Word: lemay
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...bright California morning last week, bomb-shaped General Curtis Emerson LeMay, boss of the Strategic Air Command, landed at March Air Force Base near Riverside, stepped off the ramp, glanced at his watch, then stared dourly at the calm, brilliant sky, and waited. Soon three big, eight-jet B-52 SAC bombers streaked into view in tight formation, peeled off and landed a minute apart, their huge brake parachutes billowing from their tails. Throttled down, the planes sedately taxied two miles to the base-operations building, their high-pitched, throbbing scream searing the air. Then, abruptly, the planes were silent...
...Conquest. The momentous trip, announced the happy LeMay with transparent modesty, was "just another training mission, no different from dozens and dozens of others." In some ways, this was true. The crews were as carefully briefed and seemingly as routinely inured as for any long-distance trip. Yet as they proved once again SAC's enormous everyday striking power, it was also clear that SAC's able flyers had made the kind of history that would soar to the top of man's unending catalogue of conquests over nature...
Commanding the flight from the lead plane was 50-year-old Major General Archie J. Old Jr., who coordinated the trip, kept in constant radio contact direct with LeMay's headquarters in Omaha. Texas-born Archie Old, like Curt LeMay, is no West Pointer, was an auto dealer with a reserve commission in the Air Corps until he was called to active duty in September 1940. Squarejawed, blue-eyed, thoroughly able, he rose with phenomenal speed in wartime to command the Eighth Air Force's 96th Bomb Group at a ripe 36, led the first shuttle-bomb raid...
...North American continent experiences its worst weather ... On the day operations were most intense, there were three major weather fronts across the North American continent. The Civil Aeronautics Administration was hard pressed to keep abreast of all SAC and civilian air traffic." Despite such difficulties, tough, exacting General Curtis LeMay's SAC put on a near-perfect display of massive, smooth-functioning air power: every plane took off on schedule, every aerial refueling (the B-47s used some 16 million gallons of fuel during the exercise) was successfully carried out at the proper time in the proper place...
Like Any Other Funds. Calmly Wilson told the committee he knew that such earlier witnesses as Air Force Chief of Staff Nathan F. Twining and SAC Boss Curtis LeMay had warned that the Soviet Union might overtake the U.S. in airpower. But frankly, he disagreed with them. Some of the disagreement he attributed to honest differences of opinion, some to congressional misinterpretation, some to "eager-beaver" speechwriters of the armed forces. But he was sure that the U.S. has and will keep an all-important qualitative lead over the Russians...