Ten minutes later, coming up from sick bay where he had just visited the exec, the skipper met with the rest of the VB-3 pilots in a squadron ready room. The captain of the ship had canceled air operations for the day. The mess on the flight deck had to be cleaned up, the smoking ruins pushed over the side. Badger told us, “Bill will survive. The burns are bad and he will be in the hospital for a long time. Jim Holloway will be the new exec.” A quiet moment later I caught Badger, pulled him aside, and said, “I’m just a lieutenant with brand-new wings. The job calls for a lieutenant commander with flight experience.” Badger replied, “Jim, what we need now are professional naval officers rather than experienced pilots. We must get discipline in our people and order in the squadron. As exec you can help me do that. At the same time, you will be building up flight hours and flying experience. You’ll do okay.”
I stayed on as executive officer of VB-3 and remained a lieutenant. It would not be the first time I served in a billet above my rank, and it would not be the last time I was promoted as the result of a casualty to my immediate senior in the organization. VB-3 recovered rapidly from its post-demobilization trauma. We did not lose another pilot during the rest of my time in the squadron. In 1947, VB-3 deployed aboard the USS Kearsarge with the Second Fleet to the North Atlantic and the Caribbean and served a six-month tour in Air Group Three on board the USS Valley Forge with the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean during 1948. The carrier deployment to the Sixth Fleet was the beginning of the pattern of strategic carrier deployments that endured for the entire period of the Cold War and beyond, up until 2002, as a global strategic policy requirement.
2
The Cold War
The United States and its Allies won World War II, and the victory could not have been more complete. Our main Axis foes, Germany and Japan, had submitted to unconditional surrender. Our allies were exhausted, their armed forces depleted and their economies in shambles after years of war. Their homelands had been devastated by invading armies or fleets of bombers. The United States, alone of all the principal belligerents, had not been exposed to the presence of enemy troops or felt the shock of aerial bombardment within its national boundaries. And the United States, now the most powerful nation on Earth, had a monopoly on the atomic bomb.
Out of the embers of World War II rose another threat — not a new enemy but a dangerous adversary whose hostility toward the United States had been temporarily set aside to meet the common and more immediate menace of the fascist Axis. This new enemy was the Soviet Union, and the conflict, which came to be known as the Cold War, was ideological, between communism and Western democracy.
THE THREAT OF THE USSR
History is constructed on a framework of dates and events, and the nominal beginning of the Cold War is generally identified with Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech given at Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946. But most historians will agree that the seeds of the conflict originated in the decades following the Bolshevik Revolution and during the evolution of the Soviet Union. Josef Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and head of the Soviet Union, defined capitalism and the very culture of Western democracy as the mortal enemies of communism.
Even if 5 March 1946 was not the de facto beginning of the Cold War, it was the declaration of war and the call to arms for the Western powers. During this epic struggle between the West and the Soviet Union, the very survival of the United States was at stake. For more than thirty years of this confrontation, the United States as a nation, and Americans as a people, were threatened with annihilation by Soviet nuclear weapons. By the 1970s the Russians were targeting the United States with an estimated twelve thousand warheads, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) estimated that in a strategic nuclear exchange, between 80 and 130 million Americans would die.
Early on, during my deployment to Korea in 1951, it became clear to me that in the Cold War with the Soviet Union, just as during the conflict with the Axis powers in World War II, it was the United States that accepted and exercised the role of leadership for the entire free world.
In spite of what may be viewed pessimistically a stalemate in Korea and a loss in Vietnam, as a veteran of both wars I am today impressed by the fact that the United States consistently prevailed throughout these forty years of confrontation with the Soviet Union. During that time, there was no Soviet military aggression against our North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military partners or Japanese allies. The Atlantic Alliance has outlasted all multilateral peacetime treaty organizations in modern history, and all the members of NATO are still free countries. Soviet forces did not attack Western Europe, and North Korea has not again attacked South Korea.
Further, I am today fully persuaded that U.S. leadership and military power were responsible for our survival and our ultimate victory in the Cold War. I have seen the arms technology generated by these four decades of confrontation — thermonuclear weapons, intercontinental missiles, jet aircraft, and nuclear submarines are but several examples — restructure for all time the most basic concepts of warfare. I saw our military leadership effectively integrate the enormous power and global reach of these new weapons into our operating forces to constrain the spread of Soviet influence. At the same time, they were able to avoid plunging civilization into the holocaust of a general nuclear war.
In later years, after my active-duty career, I came to realize that Korea and Vietnam were successive campaigns in a larger and more desperate struggle that began with the end of World War II and lasted for more than four decades, until the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989. The Soviet Union was our real adversary throughout the Cold War. The USSR, with its enormous armies, had the capability to overwhelm and occupy Western Europe. The Soviets’ nuclear arsenal, which soon reached an essential equivalence with ours, had the capacity to inflict one hundred million casualties on our population and literally destroy our industrial economy. Although we fought major conflicts with North Korea, China, and North Vietnam during this time, those countries did not represent direct or immediate threats to our national survival. The Soviet Union alone had the capacity to challenge the very existence of the United States.
Over the forty-plus years of the Cold War, I came to appreciate the consistency of our basic security philosophy. It was so logical and straightforward: the Russians were our primary enemy and our policy was to counter Soviet aggression, whether by threat from the USSR or military action by their Communist proxies. The military establishment in which I served was designed to defeat the Russian military across the spectrum of warfare, from limited wars to an all-out nuclear exchange. And because the Soviet Union was by far the most powerful adversary on the global horizon, a military posture that could contain the Soviets could handle any other foe.
THE STRATEGIC NUCLEAR BALANCE
In 1957, when VA-83, the A4D-2 Skyhawk squadron of which I was commanding officer (CO), was assigned the primary mission of nuclear-weapons strike, I became an integral player in the national nuclear community. As a squadron pilot, I was assigned a specific target in Europe to attack with a thermonuclear weapon, and in this capacity I became intimately familiar with the terrible destructive power of these devices and aware of our awe-inspiring arsenal of nuclear weapons and hydrogen bombs, immense in their terrible destructive capacity, constantly undergoing modernization, and continuing to grow in the size of the stockpile. It was a sobering exposure to the possibility of the destruction of civilization as we know it.