West Point ’41: The Class That Went to War and Shaped America

22 | Anticipating New Fronts

263 22 Anticipating New Fronts While the Fulda Gap was the anticipated route for a Soviet invasion of West Germany, the United States feared Communism was on the move everywhere. The Soviets had aggressively taken over Poland and Hungary. They were on the move in Mongolia. And in the year prior, America had felt Communism breathing down its red neck only ninety miles from Florida ’s shores in Cuba. But the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 by CIA-trained Cuban exiles had failed to topple Castro, Communism, or the threat of nuclear weapons within striking distance of the U.S. Ed Rowny, like Skowronek, had intensely studied Soviet ideology. While pursuing his master’s degree at Yale postwar, he had been exposed to leading experts on the Soviet Union as well as nuclear weapons. Chief among them was Gabriel Almond, who wrote the magnum opus Appeals to Communism, and Bernard Brodie, who wrote The Absolute Weapon, which foresaw how atomic weapons could be used as a deterrent to war. Rowny now sensed the Soviets feeling particularly emboldened. The star of Premier Nikita Khrushchev was on the rise, while at the same time the Kremlin perceived a general weakness in U.S. power. Rowny debated with his former professors at Yale whether a domino effect would spread Communism to other parts of the world like Southeast Asia. The consensus was that if Communists used surrogates like the Vietcong , they could take over South Vietnam, which would provide them a base with which to move against Thailand and Burma in one direction and Indonesia in the other. Each of those countries already had strong Communist insurgencies in place that the Soviets could exploit. Korea might also then be lost, given cooperation between the Soviets and China, albeit theirs was a shaky alignment steeped in distrust. The dominoes would tumble. Consequently, keeping the Soviet Communists from taking over Vietnam was considered vital. An atomic bomb in retaliation against Soviet aggression, however, was Kazel-Wilcox - West Point.indb 263 3/19/2014 5:40:17 PM 264 ★ west point ’41 not in the cards. America had altered its strategy from massive retaliation to that of graduated response. The revised strategy involved at first relying on conventional weapons while the U.S. had time to determine alternatives before risking countless civilian casualties. NATO was considering this flexible response as well. Such a response required alternative methods of warfare. Jack Norton and Ed Rowny were keen on the prospects of arming helicopters. They discussed it at length in 1959 while at the National War College together; up to that point helicopters remained used primarily for transporting troops and supplies. The pair also talked about how the next fronts might be “everywhere,” in contrast to defensive lines like the Siegfried and Gothic Lines in World War II. Rowny and Norton were not alone in wanting to alter the art of movement in war. Spec Powell had participated in the Army’s “eagle flights” initiative, which involved taking senior Army officers from different specialties , like Powell as an engineer, and giving them aviation training to expand the thinking and abilities of Army Aviation. Although the former Army Air Corps had become the U.S. Air Force in 1947, the Army retained aviation assets for command and control purposes, medical evacuations, reconnaissance, and supply missions. Powell subsequently became director of a development unit tracking the progress of equipment, being developed anywhere in the world, that might have Army Aviation applications. Items ranged from fire-resistant flight suits and various types of aircraft to crash rescue equipment. Powell’s unit conducted engineering tests on items and identified their capabilities and limitations. He also learned to fly helicopters, which in his view was not out of line with his engineering background, particularly the idea of adding a vertical dimension to combat. The helicopter is directly tied to obstacle crossing. And obstacle crossing is the principal role of the engineers in the battle area. Powell also thought it time to view the helicopter as a weapons’ platform. Before long he was assigned to the office of the chief of research and development in the Pentagon. It was 1961, and it was a far cry from his days at the Pentagon years earlier, what with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s reliance on his new intellectual “whiz kids,” which he recruited from the Rand Corporation to modernize the Department of Defense . Not many in the Armed Forces seemed pleased with...