Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

Eisenhower was infuriated by the Army’s constant requests for more troops to help defend Western Europe. “It would be perfect rot to talk about shipping troops abroad when fifteen of our cities were in ruins,” he told an aide. The Army would be needed at home to deal with the chaos. “You can’t have this kind of war,” Eisenhower said at a national security meeting a couple of years later. “There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”

Three weeks after winning an Oscar for best actor in The Philadelphia Story , Jimmy Stewart enlisted in the Army. It was the spring of 1941, long before Pearl Harbor, but Stewart thought the United States would soon be at war and wanted to volunteer his skills as a pilot. The previous year he’d failed an Army physical for being ten pounds underweight. This time he passed, just barely, and at the age of thirty-two entered the Army Air Corps as a private. By 1944, Major Jimmy Stewart was flying the lead plane in bombing runs over Germany. While other Hollywood stars like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne managed to avoid combat during the Second World War, Stewart gained a reputation in the Eighth Air Force as a “lucky” commander who always brought his men back from dangerous missions. He flew dozens of those missions, shunned publicity about his wartime exploits, and never discussed them with his family. “He always maintained a calm demeanor,” a fellow officer recalled. “His pilots had absolute faith in him and were willing to follow him wherever he led.”

After the war, Colonel Jimmy Stewart returned to Hollywood and starred in a series of well-received films — It’s a Wonderful Life , Harvey , Rear Window — while serving in the Air Force Reserve. Deeply concerned about the Soviet threat, he decided to make a movie about the importance of America’s nuclear deterrent. Stewart visited SAC headquarters in 1952 to discuss the idea with General Curtis LeMay. The two had met in England, while serving in the Eighth Air Force. LeMay gave the project his blessing, worked closely with the screenwriter Beirne Lay, Jr., and allowed the film to be shot at SAC air bases.

Strategic Air Command was released in 1955. It tells the story of a major league infielder, Dutch Holland, whose baseball career is interrupted when the Air Force returns him to active duty. For most of the film, Holland, played by Jimmy Stewart, is torn between his desire to enjoy civilian life and his duty to protect the United States from a Soviet attack. Strategic Air Command focuses on the hardships endured by SAC crews, the dangers of their job, the sacrifices that overseas assignments imposed on their families. Even the bubbly, upbeat cheer of the actress June Allyson, playing Stewart’s wife, is briefly deflated by the challenges of being married to a SAC officer. Shot in Technicolor and wide-screen VistaVision, featuring spectacular aerial photography and a rousing score, the film offers an unabashed celebration of American airpower. “She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Stewart says, at his first glimpse of a new B-47 bomber.

More compelling than the film’s plot, the onscreen chemistry between Allyson and Stewart, or the footage of SAC bombers midflight was the performance of actor Frank Lovejoy as General Ennis C. Hawkes. Gruff, unsentimental, fond of cigars, unwilling to tolerate mistakes, and ready at a moment’s notice to unleash a massive retaliation, the character was a flattering, barely fictionalized portrait of Curtis LeMay. It was another demonstration of SAC’s skill at public relations. LeMay had already become a national celebrity, a living symbol of American might. Life magazine described him as the “Toughest Cop of the Western World” and repeated an anecdote about his boundless self-confidence. Warned that if he didn’t put out his cigar, the bomber he was sitting in might explode, LeMay replied: “It wouldn’t dare.”

The premiere of Strategic Air Command was held in New York’s Times Square, with searchlights piercing the sky and more than three thousand guests, including Air Force generals, politicians, businessmen, Hollywood starlets, and Arthur Godfrey in the lobby of the Paramount Theatre, broadcasting the event live on television. Godfrey was a popular radio and television personality, as well as a good friend of LeMay’s, who frequently promoted SAC during his shows. Strategic Air Command was one of the highest-grossing films of 1955. It fit the national mood. And a few years later Jimmy Stewart, as a member of the Air Force Reserve, was appointed deputy director of operations at SAC, one of the top jobs at the command.

Behind the public facade of invincibility, questions were secretly being raised at the Pentagon about whether SAC could survive a Soviet attack. LeMay had spent years building air bases overseas — in Greenland, Great Britain, Spain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Japan — where his planes would begin and end their bombing missions against the Soviet Union. But a study by the RAND analyst Albert Wohlstetter suggested that a surprise attack on those bases could knock SAC out of the war with a single blow, leaving the United States defenseless. LeMay felt confident that sort of thing would never happen, that his reconnaissance planes, flying daily missions along the borders of the Soviet Union, would detect any unusual activity. Nevertheless, he accelerated SAC’s plans to base most of its aircraft in the United States and to refuel them en route to Soviet targets. And LeMay continued to demand perfection from his officers. “Training in SAC was harder than war,” one of them recalled. “It might have been a relief to go to war.”

The town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, became one of SAC’s favorite targets, and it was secretly radar bombed hundreds of times, thanks to the snow-covered terrain resembling that of the Soviet Union. By 1955, the SAC battle plan called for 180 bombers, most of them departing from the United States, to strike the Soviet Union within twelve hours of receiving an emergency war order from the president. But constant training and the radar bombing of Wisconsin could not guarantee how aircrews would perform in battle with real weapons. During tests at the Bikini atoll in May 1956, the Air Force got its first opportunity to drop a hydrogen bomb from a plane. The 3.8-megaton weapon was carried by one of SAC’s new, long-range B-52 bombers, with the island of Namu as its target. The B-52 safely escaped the blast — but the bombardier had aimed at the wrong island, and the H-bomb missed Namu by four miles.

Withdrawing most of SAC’s planes from overseas bases did not, however, eliminate the threat of a surprise attack. The continental United States — code-named the “zone of the interior” (ZI) — was also considered highly vulnerable to Soviet bombers. During Operation Tailwind, 94 SAC bombers tested the air defense system of the ZI by approaching from Canada, flying at night, and using electronic countermeasures to simulate a Soviet raid. Only 7 of the planes were spotted by radar and “shot down.” The failure to intercept the other 87 planes raised the possibility of a devastating attack on the United States. Now that the Soviets had hydrogen bombs and jet bombers, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended a large investment in America’s air defense and early-warning system. General LeMay strongly disagreed with that proposal, arguing that in the nuclear age it made little sense to waste money “playing defense.” If the Soviets launched an attack with 200 bombers and American forces somehow managed to shoot down 90 percent of those planes, the United States would still be hit by at least 20 H-bombs, if not more.