Ch2-Progress Unhindered PDF

# We Make Progress Unhindered... ## Chapter Two ### We Make Progress Unhindered by Custom. 1. Revolutions are invariably group activities. That's why Carl Norden was such an anomaly. Rarely does someone start a revolution alone. The impressionist movement didn't begin because one genius took up...

# We Make Progress Unhindered... ## Chapter Two ### We Make Progress Unhindered by Custom. 1. Revolutions are invariably group activities. That's why Carl Norden was such an anomaly. Rarely does someone start a revolution alone. The impressionist movement didn't begin because one genius took up painting impressionistically and, like the Pied Piper, attracted a trail of followers. Instead, Pissarro and Degas enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts at the same time; then Pissarro met Monet and, later, Cézanne at the Academie Suisse. Manet met Degas at the Louvre. Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre's studio, and Renoir, in turn, met Pissarro and Cézanne. Soon enough, everyone was hanging out at the Cafe Guerbois, trading ideas and egging each other on, and sharing and competing and dreaming, all together, until something radical and entirely new emerged. This happens all the time. Gloria Steinem was the most famous face of the feminist movement in the early 1970s. But what led to a doubling of the number of women elected to office in the United States? Gloria Steinem plus Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Tanya Melich coming together to create the National Women’s Political Caucus. Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener's eye that tells you you're on to something. For those caught up in the dream of changing modern warfare, that place where friends spent time with one another and had long arguments into the night and saw that look in their comrades' eyes was an air base called Maxwell Field. Maxwell Field was — and is — in Montgomery, Alabama. It was an old cotton plantation converted to an airfield by the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. In the 1930s it became home to something called the Air Corps Tactical School, the aviation version of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Much of the base today remains the same as it was when it was built in the 1930s: everything is in pale yellow concrete or stucco, with red tile roofs. There are hundreds of elegant houses for the officers, built in the French provincial style on quiet curving streets lined with giant ring-cup oak trees. In the summer, the air is thick and wet. This is deep inside Alabama. The grand nineteenth-century buildings that make up the Alabama state legislature are just down the road, a few miles away. It does not feel like the birthplace of a revolution. But it was. In those years, the air Force was not a separate branch of the military. It was a combat division of the Army. It existed to serve the interests of the ground forces. To support, assist, accompany. The legendary Army general John “Black Jack” Pershing, who commanded the American forces in World War I, once wrote of airpower that it “can of its own account neither win a war at the present time nor, so far as we can tell, at any time in the future." That's what the military establishment thought of airplanes. ### The Bomber Mafia Richard Kohn, chief historian of the US Air Force for a decade, explains that in the early days, people just didn't understand airpower. _"I remember one congressman being quoted as saying, “Why do we have all this controversy over airplanes? Why don't we just buy one of them and let the services share it?”_ The very first site of the Air Corps Tactical School was not in Alabama but in Langley, Virginia. There were stables out by the airplane hangars, and pilots were expected to learn how to ride, as if it were still the nineteenth century. Can you imagine how the Army's pilots of that era-and there were only a few hundred of them-felt about that? So long as they were part of the Army, they came to believe, they would be under the command of people who couldn't fly airplanes, didn't understand airplanes, and wanted them to rub down the horses every morning. The pilots wanted to be independent. And the first step toward independence was to move their training school as far away from the influence of the Army-culturally and physically- as humanly possible. The fact that Maxwell Field was on an old cotton plantation in a sleepy corner of the South was, to use the modern expression, a feature and not a bug. Because airpower was young, the faculty of the Tactical School was young-in their twenties and thirties. Full of the ambition of youth. They got drunk on the weekends, flew warplanes for fun, and raced each other in their cars. Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” It was not intended as a compliment-these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck. Harold George, one of the spiritual leaders of the Bomber Mafia, put it like this: “We were highly enthusiastic; we were starting on, like, a crusade… knowing that there were a dozen of us and the only opposition we had was ten thousand officers and the rest of the Army, rest of the Navy.” George was from Boston. He joined the Army during the First World War and became captivated by airplanes. He started teaching at the Tactical School in the early 1930s and rose to the rank of general during the Second World War. After the war, he went to work for Howard Hughes, setting up Hughes's electronics business. Then George left to help build another electronics firm that became a giant defense contractor. And this is my favorite part: he was twice elected mayor of Beverly Hills. That’s one man. In one lifetime. But if you had asked Harold George what was the highlight of his career, he probably would have said those heady days in the 1930s, teaching at Maxwell Field. _As he said in an oral history in 1970, “Nobody seemed to understand what we were doing, and therefore we got no directives that we were to stop the kind of instruction that we were giving.”_ The Tactical School was a university. An academy. But not many of the faculty had any experience teaching. And the things they were teaching were so new and radical that there weren't really any textbooks for anyone to study or articles for anyone to read. So they mostly made things up-on the fly, so to speak. Lectures quickly turned into seminars, which turned into open discussions, which spilled out into dinner in the evening. That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself. Donald Wilson was another of the Bomber Mafia inner circle. He was the one who later wrote in his memoirs that he had a dream of a different kind of war. _As he recalled of those days, “I feel quite certain that if the controlling element of the War Department general staff had known what we were doing at Maxwell Field, we would have all been put in jail. Because it was just so contrary to their established doctrine that I just can’t imagine their knowing and allowing us to do it.”_ ## 2. When people thought about military aircraft in the first part of the twentieth century, they thought of fighter planes: small and highly maneuverable airplanes that could engage the enemy in the air. But not the renegades at Maxwell Field. They were obsessed with the technological advances in aviation that happened during the 1930s. Aluminum and steel replaced plywood. Engines got more powerful. Planes got bigger and easier to fly. They had retractable landing gear and pressurized fuselages. And those advances allowed the Bomber Mafia to imagine an entirely new class of airplane-something as large as the commercial airliners that had just started ferrying passengers across the United States. A plane that big and powerful wouldn’t be limited to fighting other planes in the sky. It could carry bombs: heavy, powerful explosives that could do significant damage to the enemy’s positions on the ground. Now, why would that be so devastating? Because if you put one of these newly powerful engines inside one of these newly massive airplanes, that plane could fly so far and so fast for so long that nothing could stop it. Antiaircraft guns would be like peashooters. Enemy fighters would be like small annoying gnats, buzzing harmlessly. This kind of airplane could have armor plating, guns at the back and front to defend itself. And so we arrive at principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get get through. The second tenet: Up until then, it had been assumed that the only way to bomb your enemy was in the safety of darkness. But if the bomber was unstoppable, why would stealth matter? The Bomber Mafia wanted to attack by daylight. The third tenet: If you could bomb by daylight, then you could see whatever it was you were trying to hit. You weren’t blind anymore. And if you could see, it meant that you could use a bombsight-line up the target, enter the necessary variables, let the device do its work-and boom. The fourth and final tenet: Conventional wisdom said that when a bomber approached its target, it had to come down as close as it could to the ground in order to aim properly. But if you had the bombsight, you could drop your bomb from way up high—outside the range of antiaircraft guns. _We can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet._ High altitude. Daylight. Precision bombing. That was what the Bomber Mafia cooked up in its hideaway in central Alabama. Historian Richard Kohn described the Bomber Mafia this way: _"It was collegial. I would call it almost to the point of “band of brothers.” But if you didn’t buy the doctrine, and some of them didn’t, you could be… not exactly expelled from the brotherhood but suspected and opposed."_ ## 3. I worry that I haven't fully explained just how radical - how revolutionary - the Bomber Mafia thinking was. So allow me a digression. It's from a book I've always loved called _The Masks Of War_, by a political scientist named Carl Builder. Builder worked for the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica-based think tank set up after The Second World War to serve as the Pentagon’s external research arm. Builder argued that you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are. And to prove this point, Builder said just look at the chapels on each of the service academy campuses. The chapel at West Point military academy, the historic training ground for the officers of the US Army stands on a bluff high above the Hudson River, dominating the skyline of the campus. The chapel was completed in 1910, in the grand Gothic revival style. It is built entirely out of somber gray granite, with tall, narrow windows. It has the brooding power of a medieval fortress-solid, plain, unmovable. Builder writes, “This is a quiet place for simple ceremonies with people who are close to each other and to the land that has brought them up.” That’s the Army: deeply patriotic, rooted in service to country. Then there’s the chapel at the Naval Academy, in Annapolis. It was built almost at the same time as its West Point counterpart, but it’s much bigger. Grander. It’s in the style of American Beaux-Arts, with a massive done based on the design of the military chapel at Les Invalides, in Paris. The stained-glass windows are enormous, letting the light shine into the ornate, detailed interior. That’s very Navy: arrogant, independent, secure in the global scale of its ambitions. Compare those two to the cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. This is a chapel from another universe. It was finished in 1962, but if I told you that it was finished last month, you would say, “Wow, that’s a futuristic building.” The Air Force chapel looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens. It looks ready to take flight with a magnificent, deafening whoosh. Inside the cathedral, there are more than twenty-four thousand pieces of stained glass, in twenty-four different colors, and at the front, a cross forty-six feet tall and twelve feet wide, with crossbeams that look like propellers. Outside, four fighter jets are jauntily parked, as if some pilots, on a whim, had dropped by for Sunday morning communion. The chapel’s architect was a brilliant modernist out of Chicago named Walter Netsch. He was given the same creative freedom and limitless budget that the Air Force usually gives to the people who come up with stealth fighters. _In a 1995 interview, Netsch recalled the commission: “I came home with this tremendous feeling of: How can I in this modern age of technology create something good to be as inspiring and aspiring as Chartres...? In the meantime, I had gotten this idea here in Chicago, working with my engineer, of the tetrahedrons and compiling the tetrahedrons together.”_ What do you think it says about the Air Force that they would construct a cathedral out of aluminum and steel, in the shape of an upright fighter jet, in the middle of the Colorado mesa? That’s what Carl Builder asked in his book. And his conclusion was: This is a group of people who desperately want to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the older branches of military service, the Army and the Navy. And, further, the Air Force is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern. Netsch designed the entire Air Force Academy chapel around pyramid-shaped seven-foot modules. Tetrahedrons! This is a branch of the service for people who want to start over, to wage war in new ways, to ready themselves for today's battles. They aren’t spending their time studying the Peloponnesian War or the Battle of Trafalgar. The Air Force is obsessed with tomorrow, and with how technology will prepare it for tomorrow. And what happens with Netsch’s chapel after it’s built? It has all kinds of structural problems. Of course it does! Like some brilliant bit of breakthrough computer code, it had to be debugged. _Netsch explained: “You get into technology, you sometimes get into trouble… What happened is that all of a sudden, these leaks started. And [we] would fly out to Colorado Springs and check in [to] a little cheap motel and wait for the rains. And it would rain, and we would rush up to the chapel-it’s a big building-and try to find out where it was leaking inside… I had to write a report, and I was so hurt about these leaks. I called it “A Report on Water Migration on the Air Force Academy Chapel.” Needless to say, I received humorous digs over my euphemism. But what we found out was that… each of the tetrahedral groups would move in the wind. It’s very windy up there, and the building can receive wind from many planes. And it’s long, so it could be doing one thing at one end and another thing at the other end. These joints where everything is connected is where all the glass goes through.”_ So, it was finally decided that what we should do is develop a big cover of plastic over the glass windows, which eliminated many of the sources of the problem, because each little piece of glass sitting in that window frame, everything begins to—it doesn’t take much for water to come through. And so they went and put in these long panels of plastic, and it’s done a lot to eliminate the major problem. This is so Air Force. You build a twenty-first-century chapel in the middle of the twentieth century, and it’s so far ahead of its time that you have to do an engineering workaround based on reanalysis of meteorological patterns. My point is — where did this radical new mind-set come from? It came from the Air Corps Tactical School, in that intellectual flurry between 1931 and 1941. In those seminar rooms and late-night arguments, the culture of the modern Air Force was born. They would take warfare into the air. They would leave every other branch of the service behind. And if you stand in the sanctuary of the Air Force Academy chapel and stare up at the soaring aluminum ribs of the ceiling, you’ll get it. Meanwhile, what’s happening back at the Naval Academy? They’re burnishing the brass rails in their chapel by hand. ## 4. As with all revolutionary groups, the Bomber Mafia has a defining legend, an origin story. And as with all legends, it may not be strictly accurate, but here’s how it goes: On St. Patrick’s Day in 1936, in Pittsburgh, there was a flood. It was a devastating event. Pittsburgh is unusual in that it sits at the head of a major river, the Ohio, formed by the convergence of two other rivers, the Monongahela and the Allegheny. And that day, the convergence of the rivers swelled in a massive flood. Airmen do not typically concern themselves with land-based disasters. Hurricanes, maybe. Thunderstorms. A flood is the kind of thing the Army worries about. But there was an odd consequence of the Pittsburgh flood that would end up having a dramatic influence on the revolution brewing down at Maxwell Field. It had to do with the fact that among the hundreds of buildings along the riverbanks destroyed by the rising water was a factory belonging to a firm named Hamilton Standard. Hamilton Standard was the country’s principal manufacturer of a spring used in making variable-pitch propellers, which were basic equipment on most airplanes at the time. But because Hamilton Standard couldn’t make variable-pitch propeller springs, no one could make variable-pitch propellers, and because no one could make variable-pitch propellers, no one could make airplanes. The Pittsburgh flood brought the whole aeronautics industry of 1936 to a halt: for the want of a spring, the airplane business was lost. Down In Alabama, the Bomber Mafia looked at what happened to Hamilton Standard, and the men’s eyes lit up. The member of the Bomber Mafia who spent the most time thinking about that spring factory was Donald Wilson. And what happened in Pittsburgh made him realize something. War, in its classical definition, is the application of the full weight of military forces against the enemy until the enemy's political leadership surrenders. But Wilson thought-is that really necessary? If we just take out the propeller-spring factory in Pittsburgh, we cripple their air force. And if we can find another dozen or so crucial targets just like that — “choke points” was the phrase he used — bombing could cripple the whole country. Wilson then devised one of the Bomber Mafia’s most famous thought experiments. And remember, the men could only do thought experiments. They didn’t have any real bombers. Or any real enemy. Or any real resources. They were spitballing. In the thought experiment, Wilson made the manufacturing hub of the Northeast the target. _“Now, when we began theorizing about this thing…we had no air intelligence of any possible enemy. Thereby we had a thing…a unit that possibly could be reached by an enemy. And in order to illustrate this concept, we assume that an enemy would plant himself down in Canada and be within reach of this northeastern industrial area.”_ So the enemy in this thought experiment is in Canada—let’s say Toronto. Toronto is 340 miles from New York City as the crow flies, easily within the range of the planes the Bomber Mafia was dreaming about. What kind of damage could a fleet of bombers do, coming down from Toronto on a single bombing run? In a two-day presentation in April of 1939 at the Tactical School, they tried to figure it out. _I spoke about the thought experiment with historian Robert Pape, who wrote a book called _Bombing To Win_, about the origins of many of the ideas taught at the Air Corps Tactical School. Pape described the presentation: “The bombing that they’re focusing on [is], number one, the bridges. Number two, they have the bombing of the aqueducts. The bombing of the aqueducts is important because what they want to do Is cause massive thirst in the New York population. They basically want to create a situation where there's almost no potable water for the population to drink. And then, number three, they target electric power.” “They’re not really investigating the psychology of bombing. They’re not investigating the sociology of bombing. They’re not really even investigating the politics of the bombing—that is, the implications the bombing would have for populations, societies, and for governments. What they’re really doing is focusing on the technology of the bombing of the time, what target sets it would allow the bombers to hit.”_ The presentation was given by a key Bomber Mafia associate, Muir Fairchild. Fairchild argued that the aqueducts are the most obvious targets. The aqueduct system serving New York City is ninety-two miles long. Then there’s the power grid. Fairchild directed his students to a chart: “The Aerial Bomb Versus Traction Electric Power in the New York City Area.” As Fairchild concluded: _“We see then that seventeen bombs, if dropped on the right spots, will not only take out practically all of the electric power of the entire metropolitan area but will prevent the distribution of outside power!”_ Seventeen bombs! Conventional wisdom was that you would have to bomb the whole city—reduce it to rubble with wave upon wave of costly and dangerous bombing attacks. Fairchild’s point was, Why would you do that if you could use your intelligence, and the magic of the Norden bombsight, to disable a city with a single strike? As Pape told me: _“They’re certainly thinking that the bomber alone or airpower alone is going to win the war. And what they’re thinking is that it’s going to win the war and prevent a mass carnage like what occurred in World War I, where the armies clashed together year after year after year, and millions and millions of people died in the meat grinder of the trenches.”_ You can see why Donald Wilson, only half jokingly, said that if the Army had known what was going on at Maxwell, they would have put all the members of the Bomber Mafia in jail. Because these men were part of the Army, but they were saying that the rest of the Army was irrelevant and obsolete. You could have hundreds of thousands of troops massed along the Canadian border, complete with artillery and tanks and every other weapon imaginable, but the bombers would Just fly right over them, leapfrog all the conventional defenses, and cripple the enemy with a few carefully chosen air strikes hundreds of miles beyond the front lines. Tami Biddle, a professor of national security at the US Army War College, explains the Bomber Mafia’s psychology this way: _“I think there’s a fascination with American technology. I think there’s a strong moral component to all this, a desire to find a way to fight a war that is clean and that is not going to tarnish the American reputation as a moral nation, a nation of ideas and ideology and commitment to individual rights and respect for human beings.”_ The Bomber Mafia—despite its ominous name—was never very large. It was a dozen men at most, all living—more or less—within walking distance of one another on those quiet, shaded streets at Maxwell Field. Nor was the Tactical School itself some massive facility. It was never West Point, churning out generation after generation of Army officers. During Its twenty years of operation, It produced just over a thousand graduates. Had The Second World War never happened, It Is entirely possible that the theories and dreams of this little group would have faded into history. But then Hitler attacked Poland, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, and by the summer of 1941 it was obvious to everyone that the United States would soon be at war as well: And if the country was to go to war, it was obvious that it would need a strong air fleet. But what did a strong air fleet mean? How many planes did it need? To answer that question, the Army high command in Washington turned in desperation to the only group of experts who might have an answer: the instructors at the Tactical School, down at Maxwell Field in Alabama. So the Bomber Mafia went to Washington and produced an astonishing document that would serve as a template for everything the United States did in the air war. The document is titled “Air War Plans Division One” (AWPD-1). It lays out, in exacting detail, how many planes the United States would need—fighters, bombers, transport planes. Also, how many pilots. How many tons of explosives. And the targets in Germany for all those bombs, chosen according to the choke-point theory: fifty electrical power plants, forty-seven transportation networks, twenty-seven synthetic oil refineries, eighteen aircraft assembly plants, six aluminum plants, and six “sources of magnesium.” And this astonishing set of projections was produced just in nine days, start to finish—the kind of superhuman feat that is only possible if you have spent the previous ten years in the seclusion of central Alabama, waiting for your chance. The Bomber Mafia was ready for war. ## Chapter Three ### “He was lacking in the bond of human sympathy.” A British motorcycle messenger drove up to my residence at Castle Combe, outside London. And the message that he delivered to me was from General [Hap] Arnold, which, when decoded, said, “Meet me tomorrow morning at Casablanca.” -Commanding General Ira Eaker ## 1. Casablanca, in what was then French Morocco, was the site of a secret conference in January of 1943 between Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.