Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift

13 / Korea

13 / Korea After the Berlin Airlift, Tunner returned to his post as deputy commander of operations at MATS, with authority over all air transport divisions. He and his boss, General Laurence Kuter, made up, according to one account, a “good cop, bad cop” team, with Kuter playing the softer role. One writer said he “ran the new command, refined its doctrines and voiced its goals with deft diplomacy .” Tunner, meanwhile, “was perfectly happy to thunder around as the airlift operational leader, hawk big aircraft to anyone who would listen, and surge through his circling critics like a lion in a room full of terriers. . . . He was hardly the one to stay away from confrontation.” Kuter would “check his enthusiasm . . . until the time was right to turn him loose.”1 Tunner still found plenty of moments to show off his new doctrines. In April and May 1950 the army and the air force joined together for Operation Swarmer, to see if U.S. forces could deploy an entire infantry division by air, then keep it supplied in the same manner. This exercise was somewhat different for Tunner, in that most of the action would involve troop carrier planes launching paratroopers, not air transports landing the men directly onto the ground.Tunner had not usually been involved in this aspect of air operations,2 but Lieutenant General Lauris Norstad, deputy chief of staff for the air force and air commander for Swarmer, recognizedTunner’s expertise and picked him to command all airlift operations.This gave him control of a unified command, and his units dropped four 1,700-man regimental combat teams and air landed a fifth. Overall, his planes got 14,000 troops and 2,900 tons of equipment into the airhead established in the North Carolina woods for this exercise. 222 / Korea Tunner saw Swarmer as another way to prove that airlift could get the job done, and nothing was more important than that goal. Milton recalled that Tunner and the army officers differed as to what the top priority of MATS should be during the exercise; the army wanted specific items, while Tunner sought to maximize tonnage, always trying to prove what air transport could do. Tunner turned to Milton, “And he said to me, ‘What do you think?’ and I said, ‘Well I agree with the Army.’” And I’ve never seen him so mad in my life. When we left the meeting, he had a riding crop, I forget why, and he started hammering it on an automobile, and luckily not me.”Tunner yelled at Milton, “You just screwed up the whole damn maneuver.” But “that blew over and everything was fine” pretty quickly.3 What did not change were Tunner’s chief concerns. Looking at the lessons from Swarmer, Tunner stayed, as he always would, straight on focus. He advocated a unified transport command, which in this case meant moving troop carrier units from tactical air (where they were subordinate to the ground commanders they served), over to MATS (where they would be run by airlift professionals ). Subsequent events would confirm this approach in Tunner’s mind, but would also lead to considerable conflict with foes from his past as well as those to be made anew. Ground generals could never understand why they, the men facing the enemy directly, should not dictate airlift priorities, and would often challenge Tunner for control of the cargo planes. In addition, he would use this episode to advocate big airplanes, a step he took on all possible occasions. Never stepping off message one jot,Tunner told the Commerce and Industry Association of New York that while air transport in the United States benefited from solid organization and a glut of experienced personnel, what they really lacked were “a great pool of large transports.”4 Tunner did not have much time to pursue the matter. On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops, equipped withT-34/85 tanks, surged over the 38th parallel and invaded the South.Two days later, the United Nations Security Council called on member nations to assist South Korea, and President Truman committed U.S. forces to this conflict. The Korean War had begun. Airlift did not do too well at first. Its resources were diminished; less than a year after the Berlin crisis, MATS would have fewer than three hundred aircraft , a postwar low. That figure was going down fast; the very first U.S. plane lost in Korea was one of their C-54s, destroyed...