian, "Alto." He stopped in his tracks.

Vandervoot rushed through an opening in the wall with a .45 in one hand and a knife in the other.

"I'll take care of him;' Van said. I wasn't sure what he meant, but I said, "No, let's get the hell out of the middle of the road. Let's get over into the shadows and maybe we can get '" some information out of him." There was still some doubt whether we were in Sicily, Italy or the Balkans, although the odds strongly favored the first.

About a half-dozen of us surrounded him and I tried the few Italian words I knew.

"Dove Palermo?" No reply. He seemed too scared or too bewildered to answer.

"Dove Siracusa?" I figured that if he would point in the general direction of either or both of these two cities, which were at opposite ends ',~ of the island, we could get our first rough fix on where we were.

Since he acted as if he had never heard of either, for a moment it seemed that perhaps we were not even in Sicily. But he was obviously very scared. We had heard that the Germans had scared the wits out of the natives with their stories about the atrocities committed by American parachutists. They spread the news that we were criminals and long-term prisoners who

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had been given our freedom in exchange for becoming paratroopers. This was given credence by the practice in many 'parachute units of having all of the men shave their heads clean. After the Battle of Sicily was over, the Sicilians pointed this out to us as being one of the things that convinced them that the Germans were right.

But to get back to Giuseppe, or whatever his name was. I hadn't been able to get anything out of him-neither his name, where he was from, nor where he thought we were. I reluctantly decided that we would have to take him along. Now Vandervoort had taken an intelligence course and knew how to .", handle a prisoner in a situation like this. The idea was to take '" the belt out of the prisoner's trousers and to cut the buttons off his Hy so that he would have to hold up his trousers when he walked.

Van put his .45 [ED: Colt M1911A1 semi-automatic combat pistol] in its holster, pressed his knife against the Italian's chest, saying as he did so: "I'll take care of the bastard." The Italian was muttering, "Mamma mia, mamma mia," over "" and, over again. His concern was understandable. The moonlight was shining on the knife blade and it looked as though it were a foot long. He took off his belt and dropped it. Then Van went into Phase Two of the operation and reached for his blade with one hand, bringing the knife down with the other.

A scream went up that could be heard all of the way to Rome.

The atrocities of the paratroopers and the stories that he had heard about Ethiopia must have Hashed through his mind; he was being castrated. He screamed louder, grabbing the knife blade with his right hand. The blood ran down his hand as we fell in a kicking, yelling, fighting mass. We were on the edge of a gully and we rolled partly down it. It was pitch black and out of the tumbling mass he got away. I do not know how he did it, but one second he was with us and the next he was gone. I was madder than hell. I asked Vandervoort, "What in the hell did you think you were doing?" Vandervoort didn't answer. I decided that we had better get

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going. By now we had probably alerted any enemy for miles around.

We marched and crawled into the night. Although some men were wounded and suffering from jump injuries, they drove themselves toward the cascading flame and white phosphorus of bursting shells that could be seen far away on the distant horizon.

The sight of shell bursts was reassuring, since it meant that we were in Sicily. That is where the battle was to be fought. And we were "moving toward the sound of the guns," one of the first battle axioms that I had learned as a cadet at West Point.

But human flesh could do only so much, and the night was demanding. By count at daylight, there were but six of us. I approached two farmhouses, but at each the natives were terrified and would hardly talk. I continued on in a direction that I figured would take us toward our objective. Suddenly, as we came over the crest of some high ground, there was a burst of small-arms fire.

We hit the ground. There was a sickening thud of near misses kicking dirt into my face. I reacted instinctively as I had been taught in the infiltration course by hugging closely to the ground. In no time I realized that I would not continue to live doing that; I had to shoot back. I started firing with my carbine and it jammed. I looked to Vandervoort about six feet to my left and he was having the same trouble. In front, about fifty yards away, an officer stood looking through low hanging branches of an olive tree. He was wearing leatller puttees and reddish-brown breeches, both plainly visible beneath the branches. Ireland gave him the first squirt of his tommy gun [.45 caliber Thompson fully automatic sub-machine gun] and he went down like a rag doll. I began to make my carbine work single shot. The leading trooper, who had gone down at the first fusillade, writhed and rolled over. He appeared to be dead, practically in the enemy position. Their fire increased and, there was a loud explosion like a small mortar shell. I decided that there was at least a platoon of enemy and our best prospects were to try to work around it. I yelled to Vandervoort,

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Ireland and the troopers to start moving back while I covered.

It worked.

We had had a close call and nothing to show for it, and our prospects were not very bright. I continued to move cross-country in a direction that would take me around the area where we had the firefight. We could hear intense firing from time to time and we were never sure when we would walk into another fire fight, nor were we sure of the manner in which we would get into the fight since we couldn't tell friend from foe. Then there was the problem of enemy armor. We were in trouble and virtually helpless against enemy armor. I decided to look for a place where tanks would be unlikely to travel and where we could get good cover to hole up until dark. I wanted to survive until dark, and then to strike across country again to the combat , team objective. It was the high ground east and north of Gela, and there, with the help of God, I hoped to find troopers, and an enemy to fight. For that is what I had come three thousand miles and thirty-six years of my life for-the moral and physical challenge of battle. By midmorning we came to the place. It was criss-crossed by several irrigation ditches. Along one of them there was a thicket of underbrush. The ditch was cut out of the side of a gently sloping hill and from its edge there was a good view for about a half of a mile across cultivated land. The ditch I picked was almost dry, although the others had a lot of water in them.

It did not appear to be the place where a tank would travel by choice. And this was important. I took stock of the situation and it wasn't good. Among us we had two carbines that jammed, one tommy gun, a pistol and an M-l [ED: Garand semi-automatic 8-shot 7.62mm x 82mm long-range rifle]. We were holed up like hunted animals. Tired, wounded, hungry, but too sick at heart to eat, we apprehensively scanned the countryside for any sign of friend or foe. Occasional bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire could be heard in the distance.

"A hell of a place for a regimental commander," I said to Vandervoort, and he nodded his head in assent.

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I remembered almost bursting with pride when General Ridgway, just two months before, took me aside one evening and told me that I was to command the parachute assault forces going into Sicily. It was a lifetime ambition about to be realized.

And now my "command" consisted of four shaken troopers holed up in a muddy ditch.

A fusillade of shots rang out.

The firing was intense. It was far off to the right, perhaps over a mile away. Should I look into it? I couldn't afford to lose another man if I was to have enough strength to fight my way back through my own lines after dark.

"What do you think, Ireland?" I asked.

"Well, we've got two carbines that don't work. We have already lost one man. I have a bad leg. You have too. We have no idea where in the hell we are, except we believe that we're in Sicily. It doesn't make much sense for us to go wandering around looking for a fight and when we find it probably walk into the wrong side of it."

"Okay," I said, "but this is a hell of a place to be in and I don't like it. We will still figure on waiting until dark," I added.

It was a hell of a place. It was approaching noon and the hot July sun was burning down. Since early morning I had been aware of a big house about a half-mile away. It was three stories high with the bottom Hoor lost in trees and shrubbery, big for the Sicilian countryside. There were several windows that overlooked us and I kept watching for movement in them.

Surely the house wouldn't be empty, but after several hours of watching not a sign of life was in evidence. Perhaps I should run a patrol over and look it over.

"Van, what do you think of that house? Have you been able to pick up any movement about it? Maybe we ought to go over and take a closer look."

"I don't know," he said. "I've been watching it too. If we break up into two groups, neither will be large enough to do

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much, and if we all go out there we may get pinned down and lose another one of us, and that we can't afford."

"I'm going to move down the ditch to get a better look at it," I said.

I crouched over a bit and moved along the ditch to where I had a better view of the building. It had an ominous look about it and it appeared to be uninhabited. As I started back, my eye suddenly caught a sign of movement.

"A man," I whispered to a trooper posted as a guard on the edge of our group.

We both watched as he slowly made his way toward us. Apparently he was not aware of us. Or was he pretending, sent by the Germans to scout us out? Should I wait until he got, closer and then kill him? We certainly wanted no prisoners.

We were having a hard enough time taking care of ourselves.

On the other hand, if I shot, the sound would give our location away. I decided that it would be best to let him keep coming in and then to jump him. Whether or not to kill him would depend on the situation then. In any event, we didn't intend to make the same mistake that we had made last night, when we let the Italian prisoner escape, and alert, I suppose, the entire damn countryside. But this was a different situation. It was broad daylight and we were not going to make the same mistake twice.

The man kept coming toward us in a wandering pattern, occasionally stopping to kick a stone or clod of dirt. About fifty yards away he stopped, seemed to look in our direction, and then turned and walked away. I doubted that he actually saw us and decided to let him get away. He crossed one hill, then another; until he was out of sight, over the hills and far away.

The Sicilian sun bore down. It was midafternoon, and since the lone man had disappeared over the horizon a couple of hours before, there had been no sign of activity. I had hoped that perhaps some troopers might wander by, or if we were near the coast that the amphibious assault forces would overrun us.

No such luck. Occasional firing could be heard far away and

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sometimes an airplane would be seen high in the sky. But the Sicilian countryside was asleep in the middle of a hot July afternoon. I should have slept. I was dead-tired, but I was too worried to sleep. Where was the regiment of three thousand troopers? What had happened to our well-laid plans? Wasn't there something that one could do besides wait?

There was not. Nothing but to be patient and wait. Wait until dark. I was learning the hard way that the moral responsibilities of command weigh far more heavily on a man than the physical.

And that moral courage is far more important and necessary than physical courage. Physical courage consists simply of one's pride making one do something that is manifestly dangerous.

Moral courage comes from the soul. It can only come from confidence and belief in what one is doing. If I had any, it had to come from my upbringing and from what I had learned as a cadet at West Point.

Ah, West Point. How much simpler battles seemed when fought in the textbooks in the West Academic Building. But the instructors had not misled me. Besides, I had been an instructor in tactics myself. We had talked knowingly of "the fog of war," and the confusion and utter despair that would characterize some of the hours of greatest decision. This I had to remember. I must remember. I must remember West Point, and the days when I first aspired to go there. I must remember and I did remember.

We had landed in Africa early in May, '43, trained for a month, and then started moving toward our takeoff airfields for the Sicilian invasion. By then I was entirely confident that our operation would be successful. We had acquired many new techniques to accomplish reorganization and control after landing and a number of new items of equipment. Well trained, the troops were eager and absolutely sure of themselves when they left for their departure airfields-of such substance is valor born. Now, twenty-four hours later, I surveyed the results of the

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first day's fighting. As well as I could tell, it had been an absolute shambles. The regiment was scattered like chaff in the wind, and then possibly destroyed. I did not know. Could it be that the critics were right-that airborne combat was just so much nonsense?

The Sicilian sun was now low in the sky and soon we would be able to move out. Water was a first need; it was almost gone.

For food we had a few cartons of K-rations and some concentrated things in an "escape kit." An escape kit was a small plastic box, about six inches square and an inch through. It contained the essentials for escape and survival behind enemy lines. In mine was a silk map of Sicily and it was the only map of Sicily that I had. The practice in those days was to take no unnecessary papers or maps, and certainly, under no circumstances, a marked map. We had memorized thoroughly the terrain around our objective and we had been confident that the Air Corps would drop us near the objective. So, why carry a small-scale map?

The escape kit also contained malt tablets, which were very tasty, and pills to keep one from going to sleep. It also contained a rubber-covered piece of a steel saw about five inches long, and a very good small compass about the size of a quarter.

The saw was included so that in the event of imminent capture it could be concealed in one's bottom, later to be withdrawn and provide the means of escape. Looking the gear over, one of the troopers made the observation that there appeared to be clear advantages in being a girl in a situation like this. It did seem so.

But it was nearing time to move. It was getting dark and it must have been about nine o'clock.

It had been a hard day-in a way, one of the hardest days of my life. I ran over in my mind the things that concerned me most. First, there was the inadequacy of our weapons. It is nothing short of homicidal to send American young men into combat with weapons not up to the job that confronts them.

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We needed a more reliable, faster-firing hand weapon than the carbine. And above all, we needed a tank killer for the individual Soldier; otherwise, it would be better to have him stay at home and not go into combat. Inadequately equipped, he is a liability to everyone. Next, training had to be more realistic, so tough and exacting that combat would be a welcome relief.

And while I was not back with my own troopers yet, I felt that I had probably been spared an untimely end by being able to live through this day. If I did survive, I decided that I would never forget the simple fundamentals that I bad learned as a cadet-that I would live by them. And that, if allowed to live, I would take the best possible care of any troops charged to me. And "taking care of them" meant making them into the best fighting organizations possible, that they might survive and win in battle. George Patton's last words to us before we left Morocco came home with meaning: "No dumb bastard ever won a war by going out and dying for his country. He won it by making some other dumb bastard die for his country." I turned to Vandervoort.

"Okay, Van, move out. You be the point, just five or ten yards, depending on how black it gets. Stop after going through any ditches or bad obstacles to be sure that we are all through. If we hit a fight, I'm going to try to slide around it, so don't start any shooting unless you have to."

"Ireland, you follow me and stay close with that tommy gun.

If I need you, I'll need you right away. You two troopers follow on the flanks, one on each side and not too far out; be sure that you can see me at all times. Okay, let's go."

And we went.

Into the Sicilian night, heading for what we hoped was Gela, somewhere to the west. It was a relief to be moving instead of sitting and worrying. Sitting and worrying had been the hardest of all and I had done a lot of it.

After about an hour, we were challenged by a small poup of wounded and injured under command of a Lieutenant Klenheim. We traded morphine Syrettes for their M-1 rifles and ammunition

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and continued to the west. About two-thirty, we were challenged by a machine gun post of the 45^th Division and, at last, we had re-entered our own lines. We continued on looking for the 45^th Division CP [command post], engaged some of our own tanks with small-arms fire to their dismay-no one hurt-and kept going. Shortly after daylight, I joined up with about two hundred of the 3^rd Battalion of of the 505^th and we were back in business. We advanced at once toward Gela and by midmorning tangled with the German Herman Goering Division.

This action has been described in some detail in Airborne Warfare and I will only touch upon those aspects of it bearing on the problem of weapons in support of innovations in tactics. In airborne ground combat, the big problem was antitank weapons.

Meeting the Hermann Goering head-on gave us a good opportunity to test our judgment in weapons development, for the Tiger tank with which it was equipped was the most formidable tank roaming the battlefield, not only in 1943 but throughout the war.

The leading unit, an engineer platoon of the 307th Engineers commanded by Lieutenant Ben L. Wechsler, a first-class fighting man, moved toward Gela. He had with him one bazooka with three [ED: 2.36 inch] rockets and one machine gun, in addition to the usual small arms. I joined him and we started up the road. At once the platoon met a blast of small-arms fire. The Germans were astride the road on a ridge to the front. The platoon bored in and drove them off.

When we got to the top, we were pinned down by intense small arms fire that was soon joined by mortar fire. The grand effect sounded as though thousands of bees were playing crack the whip; leaves and branches were falling all over the ridge, and occasionally someone would get hit. We brought up the remainder of the troops and continued to bore in. In no time those wounded, many of them seriously, were working back, all with the same story. The bazooka rockets were bouncing off the tanks and the tanks were then chewing the troopers to pieces. The next day we actually buried some troopers with pieces of bazooka ground into

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them by tank tracks. We captured one tank by grenading the crew when they came out to talk things over a bit too close to a trooper, a Lieutenant Swingler. The tank had four bazooka hits on it, none of which penetrated. We were fortunate that our infantry was far superior to the German infantry, for that saved the day.

The German force was the left column of the Hermann Goering Division attacking the Gela beaches, consisting of:

Panzer Grenadier Regiment 1 (2 Battalions)

1 light Artillery Battalion

1 Tiger Tank Company

In the midst of the fighting, the German Division G-3 went forward to see the situation firsthand and he reported that "The leader of the combat command, Commander of the 1st Panzer Grenadier Regiment, lay with his adjutant under heavy hostile fire and could scarcely lift his head. He lay there an hour already and could not lead." The division commander relieved him of his command that night.

As the day came to an end I gathered all of the troopers that I could get my hands on for one last counterattack. The thought of Shiloh ran through my mind, how a battle was won by simply refusing to give up the battlefield. And I recalled the number of times in a meeting engagement when both sides withdrew after heavy losses on the mistaken assumption that they had lost the fight. Well, we would give it one last go. The Navy was helping with fire support, a company of Sherman [ED: medium] tanks joined us, and just before dusk we jumped off. We caught the Germans in the start of a withdrawal, overran a company of 120mm mortars in position, some tanks and trucks, and captured quite a few prisoners. Best of all we recovered many of our wounded who were scattered about the area of the day's fighting. Darkness came quickly and as we organized for the night, we could see the entire sky off toward the beaches aflame with ack-ack [ED: anti-aircraft guns]. It went on for some time and it was by far the most spectacular display of its type that we had ever seen. As we were admiring it, out of the

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din of the firing a steady drone of oncoming airplanes could be heard. We all grabbed for our rifles and got ready to join in the fun. Within seconds the planes emerged from the holocaust and we recognized their silhouettes in formation; they were our own Troop Carrier planes! Some of them were burning and troopers were beginning to jump from them, some landing on us and some on the Germans. Fortunately the group that I was with recognized them and did not fire on them but went to work trying to help those that they could reach. It had been a tragic mistake that has never been fully explained. Notice of the planned jump had gone out from the higher headquarters but it evidently failed to get down to the gun crews. Besides, the Germans had a bombing run over the fleet just before our planes arrived, and the very night that we were reinforcing by parachute, the Germans were doing the same thing with their 1st Parachute Division in the vicinity of Catania, far to the east. Our losses were twenty-three planes shot down and dozens damaged in varying degrees.

By daylight the next day some semblance of a command was being restored to the troops who had been through the previous day's fighting. The Germans had withdrawn and I pressed patrols toward Gela. We got through the following morning shortly after daylight.

I followed one of the patrols in a jeep [4x4 unarmored truck], red-eyed and tired and carrying an M-1 rifle. There was no sign of the enemy except the dead and a burning tank. I made my way to the 1st Division's command post and there I met General Ridgway. Together we went on to Gela a few miles away. We came to the outlying buildings of the town on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea.

There, with his pistols on his hips, stood General Patton. He greeted me warmly and with a friendly touch of profanity. It was good to see him.

We went into a nearby farmhouse, where Colonel Bill Darby of the Rangers joined us. I was glad to see Bill. I had remembered hearing him describe how he planned to scale the cliffs and capture Gela before we went in. It had sounded crazy to me. I

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now learned that when he heard what we had planned for the parachutists he thought we were crazy too. Each to his own. We assembled the division at Gela and went on to the west.

The heaviest fighting for us was over.

The Battle of Sicily came to an end in late August of 1943. We knew that we had had a rough time of it and some hard fighting but we were less certain about what we had accomplished. It was with some satisfaction therefore that we read a German evaluation of the action after the war had come to an end. General Karl Student, who commanded the German airborne assault on Crete, upon being interrogated in a British prisoner-of-war camp in October, 1945, said:

The development of airborne doctrine and following it through from concept to combat had been a fascinating experience. It also had been a sobering one. Many of the ideas of the laboratory and classroom were found inadequate in the holocaust of battle.

Vision, tempered by the caution that comes from practical experience, is extremely important in research. And equally important is the courage to make early decisions leading to advanced weapons systems in the future. Tardy decision-making is a luxury we can no longer afford.

In their postwar account of the Sicilian fighting, the Germans reported their first capture of a bazooka. They sent it back to Germany, tested it, found its defects and corrected them, and went into production on an improved model. When we landed in Normandy less than a year later, we were met with a large bazooka, about 3.5 inches in diameter. [Panzerschrek] We were still equipped

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with the small 2.36-inch size. As a matter of fact, our infantry was still equipped with the 2.36-inch bazooka seven years later, in July of 1950, when it was attacked by Russian T-34 [medium] tanks manned by the North Koreans. They reported then, once again, that the rockets were bouncing off the tanks. We had had a big bazooka in development for some years. General Ridgway, who was an Army Deputy Chief of Staff in the summer of 1950, had production stepped up at once and new bazookas and ammunition were flown directly from the factory doors to the combat area. They contributed as much as any single factor to the survival of the 8^th Army. But the laggardness in the decision-making and processes of research and development that caused that situation to occur seems to be almost inherent in our military programs, and I refer to the programs of all of the services. There are numerous examples of weapons, or their systems' components, being delayed or disapproved because the individuals who have funding control, do not, or simply will not, understand the need of the fighting man in the field.

Before leaving the Mediterranean, we were to jump into Salerno. In the few weeks' respite that followed Salerno, we sought to correct the troubles that plagued us the night of the Sicilian, landings. A small experimental group was established at Comiso, Airfield in Sicily. It was under the control of Colonel John Norton of the Army and Colonel Joe Crouch of the Air Corps. Work was started at once on improving the accuracy of delivery of paratroopers. In a few weeks they submitted recommendations that we adopted, techniques which are still being used today. Pathfinder teams, consisting of carefully selected, well-trained battle veterans, were organized to jump into combat well ahead of the main landings. They were to carry navigational aids to assist the Troop Carrier pilots. About this time the Air Corps brought over the first airborne radar that we had seen. I took a number of flights over the Mediterranean to observe its work and was delighted with the prospect of improved navigation that it offered our pilots.

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The problem of antitank weapons was more difficult. The only effective ones in existence were quite heavy, so heavy that they had to be taken into combat by glider. Since all of our combat operations were necessarily carried out under cover of darkness, we had to develop night-landing techniques for glider pilots.

Drawing upon reports of night-landing exercises back in the United States, we established an experimental unit in Sicily. After several weeks of work, we staged a demonstration of our system.

Senior airborne and troop carrier officers were flown in from Africa and Italy to see it. Tragically-and I did not realize it was happening at the time-substitute pilots were used the night of the demonstration and we succeeded in demonstrating the utter impossibility of attempting such a thing at night. Gliders were scattered all over the nearby Sicilian hills and farmhouses, most of them badly damaged, but fortunately few pilots were hurt.

While these things were going on, we gave much attention to new methods of control immediately following landing, new types of orders, simpler ways of reorganizing, all for the purpose of readying ourselves for the inevitable next jump wherever it would be. It was to be in Normandy six months later.

I arrived in London in November, 1943, and went to work with the COSSACK staff. Several years later, in Airborne Warfare, I described the problems of the forthcoming battle as we saw them then. Airborne operations...are, for the opposing commanders and staffs, keen contests of wits and ingenuity. The possible area of operations is

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1. Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Command.

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vast and normally encompasses many thousands of square miles. The airborne targets and take-off airfields may be separated by hundreds of miles yet be within a few minutes or a few hours striking time.

The commander who intends to attack marshals his troop-carrier aircraft and shifts his airborne troops with as much attention to a cover plan for deceit as to the actual assault plan itself.

On the other side, defensive troops are hidden and exposed, and moved and countermoved. Anti-airborne obstacles are prepared to destroy the attackers; worthless but sinister facsimiles are prepared to scare them off. Good landing areas are totally neutralized by passive anti-airborne defensive measures, while others, equally as good or better, are left untouched to lure the assaulting airborne troops into organized and defended traps where they can be destroyed by well concealed weapons.

Thus in such situations there are two conditions that make airborne combat, in its broader aspects, markedly different from other types of fighting. First, the defender can prepare active and passive measures against an attack with comparative immunity from detection. Second, an airborne assault, once it is under way, is beyond immediate relief, alteration of direction, or even succor. The battle, when finally joined, is the payoff.

We were constantly preoccupied with three things, the plan, the enemy and our resources. The control of the latter was out of our hands and we had to depend upon the means shipped to us from the United States and from the Mediterranean.

Discussions of the proposed plan brought to light for the first time an unprecedented situation, and yet one common to the development of a new idea. We now began to meet with such enthusiasm for airborne operations, and from sources heretofore quite skeptical, that we had to caution them of the risks present in that type of combat. I remember talking to a senior officer, who, upon hearing one of the plans described, said to me: "Why man, it's like sending Michelangelo to paint a barn. Why jump so near the beaches? Make a deep penetration-hell, go all the way to Paris." A staff team from the Pentagon actually did come over with a proposal that we make the airborne landings in the Orleans Gap, not far from Paris. What in the world they thought we would use

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against the Panzer Divisions goodness knows. But it is an interesting phenomenon that I have observed frequently, that those most reluctant to accept a new idea are often the first to yell "laggard" after the idea has been proven. As one writer has expressed it, "When it appears that the new idea is finding favour with the authorities and that adherence is likely to acquire merit, converts quickly appear; and they, like converts to a new religion, forgetting their former derision and opposition, soon become more fanatical than those who evolved the idea." [2] . The plans proposed to us ranged from jumping small teams of parachutists on all of the coastal weapons to penetrations a hundred miles deep. We finally settled upon a simple but effective plan of using the British division on the extreme left to capture crossings over the River Orne, and using the American divisions to (a) seize the causeways from the beaches inland and (b) block the movement of German reinforcements toward the beaches.

Knowing how close we had come to disaster in Sicily, and realizing that I was going to jump into Normandy, I probably had stronger feelings about the forthcoming battle than most of the staff in London. I studied the enemy with meticulous care and pored over air photographs. He gave us much to think about.

Hardly had our final plans been drafted when countermeasures began to appear in the photographs. Rommelspargel (Rommel's asparagus) began to spring up overnight in many of the proposed landing areas. These were poles about six to twelve inches in diameter and eight to twelve feet long. They were sunk a foot or two into the ground and stood about seventy-five to one hundred feet apart. Soon improvements began to show up; the poles were being wired together, then mines seemed to be affixed to the wires. Machine-gun emplacements began to appear around some of the proposed drop zones, and fields-of-fire were cleared.

Much of the photography gave us accurate locations of German headquarters and scattered ammunition and gasoline dumps.

Concurrently, intense training was conducted and we received

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two new parachute regiments directly from the United States.

They were enthusiastic and their junior officers were overflowing with energy and drive. How to condition them mentally and physically for the shock that lay ahead was the problem. American young men are so removed from battle experience that they think of combat in terms of athletic competitions, and thus in terms of sportsmanship. It almost takes the sight of a friend being killed by an enemy weapon for them to realize that it could happen to them. Physical stamina and personal bravery were present in abundance, but the cold, calculating stealth of the killer had to be given them. And the officers had to learn the clear-headedness and moral courage to make decisions under great stress; one took for granted their physical courage.

In training, profiting from my Sicilian experience, I resorted to a technique that I have often used since. All maneuvers in which decisions were required were preceded by a long grueling physical test, usually an overnight march of about eighteen to twenty miles with full combat equipment. Then when the men expected a rest, they were presented with difficult combat situations. After an all-day maneuver, when they were tired and hungry, a night march was ordered. After a couple of hours of marching, at about midnight, they would be ordered to halt and go into a dispersed bivouac, in anticipation of a night's rest. After about an hour of sleep, which was just enough to cause them to lose their sense of orientation to events and environment, unit commanders were suddenly awakened and given a new set of orders requiring immediate movement. They marched until daylight, when a new situation was given to them, usually a final attack order. In the meantime a daylight inspection was made of their bivouac to check whether or not they had lost equipment, etc. It was exacting training, but it gave me an opportunity to get to know a lot about them and for them to learn much about themselves. During such exercises we used enemy uniforms, weapons and live ammunition quite freely. Even so, rarely could the training be exacting enough to compare to the shock of battle itself, and the para-

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trooper unfortunately meets the shock head on in seconds, rather than via the gradual approach to battle on foot, as so often is the situation with our other troops.

As spring came to England and our training intensified we began to hear of something new- "V" weapons. A conference was called of the senior commanders in London and they were given as much information as was available. It wasn't very much. We knew that the enemy had a new, long-range, supersonic rocket with a big high-explosive warhead that could be used against the area where our troops were billeted. At least we understood that it could, but the measures we were taking had, of necessity, to be passive. We made plans to disperse our troops in trenches if a bombardment of rockets occurred.

Actually, the British had been following the German rocket program for some time. Major Duncan Sandys was Chairman of the Flying Bomb Counter Measures Committee, and in the spring of 1943 he began to urge that additional photo reconnaissance be made of Peenemunde, the German missile development center.

His efforts were rewarded and on the eighteenth of June, 1943, photography showed long slender objects in an emplacement that he deduced to be a very long-range rocket. He had some difficulty convincing the RAF but finally, after much discussion, that summer the first air attack on Peenemunde took place. The Germans then moved their test firings to Poland. Here the Polish Underground began to co-operate with the British. The first V-2 was fired in January of '44. The Poles reported to the British how it destroyed several cottages at a distance of nearly two hundred miles from the town of Blizna. Not all of the V-2s were completely successful and many of them detonated at distances not much more than fifty to sixty miles from the launching site. Although the Germans attempted to recover the fragments, the Polish Underground collected many of them. As a British officer personally concerned with the problem described the situation:

from time to time essential parts such as turbocompressors, fuel reservoirs, rudder chains and electrical equipment were captured. Later

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the "scatter" became less, not more than 10 miles. This was very helpful to the Germans and equally unhelpful to the Poles, who might quite reasonably have, at this point, given up the unequal struggle. But their patience, skill and courage had its reward. One of the rockets dropped on the bank of the River Bug and did not explode. This was near the village of Sarmaki where some of the "Underground" were active.

These men reached the spot in time to roll the weapon into the water and by various common-sense devices, such as watering large numbers of cattle upstream of the V-2, made the water so muddy that the German search-parties failed in their intention. That night the Poles fished the weapon out of the water and in great stealth dismantled it and removed the vital parts. Later it was flown to England by a DC-3 that made a night rendezvous with the Polish underground. [5]

In the meantime, the Germans began their spasmodic V-1 (a subsonic winged bomb) launchings against England. They preceded their effort by an elaborate construction program and by December of 1943 approximately a hundred launching sites were in advance stage of construction. On December 20 the Allied Air Forces launched an all-out attack on the sites and by April of '44 almost all of them were badly damaged or completely destroyed.

The Germans then devised a mobile system, readily transportable and difficult to detect. Although we did not know it at the time, they were having a heated internal dispute between their scientists, airmen and Soldiers. Dr. von Braun recounted the story in his testimony before a committee of the United States Senate on December 17, 1957:

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Mobile V-2 SSMs launched from transporter, erector launchers (TELs)

Redstone SSM in tactical use with the U.S. Army

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4. Inquiry into Satellite and Missile Programs. Hearings before the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, 85^th Congress.

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Training in preparation for Normandy continued and a final full-scale rehearsal was staged in May of 1944. It was conducted at night under approximately the conditions we anticipated on D-Day. The takeoff was normal, we got most of the division into the air and then found that we could not get it down. Fog and bad weather closed in on us, the drop zones could not be located, and close troop carrier formations could not be flown. A few drops were made but most of the troops had to be air-landed at airdromes scattered over England. The few unit jumps that were made, combined with the many months of intense training behind us, were considered adequate for the job ahead and no additional rehearsals were attempted.

We continued to follow the German defensive preparations and to our surprise, in late May, a German division was moved into the very area into which we were to land. These combined with the pattern of Rommelspargel caused many of us to suspect that the Germans knew of our exact plans. Plans were changed and we moved the drop zones several miles to the east. Recalling the German propaganda effort that was so successful prior to our landing in Sicily, I went to see the Chief of Psychological Warfare, in General Eisenhower's headquarters and urged that he print and drop a leaflet to the French to counter the German effort. After some explanation, he convinced me that it could boomerang.

The Germans could duplicate it and use it against us by merely changing some of the wording, so the idea was dropped.

By early June all was ready, as ready as we could make it. The anticipated V-weapons did not attack the troop areas, the troops were trained, they were bivouacked around the airfields, ammunition, orders and maps were issued, and we were ready for takeoff.

I continued to worry about tanks, but we were taking along twelve, antitank guns in gliders that were going to attempt to land with us at night. They would help.

June 5-6 was a good night for an operation and while there appeared to be some apprehension about the high winds, to those of us who had been in Sicily, it was of little concern. Take-

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offs were normal, and until we entered a dense fog bank soon after we crossed the Coast of France, all went well. I was flying in the lead plane, as commander of a task force of three parachute regiments, and looking back it was a most reassuring sight. At that moment, as so often happens in combat, everything seemed to go wrong. Within seconds everything changed and there wasn't an airplane to be seen. From the moment we crossed the Coast of "," France we had twelve minutes in which to make the jump decision; after that deadline we would have crossed the whole Cherbourg Peninsula and have been over the ocean again. At eight minutes, the fog began to dissipate, the flak and small-arms fire thickened, the green light went on, and with one last precious look at the layout of the land below, we went out. What followed, allthough a bedlam in many respects, was far better than Sicily, and by daylight I had about 125 troopers under my control. I managed to regain control of additional units, get close to our first objective, and at the end of the first day's fighting, General Matt Ridgway joined me at a railroad overpass about five miles west of the town of Ste.-Mere-Eglise.

"Jim," he said, "how are things going?" ""All right, 1 guess," I said. 'We have had very heavy fighting and 1 have lost a couple of battalion commanders as well as quite a few troopers. We have not been able to get our first objective [a bridge over the Merderet River], but we are holding our own.

Tanks at the bridge site are giving us a difficult time." "Well," he said, "1 have heard rumors that the amphibious landings did not come in on account of weather. We may have a hard time of it." We discussed this a bit further and decided, as far as possible, to keep it from the troops and to make the best of things.

Fortunately, the amphibious landing did come in on schedule, with the heavy equipment that we so badly needed. Soon we attacked across the Merderet River overrunning the German positions. We captured our first big bazooka. It was exactly like ours except that it appeared to be about twice the size. I also found

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boxes of rocket-like objects with the name "Faustpetrone" lettered upon them. I had no idea what they were and could not imagine how they might be used. They appeared to be oversized German potato-masher grenades. Later I was to learn that they were a new form of rocket, built on a German application of the principle of our bazooka ammunition. In a few months, we captured a more advanced type labeled, "Panzerfaust." Translated it means "armored fist." It consisted of a warhead about six inches in diameter fired with a small rocket charge from a small tube. The warhead remained, like an onion on the end of a stem, outside the tube. Later, in combat in Holland, the German directions were translated into English and distributed to our troops. We captured as many Panzerfausts as we possibly could and carried them with us.

Captured Panzerfaust rocket-propelled grenades: Secret of Paratrooper Success in WW2

Though considerably shorter in range than the bazookas, they were the parachutist's best antitank weapons and we were grateful to the Germans for having developed them. Soon we found them useful in close infantry combat as well. Colonel Reuben Tucker's 504^th Parachute Infantry captured a truckload that they kept with them until the end of the war.

After thirty-three days of fighting in Normandy, the division was relieved. There is no doubt now that the three airborne divisions had contributed decisively to the success of the operation, but it had been costly. Of the 11,770 troops of the 82^nd Airborne Division committed to the battle, only 6,545 were returned with us to England. Officer casualties were particularly high, especially in the infantry regiments, ranging from 52 percent in the lowest to 63 per cent in the highest. But the airborne attack had succeeded and the opportunities were now beginning to appear unlimited, provided we could get adequate airlift and further improve our methods.

As soon as we returned to England we sent back to the United States for technical assistance in solving the assembly and reorganization problems immediately following landing. The request went to the office of Dr. Vannevar Bush and he sent over Dr. Charles E. Waring. [ED: a civilian scientist that knew technology's possibilities and hadn't proved his manhood by being in the military---yet his contributions were vital by the non-snob Gavin] Dr. Waring worked closely with us for

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the remainder of the war developing infrared assembly lights, scanners and equipment to make possible their use with pathfinder teams. At the same time, we studied the interrogation reports of over a thousand German officers and enlisted men with whom we had been in contact immediately following the landing.

Our purpose was to find out what they knew about our airborne operations, what measures they had taken to defend against them and their plans for defense in the future. There is no doubt that they had done an excellent job of preparing their troops for the airborne attack, even though we defeated them. An excellent booklet, "What Every Soldier Should Know about Airborne Troops", had been printed and distributed. Numerous training exercises had been conducted on a realistic basis. The troops had been impressed with the "no quarter given" type fighting that they might expect from the parachutists and they were prepared for it. All in all, it appeared that our next airborne assault would meet stiffer opposition unless the Wehrmacht was disintegrating. This, however, it appeared to be doing.

"End the war in forty-four," was the hope. It seemed possible of attainment. By late August the Germans were reeling back into Germany and there appeared to be nothing in prospect that would save them except possibly our own mistakes. We planned one airborne jump in Tournai, Belgium, and then had to cancel it at the last moment because the Germans were falling back too rapidly. We then planned the Eindhoven-Nijmegen-Arnhem jump.

It was known as Operation "Market-Garden." Operation "Market-Garden" was intended to break the back of German resistance and bring the war to an end in '44. If it succeeded, Montgomery's Second Army would reach the North Sea, thus cutting off major German formations and placing us in a position to strike into the heart of Germany. As Montgomery expressed it, "My own view was that one powerful, full-blooded thrust across the Rhine and into the Heart of Germany, backed by the whole of the resources of the Allied Armies, would be likely to achieve decisive results." Actually, there was a basic

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conflict in strategy. Montgomery believed in defending along most of the front using a single main thrust to make a decisive penetration to the heart of Germany, in the north. General Eisenhower was more inclined to a broad-front approach and General Patton wanted to make a single all-out effort in his area in the south. The decision made was a compromise. Based on a conversation of General Eisenhower on September 5, 1944, the Chief of Military History reports:

The Supreme Commander, while giving priority to Montgomery's advance to the northeast, thought it important to get "Patton moving again so that we may be fully prepared to carry out the original conception for the final stages of the campaign." As he saw it at the time, the logical move was to take advantage of all existing lines of communications in the advance toward Germany and to bring the southern wing of the OVERLORD forces on the Rhine at Koblenz. At the same time, airborne forces would be used to seize crossings over the Rhine thus placing the Allies in a position to thrust deep into the Ruhr and threaten Berlin. . . . None of Eisenhower's executives liked the compromise but their complaints were not so loud at the moment as they be, came in later months, and years, when each felt that he had been deprived of victory in consequence of that decision. Patton called it .

"the most momentous error of the war." [5]

Somehow the decision was made to give Montgomery the ball, but to keep Patton happy, he was allowed to carry one too but with not as much support as Montgomery. Patton didn't like it General Bradley says that Patton came to his headquarters ''bellowing like a bull," roaring, "To hell with Hodges and Monty. We'll win your goddam war if you'll keep the Third Army going." The operation was carried out on September 17, 1944. The British First Parachute Division landed at Arnhem, the 82^nd Airborne Division about twenty miles south at Nijmegen, and the 101^st Airborne Division was farther south at Eindhoven. The 101^st was the first to link up. The fighting was quite heavy. The British Guards Division linked up with the 82^nd on the morning of September 19. On the twenty-first the big bridge at Nijmegen was

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5. "How The Allies Let Victory Slip in 1944," Captain Liddell Hart, Marine Corps Gazette, July, 1957.

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in our hands and the British armor was advancing toward Arnhem. By then, the Germans had cut our long tenuous route extending back into Belgium at several places. Tragically, both an American and a British officer, contrary to the standing orders of both airborne divisions, carried with them copies of the complete battle orders and these soon fell into German hands. I am inclined to believe that without this information, even though Field Marshal Montgomery lacked adequate strength, the objective of the operation would have been realized. The North Sea would have been reached and the scene set for ending the war in the fall of 1944. Reacting promptly, however, with the information of our own plans in their hands, the Germans strongly attacked across the long road up to the airhead. Soon the momentum of the entire attack was brought to a halt. With an additional corps of three divisions on land, or a single additional airborne division in the airhead, Field Marshal Montgomery could have accomplished his objective. As it was, for lack of adequate airlift only part of each of the divisions was flown in the first day, and bad weather detained the remainder of the lift for a critical period of time. Thus greater airlift could also very likely have contributed decisively to the success of the operation.

To those of us in the battle the lack of divisional combat strength and lack of airlift was obvious. Both Montgomery and Patton were apparently making an effort, in the north and in the south, but neither had adequate strength and neither was successful. Somehow, the decision behind this attack stuck in my mind in a very bothersome way, for it epitomizes the problem of generalship in a democracy. Generalship in a democracy is rife with compromise. It should be of concern to our military students and our combat leaders of tomorrow. By mid-'44, most of our military decisions were being made on the basis of absolute certainty not to fail; ultimate success appeared inevitable and could wait. This attitude seemed to permeate the lowest of commands, and venturesome, skillful tactical schemes were rare indeed. Methodical phase-line-by

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phase-line attacks were preferred. The thought often occurred to me that a "Stonewall" Jackson would have been given short shrift as a tactical commander. He probably would have been relieved for falling back or giving up ground. I am not unmindful of the spectacular achievements of General Patton. We need more General Pattons. I would feel better about future military relations with the Soviet Union and its satellites if we had more like him. But innovations in applied tactics, and in combat behavior and leadership, are as rare as innovations in concepts and research.

But winter came and still no peace. On December 17, 1944, I was the acting commander of the VIII Corps and I was with the 82^nd Airborne Division at Sissone, France. That evening I received an alert of a move to the front where the Germans were doing unexpectedly well. After getting the 82^nd and 101^st Airborne Divisions in motion, I left for Spa, Belgium, to report to the commanding general of the U.S. First Army. He was General Hodges and I met him in his office at about ten in the morning.

His chief of staff, General Bill Kean, was there as well as the Army G-3, General Thorson. The enemy situation was vague, to say the least, and the corps that I commanded was on the way by truck toward Bastogne, an obviously important road center in Belgium. The problem was what to do with the corps. It was the last uncommitted Allied reserve. General Kean ran his finger over the map and suggested Bastogne for one division and Werbemont for the other. General Hodges approved. Since the 82^nd was leading I ordered it to continue on to Werbemont and after making a reconnaissance of that locality, I went on to Bastogne.

The VIII Corps had its headquarters in a school in Bastogne and there was considerable confusion and much doubt about the situation. The VIII Corps was pulling back and they did not have much information to offer. Just before dusk the commanding general of the 101st arrived, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, and I gave him what information I had. I then gave him his orders "to organize and defend the locality". His orders were clear, he was

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to stay there unless told otherwise. His gallant defense with a great division, the 101^st Airborne, is now history. Immediately after issuing him his orders, I went north to join the 82^nd and in about twenty-four hours General Ridgway arrived to reassume command of the corps. Then followed one of the bitterest periods of fighting of the war.

The first signs of spring were in the air when we reached the Roer River. Spring was most welcome. It had been a cold and costly winter. Our casualties had been heavy and the fighting at times very difficult. With the coming of spring came rumors of a spring offensive. The hardened veterans no longer talked about ending the war, then or later, and if there had been a favorite slogan, it would have been, "Stay alive in Forty-five." I remember a remark made by a senior British officer in a meeting that I attended. He and most of his troops were veterans of the desert fighting and, at the time of our meeting, an attack that he had planned with great care was making absolutely no progress.

Speaking wistfully of it he said, "Ah, if only I had one good green division." The 82^nd Airborne Division was withdrawn and preparations

were made for another airborne operation. It was to be a jump on Berlin. This was to be the kill, and while a bit apprehensive about our prospects in another daylight jump, we knew that this would be the last, in Europe anyway. Maps were issued, orders prepared and all of the details carefully checked. It was to be a three-division effort, two American and one British. The American sector, as it turned out, was approximately the same sector that we were to occupy after the war ended. It was the southwestern portion of the city, including Tempelhof Airdrome.

Once again I went back to studying all available intelligence with care. I read the RAF and Air Corps daily digests as well as the Army reports. The antiaircraft gun deployments around our approach routes to the city appeared to be less impressive than they had been in Holland, near Nijmegen. Our estimate was that we could take care of them. There was something else, however,

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that began to show up in the pilot interrogation reports that bothered me. I remember reading of it first in an RAF post-flight interrogation report. It was a story about what appeared to be a rocket or missile. One of the digests contained a picture of the flaming, corkscrew-like path of one of them in flight. Some of the pilots reported that it appeared to home on the plane and if they attempted evasive action it seemed to change course and follow them. There was much speculation but unfortunately very little factual information except a few pilot reports. If it were a homing missile, its use in numbers would be disastrous to us. My hope therefore was that it was still in development and would not be available in numbers before our proposed Berlin operation. But our concern was soon brought to an end by the cancellation of the Berlin jump. We returned to ground combat.

We were placed in a sector along the Rhine River near Cologne.

It was a quiet area except for Colonel Tucker's 504^th Parachute Infantry, which made a river crossing and did some very heavy fighting near the small town of Hitdorf. In late April we were on the move again, this time to the Elbe River far to the north, in the area of the British Second Army. Soon we were to meet the Russian forces then storming across northern Germany. I shall always remember the meeting of our forces for a number of reasons. The 82^nd Airborne Division was under the command of the British Second Army. The Army Commander was General Sir Miles Dempsey, a brilliant and at the same time quietly efficient, modest type of British officer, who to my mind was one of the great Soldiers of the war. The 82^nd Airborne Division was strung back in trucks over the roads to Cologne for almost a couple of hundred miles. [ED: just as pre-war games showed would happen to road-bound vehicles] The head of the column was just below Hamburg near the town of Bleckede on the Elbe River. Directly to the north about sixty miles away was the Baltic Sea. I had made an early reconnaissance of the Elbe River line and it appeared that the German build-up on the far side was heavier than usual.

The river was very wide and running swiftly in spring flood. I had

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about two battalions of infantry up and the remainder would arrive during the night. The prudent thing would have been to wait twenty-four hours at least before attempting the crossing.

General Dempsey and General Ridgway came to my CP to talk about the situation. I had fought in General Dempsey's army in Holland for over six weeks and I had great respect for his judgment and ability. He asked: "Jim, when do you think you can cross? I would like to get established on the far bank as quickly as possible."

"I have some engineers and light assault boats up as well as about two battalions of infantry," I said. "I am not sure what is on the far side, but the high dikes along the river seem to be well-organized for defense and I have seen quite a few German troops digging in. I would like to get a chance to bring up more troops and delay for about twenty-four hours on the crossing. The river, as you know, is very wide and running very swiftly and it 'will not be an easy one."

Also notice, it doesn't take "special" training to sit your ass on a seat in the back of an amtrack despite usmc propaganda to the contrary.

The atomic bomb overshadowed all military thinking during the period 1945 to 1955. Especially was this true early in the decade. Hiroshima was fresh in our minds, the Soviets had no atomic bomb and no immediate prospect of getting one, and a revolution in military technology suddenly was being thrust upon us. To some extent, military thinking seemed to be paralyzed, by the bomb, and the lessons of World War II were ignored or quickly forgotten. The prevailing attitude seemed to be that after Hiroshima, it was a time to "throw the books out the window." Military texts had to be rewritten. Little that we had learned in World War II, it was said, would have meaningful application in the future. Any historian could have told us that this was nonsense, for there was much to learn from World War II, much of it of immediate value in dealing with our national defense problems, which were soon to become critical. We were fortunate in World War II. We were provided with a shield of time, space and, to a degree, circumstance, that protected us as we readied ourselves. The Atlantic and then the Pacific Ocean provided a physical barrier not easy to cross. In Europe our allies took the brunt of the first blow, recoiled under

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severe punishment, and finally held. The British fought valiantly at home, on the seas, and in North Africa. Despite this, when war reached us we were not ready, neither the Army nor the Navy nor the nation as a whole. This is not to say that we did not respond energetically and completely, for the record shows clearly that we did; but we were not ready, and never again can we afford not to be.

Our nation has always been slow to arouse itself from the idyls of peace. The avoidance of foreign entanglements has been the keystone of policy and it has been with reluctance that we have sent our sons to fight on foreign soil. The problem of political leadership, therefore, can be a most difficult one, as the political careers of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt will show.

As late as the presidential campaign of 1940, Mr. Roosevelt was holding forth to the electorate a promise of nonparticipation in foreign war- "Your sons are not going to be sent to any foreign wars," and "You can nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as a deliberate untruth." Even Congress, always a barometer of grass-roots attitudes, had difficulty in passing the Selective Service Act. It did so by one vote late in the summer of 1941. World War I should have taught us that millions of men cannot spring to arms overnight, and that the American tradition of the frontiers man leaving his plow, grabbing his musket and going off to war has long been outdated.

By World War II the Royal Air Force had already established itself as an independent military organization, and as we entered the war, the U.S. Army Air Corps was given a marginal degree of independence, a promissory note of full independence that would follow the war. In a way, this independence was tied to the soundness of the Douhet theory, for if Douhet were not valid and if the airman did not have a degree of operational independence and a decision-making capability in his own medium, what reason was there for a separate air force? The proponents of a separate air arm sought, therefore, from the mid-thirties to procure the validity, of the Douhet philosophy. The opponents were few and passive.

Much of the judgment on the contribution made by air power was far from objective. Yet if there ever was a time when we needed objectivity and an understanding of the most useful combat function of the airplane, 1945 was the time; for that was the year of the birth of the atomic bomb.

The advent of the atomic bomb appeared to fully validate the Doubet school of thought. Here was a weapon to bring about offensive air strikes that were utterly devastating, and without comparison in human history. The advocates of Douhet pointed to the Strategic Air Command and its combat record as irrefutable evidence of the superiority of the Douhet concept. Actually, if we were to plot a line reflecting, by its rise and fall, the effectiveness of the Douhet concept, we would find that it was at the peak of its validity when first propounded, in the 1920's. At that time,

___________________________________________________________________

3. Time, July 28, 1941.

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there was no defense in prospect against manned aircraft attack resolutely delivered. Gradually, however, the primitive defenses improved. Interceptors and antiaircraft artillery made heavy.

bomber strikes more and more costly. The Luftwaffe was the first to learn that there is more to air power than an all-out bombing offensive. The British had foreseen the value of the interceptor, and so the world's greatest manned aircraft battle, the Battle of Britain, was decided in their favor. When the German Panzer Divisions reached the English Channel, all that stood between them and the decision in land battle that they sought was the defensive power of the Royal Air Force.

Schweinfurt was another test case. The Schweinfurt factories produced ball bearings, vital to the continued German war effort. We made two great bombing attacks on Schweinfurt in the fall of 1943. Reported an observer:

As the war came to an end, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey was appointed to move in the wake of the advancing armies and assess the results of our bombing effort. The findings were reported in over two hundred detailed reports. They were never, in my opinion, given the recognition that they deserved. One of the most interesting aspects of our bombing effort was that German production increased in the same ratio as our bombing effort until late in 1944-until "well after the ground armies were ashore to make good the job at which the airplanes had been unsuccessful." [5] The foregoing is not to say that air power did not make a contribution to victory. Quite the contrary, air power was the most

_________________________________________________________

4. Arms and Men, Walter Millis.

5. Ibid.

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significant entity of our war power in World War II. Without it, we never could have established ourselves on the Normandy Peninsula, and we might not have established ourselves in southern Europe. But air power was most effective as a component of our over-all war power, not as an independent entity:

This dumping of enormous quantities of high explosive directly upon civilian homes, factories, power and communications facilities, and upon the cowering people who lived in or manned them, was perhaps the most striking feature of the Second War; it produced ruins more vast and somber than those of antiquity, of a kind which civilized man had never expected to see again. But if it was the machines most gruesome and dramatic contribution to warfare, it was by no means militarily the most significant. The combination of the tank and the tactical airplane continued to dominate most theaters down to the d" [6] en .

This great expansion was possible only because of the excellent National Guard and the organized Reserves. And to my mind, one of the truly great contributions of the prewar system was the ROTC. An army is not one mite better than its leaders, and without the ROTC we would never have had the leaders that we needed so badly. I have known thousands of young ROTC officers in battle and out, and I consider that the nation owes them a

___________________________________________________________________

10. Military Heritage of America, Colonel R. E. Dupuy and Colonel T. N. Dupuy.

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great debt of gratitude. It does not take a long memory to recall the troubles the ROTC had in continuing the support of its program between the wars. Frequently the object of campus puns, it was not appreciated until war came; but when war did come, the ROTC came through. In addition to the ROTC, both the Army and the Navy had an extensive service school system that contributed directly to the capability of the services to grow rapidly.

When the war came to an end, the services were faced with a problem perhaps more serious than that at the beginning. The Navy shrank from a strength of three and one-third million men in 1945 to less than a million in 1946. Ships had to be decommissioned and mothballed, bases and facilities closed down and stocks disposed of all over the world. The Army, from a strength of eight and one-quarter million in 1945, was reduced to less than two million in 1946.

The system of demobilizing the Army, known as the "point system," deserves a word. It was based upon allowing an individual to leave the service when he acquired sufficient points, which in turn were based upon length of service, days of combat, decorations, etc. From a scientific point of view, it appeared to be sound and the troopers expressed a preference for it. However, it came close to destroying the military establishment. The system was put into operation at a time when the administrative burden was the greatest ever known in the history of the United States Army. At first, when only the few very high-point men left, the impact was not seriously felt. Soon, however, it began to cut into the very muscle and bone of the organization. I should add, at this point, that the buck had been passed down to the field and unit commanders, who were informed that they could retain an individual otherwise eligible to leave if he was considered essential ;f' to the functioning of his organization. It takes little imagination to see how that worked.

When Private Jones's number came up, he wanted to go and no one could justify to him his "essentiality." He had been receiving dozens of letters from home about the return of the other

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heroes of the neighborhood, many of whom had presumably joined the service after he had, and his family just didn't understand why he didn't come back. Was it that he really didn't want to? You couldn't tell them that he was essential to the war effort now that the war was over; they knew better than that. Soon the telegrams and letters began to come from members of Congress and, surprisingly, letters came down the command chain from higher headquarters asking for an explanation as to why Private Jones was essential. The very headquarters that conceived the system and authorized exceptions now demanded to know why they were being made. Troop commanders quickly learned that there was but one thing to do-when a man's number came up, out he went. He went whether he was ready to go or not. It was the only sensible thing to do. In the meantime, organizations were rapidly being deprived of their key officers and noncommissioned officers, cooks, clerks, mechanics, and even medical personnel. Thousands of Soldiers were in paper organizations awaiting return to the United States, with no officers that they knew in charge of them and with officers who did not know what they were in charge of. We were not demobilizing the Army, we were absolutely destroying it, and the Communists encouraged it. It was an experience withou~ precedent for the regulars who were to stay, and frequently it taxed their abilities beyond any of the demands of the combat that they had just been through.

At about this time, the Doolittle Board began to look into the abuses of the so-called "caste" system. A Board of General Officers was appointed by the Department of the Army to travel about, and inquire into the low morale of the Army. A committee of outstanding jurists was appointed in Washington to look into the manual of courts martial to rid it of the abuses that, presumably, had been perpetuated during the war. Looking back, I am amazed that any army existed at all at the end of that period. From the viewpoint of the lower unit troop commanders, it was the most shocking and wrong thing that we have ever done in the history of our army-to demobilize it in such an irresponsible manner.

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Little wonder that there were so many abuses, boards and investigations. Little wonder that there was hardly any army left.

B. THE GROWING IMPORTANCE OF AIR MOBILITY

C-47s drop Gavin's Paratroopers over Normandy on D-Day

It would seem, from all of the foregoing, that there could not have been much attention given to the lessons of the war. Nevertheless, there was considerable. The outstanding lesson to those of us in the airborne business was the growing importance of air mobility. We saw the Germans, in the Mediterranean, accomplish with one air-transported division a combat task that would have taken half a dozen infantry divisions. This occurred when they poised the German First Parachute Division at Marseilles at the time that we threatened to land in Sicily. Not knowing whether the landing would take place in Italy, Sardinia, Sicily or Corsica, and not having adequate reserves for all of those localities, they gave air mobility to the one division that they did have, and it was a very fine division indeed. We, too, had used air mobility to fly a division back and forth from Africa to Sicily and then to commit it to Salerno to tip the scales of battle in our favor. We had used air mobility to fly a division from England to the continent at the time of the Battle of the Bulge. We had used air mobility to resupply Bastogne and to supply General Patton's fast-moving 3^rd Army. In fact, I have no doubt whatsoever that with half again as much air mobility we could have won the war in 1944 and occupied Berlin first.

Finding the means, and developing the techniques, to achieve efficient air mobility was the big challenge in the wake of World War II. It meant more than merely acquiring additional aircraft. It meant completely redesigning and streamlining the equipment of the airborne division, as well as re-equipping the Troop Carrier units of our Air Force.

Some of these lessons were summarized in Airborne Warfare, published in 1947; among them were the following:

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Air mobility in 1947 began to take new form. The workhorse of World War II had been the DC-3. It either delivered troops by parachute or it landed, requiring about three to four thousand feet of runway. Replacement of this airplane began immediately afterward with the "Flying Boxcar," the C-82. This airplane was designed to meet a requirement of carrying ten tons of cargo one thousand miles and return. The rear of the plane was so designed that the entire cargo could be delivered by parachute in one piece, provided large enough parachutes could be developed and they were. Beyond the Flying Boxcar, other air transports were in prospect, some of considerably greater range and more global than local in their performance.

The performance of the DC-3 was augmented in World War II

_______________________________________________________________________

9. Airborne Warfare, James M. Gavin. Published by the Infantry Journal.

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by towing gliders behind it. These were of tubular construction, covered with fabric or, in the case of the British gliders, with plywood. They proved highly inflammable in heavy flak. I flew as an observer in the airborne operation that crossed the Rhine in March of 1945, and I was appalled by the sight of gliders and planes going down in flames. I remember at one time counting twenty-three, all burning like torches and falling rapidly. After the war, we sought to develop an all-metal glider. Two gliders were produced and their cost convinced us that adding small engines would be a worth-while investment. Thus was born the STOL idea, the "short takeoff and landing" aircraft. It was officially called an assault plane, and it was intended to replace the glider and thus reinforce a parachute assault by airlanding heavy cargo and supplies in the battle area. It appeared, therefore, to have tremendous potential. A third form of air mobility had its genesis in this early postwar period, the VTOL, "vertical takeoff and landing." Thirteen Bell helicopters were assigned to the 82^nd Airborne Division for evaluation and tests in 1946. We did not know what to do with them at first and considered them for possible replacements for the L-4, or artillery spotting [ED: fixed-wing STOL "grasshoppers"] planes used so extensively in World War II. We put quite a bit of time into them and it soon became apparent that we had in our hands an air vehicle of great versatility. Additional types were in prospect, and we urged their procurement as a matter of priority.

Efforts to obtain both new types of air vehicles ran into difficulty at once. In the first place, they were so radically new that there was little interest in them in the newly established Air Force. In the second place, with the establishment of the Air Force, the Army had agreed to procure all of its air vehicles through the new service; thus the Air Force assumed the responsibility of judging the air-worthiness of the Army's expressed requirements. And there was almost as much reluctance to go into these new forms of air mobility in the Army as there was in the Air Force. Most of our senior Army officers had ex-

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perience in combat with other than air mobile units and they looked with considerable skepticism on the enthusiasm of these zealots who were insisting, sometimes with considerable exaggeration, that everything in the Army had to fly. As anyone knew who had fought extensive Panzer formations, much more was needed to win a land battle than parachute and glider troops.

But there was no doubt that our reserves had to be air-transportable. It was a frustrating experience, trying to sell the idea of air mobility and its rapidly expanding field of tactical application.

Both the helicopter and the assault plane seemed to have intriguing possibilities. I talked about them at our service schools and on our boards and urged their procurement in numbers. In 1948 I was appointed president of the Army's Airborne Panel, which was charged with evaluating our present situation and proposing solutions to the problems of the future. But we were soon to learn that all of the studies, panels and boards were of no avail if we could not convince our colleagues in the Air Force of the soundness of our air ideas. A good segment of the Air Force, particularly those who had been with Troop Carriers during the war, thought as we did, but they were rapidly being subordinated to the Big Bomber generals. And while it is easy to accuse the Big Bomber people of poor judgment, it would not be fair to do so, because they too were working within the tight framework of a limited [ED: President Eisenhower butter over guns] budget. Many of them in decision-making positions were intellectually convinced that we could afford but one thing-more and bigger bombers matched to a nuclear retaliatory power. On the other hand, many of them sensed the sterility of such a program, feeling that we needed greater versatility if we were to cope with the Soviets; and they realized that when ultimately the USSR matched our retaliatory power, we would be in a very dangerous position if we had no other capability. We persisted, therefore, in trying to convince the Air Force of the soundness of our thinking, and of course this was necessary since they passed upon the air-worthiness of our air vehicle requirements.

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In the case of the helicopter, I followed the project through the various echelons of the military establishment, finally discussing it personally with the Director of Requirements of the USAF. Our discussions were of a rather protracted nature, extending over the better part of a day on the trip that we took through the West Coast aircraft industries. He finally became exasperated with my insistence and said, "I am the Director of Requirements and I will determine what is needed and what is not. The helicopter is aerodynamically unsound. It is like lifting oneself by one's boot straps. It is no good as an air vehicle and I am not going to procure any. No matter what the Army says, I know that it does not need any." Thus the door was slammed in our faces as we sought to enter an entirely new, and absolutely essential, field of combat air mobility. Thanks to a last-minute crash program, and the programs of the Department of the Navy and the marine corps, we were able to save thousands of lives by helicopter in Korea.

But more than that, the helicopter could have given us a great mobility advantage over the North Koreans and Chinese Communist forces in Korea if we had been allowed to develop its great potential. Now we are "discovering" the tactical wonders of sky cavalry, ten years too late.

The history of the [STOL] assault plane was equally depressing.

T-Tail, rear-ramp equipped C-122 paved the way for today's C-1`30s and C-17s but the USAF only wants to operate the minimum of assault transport to move the Army for 3D maneuver

Michael Stroukoff of the Chase Aircraft Company developed the first useful assault plane, the C-122, which soon grew up to be the C-123. It met all specifications and far outperformed any competitor in the field. Takeoff and landings of eight-ton combat payloads out of pastures and cultivated fields on a few hundred feet were accomplished with little difficulty. Despite repeated requests from the Department of the Army, and ultimately from the Chief of Staff and Secretary of the Army himself, assault transport procurement was delayed year after year. Actually, none were ever procured in the original configuration. A much more sophisticated airplane called an assault plane was finally procured as a replacement for the Flying Boxcar long after the

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Korean War. Thus another field of air mobility remained un-exploited as we continued to drift toward a war on the Asiatic mainland, with a primitively equipped Asiatic army.

C. THE ROLE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Fission in 1946 posed the greatest challenge to our military planners that we had ever known. So great was it, in fact, that military thinking seemed, at the outset, to be paralyzed by its magnitude. I know of no one, for the first few years following the war, who questioned that its military use would be exclusively in bombs. The first atomic bomb was of such size that the B-29 that carried it had to be especially modified for the purpose. Such being the case, our earliest nuclear thinking in the Army was in terms of how to defend against use of the bomb on us, and how to team up with nuclear bombers in the offense.

It seemed possible to match nuclear bomber attack with a parachute assault, provided we offered no nuclear targets to the enemy while staging the operation. The first standard operation procedures to accomplish this were tried in the 82^nd Airborne Division in 1947. We simply drew a five-mile circle around our takeoff airfields. Troops were restrained from entering the area of the circle until minutes. before takeoff; thus they were kept dispersed and concentrated only at the moment of loading. Little thought was given to tactical use by the Soviets of nuclear weapons in a surface-to-surface role since they did not have such weapons and it was unlikely that they would for quite a few years.

However, the results of the Bikini tests in 1947 began to suggest new fields of possible tactical application. Certainly the results of those tests made clear that the large amphibious operations such as the Normandy operation would never again be possible against an enemy equipped with nuclear weapons-just as nuclear weapons could have been used effectively against the Normandy defenses. Thus the pattern of future attacks seemed to be emerging as a combined airborne-nuclear assault, using

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tactical weapons. This concept found little receptivity in the Air Force, however, which was discouraging since the Air Force would have to provide both the airlift and the air-delivered weapons. In fact, it would be fair to say that it encountered something close to actual hostility, because it diverted part of the small stockpile of fission material to tactical rather than strategic uses. And at the time-the latter half of the forties-an increasing segment of military and public thinking was becoming committed to nuclear strategic retaliation as an exclusively valid policy.

Survival Under Atomic Attack

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDJ1ZlSYtoU

A Day Called "X"

A Day Called 'X' was a dramatized CBS documentary showing a civil defence exercise in Portland, Oregon in which the entire city is evacuated in anticipation of a nuclear air raid, after Soviet bombers had been detected by radar stations to the north. It was filmed in September 1957[1] and aired December 8 of that year.[2][3] It was presented by Glenn Ford.

Its local rebroadcast in 2004[4] and appearance in the on-line Prelinger Archives attracted interest among local history buffs due to its extensive outside shots of the city, and the use of non-actor participants (local officials and broadcasters).[5][6]

On September 27, 1955, Portland actually conducted an exercise evacuation of downtown called "Operation Greenlight,"[7][8] and the film is often misattributed to that year.

Part 1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-cwHA39HIc

Part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvVvk2O0JLg

Part 3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaLf2gUKYGY

"Urban" bombing was accepted as a sound and proper strategy in most military and civilian circles. This profoundly disturbed me, for obviously the strategy would only remain valid so long as the Soviets were not in a position to deliver nuclear strikes against our own urban areas. When the day did come that actually could, and it was inevitable that it would, then the proper target for our nuclear striking forces would have to be the sources of Soviet nuclear strength, that is, their long-range striking air power. Further, to devote all of our nuclear striking power to urban areas, even though we did so because we considered them to be the indices of industrial production and thus determinants of a war-making capability, would have overlooked the impressive and combat-ready array of Soviet "conventional forces" deployed ready to strike [ED: "asymmetrically" as we would say today]. I often asked the obvious question: What were we to do if cities in Western Europe were overrun? Destroy them, too? And if Western Europe or other areas friendly to us were to be occupied by the Soviets and slowly consumed into the Soviet system in the pattern of Estonia and Latvia, were we to destroy all those areas with nuclear weapons? These were questions that made one very unpopular for the asking, and questions that were never answered.

I became increasingly interested in these problems. It was with great pleasure, therefore, that I received orders to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group in March of 1949. The Director of WSEG, Dr. Philip Morse, assigned me the project of

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studying the possible tactical employment of nuclear weapons. I devoted the entire summer of 1949 to reading everything on the subject that I could get my hands on and visiting our laboratories and talking to our scientists. By summer's end, nuclear weapons became more understandable to me and I drafted a paper on the subject. I had become convinced that nuclear weapons had a tremendous field for tactical application, in fact, in the long run, probably the most promising field of all. One of the recommendations in the study was that we should reconsider our then current national policy of allocating all fissionable material to strategic use. This recommendation was very unpopular with my Air Force colleagues and, for the study to be accepted, had to be stricken from it. It made little difference since the study was stamped "Top Secret" and promptly buried in the archives.

Operation Tea Pot Nuclear Weapons Effects

Part 1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSu4q9Ml6pg

Part 2

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q10YnfJhTA

Part 3

www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9DWheVb3qs

Fortunately, the publication the following year of the government's unclassified The Effects of Nuclear Weapons released much of the information.

In September of 1949, the White House announced the firing of the first Soviet nuclear device. This development was profoundly disturbing to many of our scientists, who had assumed that we had at least five more years of grace. Now the Soviets were in a position .to undertake a pattern of nuclear diplomacy as they were to do later in missile diplomacy.

I was called into conference in the fall of 1949 to consider the problem of whether or not to develop a thermonuclear weapon.

The problem had been referred to WSEG. Our scientists had been discussing it for some time and their views ranged from, on one hand, "It would be like trying to light wet asbestos in a windstorm and thus it is not worth trying," to "It is feasible and we should go ahead with it as a matter of high priority." Dr. Oppenheimer was present at one of the conferences and he expressed a view in which I found myself in complete agreement.

That is, that more important than trying to devise new ways and means of destroying a bigger portion of the human race, we should try to find ways and means of living with the powers we

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had already created. This was quite fundamental, in that our manpower and nuclear resources were limited and by diverting them to a thermonuclear program, we would, to some extent, be taking away from the other weapons programs. If the urban bombing concept were to remain policy, and thermonuclear weapons were to be added to it, and if that concept were morally and militarily unsound in the beginning, it certainly would be more so with the H-bomb added. I believed that it was unsound and that Dr. Oppenheimer's views were valid. I went to the office of Major General Kenneth Nichols, who had been a deputy to General Groves in the Manhattan Project, and discussed the technical aspects of the program with him. He pointed out that the basic calculations for a thermonuclear weapon had been made sometime ago and that very likely they were now in the hands of the Soviets. Further, that this information was known to Dr. Fuchs and to Pontecorvo, both of whom had gone over to the USSR. He was convinced that the Soviets had a capability of developing a thermonuclear weapon. I had to conclude reluctantly, therefore, that if this were so and if we did not develop one, our position would be very bad indeed. Therefore, I decided that we had to undertake an H-bomb program as a matter of highest priority and I so recommended in WSEG.

In the meantime, however, an increasing number of people were talking about the possible tactical uses of nuclear weapons. An advance study group in the JCS headed by Brigadier General Don Zimmerman, USAF, had done particularly good work in this area. The scientists, too, were beginning to see the possibilities of much smaller sizes and smaller yields. The economics of the use of fissionable materials were being studied also. I recall a figure used by General Zimmerman that when we exceeded twenty-five B-29 bombers delivering high explosives instead of using one carrying an atomic bomb, we were making an uneconomical use of our resources.

Thus we approached the Korean crisis, grossly lacking air mobility and exclusively preoccupied with our newest form of

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firepower, nuclear firepower, packaged for strategic use. However, even though so packaged, it could have been used tactically.

And when the Korean situation broke and the prospects of the defeat of the 8^th Army were real and compelling, General Nichols and I went to the office of General Ridgway and urged that he recommend to the Chief of Staff that he in turn recommend to the President that we use nuclear weapons against the North Korean forces. It would have been militarily inexcusable to allow the 8^th Army to be destroyed without even using the most powerful weapons in our arsenal. Yet, we almost did so! We had already made two combat bombing strikes of about 175 x B-29s without decisive results. The situation in the summer of 1950 offered us a number of well worth-while tactical nuclear targets if we had had the moral courage to make the decision to use them. But this we did not have for reasons that have been the subject of much soul-searching ever since. Dr. Henry A. Kissinger's Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy treats the subject well. To a large segment of our military planners, Korea just simply should not have taken place. "It has been remarked more than once that had the Korean War not actually taken place, we could never have believed that it could have." And: "The assumption behind our military planning had been that our wars would be fought against a principal enemy and a major challenge, but that our forces-in-being need only be powerful enough to gain us the time to mobilize our industrial potential. This doctrine presupposed two related contingencies: that other powers would bear the initial brunt of aggression and that the threat would be unambiguous," [12]

D. GROWING SOVIET INTRANSIGENCE

In the meantime, while schisms were developing in the Pentagon with the attendant frustrations and delay of programs that should have been advanced, our State Department was dealing with a Soviet government that was becoming increasingly in-

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12. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger.

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transigent. Many of us had felt that we could live with the Soviets without serious conflict in the postwar period; if there were to be differences, we believed that they could be dealt with through the machinery of the United Nations. This would, of course, have depended upon the continued good will of the Soviets. That they were of a different point of view was made apparent as early as 1945, when Pravda published a statement by Stalin, that first had been made to the American Labor Delegation visiting Moscow in September, 1927:

...In the further progress of development of the international revolution, two world centres will be formed: The Socialist centre, attracting to itself all the countries gravitating towards Socialism, and the Capitalist centre, attracting to itself all the countries gravitating towards Capitalism. The fight between these two centres for the conquest of world economy will decide the fate of capitalism and communism throughout the whole world, for the final defeat of world capitalism means the victory of socialism in the arena of world economy. . . .

It was like a pirate running up the skull and crossbones pennant as a declaration of irrevocable intent before closing in the attack. But our leaders continued in their efforts to find a working arrangement with Stalin. From the beginning, they were baffled by the complete and continuing non-co-operation of the Soviet Union; and while the Soviet Union became increasingly difficult to deal with in international discussions, it pursued a course of relentless aggression. To be sure, the United Nations succeeded in forcing its withdrawal from Iran, but this was, now in retrospect, hardly a serious setback. It soon made manifest its intention to gobble entirely the small European nations it had occupied at the end of hostilities. Incidents such as the unwarranted shooting down of an American C-47 airplane by the Yugoslavs, then fully committed to Soviet policies, kept the problem before the public. It was becoming evident that the "hearts and flowers" period of the postwar honeymoon had come to an end.

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For better or for worse, we had to face up to the fact that the teachings of Lenin were Soviet policy once again, and that according to this policy either we or the Soviets would survive, not.

both. "The existence of the Soviet Republic next to a number of imperialist states for a long time is unthinkable." [13] And while they prattled peace, they prepared for war and engaged in war. We called it cold war, but to the Soviets it was war, pure and simple, that they liked to describe, Orwell-like, as peace.

E. THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COLLECTIVE SECURITY PROGRAM

Since collective security was the basis of Free World planning, it soon became apparent to all the Western nations that they would have to look to their own future survival through coalition agreements. The Rio Treaty of 1947 brought together the majority of the nations of the Western Hemisphere. In the spring of 1948, five nations of Western Europe-Britain, France, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands-banded together to form a Western Union, agreeing to come to the aid of each otl1er in the event of an armed attack in Europe. Great Britain, which had been giving.

support to the Greek government, found itself in difficulties and the United States agreed, upon the request of the Greek government, to come to their assistance. Turkey, likewise, was in need of assistance and thus was born the Truman Doctrine. But more was needed than military aid, for many nations of the Free World were still suffering severely from the economic effects of after the war. And since low standards of living and attendant widespread discontent offer fertile fields for Communist exploitation, the United States considered ways and means of coming to the assistance of nations in need of such aid. The Marshall Plan was proposed and the United States firmly embarked upon a policy W" of containing Communism through economic assistance to countries in need. In furtherance of our goal of achieving collective security, President Truman in addressing Congress on March 17, 1948, proposed that the United States should match the deter-

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13. Lenin.

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mination of the free countries of Europe by doing our part to help them. The following summer, Congress adopted a resolution reaffirming our policy as follows:

to achieve international peace and security through the United Nations so that armed force shall not be used except in common interest, and advise(d) the President that it was the intent of the Senate that the United States should associate itself with such regional and other collective arrangements as are based on continuous and effective self-help and mutual aid, and as affect its national security.

There followed the North Atlantic Treaty, the first peacetime European military alliance into which the United States has entered.

Thus our international commitments, with attendant military obligations, continued to grow. That they were absolutely necessary there is no doubt-our survival lies in the direction of collective security. By mid-1950 we were committed to defensive arrangements with fourteen NATO partners, and with twenty of our Latin-American neighbors under the provisions of the Rio Treaty. Our military assistance program continued to expand, ultimately involving bilateral defense agreements with forty-six different nations. The Anzus Treaty was signed in 1951 and the SEATO Treaty three years later. Separate mutual defense treaties were signed with the Philippines, Korea and the Republic of China, and a bilateral mutual security treaty with Japan. Thus the policy of achieving security through collective agreements has continued since World War II until the present.

From the viewpoint of the military planner these treaties are what they purport to be-commitments to do something, or to provide something, or both. The wording of the treaty determines the exact nature of the obligational burden that our nation assumes. In general, we agreed in most of the treaties to participate in the common defense in the event of aggression. This implies a capability on our part to do so, and this means military strength in being or in immediate prospect. Thus to a planner it would appear that as our obligations increased, our military

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strength to support those obligations should have increased also.

The contrary was the case.

Our collective security program and our own military readiness programs were quite clearly divergent in the spring of 1950. The Army strength had been reduced from over eight million at the end of World War II to 593,000. The Navy had been reduced from over three million to 381,538, the marine corps from in excess of 474,000 to 74,000 and the Air Force from in excess of two million to slightly over 411,000. The Army stretched its strength on occupation duty from Japan to Berlin. Four divisions at reduced strength were in the Far East, and they had skeletonized and stored their heavy combat equipment. One division plus a constabulary force was in Europe.

We had increased our strength tremendously in one category: our nuclear retaliatory capacity. Unfortunately, this had been accomplished at the expense of our other forces, a trend that had continued to preoccupy our senior Army and Navy leaders since the war. Cautioning against a tendency to overlook our other forms of military power of lesser magnitude, General Bradley testified before a committee of the 80^th Congress in 1948, "Numerous intelligent and thinking people in many quarters have gained the impression that the atom bomb and other weapons of mass destruction have all but eliminated the need for an army in any war which may come." And more alarming than the exclusive reliance that we seemed to be placing in our nuclear bombs, was a by-product of the trend. It was the curtailment of the research and development programs of the so-called "conventional" forces. At a time when we should have been avid in our search for new means and new methods to match the dynamic shifting pattern of war we were, in fact, closing our minds. Never was the saying more true that a nation's greatest danger is in winning a past war, for nothing so stultifies military thinking as victory. We continued to adhere blindly to the age-less pattern of trying to do better the thing that we had done best in the last days of the last war. There is an initiative in mili-

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tary technology, as there is in military operations, and we frequently reassured ourselves that the initiative was ours. Sadly, we soon learned that we had it neither technologically nor operationally. Spring of 1950 came to Washington with the cherry blossoms, the annual visitation of the DAR, and thousands of school children trooping the halls of Congress and ascending the Washington Monument. No ominous signs of trouble ahead disturbed the peaceful scene. The Armed Forces looked their best as they swung down Constitution Avenue. Reporting on the scene in the issue of May 29, 1950, Time stated:

General satisfaction with our state of readiness was the feeling of the moment. A few weeks earlier the Secretary of Defense in defending his fat-cutting budget had made the comment, "Our defenses were in grand shape," and "are adequate to the needs of the hour." Thus in the traditional pattern of the Republic, we drifted to the brink of war, inadequately prepared psychologically and physically. This time the war's first blow was to fall on our own forces.

F. KOREA-AND LIMITED WAR

It fell on June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans struck across the 38th Parallel. Acting promptly, and making one of the most courageous and farsighted decisions in our national history, President Trumaan sought and obtained the support of the United Nations. At first it was hoped that our air and naval power would bring the aggression to a halt. Many, in fact, were confident that it would. I was a member of the Weapons Systems Evaluation

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Group at the time, and the senior Air Force member, upon learning that General MacArthur had called for the use of ground troops, remarked: "The old man must be off his rocker. When the Fifth Air Force gets to work on them, there will not be a North Korean left in North Korea." For the Army, trading its lives for time and space, it was a bitter and costly experience. Six reinforced North Korean People's Army divisions came driving across the 38^th Parallel toward Seoul. They were spearheaded by one hundred Russian-built T-34 [medium] tanks and amply supported by Russian-provided planes. In three days, Seoul fell and the North Korean Army's momentum southward continued. General MacArthur scraped together two companies of infantry and a battery of artillery and some supporting weapons, including "six 2.36 bazooka teams (whose weapons, it was discovered, could not stop the T-34 tank)." [14] He had the force flown to Korea; it was all that our limited airlift could transport. Thus the great might of this industrial nation, five years after the defeat of the Axis powers, could do no better than to airlift two rifle companies and a battery of artillery to meet six aggressor divisions.

That it was more than mere implication soon became clear as the strength of the Army was drastically reduced. I was the Assistant to the Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations and later Deputy Chief of Staff of Plans during the cutback. If the initiative had

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been ours, and not that of the Communists, and if there had been no more "Koreas," all would have been well. Unfortunately, the initiative was not ours and the military planners were soon in difficulty again. As one of them, I often thought of the lines from Stephen Vincent Benet's John Brown's Body. They were uttered by a disconsolate and angry Confederate as he described the frustrations of fighting the Yankees:

"(He) could whip five yanks with a palm leaf hat, only the yanks won't fight like that". [16]

And so it went with us. We were a powerful nation but the Communists would not co-operate and lead to our strength.

Take Dien Bien Phu for example. To the French it seemed to offer the best tactical solution to the problem of protecting the Hanoi Delta, while at the same time providing a degree of protection to Laos. It was well-organized for all-around defense.

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About a year or so later I mentioned the Vista report to General Norstad and he used strong language in his denunciation of it. Ironically, seven years later as SACEUR he was striving to achieve many of the goals sought in the report.

Unfortunately, Dr. Oppenheimer was in trouble, and his participation in Vista added to the aura of suspicion with which the Big Bomber advocates were now surrounding him. As The Reporter expressed it in an editorial some years later, in 1957:

9-ton M50 Ontos light tankette could be flown easily by piston-engined USAF transports to deliver an Army "Sky Cavalry"

The Vista recommendations had sought to improve the capabilities of each of the services. The Army was urged to adopt a lightweight tank killer, the Ontos. It has since been developed by the marine corps. Vista recommended an across-the-board improvement in communications, the development of tactical nuclear missiles to replace the 280mm, and an extensive improvement in intelligence-handling systems. It finally recommended the establishment of a Combat Developments Center to test new tactical concepts with troops. This has been established.

For the Navy, among other things, it urged a step-up in out antisubmarine defenses and the development of across-the-beach cargo and personnel-handling facilities.

The Air Force recommendations were almost entirely related to improving its capability to wage tactical, nuclear or non-nuclear war. Among other things it recommended procuring 400 x C-124 and 850 x C-123 Troop Carrier aircraft by 1954, tactical nuclear

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17. "The Hidden Struggle for the H-Bomb," Fortune, May, 1953, p. 109.

18. The Reporter, December 26, 1957.

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DISCUSSION: the Ontos light tankette was air-mobile in both the C-123 (1) and the C-124 (2) to be the vertical airdrop landing (VADL) parachute airdrop and STOL "cow pasture" airland Sky Cavalry with hard-hitting recoilless weapons Gavin described in his 1954 Harper's magazine article "Cavalry and I don't Mean Horses", and the Ontos could be helicopter and fixed-wing VTOL mobile when aircraft capable of lifting its 9 tons became available.

"Where was the cavalry? ...and I don't mean horses. I mean helicopters and light aircraft, to lift Soldiers armed with automatic weapons and hand-carried light anti-tank weapons, and also lightweight reconnaissance vehicles, mounting anti-tank weapons the equal or better than the Russian T-34s...If ever in the history of our armed forces there was a need for the cavalry arm--airlifted in light planes, helicopters and assault-type aircraft--this was it... Only by exploiting to the utmost the great potential of flight can we combine complete dispersion in the defense with the facility of rapidly massing for the counter-attack which today's and tomorrow's Army must possess"

www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m65.htm

There are arguments over the value of the atomic cannon, especially in regard to range, but General Collins believed the threat of its deployment had a role in bringing about the Korean armistice and did not doubt the presence in Europe "of our nuclear guns has contributed greatly as a deterrent to any offensive by the Soviets."

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We discussed the characteristics of the tactical weapons that would soon become available, particularly the 280mm [ED: Atomic Annie cannon], and the advantages that would accrue in the use of fissionable material when we were able to replace the artillery weapons with missiles or small air-dropped weapons. There was no question in my mind at the time about the essentiality of tactical nuclear weapons to NATO's future. The problem, and it was an urgent one, was to develop the tactics and organizational structure that would enable the NATO forces to fight successfully in tactical nuclear warfare.

From Paris I then went to Naples, Italy, for duty with Admiral Carney's Southern European command. The Admiral was one of the finest men to work for that I had the privilege of associating with in Europe and the tactical problems of the area were challenging, to say the least. I had numerous opportunities to visit our faraway fronts in Turkey, Greece and northern Italy. The northern Italy area particularly adapted itself to the tactical employment of nuclear weapons since the mountains channelized an

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attacker. The greatest danger was in a large-scale vertical envelopment. This, however, could be dealt with by a defense-in-depth, specifically by organizing the Apennines as well as the Alps. Admiral Carney had recommended, on a number of occasions, the static use of nuclear weapons in the Alpine passes and they obviously had great merit. The Greek and Turkish areas, with the exception of the area immediately north of the Dardanelles, which is rolling open country, likewise offered excellent opportunities for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in defense.

The Dardanelles defense required mobile armored forces in considerable numbers, matched with nuclear weapons, in order to handle the type of attack that might be expected through that area. It was evident, in the summer of 1952, that nuclear weapons would play a decisive role in the defense of the Southern European area.

In December of 1952, I received orders to take command of the United States VII Corps, then occupying all of southern Germany from the Alps north to an east-and-west line just above Nuremberg. It contained the cities of Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Munich and Heilbron. The most prominent terrain features were the open rolling farmlands of the east backed by the Swabian Alps in the west. The Danube bisected the area, running generally west to east and the Rhine River ran north and south directly across the rear of the area. The corps had been on occupation duty since the widespread tension following the opening of the Korean War.

It consisted of two mechanized cavalry regiments deployed on the border, two infantry divisions behind them, and numerous supporting artillery, engineer, signal and transportation units. It offered me the opportunity that I had been seeking to develop tactical nuclear concepts for our infantry organizations. I started to work on the project at once.

The Staff developed a plan for the defense of the area along World War II lines. This was done as a map exercise, initially, and we then conducted an actual count of the troops and their supplies dispersed throughout the area in terms of quantity per

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five-kilometer square. A five-kilometer square was selected because it was one that would contain a circle 2 kilometers in radius, which was the median lethal distance of a fifty-kiloton weapon. [19] When the raw data were assembled and compiled, a plot was made, showing by color gradient the density of our forces in defense. It was evident, at once, in relating this density to nuclear weapons that the Soviets could use in attack, that it would fragment badly and lead to quick defeat in tactical nuclear combat. We then turned to the problem of rearranging our deployments so as to offer the best prospect of defense against nuclear weapons, consistent with the accomplishment of our mission.

Using the existing forces, we soon learned that the World War II type organizations, no matter how packaged, would not adapt themselves to nuclear tactics. The one exception was our armored divisions. Our rearranging involved a complete re-examination of the terrain and its defense characteristics, the availability of airstrips and suitable air-landing areas, and the location of extensive underground shelters, of which there are quite a few in southern Germany. At the conclusion of our studies, forces were again deployed and their density analyzed. We learned that it was entirely practicable to provide optimum defense with a quick tactical responsiveness to an attack in a two-sided nuclear war provided certain steps in reorganization were accomplished.

One would assume that an alliance so conceived and so dedicated would move forward, with a minimum of internal friction, to high levels of achievement. Such, unfortunately, has not been the case. Neither dedication nor hard work on the part of its planners have brought NATO to the goals so eagerly sought.

None of the force levels of NATO which have been announced periodically with such fanfare has ever been achieved. Almost a decade after its creation, NATO is still without a force sufficient to prevent its members from being overrun by the Soviet army. [21] I have worked closely with NATO and within NATO, almost since its inception. I have no reservations whatsoever about the soundness of the concept and the compelling need for it to be successful. And NATO can be successful, and can achieve its lofty goals and serve Western man as no other political and military creation in Western history. But this will take realism, sacrifice and courage. Mere agreements on paper and periodic high-level meetings with much attendant publicity will not give NATO an added bit of strength.

NATO strength must come, first of all, from confidence. This is absolutely fundamental. It must have confidence in the goals it seeks and it must have confidence in the technical adequacy of the means available to achieve those goals.

Confidence within NATO will best be served when we are realistic with each other. The NATO nations collectively comprise the most highly educated, sophisticated and industrialized

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20. The Great Deterrent, Sir John Slessor.

21. Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Henry A. Kissinger.

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area in the world. Its political and military leaders are outstanding. I have known many of the senior military leaders for some years, and I have discussed NATO military problems with them on many occasions. As a group of professionals, they are, unmatched anywhere in the world today. I have no concern whatsoever for their performance in peace or war, nuclear or non-nuclear.

However, above all, they are realistic. For their peoples have fought to defend their homeland against aggression since the beginning of recorded time. More than any nations in the world, they recognize the importance of collective security. To achieve such security in a collective manner-and this includes the participation of the United States in every sense of the word-they will reach compromises between what they know must be done and what they consider the other NATO nations are willing to do.

Polite murmurs of agreement will go round the council tables and periodic communiques' will go out over the press wires, from time to time assuring an uneasy world of the potential strength of NATO and the soundness of its military planning. Privately, however, most of the senior military people are worried, for they know, as we know, that the Soviet nuclear colossus once in motion will be difficult to stop, and that if the most modem weapons are not in the hands of the NATO nations, they will be overrun in a nuclear catastrophe without precedence in human history. As the NATO military forces fall back or disintegrate, the next tactical decision confronting NATO's military leaders will be how to liberate the overrun territory. One gunpowder liberation in a generation is enough. Few of them will admit welcoming a nuclear liberation. And yet, this is what is implied in a military policy that would rely upon a "trip wire" strategy and nuclear retaliation by forces not even under the control of NATO.

NATO members must have confidence in each other and this implies mutual trust and a free exchange of information. A free exchange of technical military information provides the basis of understanding the latest trends in military technology. And in the dynamic technological age in which we live, this is of the utmost

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importance. A technological lag of even a few years could spell military disaster.

The members of NATO must have confidence in the military policies that serve it. This, of course, is related to NATO's awareness of the manner in which technology can serve it. Our military policies, therefore, must be those that would serve NATO and its members and not destroy them. Finally, not a small part of NATO's confidence must stem from a conviction of the thriving and promising nature of the cause they serve, and the righteousness of that cause. The member nations of NATO must have an ideal to which they may aspire that is more than the mere maintenance of the status quo. NATO must be a proponent of something, something worthy of the aspirations of the free people of all of Europe, and of the world for that matter. And it should provide a cause to which they can feel, at least in their hearts, they can rally. It therefore needs a doctrine and a military program ,to serve that doctrine. It needs it collectively exactly as each nation needs it separately. NATO's problem is our problem as Americans.

The free exchange of information within NATO has been one of our most difficult problems. The NATO nations have been considerate and understanding, knowing that the laws passed by the properly elected legislative bodies of the member countries sometimes preclude the free exchange of information. In some cases, an exchange may be permitted with one or two nations, but not with all. This is more damaging, in many respects, than no exchange at all since it tends to create cliques of nations within NATO itself and nothing short of Soviet penetration could be b more harmful. Yet we have such a situation today. Aside from the intangible but insidious harm caused by holding back information, real physical harm is done.

We are in a technological revolution of the most profound nature. Nuclear weapons are one sign of that revolution. Nuclear weapons are here to stay and the basic problem is to learn to live with them. Nuclear weapons can now be made so small in size

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and light in weight as to be man-handleable and shoulder-fired.

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M113 Gavin with Davey Crockett small nuclear rocket launcher to incinerate attacking enemy masses

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They can be employed in infantry combat, in the smallest of units. Fissionable material is becoming available in such abundance that the economics of the situation alone will soon compel its use as replacement for the tons of high explosives and steel shells used in the gunpowder era. That this information is not exclusively ours was made abundantly clear in the parade of November 7, 1957, in Moscow celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the Red Revolution. There the Soviets chose to display a family of highly mobile nuclear missiles. It is important to realize that these were the ones we were allowed to see, and even so, they included short-range infantry-support nuclear missiles on amphibious track-laying vehicles, missiles with a combat mobility unsurpassed in any Western army today. Their display included both liquid- and solid-propellant missiles, and both surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missiles. It is of the utmost importance to NATO, therefore, that nuclear information be provided to all of its members. Out of ignorance, too many still think of nuclear firepower as their ancestors of five hundred years ago thought of gunpowder: "0h curs'd device! base implement of death! Fram'd in the black Tartarean realms beneath By Beelzebub's malicious art design'd to ruin all the race of human kind." [22] The problem in NATO is not how to avoid use of nuclear weapons, for that is a decision the Soviets will make, but how to live with them when they are used. How to make nuclear weapons the servant of NATO and how to avoid making NATO the slave of nuclear weapons-that is the problem.

Nuclear weapons are essential to an adequate defense of Western Europe. Take, for example, air defense. Time and space are such in Europe today that only missiles can provide an adequate air defense. The British White Paper of 1957 recognized this. The most exposed nation is Western Germany. It can only be defended against Soviet air and missile attack by having nuclear surface-to-air missiles. There are technological reasons for

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22. Ariosto (1474-1533).

this. The reaction time is such that manned aircraft can no longer respond quickly enough to meet an enemy threat. Neither men nor airplanes are adequate to deal with attacking missiles and rockets. Finally, the objective of a modern air defense must be to destroy the payload of the incoming missile or bomb-carrying plane. Technologically, this is possible using a nuclear missile in defense. Obviously, therefore, if Western Germany is to be defended and not abandoned immediately, she must have nuclear surface-to-air missiles. It is idle chatter and simply a waste of time to talk otherwise.

In defending against Soviet land forces matched with nuclear missiles, the NATO nations must themselves be equipped with a family of surface-to-surface nuclear missiles. For missiles are modern artillery and tactical nuclear warheads are modern conventional firepower. It would be as wrong to ask the NATO nations to defend against Soviet nuclear aggression with gunpowder weapons as it would have been to equip our own forces with bows and arrows to deal with the blitzkrieg.

All nuclear missiles should be highly mobile. The Germans learned this lesson in World War II, when their concrete bases were completely destroyed, while their mobile missile units were not harmed until overrun by our ground forces. Because of the a fact that our Air Force has had primary responsibility for the deployment of our Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles overseas, it has thought of their employment in terms of air bases and aircraft employment.

Army Jupiter IRBMs could be air-transported by USAF C-124 Globemaster IIs

VIDEO: 1:20 shows Jupiter-C flown in a C-124 Globemaster II

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CTTF8-wmcQ

I was responsible for developing the tactical characteristics of the Army's Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, the Jupiter. It was designed to be as mobile as any piece of equipment in the present-day field army. It was designed for movement on highways to launching areas through all kinds of weather. Neither rain nor snow nor fog nor extremes of temperature can impair its launching. Furthermore, its over-all configuration is such that it can be stored in highway and rail tunnels. Mobility is so fundamental to success in combat that it is inconceivable that anyone would consider Maginot-Line-like bases as militarily

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... a new policy which, in the name of regaining "the initiative," can tend only to retie our hands to the old pre-1950 limits, shackle us once more to a single, "retaliatory" strategy and invite the Soviets to hit us again, if they wish to, in ways to which this strategy demonstrably offers no useful reply. . . . The return to the retaliatory and strategic atom is not consonant with the argument that. . . "we need allies and collective security"; for probably the best way to lose allies is to make it clear that you no longer intend to provide them with the means of local defense. It is not consonant with the EDC policy and the statement that "rearmed Germans" must "serve the common cause"; for "rearmed Germans" must mean infantry (not atomic bomber crews) and if we no longer need American infantry for local defense how can we claim that we need German infantry? [23]

Unfortunately, the New Look soon found expression in NATO policy and a document known as MC-48 was published. It envisioned a war in which the first phase would be a brief massive nuclear exchange, the outcome of which would very likely determine the outcome of the war. Some of our most able Soldiers subscribed to it, notably ['www.geocities.com/militaryincompetence] Field Marshal Montgomery, and his statements in support of it were widely used. In fact, they were reproduced by the Air Force Association and distributed to retired as well as active Air Force officers.

In the Department of the Army Staff, we were profoundly concerned with implications of the New Look, but we felt that subsequent events would soon make clear its unsoundness. Our concern was for the by-products of the New Look that would not be apparent for some time, but that would in the long run be very damaging to national security. Specifically, failure to support our surface-to-surface and surface-to-air missile programs, inadequate funds to support a satellite program, which we were proposing in 1954, inadequate funds for our research and development programs so essential to the development of land forces for the nuclear missile age, and finally a serious reduction in manpower at a time when the trend should have been exactly the opposite, all worried us. That our concerns were well founded soon became manifest.

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28. "Arms and Men," New York Herald Tribune, February, 1954.

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When I joined the Army Staff in early 1954, the Army contained twenty divisions and seven basic training organizations with divisional numbers. In accordance with the philosophy of the New Look, a critical cut in this division strength was undertaken at once. First, the Army was directed to include the training organizations in its over-all division strength. The total number of divisions was then reduced to match the old number of combat-ready divisions, so that if you didn't examine the numbers closely you would be given the impression that no reduction had taken place. As the cut back continued, and some concern was expressed on the part of Congress, the Army was directed to regroup its non-division personnel and thus account for more divisions. For example, forces at Fort Benning, Georgia, were grouped on paper with those in the Panama Canal Zone and called a "division".

Likewise, forces at Fort Lewis, Washington, were grouped with those in Alaska. To some segments of the press, these became known as "Wilson divisions". Concurrently, Congress was assured, in the annual hearings, that our combat strength was not being reduced, that as our atomic stockpile increased, fewer divisions would be required, and that we were cutting the fat and non-essential service and support units. That the contrary was the case few, outside of the Department of the Army, seemed willing to admit.

More important than manpower cuts, however, was the inability to obtain adequate funds for the missile programs. In late 1954 it was decided that it was in the nation's interest that we develop, as a matter of high priority, an Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, and that we undertake a satellite program. After considerable staff discussion, I personally recommended to General Ridgway in March of 1955 that the IRBM program be undertaken at a cost of $25 million. At the end of a week's time, I discussed it with him again, and he stated that he could not possibly obtain money on that scale from the Department of Defense, and that if the Army were to undertake the program, it would have to be out of the money then available to it. Since the

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Army's budget was critically inadequate, the decision was made not to start an IRBM but to advance the Redstone from its proposed range of two hundred miles to five hundred miles. It was hoped that by the time a range of five hundred miles was achieved, the Department of Defense would be aware of the national need and authorize a longer range. We were at the time in a most interesting situation in missile development. In 1951, the Army had undertaken the development of a 450-mile-range ballistic missile. Then at the direction of our missile "czar," Mr. K. T. Keller, a heavy thermonuclear warhead was programmed for the missile and its range, of necessity, was reduced to two hundred miles. This was a good change since it assured the country of an early surface-to-surface thermonuclear missile. At the time, however, there was no interest in the Army's missile program because evidently it was considered rather "exotic" and "far in the future". Therefore, in early 1955, when the Army decided once again to develop a missile of five-hundred-mile range, there was little interest shown in it outside of the Army.

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In the different kinds of limited war that might confront us, certain types of nuclear weapons have a genuine military usefulness. It would therefore be wrong on our part to deprive ourselves of these weapons.

However, our stockpile should include only weapons that are actually useful in war. Moreover, it should include only weapons that we can legitimately intend to use. I am altogether opposed to any school of thought that would move on toward weapons of ever-increasing magnitude, while at the same time disclaiming the intention of using them.

Commissioner Murray went on to recommend the procurement of tens of thousands of very small nuclear weapons, stating that, "A stockpile of this composition will support a theory of moderate and discriminating use of force against all aggression, including aggression that may be minor in degree." There is no doubt whatsoever of the need for small nuclear warheads in abundance. We know that at least four powers have nuclear weapons: the United States, the USSR, Great Britain and France. We can expect other powers to have them in time. The state of nuclear technology is such that the tactical characteristics of weapons can be improved with further testing. This means not only can they be made smaller in size and more efficient in yield, but that they can also be made cleaner and thus better suited to tactical use. Unfortunately, nowhere near enough has been done, for again we conflict with the requirement for large-yield weapons for so called "strategic" employment.

It would be particularly unfortunate if we fell behind in the development and procurement of tactical weapons. Heretofore, the United States has relied in war upon its great industrial capacity. Industry responded quickly and shifted its skills to the making of tanks, trucks and airplane parts, diverting the raw materials intended for consumer use to military production.

Nuclear weapons are another matter. Fissionable material is not being applied to consumer products and there will be a specific amount of fissionable material available at the outset of hostilities.

We will be caught in a very precarious situation, for if nuclear hostilities commence, even in limited areas, and we find ourselves

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opposed by modernized land forces well equipped with nuclear weapons such as the type shown us on November 7 by the Soviets, we may well find ourselves in serious trouble at once. In order to meet our world-wide requirements, we may have to ration drastically our tactical nuclear ammunition and as a consequence we may suffer the loss of another war, this one a nuclear limited war.

So the pattern of Korea may be extended into the nuclear era if we do not have the foresight to see the need and the courage to make the decisions to procure the necessary tactical nuclear weapons now. We should either procure and stockpile many more small weapons, or we must procure and stockpile fissionable material. It is now clear that national policy on this subject has changed since January of 1954. Writing in Foreign Affairs magazine in the issue of October, 1957, Mr. John Foster Dulles said:

Later, upon returning from a North Atlantic Council session in Paris in an interview with the press, Mr. Dulles is reported to have said: "Tactical weapons such as atomic cannon are fast becoming conventional and presumably they would be used in war."

Unfortunately, there is a vast chasm between statements of policy and military capabilities. There is much to be done if this is to be bridged, for the acceptance of tactical nuclear weapons

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suggests an entirely different pattern of war. Missiles in many categories, extensive tactical land and air mobility, vastly improved intelligence-gathering systems and improved communications are all required. The programs of the Department of Defense today indicate little awareness of this need. The Army, which has had a great potential for missiles development and a great need for the associated components of its weapons systems for that kind of a war, has been limited by a steadily deteriorating budget, and this has been the technical dilemma. While policy appears to have changed, the military programs supporting that policy have not changed and the dilemma, that was a military-political one at the time of Korea, slowly has become technical how to provide the missiles, mobility and associated equipment required for tactical nuclear warfare under the fiscal limitations and the artificial restrictions imposed by the Department of Defense.

Seemingly, more preoccupied with rhetoric than reason, and with publishing restrictive memoranda than with urging that more rather than less be done to solve the problems of limited war, the Department of Defense continued on its course out of harmony with the Executive.

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So contrary to the national need has this course been that there is real need to ask ourselves whether or not we have been the victims of Soviet strategy? To the Soviets we are at war, and the conduct of war involves to an increasing degree its fourth dimension: strategy. Strategy includes technology, and thus the making of technological decisions. For example, we are constantly faced with the problem of how much of the national product to put into our military programs. The state of Soviet economy, its very low standard of living and its ability to get more out of its people for less investment in consumer goods, has enabled the Soviets to maintain a huge military establishment. And not only to maintain it, but to refurbish it from time to time. Compared to the Soviets, we seem constantly worried lest too much of our national product go into our military program. In fact, it was this very point that caused us finally to rely exclusively on a one weapons system for some years. If our economy is as precarious as this suggests, then it would be an extremely worth-while strategy for the Soviets to cause us to invest in weapons systems that would not serve our need but would in fact, in the strategic sense, serve theirs. As an example, there are many well-informed individuals in intelligence circles who doubt that the Soviets have huge fleets of manned bomber aircraft. Instead they believe that the Soviets achieved a significant lead over us by jumping ahead to missiles quite a few years ago, while at the same time they led us to believe that the bomber threat was the most serious.

Within the pattern of strategy of the war in which the Soviet Union is now engaged with the West, we should expect them to devote a major propaganda effort to causing us to create weapons systems that will serve the Soviets rather than serve us. And I use the expression "serve the Soviets" in a strategic sense. Thus if the Soviets' strategy is sound, the tactical application of their power will meet with success because we have been misled strategically and are incapable of meeting the technical challenge.

Hence, it seems reasonable to presume that as long as the Soviets

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have the strategic initiative, and our actions, as a consequence, are reactive, we should expect the Soviets to talk constantly about the danger of global war. We should expect them to deprecate any thought of local war, and we should expect their military and political leaders to boast of their most powerful long-range equipment. If they could cause us to invest a sizable portion of our national product at the proper time in weapons systems that in fact could not serve, while for what we consider economic reasons we neglect others, they will have achieved a major strategic victory.

The time-honored principle of civilian control of defense matters is sound and absolutely fundamental in our democracy. It must be preserved and the efforts of our military should serve its continuance. It worked particularly well through World War II. At that time the Secretaries of the separate services had competent military staffs to advise them. The civilian Secretaries made the decisions, defended their programs before Congress, and assumed full responsibility for the exercise of civilian control over their departments. That it was exercised effectively the record now shows. With the establishment of the Department of Defense in 1947, an additional layer of civilian management was placed above the services. Furthermore, by the law, military officers are forbidden to be staff officers in the Department of Defense. By its ruling they may be aides and assistants. They do not occupy executive or decision-making positions. In order to conduct the affairs of his office, therefore, the Secretary of Defense had to bring in increasing numbers of civilian secretaries. These have varied in competence from one who was recently reported in the press to have spent a few days a month in his office, to some of the most able men in public life. There has been much criticism of the large numbers of Assistant Secretaries and the

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manner in which they have retarded decision-making in the Department of Defense. Some of it, but far from all of it, is justified.

However, there is one layer of civilian participation that is almost entirely overlooked and it is one of the most significant in the Department. It is the group of Civil Service career people who, year in, year out, work in the Pentagon. Within the Armed Forces themselves there are many able Civil Service people who contribute effectively. However, within the services the decisions and final recommendations are made by uniformed people to their civilian Secretaries. In the Department of Defense, lacking senior military staff officers, the Assistant Secretaries rely largely on the Civil Service employees. In the Department of Defense, there are over three hundred such individuals. They probably have more impact on decision-making in the Department of Defense than any other individual or group of individuals, military or civilian. Here is an illustration of the decision-making problem, as the Department of Defense is now organized, and presumably will be organized after congressional action of the 85^th Congress.

Since he is required to obey such instructions, he then, upon being queried by a member of Congress about the adequacy of the program, faced with the dilemma of telling a falsehood or being insubordinate. The degree of this difficulty reflects, to a large extent, the adequacy of the defense budget. When there is an abundance of money and most programs are well supported, there appears to be no great problem. However, when less money becomes available, as has been the situation in the Army for the past several years, then painful decisions must be made to delay or eliminate programs entirely. Sometimes it quickly becomes apparent that some of these programs are critical to our very survival. An individual who is aware of our military history and who is sensitive to our national need is soon- faced with a very difficult choice. Should he, motivated by a growing concern for our national survival, tell Congress the truth and thus invite the wrath of the Executive hierarchy upon himself? Or should he be

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24. Department of the Army Memorandum to prospective witnesses before Congressional Appropriation Committees.