Background For War: MAN IN THE FIRST PLANE

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A quick, certain fate awaited any LeMay man who betrayed the slightest sign of the milkshaky unpreparedness that enveloped the occupation troops of Germany and Japan. The Strategic Air Command (known to the Air Force as SAC) was a $310 million-a-year business, a top-priority task force with 1,100 planes, some 60,000 pilots, crewmen and groundmen. For 22 rugged months Curt LeMay had been holding them all to a relentless, competitive training schedule. With an impersonal assortment of charts and graphs —his "numbers racket," he called them —he kept a sharp, hazel-eyed watch on everything from bombing accuracy (up 500%) to venereal-disease rates.

Every month he waved the numbers in the faces of his wing and group commanders. "Al, your maintenance is down to 62%," LeMay might say. "Joe's is up to 72%. He's got the same problems you have. How come? Now, Joe, don't look so damned smug. Your costs are up . . ." One colonel complained that he was being marked down for "an act of God," because an eagle had damaged one of his planes in flight. LeMay sucked on his pipe, replied in a flat, low voice: "I'm not interested in distinguishing between the unfortunate and the inefficient. The result is the same." Such ruthlessness, which comes easily to some commanders, can either be sensible or silly. One of LeMay's victims shrewdly summed him up: "He's tough, but he's not stupid-tough."

The Plane. SAC's complicated and outsize bombers demand ice-cold thinking, endurance and guts from the men who fly them. The Consolidated Vultee B-36, a cigar-shaped aerial monster, is LeMay's blue-ribbon flying warship. It costs $4,700,000 before it ever gets off the ground (a small submarine costs $6,000,000). The tanks in its 230-ft. wing can swallow 2½ tank-car loads of gasoline, enough to feed its six pusher engines for nearly two days. It can cruise over the enemy out of sight of earth—and, the Air Force insists, fairly well above the range of effective interception. Four new jet engines, hanging beneath the wingtips, were designed to give it a spurt over the target to at least 435 miles an hour. It can carry a bomb load equal to 30 B173 at extreme range, or four B-293.

A commander of a B-36 is usually a captain or a major, on the average a seasoned "old man" of 29 years and 3,000 hours' flight experience. LeMay laced SAC with veteran pilots, navigators and bombardiers from his old World War II bomber commands in England, India and the Marianas. Around them he has tailored the individual B-36 flight crews, trains them for weeks in ground school and on the Consolidated assembly line before he allows them to set foot in the super-plane.

"If they build an airplane any bigger they'll have to give the aircraft commander a desk and a secretary to help him run things," a harassed plane skipper groused last week. The pilots, sitting far forward in the ribbed, safety-glass nose, can't even see back to the six engines at mid-fuselage. Said one: "It's like standing in the bay window and flying your house."