ARMED FORCES: Man Behind the Power

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Pilots' Admiral. In dark December 1941 the Navy picked Captain Radford to centralize and expand the Navy's flight training program. After a fast survey Radford announced that the Navy could up its training program from 300 pilots a year to 25,000—and proceeded during the next 16 months to push through just such an expansion. Few were surprised when the Navy promoted him to rear admiral and sent him out to command one of the newly forming carrier attack groups in the Pacific —even though Radford had never commanded a ship.

From his flagship Enterprise, Radford led Carrier Division II through the Gilbert Island landings, improvising air and sea tactics to meet each crisis, running his ships and men with warm command and cold logic. In May 1944 he was hustled back to Washington as Assistant Deputy Chief of Naval Operations (Air), where he beat loud drums for the cause of naval aviation and produced the Radford Report, a skillful survey of the delivery, combat use, rotation, repair and relocation of aircraft. Brought back to the Pacific in November 1944, when Japanese naval forces were dwindling fast, Radford was appointed commander of Carrier Division 6 with Admiral Marc Mitscher's vast Task Force 58. There he pasted Japanese shore installations from the South China Sea all the way north to Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Japan. His airmen called him the "pilots' admiral" because they knew that he could do himself anything he demanded of his air groups—and he knew well the fine line between possible and impossible. Once, while his flagship Yorktown was in the Philippines area, Radford got-orders to send his F4-U Corsairs on a 1,200-mile round-trip attack on Japan. The fighters, he calculated rapidly, would have only five minutes over the target and would not have enough fuel to return if they tangled with the enemy. He signaled his dissent with a famous line: "Negative—no safety factor," and the task force order was canceled.

"Billion-Dollar Blunder." After V-J day, Radford's basic good judgment gave way to blinkered zealotry. He led the Navy fight against 1) unification of the armed forces under a strong Department of Defense, and 2) the Air Force's strategic-bombing concept, symbolized by the intercontinental B-36, which Radford unhappily termed "a billion-dollar blunder." Such was Radford's quiet but sharp-toothed tenacity as he helped lead the famous "Revolt of the Admirals" (1948-49) that the Army's General Omar Bradley, then chairman of the J.C.S., got away with calling him one of the Navy's "fancy Dans who won't hit the line with all they have on every play unless they can call the signals."

Korea brought new crises, bigger budgets and a truce in the interservice knifing. In December 1952 President-elect Eisenhower and Defense Secretary Designate Charles E. Wilson made their trip to Korea. At Iwo Jima, in Korea, aboard the cruiser Helena (where Ike gathered prospective members of his Cabinet) and at Honolulu, Radford—as the Navy's Commander in Chief, Pacific—expounded his theories on military diplomacy and on the problems of Asia.