Word: sacs
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...quick, certain fate awaited any LeMay man who betrayed the slightest sign of the milkshaky unpreparedness that enveloped the occupation troops of Germany and Japan. The Strategic Air Command (known to the Air Force as SAC) was a $310 million-a-year business, a top-priority task force with 1,100 planes, some 60,000 pilots, crewmen and groundmen. For 22 rugged months Curt LeMay had been holding them all to a relentless, competitive training schedule. With an impersonal assortment of charts and graphs -his "numbers racket," he called them -he kept a sharp, hazel-eyed watch on everything from...
...Plane. SAC's complicated and outsize bombers demand ice-cold thinking, endurance and guts from the men who fly them. The Consolidated Vultee B-36, a cigar-shaped aerial monster, is LeMay's blue-ribbon flying warship. It costs $4,700,000 before it ever gets off the ground (a small submarine costs $6,000,000). The tanks in its 230-ft. wing can swallow 2½ tank-car loads of gasoline, enough to feed its six pusher engines for nearly two days. It can cruise over the enemy out of sight of earth-and, the Air Force...
...commander of a B-36 is usually a captain or a major, on the average a seasoned "old man" of 29 years and 3,000 hours' flight experience. LeMay laced SAC with veteran pilots, navigators and bombardiers from his old World War II bomber commands in England, India and the Marianas. Around them he has tailored the individual B-36 flight crews, trains them for weeks in ground school and on the Consolidated assembly line before he allows them to set foot in the super-plane...
...number of B-36s now in service is secret, but the U.S. has more atom bombs than B-36s. Of SAC's 14 striking groups, only three have the intercontinental bombers. The rest of SAC's groups are equipped with World War II-type heavy bombers, now known as mediums. There are eight groups of Boeing B-29s (which SAC pilots used to call "mouse-powered," and their 2,200-h.p. engines, "dollar alarm clocks"), and there are three groups of their beefed-up postwar cousins, the Boeing B-50s. The mediums can't fly from...
...parade ground. There, in the evenings, he sits in a comfortable armchair pulling at his ever-present pipe. His gregarious, twinkly eyed wife Helen, whom he met 19 years ago at a dance, is not afraid to chatter, or to stray as far from the point as she chooses. SAC's officers have unconcealed admiration for LeMay's eleven-year-old daughter Jane, who frequently tells...