Modern Marvels: Strategic Air Command

Flight Journal, Apr 2004 by Farmer, James

Modern Marvels: Strategic Air Command Video may be ordered from www.HistoricAviation.com; $24.95.

"Strategic Air Command" is a 50-minute, 2001 production of the A&E Television Network. The comprehensive documentary recounts SAC's evolution from its inception in March 1946 to its dissolution in June 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Setting the stage for what was arguably the most powerful military organization that the world has ever seen, the video opens with a review of the historic evolution of strategic bombardment from its theoretic inception to the stratagem's initial application during the final stages of WW I. We follow Gene "Billy" Mitchell's famed trial bombing of the captured German dreadnought Ostfriesland in 1921 and the growth of the U.S. 8th and 20th Strategic Air Forces during WW II.

While SAC's first commander was more focused on the creation of a separate USAF, it is the arrival of the unit's second CO in October of 1948, the famous "Iron Trail" Gen. Curtis LeMay, who begins to create the monster organization we came to heavily depend on during the height of the Cold War. Finding that the nation's atomic weapons remained under the control of the Atomic Energy Commission and that even the routing and targeting of potential enemy targets were lacking in part or entirely, LeMay hit the ground running. "Discipline was the name of the game," former SAC CO Gen. Russell Dougherty tells us at one point. But spot promotions and the creation of select crews also became a part of the LeMay mix.

The costly pursuit of advances led to the development of technology from the B-29, B-50 and B-36 to the all-jet B-47 and B-52s with the supporting aerial refueling systems of KC-97S, and later the KC-135s and KC-10s, to get bombs on any target in the world. By the fall of 1959, SAC had test-fired its first ICBM, the Atlas, but it was only with the arrival of the solid-fuel Minute Man missile that a true rapid-response missile system was in place. It was the triad of bombers with land- and sea-launched missiles that shored up the West's defenses during the height of the Cold War, and it was the sobering B-52 losses during Vietnam's Linebacker II operations that finally revealed the vulnerability of conventional strategic bombers.

All in all, "Strategic Air Command" is a remarkable survey of an incredible organization.

-James Farmer