2. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. 13-40

Book I, Becoming an American: 4. White Silk Scarves and Open Cockpits; 5. Entering the Brotherhood; 6. A Fiasco and Reform; 7. Staying the Course; 8. A Fork in the Road; 9. "Let's Dive-Bomb the Bastards"

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Having attended Texas A&M, which was a military school where ROTC was mandatory, Schriever not surprisingly entered the Army on graduation. And San Antonio was where the Air Corps did advanced pilot training at Kelly Field. As Sheehan notes, "This was the romantic era of flying, of white silk scarves, leather helmets and goggles, and open cockpits." Schriever entered flight school in July 1932, was selected for Advanced training eight months later, graduated in June 1933 and was sent to March Field near Riverside, Calif., for a year of active duty as a second lieutenant. His mother and brother went with him to Riverside because the Depression had forced her to close the sandwich shop and Gerry could no longer afford tuitition at A&M.

Hap Arnold, then a lieutenant colonel, was commanding officer at March Field. Arnold was a West Point graduate who had learned to fly in 1911 at the aircraft factory the Wright brothers had started in Dayton, Ohio. He didn't see combat in World War I, but worked instead in Washington on the efforts to start mass production of airplanes. He testified for the defense in the 1925 court-martial of Billy Mitchell, who was charged with insubordination for his efforts to get the brass to recognize the importance of air power. Arnold was punished for his support of Mitchell by being sent to the cavalry post at Fort Riley, Kansas, "to take charge of a small detachment of observation aircraft attached to the horse soldiers." By 1933, however, he had regained favor.

The Air Corps was still underfunded, however. "The B-3 and B-4 Keystone bombers that Bennie and his mates flew were big, ungainly biplanes with highly flammable cloth and wood-frame wings and fuselages." Flight instruments were primitive and fliers were limited to only four hours of flight a month when the weather was favorable. Schriever had plenty of time for golf, which allowed him to network, and his mother made friends with Arnold's wife, which "led to Bennie becoming well acquainted with his commanding officer."

In 1934, a scandal involving commercial contracts for flying the mail led President Roosevelt to temporarily turn over the job to the Air Corps, whose planes were, as noted above, poorly equipped especially for night flying. But given that it was an improvement over being able to fly only four hours a month, the pilots were eager to do it. "To keep from freezing in the open cockpits, the pilots wore leather face masks and flying suits, both lined with sheepskin." But the lack of instrumentation was disastrous: "Twelve pilots were killed in all and there were sixty-six crashes. Roosevelt turned the job over to commercial fliers again in June, but the deaths had made the government aware of the state of the Air Corps' equipment.

The threat of war in Europe that became apparent in the mid-1930s led to the development of better military aircraft, including the B-17 Flying Fortress that Boeing produced in 1935, a dozen of which were on their way to Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. "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."

But Schriever had been forced by the lack of funding to return to civilian life in March 1935. He and his mother returned to San Antonio, where they were joined later by Gerry, who completed his college course work at the University of San Antonio and entered the same Flying School that Bennie had attended. Bennie took charge of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp on the Arizona-New Mexico border in June 1935 and developed skills at managing people.

In 1936 the Air Corps was building up again, and Schriever went to Albrook Field in Panama, where the commander for the Canal Zone, Brigadier General George H. Brett, heard of Schriever's golf prowess and asked him for some pointers on improving his game. Brett made him one of his aides and one day in 1937 sent him to pick up his daughter, Dora, who was arriving on a transport ship after a stay in Washington. After leaving the Air Corps again and taking a job as a co-pilot for Northwest Airlines in Seattle, he married Dora in January 1938 at the home of Hap Arnold, who was a good friend of the Bretts, in Washington. Arnold became head of the Air Corps in September of that year and urged Schriever to apply for a commission again. Schriever was sworn in on October 1, 1938. The Schrievers' first child, Brett Arnold, was born on March 23, 1939.

George Brett had been put in charge of the testing facilities and laboratories at Wright Field near Dayton, and requested that Schriever be assigned to him as a test pilot. Schriever entered the Air Corps Engineering School at Wright Field in July 1940, and impressed its commandant, George Kenney, so much that he was selected to go to Stanford in September 1941 to get a master's in advanced aeronautical engineering. The Schrievers' second child, a daughter they named Dodie Elizabeth, was born in June, and the family moved to Menlo Park, Calif. After Pearl Harbor, Schriever was assigned to the Southwest Pacific Area of the Army Air Services in Australia, but he was not to leave until he had completed his work at Stanford, which he did in June 1942.

Schriever reported for duty in Melbourne where his father-in-law was a lieutenant general in charge of the Allied Air Forces, Southwest Pacific Area, but was about to be relieved of that command by Douglas MacArthur. Brett's replacement was George Kenney, and Schriever was promoted to major and sent to the 19th Bombardment Group to be engineering officer in charge of maintenance. Kenney chose to focus on bombing raids against the Japanese in New Guinea, and Schriever and Major John Dougherty put together a strike crew. Schriever and Dougherty flew a B-17 that dropped flares to illuminate the targets for the other bombers that followed. 

One night a cloud bank intervened between them and the targets on which they were to drop flares, so Dougherty, "a wild streak of an Irishman," decided to dive-bomb the target. "Schriever glanced at the airspeed indicator and it was registering 260 miles per hour. In fact, no one was ever known to have attempted bombing with a B-17 in this harum-scarum manner." They came under heavy fire, but received only six hits from small-arms fire. Dougherty won a Silver Star and Schriever an Air Medal for the maneuver. They later received Purple Hearts -- though neither was wounded (the medal was designated only for wounds later) -- for another raid over Rabaul in October. Schriever was then transferred to the Fifth Air Force Service Command as chief of the Maintenance and Engineering Division.

1. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, by Neil Sheehan, pp. ix-12

Foreword; Prologue: A Rite of Succession; Book I, Becoming an American: 1. Ellis Island and a Tragedy in Texas, 2. A Benefactor and the House on the Twelfth Green, 3. The Virtues of Golf

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A slow start: Once the prefatory stuff is got through, Sheehan gives us the obligatory family history, childhood and education chapters for his subject, Bernard (né Bernhard) Schriever. The foreword gives us the thesis:

This other [space] race initiated America's exploration and exploitation of space and was for the highest stakes -- preventing the Soviet Union from acquiring an overwhelming nuclear superiority that could tempt Soviet leaders into international blackmail and adventurism with calamitous results for human civilization. 

The "Prologue" takes us to January 1946, when Gen. Henry Harley "Hap" Arnold -- so nicknamed, Sheehan tells us, "because of his unusual smile" (telling us why it was unusual would have been more useful) -- is getting ready to retire and turn over command of the Army Air Forces to Carl "Tooey" Spaatz (whose nickname is not explained here). Gen. George Marshall had made Arnold a member of the Joint Chiefs during the war, preparing the way for the independent branch of the service that the Air Force became.

Arnold wasn't an innovator, but now he wanted to cultivate scientists and technologists to face postwar challenges, realizing that the war had proved air power to be essential to U.S. security. So he called on Col. Bernard "Bennie" Schriever (who had "acquired his nickname from the sportswriters" in San Antonio, where he was "a champion amateur golfer as a youth and they had wanted a snappy moniker for their articles about his exploits on the links").  So much for nicknames -- or "snappy monikers." Arnold emphasized to Schriever  the importance of technological innovation: "The Third World War will be different. It will be won by brains." He wanted Schriever to head a Scientific Liaison Branch in the Research and Engineering Division of the Air Force.

He would go on to become the father of the modern, high-technology Air Force and play a pivotal role in preserving peace during the grim years of the Cold War by building the first weapon in the history of warfare that was meant to deter rather than to be fired in anger -- the intercontinental ballistic missile.

So after that moniker-riddled prologue, we go back to the beginnings. Schriever's German-born parents, Adolph Schriever and Elizabeth Milch, meet in America and marry in Hoboken in 1908. They return to Germany and she gives birth to their first son, Bernhard Adolph, in Bremen in September 1910, and their second, Gerhard, two years later. When the war begins in August 1914, Adolph, an engineer on the George Washington, a passenger ship of the North German Lloyd line, is in New York and is detained for the duration of the war. In 1917 Elizabeth and the boys manage to sail from Rotterdam, in neutral Holland, to the United States, arriving just two months before the Americans enter the war. Adolph is allowed to join them -- although he and his fellow engineers had tried to sabotage the George Washington's engines before they left the ship.

The Schrievers move to the Texas hill country, which has a large German community, and Adolph goes to work in a brewery in New Braunfels and then in a factory in San Antonio where he's involved in an accident that fractures his skull in two places. He dies shortly after his thirty-fifth birthday in 1918. Elizabeth and the boys go to live with an uncle of Adolph's in Lubbock for a year, and then move back to New Braunfels where she works in a butcher shop and as a housekeeper. Unable to make living for the family that way, she puts the boys in an orphanage in San Antonio for six months until she she finds a job.

More nicknaming: At some point Bernhard becomes Bernard and then Ben. His brother, Gerhard, becomes Gerry. In third grade, Bernard makes friends with Felix McKnight, who grows up "to become a prominent Texas newspaperman -- co-publisher and editor of the Dallas Times Herald." Elizabeth gets a job as head housekeeper in the mansion of a banker, Edward Chandler, in San Antonio. Chandler builds a house for them on the edge of a golf course, as well as a refreshment stand near the twelfth green of the course where the boys sell soft drinks and lemonade to golfers. After Chandler's death, Elizabeth takes over the refreshment stand and makes a business out of it.

The brothers learn to play golf, and Bernard becomes very good at it. Sheehan makes maybe a little too much of this, claiming that "The game requires enormous and sustained powers of concentration and self-control, because it is as much mental as physical" and that this explains the stability and patience Schriever exhibited later in life when, after missile test failures, "He would remain calm and press on with the searching and questioning." In any case, "There was a kind of Teutonic quality about him. Reserve was his most natural state." On the other hand, during his career as a teenage amateur golfer, "The self-control Schriever displayed in tournaments did not mean that he lacked a temper. When he was playing badly for some reason, he would curse vehemently and fling whatever club he happened to have in his hands a remarkable distance." So much for "sustained powers of concentration and self-control" and "Teutonic reserve."

He enters Texas A&M in 1927, with tuition help from his mother's sandwich stand and his father's brother George, who was a successful businessman in Union City, New Jersey. He becomes a star amateur golfer, and "gained a mention in Ripley's Believe It or Not for three times driving more than 300 yards to the same green on the Brackenridge course and one-putting for an eagle." (I have no idea what any of that means.) He majors in construction engineering at A&M and on graduation in 1931 is offered a position as golf pro at a course in Bryan, Texas. But he decides to join the Army Air Corps and become a flier.