The Majors Read online

  Christ, the DCSOPS thought, he’s right about that.

  “It would be a slap in the face to those officers, myself included,” Colonel Gregory said, “who have worked so long and so hard to get army aviation this far. The suggestion, frankly, infuriates me.”

  “I respectfully suggest that Colonel Gregory has made my point,” MacMillan said. “The Flying Club will be furious if they don’t get to spend all the money the army is about to pour into army aviation any way they want to. They mean well, General. But they just don’t know about ground combat.”

  “Is that all you have, Major?” the DCSOPS asked. He saw that Colonel Gregory’s face was livid with scarcely concealed fury.

  “Yes, sir,” MacMillan said, and came to attention.

  “I’ll look this over, Major,” the DCSOPS said. “And have these gentlemen look it over and offer their comments.”

  “Thank you very much, sir,” MacMillan said. “May the major consider himself dismissed, General?”

  “You can go, Mac,” the general said. MacMillan saluted, did a crisp about-face, and marched out of the office, dipping his knees just low enough to pick up his briefcase as he walked past the coffee table.

  There was silence in the room for a moment. Then the Assistant DCSOPS chuckled as he leafed through the proposed table of organization and equipment.

  “Well, he’s got brass, I’ll say that for him,” he said. “This thing calls for a colonel, a light colonel, two majors, four captains, and a dozen lieutenants. And eleven aircraft.”

  “Eleven aircraft?” the aviation officer asked, a bitter tone in his laugh. “Only eleven?”

  “A twin-engine Beech, two Beavers, three Cessna L-19s, two H-19s, an H-34, and two H-13s,” the assistant DCSOPS said, reading from the proposed table of organization and equipment. “That’s eleven.”

  “Mac’s a nice fellow,” Colonel Gregory said (reverting, the DCSOPS thought, to the ridicule it and it’ll go away tactic). “Not too smart, but nice. Let’s also give him a B-29, a squadron of P-51s, and maybe a C-54.” He and the Assistant DCSOPS enjoyed their laugh.

  “I was about to say have a couple of photocopies of that staff study made,” the DCSOPS said. “But if there is only one copy, if it leaks, we’ll know where it leaked. You take it first, Colonel Gregory, and list your objections to it, and then send it to me through General Kellogg.”

  “Does the general really intend to put this through the review procedure?” Colonel Gregory asked, in disbelief.

  “The general does,” the general said. “You and General Kellogg are it, Greg. Review it and get it back to me in a week, will you, please?”

  “Yes, sir,” the aviation officer said. “Will there be anything else, sir?”

  “Yeah. No matter what I decide, MacMillan was right about the efficiency report. Fix it so you rate him, Greg, and I’ll endorse it. I may not give him his empire, but I’m sending him down there to work for me, not the Aviation Board. Or what was it he said, ‘the Cincinnati Flying Club’?”

  (Two)

  Marburg an der Lahn

  West Germany

  23 December 1954

  There was a side to Lt. Col. Edgar R. Withers’s late-blooming rebirth in the Lord Jesus Christ which worked to Major Craig W. Lowell’s advantage. Colonel Withers called Lowell into his office for a little private chat and told him, man to man, that he believed that Ilse’s tragic death was the means the Lord had taken to test Lowell, to see if Lowell could measure up to his dual responsibility as a Christian to be both father and mother to the “poor lad.”

  Withers said he was going to arrange Lowell’s duty schedule so that Lowell could make frequent trips to Marburg. He did that, and he even “understood” when Lowell got the spectacular speeding ticket.

  Lowell had arranged through Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes’s London office to buy a Jaguar convertible “out of routine merchanting,” in other words, without having to wait his turn on the waiting list. The Jaguar arrived in Germany two weeks after he ordered it, by coastal ship to Bremen, and he rode up to Bremen to pick it up on a troop train carrying military personnel to the army’s maritime facility in Bremerhaven.

  He had no sooner got on the Frankfurt-Munich autobahn when a Mercedes whipped past him doing at least ninety. He remembered having heard that there was no speed limit on the autobahn and shoved his foot to the floor.

  He was arrested by military police near Hersfeld. The no speed limit did not apply to American officers. It applied only to the Germans. He shortly found himself replying by indorsement to the commanding general of Seventh Army, explaining why he had violated the command’s 60-mile-per-hour speed limit by driving his personal vehicle in excess of 110 miles per hour on the autobahn near Hersfeld.

  Withers was required to punish him. He could have fined him a third of a month’s pay, and written a really nasty letter for his personnel file. He chose instead to “orally reprimand” him, the least of the punishments prescribed, and the oral reprimand consisted in bringing Lowell’s attention to the fact that if he should kill himself on the highways, “the lad” would be an orphan.

  While technically that was true, Peter-Paul Lowell would not have been left all alone in the world should his father wipe himself out on the autobahn.

  Schloss Greiffenberg, now that the Graf von Greiffenberg had returned “from the East”—the innocuous euphemism for Siberian imprisonment—was crowded with displaced Prussian and Thuringian and Pomeranian and Mecklenburgian kinfolk. All of them seemed to have had the foresight to either ship the family treasure out of East Germany before the Russians came, or even sooner to have opened numbered bank accounts in Zurich.

  While they bemoaned the loss of their estates to the Bolsheviks, they were living as they had lived for centuries, in castles, tended to by servants, and with little to occupy their time but the investment of their capital—and the care of a little boy.

  Elizabeth, the Pomeranian Baroness von Heuffinger-Lodz, Lowell soon learned, was the first among equals of his German in-laws. Shortly after he returned “from the East,” not long after Ilse had been killed, Lowell’s father-in-law was offered a commission in the Bundeswehr, Germany’s new army. There were not all that many ex-colonels around whose opposition to Hitler was certifiable and thus were safe to lead a new German army.

  There was no question about accepting the commission. It was his duty to das Vaterland to accept an officer’s commission, as his ancestors had for seven hundred years. Lowell’s father-in-law was now Generalmajor Graf von Greiffenberg, Deputy Chief of Intelligence.

  It had seemed entirely logical to the Graf, with his daughter dead, and his American son-in-law at war in Korea, to turn the rearing of his grandson over to a widowed relative. That, too, had been going on in the family for hundreds of years. And when Craig Lowell thought it through, it seemed logical to him, too. The boy was obviously better off here than he would be “at home” in the United States, with a grandmother in a funny farm and the only other “logical” choice for his rearing Craig’s cousin Porter Dawes and his wife. There would be time, Lowell had decided, to make the boy aware of his American heritage later. At the moment, his father was busy, trying as best he could to save his military career.

  Herr Generalmajor (he was either so addressed, or as “Herr Graf”; it was as if he had no Christian name) seemed confused about Craig’s status as an army aviator. There had been two-seater Feisler Storche airplanes in the Wehrmacht, too, flown by people one didn’t pay much attention to. It was hardly the sort of thing an officer and a gentleman did.

  Lowell did not tell his father-in-law of his difficulty with the army. It wasn’t that he was ashamed of what he had done—he had had a moral obligation to stand up and be counted when the army had tried to screw Phil Parker, and Ilse had been long dead before he had become involved with Georgia Paige—but rather that his father-in-law, for whom he had a great deal of respect, had simply presumed that Lowell, like himself, was an officer and an arist
ocrat, and Lowell really liked that.

  It would have been awkward to acknowledge that he was on the shit list, or even that he was in trouble at all. As a result, Lowell found himself arguing the case for army aviation with a good deal more conviction than he really felt.

  Herr Generalmajor didn’t seem to be overly impressed with Craig’s arguments, and often made references to Craig’s “next command.” There would be no “next command” in tanks, Lowell knew; and he doubted, in his dark moments, if there would ever be an aviation command more important than an aerial motorpool. Even if the dreamers had their way and eventually got their aviation battalions, he doubted that he would be given such a command.

  Craig was determined, however, to be close to his son, which meant seeing him often, even if Ilse’s relatives seemed to treat him sometimes as the vestige of an unfortunate alliance that would best be forgotten. Only his father-in-law and Elizabeth von Heuffinger-Lodz seemed to really accept him as a member of the family.

  To solve Craig’s time-in-transit problem, the Graf turned over to his son-in-law an enormous Mercedes sedan, equipped with the special license plates issued to general officers of the Bundeswehr. That kept the German police at a respectful distance, and the U.S. Army Military Police no longer had authority to control speeding German vehicles on the autobahn. Lowell rented a garage in Augsburg, leaving the Mercedes in it when he was on duty and the Jaguar there when he drove to Marburg.

  His personal life in the military society at Augsburg was unsatisfactory, but he had expected that, and it didn’t particularly bother him. He had decided against taking an apartment “on the economy,” although the Generalmajor offered to help him find one. He didn’t intend to stay in Augsburg when he had time off anyway, and he didn’t want to call attention to himself.

  He lived in the BOQ. Despite the notion that “initial utilization tour” aviators were assigned without regard to rank and branch of service, and that he was nothing more than a commissioned jeep driver, he was, de facto and de jure, a major, a field-grade officer.

  Nonaviators disliked aviators, as a general rule. Not only were they regarded, once again, as nothing more than jeep drivers with commissions, but salt was rubbed into that wound by flight pay. Aviator lieutenants made as much money as nonflying captains.

  The old-time aviators, the ones who ran the Seventh Army Flight Detachment and told Major Lowell when and where he was to fly, were required to pay to him the military courtesy captains and lieutenants are obliged to show to majors. They lived in company-grade, single-room BOQs, while “young Major Lowell” (how the hell did he get to be a major?) was assigned a field-grade officer’s two-room suite. They might be flight examiners and his instructors in the finer points of helicopter flight, but they were the ones who pulled officer of the day and conducted inventories of the unit supply room. Majors are not expected to do that sort of thing.

  Lowell made some friends among them, of course. They weren’t all either commissioned cretins or fools. He understood a good deal of the resentment the old-timers felt toward the newcomers. As it became increasingly evident that army aviation was going to grow, it had become just as evident to the old-timers that after having taken all the crap they had all those years, the newcomers were about to take all the gravy.

  A letter from MacMillan, eight lines long, and with six misspelled words, reported that a Combat Developments Office had been set up under the DCSOPS at Camp Rucker. Lowell felt more than a little uneasy about that, for Bill Roberts had written shortly afterward, bitterly reporting the same thing and saying it was the first step in the establishment’s attempt to take over army aviation. It would be very embarrassing if Bill Roberts found out that Lowell had put MacMillan’s thoughts into a presentable form. He had done it for MacMillan primarily because Mac was just back from the escapade in Indo-China, and somehow felt he was paying him back for taking care of Sandy.

  Mac would have really looked like the dumb ass he was if he had submitted his proposals to the brass in the form they had been in when he had showed them to Lowell. But Mac had been right: the Army simply couldn’t afford to turn a vastly expanded army aviation program over to the Cincinnati Flying Club. Not because the members of the Club weren’t competent, for they were about the only people around aviation who were, but because there was not enough of them to go around. When they ran out of Cincinnati Flying Club members for responsible jobs, they would have to get people outside of aviation altogether, for the vast bulk of the other army aviators simply were unqualified.

  The subject of the low quality of aviation officers as a personnel problem for the future had been the subject of several of Lowell’s long letters to Bill Roberts. Roberts was now a full colonel at Camp Rucker and president of the Army Aviation Board. Lowell had suggested solutions, including the periodic reassignment of officers to their basic branch, so officers would know something besides flying. Roberts argued that what the army needed was a separate branch for aviation, Army Air Corps II. Lowell had concluded that Roberts was wrong and MacMillan right.

  Lowell—after some time—finally acquired adequate skill as a pilot by the simple expedient of flying whenever he had the chance, and, where necessary, by using his rank to get the more interesting flights (ferrying brass around during maneuvers, for example). There was no longer any question in his mind that he was a competent pilot, but that was not the same thing as saying that he was a good one. He had to work at it. He could not swoop and soar like real aviators, who flew as if they had been born to fly.

  It was during a brass-ferrying flight near Bad Tolz that he had his own rebirth of faith, not in Lt. Col. Edgar R. Withers’s Lord and Savior, but in army aviation.

  The brass hat he was chauffeuring was a brigadier general, the European Command’s deputy quartermaster general. Like most technical service soldiers, the general took his role in the scheme of things very seriously. He was up at the crack of dawn, loaded down with steel helmet and field equipment, and had kept Lowell busy flying between one supply point and another.

  Many of the supply points where the general stopped to jack up the troops were Class IV, POL, Petrol, Oil and Lubricants. One of them, inevitably, was engaged in refueling a tank battalion.

  As Lowell made the approach to a field beside the road, he was at first—and automatically—critical. The M48s were too close to one another. If they were attacked by enemy tanks or aircraft, or if there was a fueling fire, one exploding tank would blow up others. The company commanders didn’t know what they were doing, and neither did the battalion commander, or he would have straightened things out.

  But the battalion commander had a battalion, Lowell reminded himself. Although Major Craig W. Lowell had commanded a battalion-sized task force and he had fought so well with it that it was now in the textbooks, he would never be given command of one again.

  He had another thought, as he prepared to land the H-13:

  Christ! he thought. If I had a couple of 3.5 rocket launchers mounted on the skids of this thing, I could take out two of those tanks and be gone before they knew what hit them!

  As quickly as the thought came to him, he shot it down. There was no way to mount rocket launchers on a helicopter’s landing skids, and even if there was, there would be no way to aim them.

  And just as quickly came the solutions. Rocket launchers had no recoil. They kicked up a lot of dust on the ground, but that wasn’t recoil. A rocket’s propelling charge recoiled against the atmosphere. They could be fired from choppers. And they could be aimed by aiming the whole airframe. A helicopter is capable of movement through all axes.

  While the assistant quartermaster general was off shaking up his troops, Lowell made a sight for rocket fire. He took off his aviator’s metal-framed sunglasses and snapped their lenses out. Then he bent them into a U at the nosepiece. Then he found his personal roll of toilet paper, invariably carried when playing soldier on maneuvers where one crapped where one found the opportunity. He unrolled it all, and took
the paper tube on which it had been wrapped and shoved it through the bent frame. Finally, he taped it to the top of the control panel, and tried to line it up parallel to the center line of the H-13.

  When the assistant quartermaster general got back into the H-13 and ordered himself transported to the next outpost of his logistic empire, Lowell made a mock rocket firing run over the parked tanks.

  Sighting through the toilet paper tube would work!

  “Major,” the assistant quartermaster general asked, “what the hell was that strange maneuver you just made? You some sort of a hot-rodder?”

  Lowell could think of nothing to reply that wouldn’t make him look even more foolish in the general’s eyes. He said nothing.

  “Don’t do anything like that again,” the general said.

  “Yes, sir,” Lowell said.

  “And take whatever that is you’ve got taped to the dashboard off,” the general ordered. “It’s unmilitary.”

  Unmilitary or not, Lowell thought, as he pulled off his ruined sunglasses and the toilet paper tube and threw them out the door, that’s going to affect tank warfare even more than the 3.5 rocket itself did. It gets the rocket to the tank. And the army could swap one $75,000 helicopter for one enemy $500,000 tank. That would be a real bargain, even if the enemy got the chopper. By the time the tankers could get the turret-mounted .50 caliber machine gun in action, they wouldn’t have time to engage it. Not until the chopper had fired its rockets. He said it in his mind again: the army could afford to trade choppers for tanks all day long.

  That night he began to put it all down on paper. A thousand questions arose that would have to be answered. He started looking for the answers. He decided that before he even told Bill Roberts about it, he would have answers for those thousand questions, and maybe, if he could arrange it, he would be able to actually try firing rockets from a helicopter’s skids.

  Lowell wrote about it right away to Captain Phil Parker, telling Parker to keep his mouth shut. Lowell began to see rocket-firing helicopters as his way out of purgatory. He didn’t want some sonofabitch from the Cincinnati Flying Club latching on to his idea and claiming it as his own.