Word: schrievers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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During World War II Officer Schriever rose from captain to colonel, flew 63 missions chiefly as a B-17 pilot in the Pacific, rose through varied air-logistics jobs to command the advanced echelon of Far East Air Service Command. He saw less than an ambitious airman would want to of the shooting match, but he continued to qualify himself for research and development. He learned something of the shoestring tragedies of R and D when a B-17 fitted with a new flare-dropping rack that he had designed caught fire mysteriously over Cairns, Australia and crashed, killing...
Into Research. After 1938, when he won a Regular Army commission as a second lieutenant, Schriever headed like a self-guided missile into the heart of the growing field of aviation research and development. On the basis of his flying experience and his engineering background, he got a coveted job as test pilot at Ohio's Wright Field; there he flew anything that came along, frequently five or six new and unproven planes a day, all the way up to the B-17 which was then in modest production. He moved on to Wright Field's Air Corps...
...Schriever's request, the Air Corps sent him on from Wright Field to Stanford University for graduate work, whence he emerged a year later with an essential emblem of the missileman-to-be-a master's degree in mechanical engineering. Already he was looking ahead, piecing together his pictures of the future, systematically qualifying himself to take part...
...postwar armed forces began to explore new ways of war, the Air Force installed Schriever in the Pentagon to help plan a vague new development program. Month after month thereafter, he moved unobtrusively about the fringes of the chaos of the U.S.'s first moves into missilery. As early as 1950 he was one of the very few-and very unpopular-airmen who did not like the Air Force's cherished B-52. Schriever argued obstinately for a lighter, faster bomber that could fire air-to-ground missiles...
...Schriever lost that battle, and some others. Of an early ICBM project, he said: "It had a questionable military value based on the then state of the art, so we sort of put it on the back burner." But interest in missiles was picking up, and one of the reasons was Schriever's visionary enthusiasm. Everywhere he debated and discoursed upon the values and virtues of missiles, missiles, missiles with such fervor that, according to one friendly scientist, "they thought Ben was insane...