6.
The air mail fiasco was the beginning of the end to stagnation. In February 1934, President Roosevelt suddenly canceled the air mail contracts between the Post Office and the new-fledged commercial airlines because a Senate investigation had discovered evidence of fraud. Roosevelt had not acted, however, without first having postal officials ask Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, chief of the Air Corps, if his pilots could temporarily fly the mail until honest arrangements could be made with the airlines. Foulois regarded the president’s inquiry as an order. He also saw it as an opportunity to gain more appropriations for his strapped Air Corps by generating a lot of favorable publicity from a successful operation. “We have had a great deal of experience in flying at night, and in flying in fogs and bad weather, in blind flying, and in flying under all other conditions,” Foulois told the House Post Office Committee. Given the state of his aircraft and the amateurishness of his pilots, Foulois’s recklessness in accepting the mission and his false testimony to Congress bordered on the criminal.
To meet the schedule set by the Post Office did require flying at night and in bad weather. Commercial airline pilots were flying at night by the mid-1930s. They had two-way radios to obtain information on weather conditions ahead and at airfields where they intended to land and some rudimentary instruments to fly by when the weather was marginal. Air Corps pilots were not only unaccustomed to flying at night, they couldn’t talk to anybody from many of their aircraft, and they lacked both instrumentation and training for dicey weather. The weather that February and March of 1934 would have daunted the best of airline pilots, however, and certainly forced delays in mail delivery. It was some of the worst late-winter weather—blizzards, dense fog, frigid gales, heavy rains—since records had been kept and it struck much of the country, but especially the West, where Schriever and his comrades were operating.
Arnold was put in charge of the Western Region, with his headquarters at Salt Lake City. He broke his squadrons down into detachments so that they could be parceled out along the various routes. Every available aircraft, from the P-12 pursuits, to the observation planes, to the awkward Keystones, was thrust into the task. To keep from freezing in the open cockpits, the pilots wore leather face masks and flying suits, both lined with sheepskin. Bennie’s detachment was assigned portions of two routes, from Salt Lake City to Boise, Idaho, and from Salt Lake to Cheyenne, Wyoming, via Rock Springs. Schriever remembered the eagerness with which he and his fellow pilots accepted the challenge, as young warriors so often do when they go into harm’s way without knowing the odds. After the miserly four-hours-a-month diet, it was above all finally a chance to do some flying. Bennie’s time in the air escalated rapidly and by March and April he was logging nearly sixty hours a month.
On February 19, 1934, just as Foulois had promised, the U.S. Army Air Corps loaded the mail and flew into the breach, night and weather be damned. Three pilots out of Salt Lake were killed in a single day, two of them Bennie’s Flying School classmates. One was trying to make it to Boise, pressing on beneath steadily lowering weather, when he ran out of visibility and altitude at the same time and flew into the ground. The two others smacked into the side of a mountain they could not see, apparently while forging on through a snowstorm. On another occasion, Schriever and two other pilots drove out to the airfield at Cheyenne to take a couple of O-38 observation planes from Cheyenne back to Salt Lake at night. The two other pilots were West Pointers who outranked Bennie. They chose to fly together and to take off first in a newer model of the O-38, which had a canopy over the tandem cockpits to protect them from the weather. While Schriever waited behind them in the open-cockpit version, the two West Pointers sped down the runway. What they had neglected to do, because they were too unseasoned to understand the necessity, was to come out and familiarize themselves with the airfield in daylight. They used only part of the runway, pulling up before they had gained enough speed and lift to clear a high-tension wire concealed by the darkness just beyond the end of the field. Bennie watched them die instantly. Twelve pilots were killed in all and there were sixty-six crashes. Although most were obviously not fatal, the wrecks still made for unpleasant photographs in the newspapers. In late March, an embarrassed and angry Roosevelt arranged for the airlines to resume flying the mail as of the beginning of June.
Schriever and many of his fellow fliers came to believe that their comrades did not die in vain, that their deaths helped create an impetus to modernize the country’s air force and thus avoid defeat in the new war to come. An investigative board convened under Newton Baker, President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of war during the First World War, recommended important organizational changes in the Air Corps structure and a program of instrument and night flying for pilots as well as enough hours in the air, three hundred per year, to raise them to proficiency. The board did not specifically recommend equipping the Air Corps and Naval Aviation with state-of-the-art aircraft, but the deaths and the shocking nature of the episode made this necessity strikingly apparent. Progress and reform, however, were neither steady nor uninterrupted. The Roosevelt administration and Congress remained stingy until war in Europe loomed in 1938 and hostilities actually began the following year. The Regular Army generals who opposed any independence for the Air Corps used the War Department General Staff, which they controlled, to keep the pace to a slow march. Nevertheless, officers like Hap Arnold kept prodding and cajoling from within and notable advances occurred through the ingenuity and entrepreneurship of the struggling but resourceful American aircraft industry. In 1935, Boeing produced the prototype of the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress, the first of the long-range strategic bombers that, with the follow-on B-24 Liberator from the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, were to bring the dark cloud formations of destruction to Germany’s skies. With the exception of the B-29 Superfortress, another Boeing triumph that was developed during the war, most of the combat aircraft the U.S. Army Air Forces were to fly during the Second World War were either in production or soon to go into production by the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Bennie recalled flying the workhorse Curtiss P-40 fighter when he was a test pilot at Wright Field near Dayton, Ohio, in 1939. That same year, the Air Corps purchased the test models of the twin-engine Lockheed P-38, the first of the high-altitude American pursuits to approach the performance of the latest German and Japanese fighters. A rudimentary fighting air force was in place when it was needed. A dozen B-17s on their way to the Philippines were, in fact, preparing to land at Hickam Field in Hawaii when the Japanese arrived on that Sunday morning of December 7. To Schriever, the sequence was clear. Had the alarm not been raised by the air mail disaster, that rudimentary air force would not have existed when the moment of peril came. Another lesson was equally clear to him—technological backwardness meant failure and defeat.
The air mail fiasco also enabled Bennie to extend his flying duty for eight months, in niggardly increments of six months and then an additional two, until he finally was taken off active service in March 1935 and had to return to civilian life in San Antonio. Elizabeth went back with him to resurrect her sandwich stand. The Depression seemed to be easing a bit and she thought she could make a go of it once more. Gerry did stints as a social worker in Los Angeles and then in San Antonio, until he found a night job with an oil field mapping service. It enabled him to take enough classes during the day at what was then called the University of San Antonio to complete the two years of college that was then one of the minimal requirements for Flying School. He entered, as Bennie had, at Randolph Field in February 1938, and won his wings as a pursuit pilot the following February. One of Franklin Roosevelt’s programs to alleviate the Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps, shortly enabled Bennie to return to active duty. Each of the CCC camps had an Army officer in charge. In June 1935, he volunteered to take over a CCC camp on the Gila River along the Arizona-New Mexico border. The camp was four to five miles down a gravel road off a tarmac strip that led to the New Mexico railroad crossing town of Lordsburg.
The CCC was Schriever’s first lesson in unorthodox management. While now a Reserve first lieutenant in the Air Corps and theoretically the camp commander, he could not legally apply military discipline to the nearly 200 boys in the place because all of them were civilians. Duty with the CCC ruined a number of freshly begun military careers because the junior officers put in charge did apply ill-suited methods of military discipline and provoked a backlash. The youths, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, had volunteered to build small water retention dams and do other conservation work in the surrounding high desert country for a nominal salary. Most were whites from impoverished families in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, with a small number of Hispanics and a half dozen or so blacks. There was no segregation. The young men lived together in barracks. Schriever, at twenty-five not much older than his charges, decided that the only way he could acquire control of the camp was to identify those boys who seemed to be natural leaders and get them to run it for him. As carefully as he could, he chose the six to eight youths who stood out from the others and appointed them group leaders, in effect his top sergeants. They held regular meetings. Bennie urged them to level with him about any problems in the camp. They also held special meetings, in what Schriever called his “kangaroo court approach,” whenever one of the inevitable troublemakers among the camp population made a serious nuisance of himself. If the boys decided that the offender, who was not invited to hear his fate, was incorrigible, Schriever would give them the nod to run him out of the camp. There was no violence, simply enough harassment to persuade the nuisance to leave.
The lesson he learned running the CCC camp stayed with Bennie. He was to apply the method again and again throughout his career, ultimately in accomplishing the momentous projects he was given at its height: study a task, identify the right man to solve the problem—no yes-men, you have to know what is really going on and yes-men won’t tell you the truth—then win the man’s loyalty and back him up while he does the job. Capable people, he observed watching his youth leaders, also have minds of their own and you have to refrain from interfering and let them accomplish a task in their way. He made certain as well that his was a happy camp. He had Army trucks haul the boys into Lordsburg for baseball and basketball games against other camps or just for weekend liberty, showed films for entertainment, bought the best food he could locally, let the boys supplement it with the plentiful pheasants, quail, and doves they shot along the Gila River, and turned the kitchen over to a young man who happened to be a talented cook. When Bennie left in the summer of 1936 at the end of his year, the boys presented him with a .22 caliber Smith & Wesson target pistol and a wristwatch they took up a collection to buy.