Sometimes they would paste a baby picture or animal picture on the ID badges just to test security guards. Once a SAC general found soldiers entering his office to repair phone lines. It took the officer several minutes to remember that the Air Force used outside repair people. He drew his automatic before the intruders had time to deposit the slip of paper that read, “This is a bomb.”
The Office of Special Investigations penetrators became a regular nuisance to SAC crews. LeMay even had his wife tested by a bogus repairman who tried to penetrate the general’s residence.
SAC’s headquarters was at Offut Air Base in Omaha, Nebraska, formerly a dreary Army post. The location had been chosen carefully: By the Great Circle route, it was as far from the bases of Soviet bombers as possible. Like railroad towns, Offut and the other distant SAC bases at Rapid City or Minot quickly turned into American dream towns. LeMay made SAC a housing developer, creating whole new communities around the bases, green-grass Levittowns under blue skies. He set up hot-rod shops on SAC bases to improve morale. The cars raced on the runways. It was Pax Atomica, as LeMay liked to call it.
“Do you realize how many babies are born in SAC each month?” said Jimmy Stewart, as a B-36 pilot in Strategic Air Command. I had been one of those babies. I grew up on a SAC base.
I grew up with the religion of airpower. I must have been but three or four when my mother brought home a model of the B-29 on which my father had flown, all silver, with burgundy prop and tail tips, and I learned that the airpower that had won the last war was there to prevent the next. Like many of the Interceptors, I had “imprinted” on these aircraft as a child, the way Konrad Lorenz described the imprinting nature of goslings. The B-36s overhead were just a larger, clunkier version of the B-29; the B-52s and B-47s and B-58s would continue the evolution.
My father figured as a heroic warrior of airpower. Family myth segued neatly into the national myth that arrived on our primitive black-and-white TV set via Walter Cronkite and the program The Twentieth Century: how eager American youths from small towns across the country were sent for training to the new bases set up far from the vulnerable coasts.
Then Air Power had shuffled the trainees into ethnically mixed all-American crews — the kid from Brooklyn, the guy from Texas, the farm boy and the city boy — that would fly from Wichita to Khartoum and Bombay, to China and Guam, and eventually over the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. My father had bombed Tokyo in LeMay’s great firestorm, then been shot up over Osaka, left blind, with his right arm crooked and bent. His left compensated; from my earliest days I thought it looked like the arm on the baking soda box. Decades later, bits of shrapnel were still working their way out of his skin.
The B-36, the flagship of SAC during the 1950s, was something of a turkey, slower and with less range than promised. Originally designed in 1941 to reach Germany from the United States in case England fell, it first flew in 1946. It was jokingly called “aluminum overcast” for its huge size. A mechanically ragged airplane, it was saved by its abundance of engines. There was another joke about it: “Pilot: Feather four. Engineer: Which four?” The bomber’s big, slow propellers emitted a distinctive whump-whump sound. One pilot recalls that it sounded like a streetcar rumbling toward takeoff.
It was huge, with six pusher-prop turbojets set along its wings so thick crewmen could scramble out to work on the power plants in flight. But the dome and the bulbous nose gave the plane a stupid, brontosaurian look. In flight, the great glass-domed turtleback canopy atop the bomber was often filled with blue smoke from the cigars the pilots felt free to smoke on long flights because LeMay was rarely without his own stogie. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but in SAC it was a symbol of jaunty esprit, an accent of élan on the way to the end of the world.
Trophies given to the winning crew in a SAC competition one year were ashtrays with a B-36 mounted on their rim, circling the smoking ashes beneath.
SAC was staffed by callow youth and bomber vets, “the Blue Sky Boys,” who had pounded Germany and Japan with Flying Fortresses and Superfortresses and who got the nod in 1948 to deliver the big ones. SAC’s job was to routinize Doomsday, to bureaucratize Armageddon. They stayed airborne twenty-four hours a day.
SAC’s Cold War was a new kind of war, but LeMay still needed targets. He needed them to etch into three-dimensional Lucite templates for the radar bombsights of his bombers. He needed them to flesh out his Strategic Library Bombing Index. He needed them to shape the SIOP, the sinister acronym for single-integrated operating plan — the blueprint for nuclear war.
LeMay needed targets because he alone controlled them. Neither the joint chiefs nor the president knew the targets in case of nuclear war. LeMay kept the information to himself until the early sixties. And since there were no locks, no presidential codes for the weapons, his bombers could have launched a nuclear war on his authority alone.
LeMay feared dilly-dallying politicians: He wanted to “hit ’em with everything we’ve got” at the first signs of any massing of the bombers he was sure the Soviets were rapidly building. But he had very little information. The Soviet Union was a great black empty space. SAC was still using German maps of the country from World War II. Human agents had little success. They might manage to pass for ordinary Soviet citizens, but ordinary Soviet citizens had virtually no access to the areas and targets desired. Reconnaissance versions of the B-29 had skirted the perimeter of the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. A variety of electronic listening and air-sample programs had been in continuous operation.
Other ideas floated around. In the early fifties a forward-looking officer at Wright-Pat had taken a look at new engines and wings and realized it might be possible to fly above radar. Maj. John Seaberg began Project Bald Eagle, developed to create a high-flying spy plane. Specs were issued, proposals advanced, but nothing came of it.
Several balloon programs had been used to spy; one was Mogul, the secret program later officially asserted to have been the source of the Roswell “saucer” wreckage, aimed at sampling potential fallout from Soviet atomic weapons.
The most ambitious balloon program carried cameras: Project Genetrix, aka Weapons System 119L, launched polyethylene balloons high into the jet streams. It operated under the cover story of weather research and the code name Moby Dick. It involved five launch sites and ten locations for tracking, and the Soviets protested as soon as the first flight was made, in January 1956. Almost five hundred balloons were launched; some were shot down, many were lost, and only forty produced any useful photos. The program ended with the humiliating spectacle of captured balloons displayed in Moscow’s Gorky Park as evidence of imperialist treachery.
LeMay also enlisted the help of the British for a less confrontational approach and supplied them with planes, Canberra bombers adapted for reconnaissance. They fared poorly. The historian Richard Rhodes records that one pilot from those missions, looking out of his cockpit, realized what a difficult task it would be to find anything in the vast landmass. It looked, he said, like “one large black hole.” Some of the Canberras returned full of bullet holes.