Aviation Supply Depot, where he now worked, “that his brother, Harry, had a serious romantic interest in a Gentile girl who lived in Germantown.” Gold and Mary Lanning dated regularly from September onward. She evidently accepted him as a serious suitor, but she sensed, Harry knew, that he was holding something back:
Even in the very beginning a warning bell sounded: suppose that the Grand Jury Investigation in 1947 is really not the end of all inquiry into my life, and who knew better than I on what a precarious house of cards my whole life rested? And from the very first I realized, and Mary often remarked on it, that I never could be completely relaxed and at ease in her presence. But she never suspected the real cause.
He could no more have told her about his years of espionage work than he could have confessed to murder, though he seems to have edged toward disclosure at least once, Mary Lanning recalled for the FBI:
She… said that at one time during the period of her acquaintanceship with Gold he had mentioned a visit to New Mexico. She said that she recalled his mention of having been in the city of Santa Fe. The exact dates of those visits were not known to her, but she believed that it was during the period he was employed by Pennsylvania Sugar Company, as he indicated that Pennsylvania Sugar had had some interest in a Coca Cola bottling plant in that area.
So Harry threw himself into heart research, receiving regular promotions, and uneasily courted the snub- nosed girl of his dreams.
In the same season — on September 1, 1948 — Donald Maclean departed New York with his family for reassignment in England. Before he left, the Atomic Energy Commission gave him a farewell luncheon at the elegant old Hays Adams Hotel.
The crisis in Berlin had spurred the US Air Force to review its readiness to go to war. The Strategic Air Command in particular — the United States's only deterrent in 1948 — was notably below standard. Hoyt Vandenberg, the senator's nephew and since April 1948 the USAF Chief of Staff, asked the distinguished aviator Charles Lindbergh to study the Air Force's atomic squadrons and recommend their improvement. Lindbergh flew with SAC aircrews through the first summer of the Berlin airlift. He found them ill-trained and overworked. Even the 509th contrived to inflate its training record. During July, it made 386 visual bomb drops from under 25,000 feet with an average circular error of 353 feet but only forty-four drops from above 25,000 feet with an average circular error of more than one mile. It made four visual drops for each radar drop. Since the SAC atomic mission would be to bomb the Soviet Union by radar at night from above 25,000 feet, the 509th training program corresponded to shooting fish in a barrel. Lindbergh's indictment was blunt. “The personnel for atomic squadrons were not carefully enough selected,” he found, “the average pilot's proficiency is unsatisfactory, teamwork is not properly developed and maintenance of aircraft and equipment is inadequate. In general, personnel are not sufficiently experienced in their mission.”
Lauris Norstad retraced Lindbergh's SAC investigation and confirmed his findings. Three years after the war, with the Soviets actively probing US intentions, the only atomic striking force was still not combat-ready. Norstad insisted that Vandenberg appoint a new commander. “Vandenberg asked whom he would recommend,” writes a military historian, “and Norstad responded with a question: Who would you want in command of SAC if war broke out tomorrow? The chief of staff quickly replied: LeMay.”
Perhaps restless at USAFE with Tunner running the airlift, LeMay signed on enthusiastically on October 19, 1948. He arrived at SAC headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, with a roar. “The first morning,” one of his staff officers recalled, “… General LeMay said, ‘As the first order of business, I want to review the war plan.’” There was no war plan, LeMay storms:
Then I asked about the status of training: “Let me see your bombing scores.” “Oh,” was the response, “we are bombing right on the button.” They produced the bombing scores, and they were so good I didn't believe them. The same was true of the radar bombing scores. Then, looking a little further, I found out that SAC wasn't bombing from combat altitudes, but from 12,000 to 15,000 feet. I looked at the radar picture, and the planes weren't at altitude. There had been trouble with the radars working at altitude. Instead, the crews bombed down where the radars would work. Instead of bombing a realistic target, they were bombing a reflector on a raft out in the ocean… It was completely unrealistic.
“We didn't have one crew,” LeMay adds in his memoirs,
“The day that was bloody was the first day or two that General LeMay was there,” the staff officer, Jack Catton, continues. “[The General was] so disappointed and frustrated with what [he] found in the Strategic Air Command when [he] came back to command it, that it got right bloody. General LeMay assembled the staff and advised who was going to stay and who was going to go. He restaffed himself right then. So it was bloody, but it was necessary and appropriate, and we really got a head of steam going.” Catton survived the purge.
“Everybody thought they were doing fine,” the new SAC commander understood. “The first thing to do was convince them otherwise.” After moving the command from Andrews to Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska (a basing decision concluded before he arrived), LeMay ordered a maximum-effort mission against Wright Field at Dayton, Ohio — “a realistic combat mission, at combat altitudes, for every airplane in SAC that we could get in the air.” Since Air Force intelligence could supply only vintage prewar aerial photographs of Soviet cities, LeMay gave his crews 1938 photographs of Dayton. He instructed them to bomb by radar from thirty thousand feet and to aim for industrial and military targets, not radar reflectors.
“Oh, I'll admit the weather was bad,” he recalled in retirement of the January 1949 mission. “There were a lot of thunderstorms in the area; that certainly was a factor. But on top of this, our crews were not accustomed to flying at altitude. Neither were the airplanes, far as that goes. Most of the pressurization wouldn't work, and the oxygen wouldn't work. Nobody seemed to know what life was like upstairs.” Not many crews even found Dayton. For those who did, bombing scores ran from one to two miles off target, distances at which even Nagasaki-yield atomic bombs would do only marginal damage.
LeMay called the results of the Dayton exercise “just about the darkest night in American military aviation history. Not one airplane finished that mission as briefed.
The knot of the Berlin crisis finally loosened over the 1948 Christmas holidays. The winter had been severe, fog in particular limiting deliveries, and stockpiles in Berlin were running low. “It looked like curtains,” Army Undersecretary William Draper remembered. “If that fog had stayed another three weeks we probably would have had to run up the white flag. We probably couldn't have gone on. You can't have people starving and keep on with the occupation. But the weather lifted about the fifth of January… and immediately we restored the situation. The Russians knew they were licked right away… ” At the same time, an economic counterblockade had pinched the Soviet zone of Germany severely, reducing needed imports in 1948 by 45 percent.
Stalin sent a signal of capitulation at the end of January 1949. Kingsbury Smith, an American journalist, had telegraphed the Soviet leader a series of questions. Stalin responded to one which asked if he was prepared to lift
