A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Part 5

The V-2 was a st.u.r.dy missile. It had double walls of sheet metal welded and riveted into place and supported by internal braces. The casing of the warhead was steel plate. The whole weighed 27,376 pounds when fueled with its alcohol and liquid-oxygen rocket propellants. Wernher von Braun and the other originators of the V-2 conceived this design because it did not occur to them to have the warhead separate itself from the rest of the missile at some point in flight. Instead, the V-2 flew up into s.p.a.ce and then the entire missile-warhead filled with 1,650 pounds of high explosive, the by now empty fuel tanks, the guidance system, rocket engine, and all-came back down through the earth's atmosphere to its target. The V-2's rocket engine, which generated only 56,000 pounds of thrust, limited the missile to an average range of 180 miles. (A maximum of 220 miles could be attained by lightening the warhead.) Bossart and his team confronted a challenge of far greater magnitude. They had to propel a warhead thirty-two times farther than the V-2's. And it would probably be thousands of pounds heavier. In these years before the thermonuclear breakthrough in the Mike test of 1952, the a.s.sumption was that the warhead would be the atomic, or fission, type, which exploded with considerably less force than a hydrogen, or fusion, bomb. To make the missile as potent as possible, the fission bomb const.i.tuting the warhead would therefore have to be a big one weighing well beyond 2,000 pounds. The weight of the missile thus became a critical factor. If Bossart followed the V-2 design pattern, he would end up with a missile so huge and so heavy that it was difficult to imagine any rocket engine or cl.u.s.ter of rocket engines powerful enough to lift it off and send the warhead 5,750 miles.

Bossart's first conclusion was that it was a foolish waste of rocket engine power to propel the entire missile all the way to the target. He could gain range relative to thrust if he built a missile with a warhead that broke free of the main body. The moment of separation would occur when the rocket was at the correct angle and speed so that its momentum would, in effect, hurl the warhead through s.p.a.ce in a trajectory that would carry the bomb to its target. He then turned to the body of the missile. The lighter the missile body, the potentially heavier the warhead could be, because more of the thrusting power of the rocket engines could be devoted to lifting the bomb rather than spent getting its delivery vehicle into the air. His answer was to create a missile body that was simply a tank for the rocket propellants. The tank was made of thinly rolled aluminum alloy. (Later stainless steel rolled as thin as a wafer would be employed.) In a further saving of weight, there were no internal supports to prevent this balloon tank from collapsing. Instead, the tank was filled with inert nitrogen gas to keep it pressurized to full extension until the time came to pump in the propellants. The bottom of the tank was attached to a bulkhead strong enough to hold the rocket engines.

The fourth and extremely important contribution Bossart and his teammates made to American rocketry was to invent an effective technique to steer the missile in flight. The Germans had been able to steer the V-2 after a fashion by installing movable vanes in the thrust opening at the base of the rocket engine, fabricated from graphite so that they would not melt in the furnace of the rocket's flame. These did not work that well and reduced the engine's power. The Bossart group's approach to the steering problem was to mount the four rocket engines in the cl.u.s.ter that would power their test missile on swivels. The swivels were connected by rods to an autopilot and gyroscope mechanism, which could be programmed to guide the missile on a given course. There was a limitation. The swivels could swing each of the four engines in the cl.u.s.ter in only one preselected direction. Nevertheless, this was a marked improvement over the vanes in the V-2 and pointed the way toward the later mounting of rocket engines on gimbals, which could swing in any direction.

By 1947, the armed services were strapped by peacetime money rationing. That July 1, just as the first test missile was almost finished, Project MX-774 was canceled. The newly independent U.S. Air Force did, however, allow Convair to use the funds in the contract still unspent to construct two additional research rockets and to test-fire all three at the Army's White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico. They were trim rockets, shimmering in the New Mexico sun, thirty-one feet tall from the fins at the base to the pencil point tip at the top of the nose cone. The four-engine cl.u.s.ter provided 8,000 pounds of thrust. The hope was that the missiles would reach an alt.i.tude of about one hundred miles so that Bossart and his fellow engineers could fully test all their ideas. None did, however, because of engine burnout. The third and last MX-774, launched in December 1948, reached an alt.i.tude of thirty miles before it too failed and started down to destruction on the desert floor. Nevertheless, enough was learned, from earlier static tests of the swiveling system for the engines as well as from these live firings, to conclude that the innovations would work.

Convair invested its own funds in further research directed by Bossart and on January 23, 1951, after the scare provoked by the war in Korea had replenished its coffers, the Air Force revived the project by giving Convair a new study contract. The specifications were outlandish. They reflected the abiding dilemma of the weight inherent in a fission bomb warhead and a consequent accuracy requirement precise enough to ensure ma.s.sive destruction of the target by a weapon with far less bang than a hydrogen bomb. The Air Force wanted a missile that would throw an 8,000-pound warhead 5,750 miles and strike its target with an average accuracy (CEP) of just 1,500 feet. Convair responded with equally outlandish specifications for the ballistic missile that would loft this mammoth warhead. Code-named Atlas by Convair, the rocket was to measure 160 feet in height and twelve feet in diameter. By October 1953, new specifications had been worked out that were supposed to be a compromise. They were still outlandish. The warhead weight had been reduced to 3,000 pounds, but the wishing-well accuracy requirement of 1,500 feet lingered. And the missile itself remained a monster. It was to be 110, rather than 160, feet in height, but still twelve feet in diameter, would weigh 440,000 pounds fully loaded with fuel, and needed a cl.u.s.ter of five rocket engines putting out a combined thrust of 656,100 pounds to lift it. This was where the project stood when the Tea Pot Committee, organized in late September and early October 1953, took it up.

Approximately four months later, on February 10, 1954, the committee's inquiry was complete and its final recommendations forwarded to Trevor Gardner with a covering letter from Simon Ramo. Gardner could not have asked for a better outcome if he had written the committee's report himself. What he had essentially wanted was validation by these eminent scientists that an ICBM was technically feasible. He got this and he got a great deal more. The committee said that not only was the unstoppable weapon feasible, the first ready-to-fire ICBM could be produced by 196061 and enough missiles to const.i.tute a deterrent threat to the Soviet Union could be fielded by 196263. However, this goal was contingent, the committee said, on the Air Force conducting a "radical reorganization" of the project. The measures it recommended for this reorganization were also just the sort that Gardner had in mind. The scientists came to the same conclusion he had that the nation's Second World War-era aircraft industry was incapable of bringing to fruition a project as technologically challenging and complex as this one. They too sought the creation of an organization that would const.i.tute the seed of an American aeros.p.a.ce industry.

To begin with, the committee recommended that, except for some limited additional research, the Air Force halt all further work by Convair. "The most urgent and immediate need," the committee said, was for the Air Force to set up a "new IBMS development group, which ... should be given directive responsibility for the entire project." (IBMS were the original initials for Intercontinental Ballistic Missile System, later changed to ICBM to avoid confusion with the initials for the International Business Machines Corporation, IBM.) This command group was also to exercise its "overriding control" with a unique independence and freedom from bureaucratic hara.s.sment and was to be composed of "an unusually competent group of scientists and engineers." (Gardner thought he already knew how to find this scientific and engineering talent and so did Schriever. Shortly after the submission of the Tea Pot report, Schriever and Gardner put the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation on hold with another letter contract from Schriever's Development Planning Office, this one for further missile research.) "Within a year" of study and experimentation, the committee predicted, a group of this quality would be "in a position to recommend in full detail a redirected, expanded, and accelerated program" that would meet its beginning of the 1960s deployment schedule for the missiles.

The report also lent a.s.surance to von Neumann's p.r.o.nouncement to Schriever and Gardner that a hydrogen warhead weighing less than a ton, yet with a megaton's blast, could be readied by the end of the decade. "The warhead weight might be reduced as far as 1500 lbs," the committee said, and its diameter scaled down as well. Given the advent of thermonuclear weaponry, the committee said that the impossible accuracy requirement of 1,500 feet, tied to a lower-yield fission warhead, should be extended to a CEP of "at least two, and probably three, nautical miles [2.3 to 3.4 statute miles]." (For some reason, von Neumann had been unable to persuade his colleagues on the Nuclear Weapons Panel of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, which he also headed, to predict a one-megaton bomb of less than a ton in an October report on the panel's deliberations. The closest they got was a three-ton bomb yielding two megatons.) The Tea Pot Committee said that the final decision on the warhead should be left to the results of the Castle series of thermonuclear tests at Bikini Atoll that von Neumann had spoken of in his meeting the previous May with Schriever and Walkowicz. A 23,500-pound dry thermonuclear device, fueled with lithium deuteride and misnamed Shrimp, was set off on March 1, the first day of the tests. The physicists from the Los Alamos Laboratory discovered they had miscalculated somewhat the forces they were about to liberate. They had predicted that Shrimp would go off with a detonation of five megatons. Instead it ran amuck to fifteen megatons, one for every 1,566 pounds. The 1,500-pound, one-megaton missile warhead indispensable to the building of a practicable ICBM was now a certainty. Gardner, and Schriever always working closely with him through these developments, could count on substantially tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the dimensions of the 110-foot-high monster ICBM most recently proposed by Convair and reducing its 440,000-pound weight by roughly half.

Johnny von Neumann tipped the issue decisively in their favor by injecting a clincher argument into the committee's report. It was once again based on the fear that drove American military technology, in this case fear that the United States was already caught in a race with the Soviet Union to determine which of the two great powers would be the first to build an ICBM. As Schriever recalled many years later, there was no firm evidence at the time that America confronted such a race; in fact, no hard intelligence at all on Soviet missile work. Nor would there be for another year and a half. Not until mid-1955 would Gardner succeed in setting up a long-range radar installation and electronic eavesdropping posts in Turkey to monitor missile firings at the Soviets' then main testing range at Kapustin Yar in southern Russia, on the dusty, dismal Astrakhan steppe about seventy-five miles east of where Stalingrad (subsequently renamed Volgograd) lies in the bend of the Volga River.

The Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (Wright Field had been amalgamated with neighboring Patterson Field into a single installation after the Air Force was proclaimed independent in 1947) believed the Soviets were making swift advances in a number of guided missile types, but there was no proof. In late 1951 and early 1952, the center also received reports that the Soviets had built a super-rocket engine producing 265,000 pounds of thrust, twice as powerful as any American counterpart, and precisely the sort of engine most useful for an ICBM. The engine reports proved to be false. Senior Air Force intelligence officers were, in any case, focused mainly on Russian progress in bombers. At the time, no one who mattered in the U.S. intelligence community was concerned about the possibility of a missile gap, which John Kennedy was to make one of the main slogans of his successful run for the presidency in 1960. The National Intelligence Estimate for 1953 put out by the CIA, an annual top secret report that collates and summarizes the collective judgment of all the nation's intelligence agencies on subjects of importance, does not even mention Soviet missile activities.

What intelligence did exist had mostly been gleaned from interviews with the German rocket specialists whom the Russians had released and allowed to go home, the last sizable group returning to Germany in November 1953. Once the Soviets had milked the Germans of their expertise, however, they had been careful to isolate them from more advanced missile designs and experimentation. As early as the fall of 1950, most had been excluded from secret work. The existence and location of Kapustin Yar had first been learned from a Red Army general and rocket expert named Gregory A. Tokady (also known as Tokaty-Tokaev), who had defected to the British in 1948. But an attempt to photograph it in late August 1953 by a British twin-jet Canberra bomber, with a large, oblique-looking camera fitted into its aft fuselage by RAF and U.S. Air Force photoreconnaissance technicians, had nearly ended in disaster. As the plane was approaching Kapustin Yar, it was intercepted and shot up by Russian fighters and was vibrating so badly from damage when it reached the test range that the photographs were useless. Fortunately for the crew, the Canberra was battle-worthy enough to hold itself together while they turned south along the Volga and across the Caspian Sea to land safely in Iran. The RAF did not try any more daytime spy flights deep into Russia.

No one in the United States knew that on March 15, 1953, the better part of two months before Bennie Schriever ventured up to Princeton to see von Neumann, the first Soviet medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM), the R-5, had been test-fired from Kapustin Yar without a hitch and had flown its full 800-mile range. Subsequently named the SS-3 Shyster by NATO intelligence officers, the R-5 was designed to carry a nuclear warhead. Through espionage or through their own high competence, Soviet missileers had gained and were employing some of the same ideas, like separating warheads and swiveling engines to steer their rockets, that Charlie Bossart and his crew had brain-stormed in 1946 and 1947 for the MX-107B. The men who led these Russian missile advances, men like Sergei Korolev, the chief rocket designer, and Valentin Glushko, the princ.i.p.al rocket engine maker, were still anonymous figures hidden behind the high wall of a closed society. Their ident.i.ties were regarded as high secrets, officially to protect them from a.s.sa.s.sination by American agents, but actually because of the Soviet state's obsessive concern with security. Most important, nothing was known of the decision by the Politburo at the end of 1953 to base the Soviet Union's nuclear strategy on long-range missiles, rather than on an imitation of SAC's bombers, and to commence the building of an ICBM to carry the hydrogen bomb Moscow was to acquire in two years. The United States was indeed caught in a missile race, a strategic compet.i.tion of profound importance of which it was quite unaware, and in which it was behind.

The Russophobia ingrained in von Neumann by his Hungarian youth led him to perceive the danger, as did the incisive logic of his mind. The committee had been briefed on currently available intelligence on Soviet missile activities. Because the information was so spa.r.s.e and inconclusive, there was a dispute within the committee about what to believe. In his initial draft of the committee's report, Ramo wrote that "the Russians are probably significantly ahead of us in long-range ballistic missiles." After about half the committee members objected, he came up with fuzzy compromise language to try to bridge the gap. Von Neumann would not hold for this fence straddling. In a statement he insisted on appending to the report, he argued, in effect, that however imprecise the evidence, responsible men should err on the side of caution and conclude that a race was on and that the Russians were leading.

He began by focusing on another reason Ramo had raised for building an ICBM with "unusual urgency." This, von Neumann noted, was "a rapid strengthening of the Soviet defenses against our SAC manned bombers." He was referring to an integrated air defense system of radars, jet interceptors equipped with air-to-air missiles like Ramo and Wooldridge's Falcon, and batteries of surface-to-air missiles. The Soviets were indeed busy putting together such an air defense system, as Schriever had already discovered, though he had been rebuffed by Curtis LeMay when he had sought to persuade LeMay to have SAC's bombers adopt evasive tactics in a low-level approach rather than the high-level one LeMay favored. This reason alone was sufficient for proceeding with an ICBM project, von Neumann said in a prophetic comment, because one could expect the Soviet air defense system to be in place "during the second half of this decade." And so it was when the Russians demonstrated what formidable air defenses they had deployed by shooting down the U-2 in 1960 at a moment the Soviet leadership must have savored, news of it arriving while Nikita Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet chieftains were a.s.sembling atop Lenin's mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square to review the annual May Day Parade of armed might. As for information on Soviet progress toward an ICBM, von Neumann conceded it was true that "available intelligence data are insufficient to make possible a precise estimate." Nevertheless, he argued, "evidence exists of an appreciation of this field" by the Soviets and there was "activity in some important phases of guided missiles" connected with development of an ICBM. "Thus," he concluded ominously, "while the evidence may not justify a positive conclusion that the Russians are ahead of us, a grave concern in this regard is in order." When a scientist of von Neumann's reputation spoke this solemnly, who could fail to pay attention?

GETTING STARTED.

Having obtained a scientific validation "which those narrow-gauged b.a.s.t.a.r.ds in the Pentagon couldn't back away from," as Gardner triumphantly told his a.s.sistant, Vince Ford, he now set about convincing the authorities in the Air Force and the Department of Defense to launch a crash program to create an ICBM. On February 16, 1954, six days after Simon Ramo had sent him the final draft of the report, the "wild Welshman," as Ford affectionately referred to his boss, forwarded a copy to Donald Quarles, an engineer and physicist whom Secretary of Defense Wilson had chosen as his a.s.sistant secretary for research and development. In his covering memorandum, Gardner told Quarles that the Air Force could build and be ready to launch the first ICBMs within just about four years, by mid-1958. Although the Tea Pot report had specified 196061 as the earliest possible goal for operational missiles, Gardner said it was his belief, confirmed by talks with von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, and Jerome Wiesner of MIT, that "a 'Ph.D. type' operational capability" was attainable by mid-1958. What he meant by this self-coined term was the ability to deploy and threaten the Soviets with the initial few missiles off the production line, using civilian test-launch crews from the rockets' manufacturers to form the firing crews. (There would not be enough missiles available this early to train regular Air Force launch crews.) Gardner brought von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, and Wiesner down to the Pentagon to make the rounds of senior officials and talk up the report. He spoke of the scientists as his "influence matrix." He already had his own superior, Air Force Secretary Harold Talbott, on board.

Talbott instructed him to draw up a detailed plan. The memorandum spelling out the scheme was ready as early as March 11. Stamped top secret, it was addressed to Talbott and to General Nathan Twining, who had taken over as Air Force chief of staff after Hoyt Vandenberg was felled by cancer the previous June. Schriever and Vince Ford pitched in with substantial contributions to help Gardner compose the memorandum, but he was its princ.i.p.al author and the credit must go to him. The doc.u.ment was a masterly example, concise and flexible, of preliminary planning for an enterprise of surpa.s.sing scope. After a brief paragraph referencing the Tea Pot report as the practical basis for his plan, Gardner specified two primary objectives. The first was to attain his "Ph.D. type" capability, which he now defined as having "two launching sites and four operational missiles" by June 1958. The second was a full-bore deterrent to a Soviet nuclear attack-the creation of "20 launching sites with a stockpile of 100 missiles" by June 1960. To achieve these goals, Gardner proposed forming what amounted to a separate organization within the Air Research and Development Command. It would be headed by a major general who was ostensibly a vice commander of the ARDC, but whose "sole responsibility" would be leadership of the ICBM program.

The purpose of placing the new organization within the ARDC was to enable it to draw on the larger resources of its parent. The major general was to be "backed up by a brigadier general of unusual competence to work directly with the contractors in supply of top level support and technical supervision." Gardner named the two generals he had in mind. The first was Major General James McCormack, an Air Force intellectual with a specialty in nuclear weaponry who was already vice commander of the ARDC. The brigadier "of unusual competence" who was to back him up was Brigadier General Bernard Schriever. Both "should be prepared to remain with the program until it is satisfactorily completed." Attached to their organization would be a "systems management scientific group of the highest competence" to provide the know-how necessary to overcome technological obstacles like reentry. His preference, he said, was "the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation." He estimated the total cost over the next five fiscal years at $1.545 billion, an enticingly reasonable figure that would prove to be a gross underestimate.

Wasting no time, Gardner took the paper in hand and strode off to a meeting with Secretary Talbott and General Twining the same day the memorandum was completed to brief them on his plan. Both reacted favorably, but Twining could not render a firm decision until, in courtesy to his staff, he had received a recommendation from the Air Force Council. The council was the highest advisory body to the chief of staff. It was chaired by the vice chief, currently Lieutenant General Thomas White. The other members of the council comprised the next tier down, the deputy chiefs who headed the various staff sections at Air Force headquarters. After briefing Talbott and Twining on March 11, Gardner briefed the Air Force Council too, returning for a second session on the 15th. "We've just introduced the Air Council to the nuclear missile age," he announced to Vince Ford.

Another threat nearly as dire as the Russians in Air Force eyes was also now prompting construction of the ICBM-the Army. Interservice rivalry was particularly acute during the late 1940s and the 1950s. Among other disputes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had never been able to agree on which service was ent.i.tled to build what missiles. Furthermore, the Army had "the Germans," as Wernher von Braun, n.a.z.i Germany's chief scientist on the V-2, and his team of rocketeers were referred to wryly within the Pentagon. They were currently working at the Army Ordnance Department's Redstone a.r.s.enal near Huntsville, Alabama. Twining and White were being warned by the handful of officers who sided with Gardner and Schriever that if the Air Force did not build the ICBM, the Army, claiming superior expertise in von Braun's group, would s.n.a.t.c.h the mission from it. With this threat in mind, the council accepted Gardner's plan and on March 23 recommended directing the Air Research and Development Command to obtain an operational ICBM as early as possible, "limited only by technical progress." Twining quickly signed off on the recommendation.

In the meantime, the ever impatient Gardner had moved to preempt the decision making. He persuaded Talbott to order Twining on March 19 to speed up immediately the process of putting his plan into effect. Talbott also appointed Gardner his "direct representative in all aspects of the program." But Gardner's blowtorch methods had their limits. He could not build the missile by himself. He had to get the Air Force to do that for him and so he chafed and fretted while the struggle resolved itself within the service bureaucracy. LeMay was vociferously opposed because the ICBM would divert funds from aircraft production, and his allies among the bomber generals on the Air Staff were with him. He predicted that the Atlas would turn out to be an extravagant boondoggle. It would never perform as antic.i.p.ated.

April went by and nothing much got done by the Air Staff. Gardner, however, did not let the month pa.s.s entirely idle. He wanted a means to overcome future naysayers by continuing to provide the program with the prestigious scientific imprimatur he had achieved through the Tea Pot Committee. At his suggestion, von Neumann volunteered to chair a permanent Atlas (later ICBM) Scientific Advisory Committee. Seven of the original Tea Pot members, including Kistiakowsky and Wiesner, agreed to stay on and nine new members were added. One was Norris Bradbury, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, which would be designing the warhead. Another, apparently chosen for fame rather than his scientific knowledge, was Charles "Lucky Lindy" Lindbergh, the hero of the first transatlantic flight to Paris in 1927. Lindbergh had been declared a pariah by President Roosevelt for his isolationist and anti-Semitic agitation on the eve of the Second World War. Talbott, who was prepared to forget all of this in remembrance of Lindbergh's transatlantic exploit, had resurrected him, awarding him a reserve rank of brigadier general.

In mid-May, General White, with the a.s.sent of Twining and Defense Secretary Wilson, who had been brought into the discussion, a.s.signed Project Atlas the Air Force's highest priority and ordered its acceleration "to the maximum extent that technology would allow." In White, Gardner and Schriever had won an advocate for the ICBM within the hierarchy. White was an urbane man, thoughtful and open-minded, and his route to the top was an unusual one for the time. He was an intellectual and linguist who had spent four years studying Chinese in Beijing in the 1920s and served in intelligence posts as air attache in Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy during the 1930s, rising to become a.s.sistant chief of staff for intelligence in 1944. Hap Arnold had then recognized his all-round talents and given him senior command posts in the Pacific during the last year of the war. Schriever had known him slightly after White had been designated deputy commander of the Thirteenth Air Force in September 1944 for the New Guinea campaign and then promoted to chief of the Seventh Air Force in the Marianas not long before the surrender of j.a.pan. Colonel Ray Soper, who subsequently served as an ally for Schriever in a pivotal position on the Air Staff, remembered White lecturing the a.s.sembled deputy chiefs in the Air Force Council. Ballistic missiles were here to stay, he told them, and the Air Staff had better realize this fact and get on with it. Nevertheless, the opposition had not yet exhausted stalling tactics. It was not until June 21, 1954, three months after Twining had said go, that Lieutenant General Thomas Power, who had just completed his six years as LeMay's vice commander at SAC and taken charge of the Air Research and Development Command at Baltimore in mid-April, received a directive from Air Force headquarters. It ordered him to get things moving by establishing "a field office on the West Coast with a general officer in command having authority and control over all aspects of the program."

"OKAY, BENNIE, IT'S A DEAL"

Napoleon is said to have remarked that a man makes his own luck. There is also an old Marine Corps maxim that may express the thought more precisely: "Luck occurs when preparation and opportunity coincide." So it was to be with Bernard Adolph Schriever. Major General James McCormack, Gardner's choice to lead the building of the ICBM as vice commander of the ARDC, had a heart attack that spring and would have to retire soon. The number of stars an officer wore on his shoulder tabs could matter in an enterprise like this, because he would have to hold his own against civilian contractors who might try to bully or hoodwink him and against other generals who had competing interests. Gardner had the choice of going with Schriever, who was to have served as McCormack's backup in the field but who had only the single star of a brigadier awarded the year before, or finding another major general qualified to replace McCormack. He hesitated, scanning the records of potential candidates. Vince Ford urged him to give the command to Schriever alone. Schriever and Ford were friends and Ford owed Schriever a professional and moral debt for bringing him back on active duty.

Their relationship was not, however, the reason for Ford's recommendation. Ford had seen Schriever manage one high-tech study project after another. He knew how pragmatic yet tough and independent-minded Schriever could be and what moral courage he had displayed in taking on the mighty LeMay Ford was convinced that Schriever was precisely the man for the job, that the lack of a second star would prove no handicap. But Schriever and Gardner had not hit it off at all well during Gardner's initial weeks at the Pentagon in the winter and early spring of 1953. Gardner had at first mistaken Schriever's controlled manner for lack of imagination and written him off as another careerist. "He felt that Bennie ran too long in one spot," was how Ford put it with a smile of remembrance. Gardner had also offended Schriever by one of those acts of alcohol-induced boorishness to which Gardner was p.r.o.ne. Bennie and his wife, Dora, had given a welcoming c.o.c.ktail party for Gardner at their home in the Belle Haven section of Alexandria, Virginia, south of Washington. The guest of honor had arrived pre-stoked for an evening of inebriation with a couple of his double-shot potions of Old Forester and ginger ale already under his belt. After several more, he had picked up a newspaper, sat down, and expressed his scorn for host and hostess and the rest of their Air Force company by burying his face in the paper for most of the party. It had taken Gardner a while to discern the knowledge and character Ford knew so well beneath Schriever's restrained exterior. And it took time for Bennie to understand that despite Gardner's abrasiveness and occasionally outrageous behavior, this was a man who cared about the same things he did and who possessed the daring and influence to accomplish them. Nevertheless, the memory of that inauspicious start to what was to become an extraordinary collaboration and abiding friendship seemed to linger with Gardner as he skimmed the records of possible two-star replacements for McCormack. It did not linger for long.

Early one morning in May 1954, the telephone rang in Schriever's office. His secretary picked it up to find Gardner's secretary on the line. She said that she was calling for Gardner, who wanted to speak to Schriever. His secretary replied that he was out at a meeting. Gardner's secretary said he wished to have lunch with Schriever that day at Restaurant 823, a German rathskeller located in a bas.e.m.e.nt at that number on 15th Street in downtown Washington. Would Schriever please call back when he returned to say if this was possible? In the meantime, Vince Ford arrived at Gardner's office on the fourth floor of the Pentagon. He heard Gardner talking to someone on the phone behind the oak door to the inner office. "What's up?" Ford asked the secretary, with whom he shared the outer room. "He's talking to Mr. Talbott and he's trying to locate General Schriever," she said. Ford had noticed that Gardner somehow "had a way to look and listen in four different directions at once." He apparently overheard Ford. The busy light on the telephone line Gardner was using suddenly went out on the console on his secretary's desk and his door opened. "Hi," he said to Ford. "Come on in a sec." He told the secretary to try again to reach Schriever. Ford took a chair at the conference table opposite Gardner. "The job is Schriever's-if he wants it," Gardner said, raising his eyebrows, his face softening into a half smile in recognition of Ford's successful lobbying. Just then the secretary appeared in the doorway. "General Schriever will be at the River Entrance at noon," she said.

Bennie was waiting for them when they arrived precisely at noon. The River Entrance facing the Potomac was the status entry to the Pentagon. The chiefs of staff and the secretary of defense and other civilian VIPs had their offices on that side of the building. Officials of Gardner's rank were allowed to park their cars in the small lot there. They climbed into Gardner's Cadillac convertible, Schriever in the pa.s.senger seat in front and Ford in the back, and, as Ford described Gardner's speed-limits-be-d.a.m.ned driving, "boomed across" the 14th Street Bridge into Washington. Ford observed that the fancy auto "would be a wreck-finished ahead of its time, like one day he would be. He was as hard on his cars as he was on himself." Swinging down I Street, Gardner suddenly turned sharply at a parking lot near the intersection with 15th, bounded over the curb, and stopped just in front of a "Lot Full" sign. The Cadillac straddled the sidewalk at an angle. Schriever smiled and shook his head. Gardner got out and tossed his keys at the outstretched hands of several parking attendants. They were used to him and were grinning. He was a generous tipper.

The "823," as its habitues called it, was a short way down the block on 15th. "It's always gemutlichkeit at Restaurant 823," the ad in the yellow pages of the telephone book promised, and so it was. The rathskeller had an old-fashioned imitation Bavarian atmosphere with a violinist and two pianists on back-to-back grands, draft beer in steins, and the heavy, hearty German food that patrons happily consumed in these years before cholesterol frights. Gardner had discovered the "823" during business trips to Washington in earlier years while he was running Hycon Manufacturing. The moment they walked down the steps to the bas.e.m.e.nt level and entered the restaurant, it was clear that the waitresses and barmen knew and liked him. As he pa.s.sed through he called to them by their names. His favorite waitress, a woman named Helen, pointed them to a booth and then came over with a smile and asked, "Know any new dirty stories, Mr. G?" "No, but I could use one," Gardner responded in kind. She leaned forward, cupped her hand, and whispered into his ear, both laughed, and Gardner, no beer drinker, ordered his double Old Forester and ginger ale. "Bennie, what'll it be?" he asked Schriever. "I'll have a martini, very dry, Beefeater's with a twist," Schriever said. He quickly and uncustomarily added, "Better make it a double."

Ford had a Scotch and watched Schriever's face. He could see that from the sudden invitation to lunch, Bennie knew something was up, but did not appear to have guessed what it was. He was wrong. Schriever had guessed precisely what was up and was prepared. As soon as his martini arrived, he circled the bell of the gla.s.s with his right hand and looked straight at Gardner, who now wasted no time. "Bennie," he asked abruptly, "how'd you like to run the new missile organization we're setting up in California?" The eyes behind the thick rimless gla.s.ses fixed on Schriever. The wheel had come full circle. Schriever had needed Gardner to launch the ICBM enterprise and Gardner now needed Schriever to carry it to fulfillment. Bennie desperately wanted the opportunity, but was determined to have it on his terms because he was convinced that was the only way he would succeed. And so he deliberately kept Gardner waiting to raise suspense. He slid his long fingers up and down the stem of the martini gla.s.s for several seconds while he glanced down in thought. At last he looked up at Gardner.

"I'll take the job, but only on one condition," he said.

"Like what?" Gardner responded aggressively.

"I'll take the job," Schriever said, speaking slowly so that each word came through distinctly, "provided I can run it-completely run it-without any interference from those nitpicking sons of b.i.t.c.hes in the Pentagon."

Gardner seemed pleased by this Gardner-like response. "Okay, Bennie, it's a deal. The job is yours," he said.

Schriever ordered a middle European dish that his German ancestors had appreciated, pig's knuckles, for lunch.

BOOK V.

WINNING A.

PRESIDENT.

A SCHOOLHOUSE AND A RADICAL NEW APPROACH.

He set up shop in a former Roman Catholic boys school in Inglewood, a suburb of Los Angeles out near the city's international airport. An Air Force lieutenant colonel, the West Coast representative of the Air Research and Development Command, had run across the place while searching for a house that Bennie could rent or buy for his family. Bennie had asked him to look for a house in Santa Monica, farther north, but had specified that it had to be close to a parochial school. While Bennie remained a nominal Lutheran, he had agreed when he married Dora, a devout Roman Catholic, that the children would be raised in her faith. The lieutenant colonel had decided that the logical way to proceed was first to locate a good parochial school, since it was an absolute requirement, and then to find a house. In the course of exploring, he had learned that Saint John's Catholic School for boys had outgrown its s.p.a.ce on East Manchester Boulevard in Inglewood and moved elsewhere. A quick reconnaissance had convinced him that the vacated buildings would make excellent start-up quarters for the new missile organization, to be called, for purposes of anonymity, the Western Development Division (WDD).

The Los Angeles Archdiocese had wanted to sell the buildings rather than rent them, but in the spirit of patriotism agreed to let the Air Force have a lease. The address of the main two-story cla.s.sroom and administration building was 401 East Manchester, just at the intersection with Locust Street. s.p.a.ce was not at such a premium in the Los Angeles area in the mid-1950s and the school was laid out leisurely. Next to the main building back down the boulevard was a modest chapel, then a singlestory cla.s.sroom structure, and beyond it a large, fenced-in parking lot. In July, Schriever and the initial members of his missile band, to be known ever afterward as the Schoolhouse Gang, began moving into the buildings.

Again in the hope of preventing Soviet spies from discovering what was to go on in this decidedly unmilitary-appearing, onetime educational complex, Bennie and everyone else wore civilian clothes, or mufti, the military term for civilian garb. The desire for clandestinity was unrequited. A couple of weeks after the Schoolhouse went into operation, a member of Schriever's crew walked to the bank a short way down Manchester Boulevard to cash his government paycheck. The teller, a tall and quite attractive brunette, smiled at him, compared the signature on his government ID card with that on the check, and then counted out the $20 bills he requested. As he turned to go, she said in a quiet voice, still smiling, "Don't blow us up over there, will you?"

They decided to make the chapel their briefing room. The priests had desanctified the chapel, but had otherwise left the interior intact. When it was put to its first important use, a two-day meeting on July 2021, 1954, of the enlarged and now permanent ICBM Scientific Advisory Committee (soon to be commonly referred to as the Von Neumann Committee), there had been no time for remodeling. Bennie had not yet even officially taken charge of the fledgling Western Development Division, something he would not do for nearly another two weeks, until August 2, when he issued General Orders No. 1, formally a.s.suming command.

And so on this opening morning of the meeting he stood on the step before the altar rail, where the students had knelt to receive the Communion wafer, and updated his prestigious audience on what had transpired since the formation of the new committee by Gardner and its initial meeting in Washington in April. Johnny von Neumann, Kistiakowsky, Wiesner, Norris Bradbury, and Charles Lindbergh sat on the pews in front of him with the other members new and old. Running down the walls on both sides of the chapel were windows of stained gla.s.s with portraits of saints and depictions of religious scenes. These were subsequently covered with plasterboard when the pews were ripped out and replaced by seats. The altar was also removed and a small briefing stage erected in its place. Technically, the plasterboard was nailed over the windows for security reasons, but some of Bennie's subordinates also found themselves uncomfortable devising a weapon of such terrible proportions amidst the stained-gla.s.s reminders that this had once been a holy place.

Obstinately attempting to hang on to the entire project, a Convair team sent up from San Diego to brief the committee now proposed that the firm continue development of its five-rocket-engine, 440,000-pound behemoth missile while it studied the feasibility of a 250,000-pound ICBM. Von Neumann and the other members of the new committee rejected this, as had the original Tea Pot group, and focused where the Tea Pot report had led-on the precise nature of the managerial and technical organization required to put ICBMs on launching pads. By this time it was a.s.sumed, as Gardner had schemed to arrange, that the new Ramo-Wooldridge firm would provide the engineering and scientific expertise required. The question now was how they would relate to Schriever's Air Force organization.

Donald Quarles, the a.s.sistant secretary of defense for research and development, was attending the meeting as an observer to contribute whatever he could. An electrical engineer and physicist, Quarles had run the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, before entering the Pentagon. The laboratory devised the techniques required to transform nuclear devices produced by Los Alamos, and later by Livermore, the second nuclear weapons laboratory established at Liver-more, California, in 1952, into useful weapons for the Air Force. In the lingo of the service, it weaponized the devices. Quarles suggested that instead of setting up the Ramo-Wooldridge team as a separate staff of advisers, it would be more effective to integrate them with Schriever's Western Development Division by placing them in a "line position" right under it. General Power, who was also attending, ordered Bennie to study the matter and come up with a recommendation. As WDD was a field office of Power's Air Research and Development Command, Power was Bennie's immediate superior in the Air Force chain. Schriever had a report ready by the latter half of August. He proposed that the Air Force act as its own prime contractor through his WDD organization and employ the Ramo-Wooldridge firm as a "deputy" responsible for systems engineering and technical direction of the project. (In practice, although the Air Force was to retain final authority, the men of the two groups were to work side by side and Schriever and Ramo to form a close partnership.) The radical approach that the Tea Pot Committee had first propounded and Schriever was now advocating would amount to a revolution in the Air Force's relationship with the aviation industry. The prime contractor system, under which one firm was given responsibility for the entire development, testing, and production of a new aircraft, including any elements it might decide to subcontract out to other companies-engines, for example, were always subcontracted-was time-honored and immensely profitable. And the method had succeeded reasonably well in the evolution of aircraft. It was not that great a bound in technology from the Air Force's first swept-back-wing, jet-powered bomber, the Boeing B-47 Stratojet, to Boeing's next and far more formidable swept-back-wing, eight-jet-engine offspring-the B-52 Stratofortress. Guided missiles were quite another matter due to the much more intractable technological challenges. The Tea Pot Committee had seen this in the mult.i.tude of modifications, delays, and failures in the histories of the other two strategic missiles it had examined, Snark and Navaho. Schriever planned to give Convair a contract only to manufacture the fuel tank and other sections of the body of the Atlas, what was referred to as the airframe. The contract would also include a.s.sembling the entire missile once all the components were ready and partic.i.p.ation in the subsequent test firings.

Simon Ramo would, in effect, become chief engineer and chief scientist of the enterprise. Except for the hydrogen bomb itself, which Los Alamos would build and test, the Ramo-Wooldridge task force under him would oversee the design of virtually everything else, such as the guidance and control mechanism, and the warhead, or reentry vehicle as it was called, which would house the bomb. The actual manufacture of these subsystems would then be done by organizations the Ramo-Wooldridge and WDD teams would have worked with in the design and prototype phases. These would often be subsidiaries of larger firms, but they would have already established a reputation in a specialized field and would be selected for their expertise. Convair was not among the candidates. (To avoid conflict of interest, Ramo-Wooldridge would be forbidden under its contract with the Air Force to manufacture any ICBM components. Dean Wooldridge was in the process of exiting the scene in order to seek and manage separately other non-ICBM business for the firm.) If Schriever's newfangled approach prevailed, Convair stood to lose a great deal of money, hundreds of millions and possibly even billions of dollars in business, on a program with the potential of the ICBM. Bennie had no alternative if he was to succeed, but he had been warned that the course he was taking would ensnare him in a nasty power struggle right at the outset of his venture.

THE GURU OF ROCKETS.

In the meantime, Schriever had been recruiting his own missile-building task force. Because Atlas had been given the Air Force's highest priority, he could pick whomever he wished and their commands had to release them. To give Bennie's team continuity, Gardner had also arranged with White and Twining that once an officer was selected, unless Bennie subsequently relinquished or fired him, he was a.s.signed to WDD for the duration.

No missile could fly without rocket engines. It was thus understandable that the first name on a list Bennie had been compiling was that of Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hall, the expert on rocket propulsion at the laboratories of the Air Development Center at Wright-Patterson. Hall had been the man who had briefed the Tea Pot Committee on rocket engines. Schriever and Ed Hall could not savor the irony involved when Schriever summoned Hall to a meeting at his office in the Pentagon that July of 1954, explained the project to him, and invited him to become WDD's chief of propulsion. At the time, neither knew that Ed Hall's younger brother, Ted, had been, along with Klaus Fuchs, one of the Soviet Union's two invaluable physicist spies at Los Alamos.

Edward Nathaniel Hall was, in fact, considerably more than an expert on rocket engines. He was the U.S. Air Force's guru on rocketry. He was also well known to devotees of the subject outside the Air Force. In the following year, 1955, his achievement in improving liquid rocket fuel was to earn him the American Rocket Society's Robert H. G.o.ddard Memorial Award, commemorating the American rocket pioneer who had first attempted to interest the Army in the military utility of rockets near the close of the First World War in 1918. While Ed Hall did not share Ted's politics, he did share the brilliance of mind and the largeness of ego of the brother who was his junior by eleven years. He also had a trait distinctly his own that would serve him ill-a flash-pan temper.

His road to recognition as a rocketeer had not been an easy one. Born Edward Nathaniel Holtzberg in New York City on August 4, 1914, three days after the First World War broke out, his sense of security had not been improved by the socioeconomic roller coaster on which his father, Barney Holtzberg, had taken the family in the rise and crash of his fur business. That sterling quality in Jewish culture, the sense by both parents and child of the value of an education, had been Ed Hall's salvation. He won his way into Townsend Harris, one of New York's elite high schools, where entrance was by compet.i.tive examination, and went on to the City College of New York. Tuition at CCNY was free in the 1930s. In 1935, he acquired a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and then, to improve his chances in the job-scarce environment of the Depression, took a professional degree, the equivalent of a Ph.D. without the thesis, in the subject the following year.

But he couldn't find a steady job as an engineer. Hall knew that the difficulty was not simply the lack of opportunity posed by the Depression. When an opportunity did come along, someone else less able was hired and he was turned down because of the anti-Semitism that was also so prevalent at the time. His more advanced degree in chemical engineering didn't help, nor did a disguise he sought to adopt by filing court papers to change Holtzberg to Hall. A tall, husky man with an aquiline nose, deep-set brown eyes, a high forehead, and dark curly hair, Ed Hall looked much too East European to pa.s.s for an Anglo-Saxon. He had to be satisfied bouncing about earning his living as an auto mechanic, a steamfitter, a plumber, an electrician, a radio repairman, whatever he could scrounge. And so he finally gave up on the civilian world. In September 1939, as. .h.i.tler's armies invaded Poland and the Second World War began, Hall joined the U.S. Army Air Corps as an enlisted man. The Air Corps was not yet awarding commissions to engineers. A man had to become a pilot first and then go into engineering, but Hall reasoned that this would change with the world situation becoming more perilous and the Air Corps thus bound to grow. He opted for the mechanics school at Chanute Field south of Chicago. Familiarizing himself with the service's flying machines seemed the obvious way to get started.

At his first posts-March Field, California, where, not that many years before, Bennie Schriever had served his initial stint as a novice pilot under Hap Arnold, and then at a new airfield in Alaska, Elmendorf, near Anchorage-Hall's skill at repairing aircraft and correcting the mistakes of the ordinary mechanics gained him quick promotion to sergeant. He succeeded so well at Elmendorf that he became a captive there. In 1941, with war approaching and the Air Corps on the edge of a breakneck expansion into the Army Air Forces, Arnold realized that he would require a lot of competent engineer officers to keep his planes in the air. An announcement went out that enlisted men with the requisite qualifications could apply for commissions. Hall immediately did. The airfield commander had no intention of losing him. He threw Hall's application for a commission into his wastebasket. A fellow sergeant who ran the Elmendorf radio shack rescued him, surrept.i.tiously transmitting the application to Sacramento, where it was routinely forwarded to Washington.

Hall entered the war as a freshly commissioned second lieutenant right after Pearl Harbor. It was a measure of his capacity to get himself into jams and to irritate people that despite membership in a burgeoning organization where promotions came faster than paymasters could keep track of them, and his heroic contributions as an aircraft repair and engineering fireman for the air forces in England, he managed to finish the war in 1945 just four grades up. (And pa.s.sage from second to first lieutenant is, barring serious misconduct, virtually automatic, not really counting as a promotion.) He did not make major until June 1, 1945, after Germany had surrendered and j.a.pan was two and a half months from collapse.

At the beginning of 1943, when Hall was given his first emergency a.s.signment, he was up one grade to first lieutenant. His task was to organize and operate a mobile repair service for B-17s that had crash-landed at airfields, in meadows, and in other open s.p.a.ces all over southern England and the Midlands after being shot up on bombing raids into the n.a.z.i-occupied continent. Squadron mechanics were qualified for routine maintenance; major fixes were beyond most of them. The original scheme for handling seriously damaged bombers had been to dismantle them and send them to a central depot for repair, but this had proven impractical. The brigadier general in charge of the maintenance and repair division of the Eighth Air Force's service command came up with the mobile repair idea as a way to attack the problem. With losses to the Luftwaffe's fighters and German flak rising and promised replacement bombers being diverted to the campaign in North Africa, the need to get these wounded Boeing warriors fit for the air once more was literally desperate. Hall was chosen for the job because of the reputation for energy and effectiveness he had established while engineer officer for a transport group that supplied the way station airfields built at Goose Bay, Labrador, and on Greenland and Iceland to ferry aircraft to Britain.

The brigadier gave Hall a letter authorizing him to take charge of any battle-damaged aircraft anywhere in the British Isles and carte blanche to organize his repair teams. He interviewed other junior engineer officers until he found six he thought reasonably competent. They in turn each rounded up four or five enlisted mechanics for their teams. Even though he was repairing aircraft manufactured by a compet.i.tor, civilian engineers from the Lockheed company stationed over in Northern Ireland were kind enough to ship him half a dozen trucks. Hall outfitted them as on-the-road machine shops with drills, riveting equipment, and other tools and spare parts. The Lockheed group also sent him some of their expert civilian aircraft mechanics to train his men and tackle the really complicated jobs. He finagled a Ford station wagon that had once belonged to the British to transport himself around. It had the RAF's roundel insignia on one side and the American star on the other, allowing Hall to gas up at any fuel point run by either service. He also requisitioned enough radio equipment to set up a network that kept him in touch with all of his teams and enabled him to receive warnings of where downed aircraft were located. As soon as he got a report, Hall would whisk to the scene in the station wagon, write up a repair plan for the aircraft, and dispatch a team. He and his men were soon reviving "splashed down" bombers, the English euphemism for a crash landing, hither and yon.

Then one day he was notified of a B-17 down in bad condition at an airfield under LeMay's command. He arrived to discover a mechanic from an English civilian repair crew on a ladder making what the Englishman seemed to think was an acceptable fix to a spar, the main support for the span of a wing. The spar had been shot nearly in two at a point where it bore a particularly heavy load. Hall looked at the repair the English mechanic was attempting and asked where his foreman was. Hall found the foreman and asked him who had designed this fix. "Oh, it was done by Boeing," the foreman replied. Hall could see that this had to be false. Under the proposed repair the wing would have snapped in two under the stress of flight. He told the English foreman to cease work. "Go to wherever you live or whoever runs you, but no more work on this airplane," Hall said. "Oh, I can't do that. We are under contract," the foreman said. "Contract, bontract! Get out of here," Hall shouted. He gestured at the .45 caliber semiautomatic service pistol he carried in a holster on his hip. "Look, I have a gun here," he said. "I am going to take it out, point it at you, and count to five," and proceeded to do just that. The Englishman, as Hall told the story, "took off like a scared cat," his mechanics with him.

Not long afterward, while Hall was inspecting the B-17 for more battle damage, he was called to the telephone. In the hurly-burly of the buildup, the usual had occurred-incompetents had snookered their way into rank and place. The caller was a colonel at the central depot. Hall had run across him in earlier years and knew that he had spa.r.s.e engineer training. The man had somehow convinced the authorities otherwise, been given a colonel's eagles, and put in charge of the depot's engineering section. He had then apparently hired some Englishman with a crew of self-styled aviation mechanics to repair bombers. The colonel said he understood Hall had dismissed the crew from a job and ordered Hall to put them back on it right away. Hall refused and said the colonel's hired mechanics had no idea what they were about. "What they were doing would have guaranteed that the airplane would have crashed," Hall said. The colonel asked by whose authority Hall was acting. Hall read him the letter of blanket authorization from the brigadier general commanding the maintenance and repair division. "It doesn't make any difference," the colonel said. He once again ordered Hall to put his English crew back on the job. Instead of simply hanging up, informing the brigadier of what was going on, and taking satisfaction as the brigadier brought his heel down on the colonel, Hall did something that he subsequently reflected "wasn't very wise." He let loose the spring of his temper. "You son of a b.i.t.c.h!" he yelled into the phone. "I'm not about to put anybody back and kill people and ruin airplanes." And then he hung up.

A couple of weeks later he received a notice to report for a court-martial hearing at Eighth Air Force headquarters at Bushy Park, up the Thames from London, near Hampton Court Palace, where Henry VIII had held sway. When he arrived at the appointed office, a major sitting behind a desk read him a charge sheet the colonel had sworn out against Hall. To Hall's further anger and insult, the colonel did not accuse him of insubordination or conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. Rather, he charged Hall with gross technical incompetence in the performance of his duties as an engineer. The major handed Hall a copy and instructed him to return in two days with a response. Hall went immediately to the Boeing office in London. He knew the engineers there because he had been consulting regularly with them on how best to repair the B-17s. He told them what had happened, showed them the charge sheet, and asked if they would write a letter affirming his competence. They were happy to oblige. The letter said that not only was Hall an extremely accomplished engineer, his mobile group was far better at repairing B-17s than any other organization in the United Kingdom and its disbandment would be a disaster.

The next morning, Hall presented the letter to the major. He could see the man's face color with anger as he read it. He asked Hall if there were any other copies and, if so, to hand them to him. Hall replied that that was impossible because he had mailed the copies to friends in the United States, with instructions to give the letter to their local newspapers if they did not hear from Hall within two weeks. The major ordered Hall to take a seat and strode off, letter in hand. About fifteen minutes later, a general appeared. Hall subsequently decided that the bestarred figure was probably Ira Eaker. It may well have been, as Eaker was then commanding the Eighth while Carl Spaatz was off in the North African theater as Eisenhower's deputy for air. The general grinned at Hall as he rose from the chair where he had been sitting, shook his hand, slapped him on the back, and said, "Ed, get out of here and keep them flying," which was what Hall did. He kept his teams at it until, as more trained engineering personnel arrived from the United States and more and better repair depots were established, they worked themselves out of a job and were disbanded.

(Hall's quickness to reach for his pistol was not limited to professional crises. Shortly after his arrival in England in late 1942, while he was briefly stationed at Oxford, Hall met a young Englishwoman named Edith Shawcross. She was a niece of a prominent English jurist, Hartley Shawcross, later awarded a life peerage as Baron Shawcross of Friston for his accomplishments as senior British prosecutor at the war crimes trial of the leading n.a.z.is at Nuremberg in 194546. An independent woman with a will that was strong, if not quite as strong as Hall's, Edith was an honors graduate in botany from St. Hilda's, one of the women's colleges at the university. She had joined the Civil Defence Corps and in 1942 was driving an ambulance in Oxford. While she was standing in line to buy a drink at a hotel bar there one evening, an American officer walked up and asked if she would step aside so that he could pa.s.s through. Thinking he was trying to jump the line, she said, "No, I was here first." Hall pointed to a bartender farther down the bar who had gone unnoticed. There was no line in front of him. "That's all right, baby," Hall said, "I'll buy you a drink." He did and they were married nine months later.

In early 1944, while Hall was momentarily stationed near Bournemouth on the south coast, he received a phone call that Edith was giving birth to their first child and having an extremely troublesome time. He tore up the roads to Oxford in the Ford station wagon he had not yet surrendered. At the hospital there, Edith's obstetrician told him that she had been in labor for about fifty hours, that the heart of the child still within her was weakening, and that she was also failing rapidly. The obstetrician seemed confused, as if he had lost his nerve, and, in any case, Hall decided, time was critical if either mother or child or both were to survive. He drew his .45, pressed the muzzle into the doctor's chest, and ordered him to deliver the baby immediately. This the obstetrician, who seemed relieved at being forced to take action, did in a procedure using a forceps. Edith rallied. As an infant, the child was weak from the almost certain deprivation of oxygen he had suffered during his prolonged birth, but he lived. The Halls named him David and he went on to gain a Ph.D. in physics from Cal-tech.) Hall's achievement with his mobile repair teams should have brought him immediate promotion to captain. In March 1943, the brigadier in charge of maintenance and repair presented him with a letter of commendation praising his "intelligence, initiative and industry" and his "quick grasp of the requirements of field maintenance" for the success of the project. The letter was endorsed by the major general heading the entire Service Command a