Background For War: MAN IN THE FIRST PLANE

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Before the plane can take off, the commander and his flight engineer spend an hour chanting their way down a 600-item check list to be certain every one of their maze of controls is working—and will work in the air. The engineer operates from a console of 120 dials and gadgets, spends nearly half of every hour logging their readings. Just figuring the miles-per-gallon on a 5,000-ft. climb keeps him scribbling for 20 minutes. "A man can just about keep up with his work if the flight is ideal and not a damn thing goes wrong," an engineer explained. "If anything slips it's a rat race all the way back to the base. What this thing needs is an engineer with four hands and five eyes."

Thirty continuous hours in the air, ground out in the seconds, degrees and miles of a B-36 flight, mean packing aboard survival kits for the Arctic, life rafts for the ocean, 100 Ibs. of food* to be cooked in two tiny electric ovens—and endless time for minor irritations of dreadnought flying to sap the toughest crewman. The crew's sections are pressurized like bug-bombs. To get from the nose compartment to the rear chamber a crewman has to lie full length on a little roller sled, pull himself hand over hand down an 85-ft. connecting tube.

Among the guns and fire-control apparatus of the after-section are eight inviting bunks. But at high altitude nobody is allowed to "sack out." Reason: an accidental pressure failure would fill the cabin with a frigid blue haze, and the loss of oxygen would kill a man in 30 seconds if he didn't slap on his oxygen mask. A sleeper would be a dead duck. A more earthy problem: the toilet mechanism won't work at high altitude. The most practical makeshift is a bucket, and by unwritten law, the first man who needs it on the flight cleans it after landing. This makes the hours of flight a competition in painful restraint.

In the B-36's early days it was grounded so frequently by "bugs" in the 30 miles of wiring, tubing and cables that the crews dubbed it "the ramp rooster." But after long, slow shakedown, it is now admiringly known as "the magnesium monster," and the SACmen are ready to battle anyone who says it isn't the best bomber in the world. When the Navy insisted a year ago that the B-36 could be shot down, Curt LeMay shot back a blunt answer.

"I think that under certain circumstances it can be shot down," he told a congressional committee. "But I do not think whether it can or cannot be shot down enters into this controversy at all . . . The thing that I am concerned about is whether the proper number of B-365 in the proper tactical disposition can penetrate enemy defenses and destroy a target with acceptable losses to ourselves, and I believe the B-36 can do this job . . . I expect that if I am called upon to fight I will order my crews out in those airplanes, and I expect to be in the first one myself."