ARMED FORCES: The Warning Siren

(See Cover)

At an air base in central Japan one day last week, a heavy spring rain swept across the runways and drummed on the roof of a large corrugated metal shed. Inside, the leather-jacketed crews for ten U.S. Air Force B-29s crowded into the briefing room. "Gentlemen," said the major, as he laid his pointer on a ten-foot map of Japan and Korea, "our target for tonight is the rail bridge at Sinhung." Said the captain: "You'll each be carrying forty 500-pound bombs with nose fuses . . . Flak is expected to be meager until the release point. We don't believe it is radar-controlled and we don't think it will be accurate." Said the colonel: "We clobbered them at the Sinanju bridge. I hope we do the same tonight."

The old Superforts, already loaded up, glistened dully through the downpour as the crews jogged out for the preflight check. In their orange baseball caps, the crews themselves glistened dully, too. Most of them were reserves, and like their planes they were ten years older than in the glamour days of World War II. There was little of the "tiger" (Korea equivalent for "eager beaver") about them. They were cool, experienced, careful, sometimes sardonic. They liked to call themselves the "Christmas help," and they liked to point out that the average B-29 in the outfit was carrying the fathers of ten children.

Dusk was fading as the radar operators and bombardiers mumbled over slide rules and fed a mass of specifications on target, course and weather into their mysterious banks of electronic panels. Then the B-29s coughed into life, wheeled ponderously down the feeder taxiways to thunder off into the rain at three-minute intervals.

Seven hours and 50 minutes later, the first pair of landing lights broke through the wet darkness. One by one the ten Superforts touched down, with a chirp of tires, between the yellow field lights edging the runway. Their report: "Mission accomplished."

Sideshow War. Technically the mission was a success: ten planes used up 40,000 gallons of high-octane gasoline to drop 100 tons of high explosives by radar through the clouds on a tiny bridge span. Yet, in Korea the U.S. Air Force was expending precious planes, crews, pilots and supplies in a war that was only a sideshow. And even in that sideshow war, the aging U.S. B-29s have been driven from the daytime sky, are forced to fly by night because they are relics of World War II within range of an enemy air force designed precisely for World War III.

There was one man in Washington who heard this warning siren loud & clear, but heard it as just one more note in an alarm from U.S. airmen all over the globe. From the reports on his broad mahogany desk in the Pentagon, General Hoyt Sanford Vandenberg, Air Force Chief of Staff, could see an air-power crisis closing on the U.S. at jet speed, while the U.S. was buzzing along in a B-29 frame of mind. "We are tempted to retreat from one fading hope to another," said Vandenberg two years ago, "without subjecting ourself to the discipline of facts." In 1952, the facts demanded an even more rigorous discipline. Items:

¶ The U.S., four years after starting rearmament, is still without a minimum adequate air defense against atomic attack by the U.S.S.R.