Hell, I even thought I was dead ’til I found out that it was just that I was in Nebraska.
LITTLE BILL DAGGETT, Unforgiven1
In Vietnam, American soldiers filing out through the barbed wire around the firebase used to say they were headed into “Indian country.” The nineteen-year-olds, with a few notable exceptions, were neither historians nor anthropologists, and thus they were not drawing some abstract academic analogy. No, the troops borrowed the term from hundreds of western movies and television shows. The GIs all knew the deal. Leaving the wire was like marching through the wooden palisades of some Hollywood frontier fort. Inside, we owned it. Out past that boundary lay the unseen enemies—the Indians.
So it had been in the Nebraska Territory. Before there was a Nebraska Territory, or a Nebraska state, or any United States, the Indians were there. They weren’t just any Indians, either. They were the dangerous ones, the unbroken ones, the Great Plains warriors feared and respected most: the Arapaho, the Cheyenne, the Pawnee, and the fearsome Sioux. That last group of people called themselves Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota, but not Sioux. The name came from a corrupted French term for “little snake,” or more colloquially, an enemy, and a treacherous one at that. Whatever you called them, they lived there on the broad grasslands, following the great buffalo herds along the meandering shallow rivers that scarred the dry prairie. The Indians called this region Nbraske, “flat water.” 2 That’s a pretty good description of the Platte River that bisects the modern state from east to west.
Today, trendy people, go-getters who live and work in New York and Washington to the east or San Francisco and Los Angeles to the west, refer to places like Nebraska as “flyover country,” that expanse of nothing between the parts of America that really matter (or think they do). Before the Civil War, only birds and an odd balloon or two flew over Nebraska, but those Americans who went there pushed through as quickly as they could. Civilization, or what passed for it in antebellum America, lay back east of St. Louis. The gold was out west in California. And the Nebraska Territory, part of what nineteenth-century mapmakers helpfully designated the “Great American Desert,” well, the best idea there involved getting through it posthaste in your Conestoga wagon with enough supplies and all your bodily parts. Roaring grass fires, howling tornadoes, and marauding Indians sometimes made that a very sporty proposition. Still, for the Indians, and their numerous buffalo prey, the less settlers, the better. Moving on through suited all parties.
After the Civil War, that changed. One of the laws pushed through the Union Congress in 1862 encouraged settlement out west. The Homestead Act granted land, typically a 160-acre plot, to any citizen “head of a family,” male or female, over twenty-one years of age. Union military veterans could also apply, even if they didn’t have a family or were not yet age twenty-one. Freed African American slaves were included, too, by a later provision, although Confederates (“who had borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies”) were not. To gain permanent ownership, the applicant had to engage in “actual settlement and cultivation” for at least five years.3 This act opened the Great Plains to many, including waves of immigrants arriving from Europe.
With the homesteaders came the railroads, designed to link the eastern United States with the bustling boom towns of the Pacific coast. Coincidentally, the lattice of west-bound rails provided the means to sustain those who chose to take their chances on the prairie. Along with the Homestead Act, the Union Congress also passed Pacific Railroad Acts in 1862 and 1863, both of which granted land rights and federal financial backing for a transcontinental railroad line. In the Nebraska Territory, the Union Pacific commenced construction in earnest after the Civil War. The line passed through Omaha and paralleled the Platte River.4 By March 1, 1867, the combined numbers of railway workers and sod-busting farmers provided enough population to allow Nebraska to gain statehood.
That year also saw a series of clashes with the Plains Indians. Those would go on for the next decade or so. History and Hollywood remember the one big battle, the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Sioux victory over Lieutenant Colonel (brevet Major General) George A. Custer and the bulk of the 7th Cavalry Regiment on the Little Big Horn River on June 25–26, 1876. Yet that major engagement was atypical both in its scale and its results. The era’s U.S. Army records reveal much more pedestrian data. From 1865 to 1898, the military counted 943 firefights. In these, 948 soldiers were killed and 1,058 were wounded. Indian losses, admittedly an estimate (and probably inflated by optimistic officers; some things never change), totaled 4,371 killed, 1,279 wounded, and 10,318 captured. This meant the usual encounter resulted in two soldiers killed or wounded, six Indian casualties, and eleven Indian prisoners.5 An average year on the Great Plains, the entire United States between the Mississippi River and the eastern reaches of the Rocky Mountains, saw twenty-nine such skirmishes. If you blinked, you missed the “war,” such as it was.
In the usual pattern in places like Nebraska, the soldiers followed the Indians here and there, rarely caught up, but over time wore them out. With wives and children exhausted, ponies tired, and braves despondent, one by one, the main chiefs accepted confinement to the great reservations: Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Spirit Lake, and Yankton. Most of the Indians survived.6 But their way of life was gone.
Why did it end this way? The Indians were better fighters, man for man, than the young volunteer Regulars who chased them. The Indians moved faster. They shot well. They knew the prairies as their homes for centuries. They could subsist off the buffalo and stay ahead of the weather. And yet… and yet, in the end, it wasn’t about that.
It wasn’t about soldier versus brave. That was a symptom, not a cause. The fatal displacement wasn’t done by advancing ranks of Regulars—there were far too few in uniform for that, 25,000 at best—but by the determined sod-busting of hundreds of thousands of plodding agrarians and herdsmen, drawn west to stake their homesteads: family farms without any elbow room for wandering warriors. The decisive penetration didn’t come from cavalry troopers picking their way up creek beds, but from steel rails heading west, ever west, bearing commerce and passengers aplenty, none of them much interested in tenting on the prairie, nor all that interested in those who did. Even the slaughter of the buffalo reflected an urge for hides in America’s teeming eastern cities, a tribute to modern weaponry, and the sad fact that the lumbering beasts reproduced too infrequently and grew up far too slowly to compete with the pitiless bark of thousands of repeating rifles, some in Indian hands by the 1870s.7 Each 160-acre plot claimed, each rail line spiked down, and each buffalo killed wore away the life of the Plains Indians as surely as any shot from an army trapdoor Springfield rifle. The human wave from the east never let up. The Lakota called these numerous new arrivals wasichus, “uninvited visitors” who refused to leave.8 They had that right.
The Plains Indians survived, penned and sullen, existing after a fashion on remote reservations. Six Indian reservations, all established in territorial days, remained in Nebraska. All were small, all underpopulated, all out of the way, and all well to the east, carved off the fringes of the state, home to a few thousand Indians hanging on by their fingernails. In the greatest stretch of Nebraska, the endless productive prairie, just the names endured, pinned to small towns and shallow rivers. Those fragments of Indian language mark the footsteps of ghosts.
This is what winning looks like in a people’s war.9 The side that prevails—the wasichus—moves in and never looks back. And the side that loses gets prodded, pushed, and squeezed by political, economic, cultural, military, and above all demographic pressures that do not stop. In later days, anguished national leaders pointed to Vietnam, and eventually Iraq and Afghanistan, too, and wondered if America could ever hope to win a war against insurgents. They might have done well to look at Nebraska. All that was left of the Indians was a hole.
LIEUTENANT GENERAL CURTIS EMERSON LEMAY looked at Nebraska. He didn’t see the fading signs of the Indians. He wasn’t concerned with them. What interested LeMay about Nebraska was what always interested him: winning America’s wars. After the tremendous victories over Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in 1945, Americans all over the country, including those in Nebraska, figured the war was over. But LeMay was already thinking about the next one. That was his job.
Now the potential enemy was the Soviet Union. Along with atomic weapons, Russia had big bombers, too. After getting caught on the ground at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, no American air force general was willing to do anything but assume the worst case. Hundreds of Soviet bombers with atomic bombs—that amounted to a hell of a threat. And those planes could arrive any hour on any day.
When LeMay took over the Strategic Air Command (SAC) on October 19, 1948, he took charge of America’s nuclear bomber fleet, the country’s Sunday punch. LeMay reported for duty at Andrews Air Force Base, ten miles from the center of Washington, DC, and less than a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.10 The Pentagon, the White House, the U.S. Capitol—all of those useful destinations for a SAC commander could be reached easily by air force limousine. Around SAC headquarters, Andrews featured nicely manicured lawns, a palatial officers’ club, and a wonderful golf course. Any weekend, in less than two hours, you could motor to the beach to fish or frolic. Duty at Andrews was pleasant. Most generals loved it. Not LeMay.
Curtis LeMay saw SAC headquarters at Andrews as the Russians saw it: their top target, the one installation that, if allowed to carry out its primary task, could cause the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to cease to exist. And wasn’t it handy that SAC planted its flag right near Washington, just a few minutes inland for a modern aircraft streaking in from the ocean? Hell, if war came, the base might not even survive the back blast from whatever array of nukes the Soviets unloaded on Washington proper. Andrews Air Force Base amounted to a staked goat, a sacrifice. LeMay had no intention of beginning World War III with his command post blown away.
Thus LeMay saw Nebraska in classic real estate terms: location, location, location. He wanted a place smack in the middle of the continental United States, as far as possible from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and midway between the Canadian and Mexican borders. Those Russian bombers might get there someday. But they’d have to work for it.
Mapmakers pinpointed the exact center of the continental United States as 98° 35' longitude and 39° 50' latitude, an open field near Lebanon, Kansas, not far from the Nebraska border.11 “X” marked the spot. Putting something out there in the middle of nowhere would take a lot of work, and a lot of time. LeMay demanded a solution way faster than that. He found one. If you went just 160 miles to the northeast, Nebraska offered a ready-made alternative: Offutt Air Force Base, just south of Omaha.12 That would do.
The move to Offutt happened very quickly, weeks after LeMay assumed command. A plan had been in the works, but LeMay moved out in his usual way—immediately. By November 9, SAC had its command center up and running in Nebraska. The airmen set up in Administrative Building A, a three-story structure affiliated with the shuttered Glenn L. Martin bomber plant. During World War II, that massive factory complex churned out its own B-26 Marauder medium bombers and B-29 Superfortresses on license from Boeing. Among its 515 B-29s produced were Enola Gay and Bockscar, the mission aircraft for the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.13 In that sense, America’s atomic bombers came home.
The move to Offutt turned out to be the first of many that made SAC the formidable nuclear-armed force it became, so powerful that it took the motto “Peace Is Our Profession.” The message was stark. The Russians wouldn’t dare attack. If they did, they’d be eradicated. LeMay commanded SAC for nearly nine years. When he took over, the organization comprised 450 piston-engine bombers with a war plan to deliver 133 atomic bombs on 70 Soviet targets. When LeMay left in June of 1957, the command fielded 1,655 jet bombers ready to drop 1,655 thermonuclear bombs, each one up to a thousand times more potent than the Hiroshima type, on 954 Soviet targets. After a maximum effort, all that would be left of the USSR would be what one officer called “a smoking, radiating ruin.”14
And what of Offutt Air Force Base? Once the “go code” went out, its primary purpose would be fulfilled. It then became expendable. As LeMay departed in 1957, SAC moved into its purpose-built Building 500, complete with a three-story deep sub-basement command post. Of course, the advent of thermonuclear hydrogen bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles, like the Russian rocket that launched Sputnik that year, meant Building 500’s underground bunker wouldn’t last long even with a near miss. Plus, those hostile missiles could arrive in thirty minutes. To prevent a bolt from the blue, SAC began to keep a relay of command jets aloft 24/7, code-named “Looking Glass.” Even if Soviet warheads obliterated the Offutt rabbit hole, the SAC retaliatory codes would still go out through the Looking Glass.15 Lewis Carroll was unavailable for comment.
The choice of Offutt Air Force Base as SAC headquarters elevated Omaha, Nebraska, and its quarter of a million residents from a lowly fortieth place among American population centers to number two on the USSR’s hit parade, second only to the capital city of Washington, DC.16 For the Soviet general staff, the death of the people of Omaha would amount to collateral damage, nothing personal, just business. It was a sword of Damocles ever present, if you thought about it. Most people in eastern Nebraska chose not to do so.
They also likely gave little consideration to another by-product of SAC’s basing decision. Once SAC headquarters got up and running, Soviet foreign intelligence (KGB) and military intelligence (GRU) became very interested in Nebraska. For the entire Cold War, what happened in and around Offutt Air Force Base got plenty of attention.17 Those poking about and asking questions rarely matched the ham-handed Boris and Natasha stereotypes. When assigned an objective, KGB and GRU officers consistently ran sophisticated agent networks to find out the information they needed. Consequently, both U.S. Air Force security entities and the Federal Bureau of Investigation stayed active in and around Nebraska, particularly Omaha.
So SAC came to Omaha. With the thunder of huge jet bombers coming and going, rattling windows and shaking roofs at all hours, the recognition that Omaha was now a USSR nuclear bull’s-eye, and the suspicion that the next person who asked you for directions could well be working for Moscow, you might think locals in eastern Nebraska would have nothing but contempt for the man who inflicted all of this on them. This seemed especially likely when the laconic LeMay, curt indeed, answered a welcoming journalist’s question about what it all meant. “It doesn’t mean a damn thing to Omaha, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing to me.”18 So there.
Nevertheless, they liked him. In so many ways, Curtis LeMay struck Nebraskans as one of their own. He reminded you of the guy who fixed your car: grease on rough hands, brow furrowed, wrench sticking out of a side pocket. Don’t even think about skimping on paying the bill. He’d sock you. No small talk, no BS, just work. Whereas the regal General William C. Westmoreland looked like he belonged at a full-dress parade, Curtis LeMay matched the other kind of commander, the one you’d call up for a desperate battle, a death struggle. His square, determined face, often decorated with a protruding cigar, topped a football player’s physique. Although only five feet, eight inches tall, he looked much bigger. He seemed solid, all muscle, and all aimed at getting things done. LeMay gave you the impression he’d smash right through a wall to go where he needed to go. He’d make things happen, this one.
LeMay made himself. His Ohio parents worked for a living, and although Curtis considered West Point, the U.S. Military Academy did not consider him. So he went to Ohio State University, worked at a local steel mill, majored in civil engineering, and gained his commission as a second lieutenant in 1928. He sought flight school and excelled in the air. Uniquely among the small U.S. Army Air Corps of the Depression era, LeMay qualified as a pilot and navigator, and could carry out the bombardier’s duties, too. He also learned how to repair aircraft, tune the radios, and serve as a turret gunner. His hands were usually dirty. In 1937–38, he flew some of the first training runs with the big new Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.19 LeMay knew that aircraft cold. No man could outfly or outwork him.
LeMay was still a first lieutenant as late as 1940, as America prepared for war. He moved up quickly thereafter: captain in early 1940, major by 1941, lieutenant colonel and colonel within months in 1942, then one-star general by 1943. He earned his promotions in the deadly skies over occupied Europe. Never one for lectures or grandstanding, LeMay focused on flying. He drilled his air crews relentlessly. They learned to assemble quickly above the soup of foggy England, fly in tight formations, almost wingtip to wingtip, and use their onboard machine gun turrets to defend each other. Above all, they worked on bombing. In theory, the top-secret Norden bombsight allowed a B-17 to “put a bomb in a pickle barrel” from five miles up. But that presumed pickle barrel wasn’t defended by skilled Luftwaffe fighter pilots. In reality, a bombardment group’s lead bombardier did the aiming. The other guys, jokingly called “toggleers,” flipped a switch once they saw the first plane unload. It made a ragged pattern on the ground. LeMay taught his group to stay tight in their combat box formation.20 Close in the air, close on target—he preached it, taught it, and demanded it.
LeMay didn’t send his crews out. He led them. He piloted the lead B-17. LeMay understood that it all came down to bombs on target. He taught his fliers to press on. Once they started the bombing run, neither flak bursts nor marauding Messerschmitt fighters could divert LeMay’s airmen from their ominous task. His 305th Bombardment Group never turned back. They made it to their targets every time, and regularly put twice as many bombs on their aim points as any other group. The crude bombsights and light bombs of 1943 lacked accuracy and hitting power. Able German defenders exacted a high price. But the 305th set the standard. By the fall, LeMay was leading the entire 3rd Air Division of seven groups.21 He didn’t look back.
Men died in the air over Germany: 37,500 Americans, 60,000 British and Commonwealth crewmen. People died on the ground, some 593,000. The Americans flew by day, tried to hit individual factories, and in so doing tore up complete German city blocks with high explosives. The British Royal Air Force flew by night and endeavored to burn out factories and workers’ housing. Together, the Allies blew apart and broiled the enemy’s aircraft plants and oil refineries. They paralyzed German rail and road networks. Twice—at Hamburg in July of 1943 and Dresden in February of 1945—British incendiary munitions and American high explosives hit hard enough, in sufficient volume, and in the right weather conditions to generate firestorms, self-sustaining vortexes that immolated entire cities. In ground combat, artilleryman William Westmoreland focused on killing enemy soldiers, the terrible arithmetic of attrition. Airman LeMay saw Westmoreland and raised him, following the path blazed by Sherman in Georgia and Sheridan in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and tried all too often on the western plains. Whole societies made modern war. So entire societies must pay the price. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay said. “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough, they stop fighting.”22 By May of 1945, the Germans stopped.
Imperial Japan did not. When the sleek aluminum-bright Boeing B-29s finally arrived in numbers, they went to the Pacific theater to be used against Japan. Their unprecedented range allowed them to reach the Japanese home islands from China to the west and the hard-won island airfields of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian to the east. But the mighty Superfortresses proved ineffective. Many of Japan’s industrial facilities were small and well dispersed, dependent on piecework handed out in urban neighborhoods. Tokyo alone hosted 45,000 of these microfactories. In the winter of 1944–45, low clouds and rain squalls obscured Japan’s cities three weeks out of four. For the high-flying B-29 formations, weather up at 30,000 feet featured something unexpected, a 200-mile-an-hour wind sheer known as the jet stream.23 The damn bombs went everywhere.
Enter Major General Curtis E. LeMay. When he took command of the B-29 force, he learned to fly the streamlined, ultramodern Superfortress, leading his men as usual. Right away, he realized that the standard methods developed in Europe didn’t work for Japan. Determined to get the ineffective air campaign on track, LeMay asked his battlewise subordinates what they thought. He listened. He studied meteorological charts and bomb damage photos. And he looked hard at the gleaming B-29s. Just what could these things really do?
LeMay checked again with his intelligence officers. It appeared the Japanese didn’t field many short-range antiaircraft guns. Their fighter planes were optimized to climb up and fight in the thin air. They had only a few radar sets, and no real night fighters. And the island country’s production methods—the key industrial targets—relied on piece workers living in the densely packed streets of timber-framed houses. In the capital city of Tokyo, 98 percent of the structures were made of flammable wood. What if LeMay threw out the rule books from the U.S. air war over Germany? Strip down the B-29s. Leave behind most of the machine guns, most of the gunners, and the extra fuel tanks. Load up on incendiary bombs, like the British at Hamburg and Dresden. Go in low, under 10,000 feet. Maybe ease down to 5,000 feet. Go at night.
LeMay thought hard. He even conjured up a scene from the American Civil War. What might Major General Ambrose Burnside have told the mother of a dead Union soldier after Fredericksburg? We remember Burnside as a callous bumbler. In December of 1862, he took a gamble, pushing the Army of the Potomac up the heights into the teeth of Confederate guns. It failed utterly.24 Was LeMay about to make the same kind of fatal mistake?
This time he could not pilot the lead plane. LeMay had been briefed on the atomic bomb. His flying days were over. So on March 9, he watched from a Guam runway as 334 B-29s took off into the setting sun, headed for Tokyo. Hours later, just after midnight in Japan, the American aircraft came in low, fast, and heavy with incendiaries. Twenty-seven B-29s didn’t come back. But the others did gruesome execution, dumping enough munitions to kindle a massive fire tornado, Hamburg and Dresden squared. The howling gusts pulled victims into the raging inferno. When the fires finally burned out four days later, sixteen square miles of Tokyo were gone. So were 83,793 people.25 Even with atomic weapons, neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki equaled that apocalyptic toll.
Tokyo opened the fire-bombing campaign. LeMay’s bombers kept it up. They gutted city after city, more than sixty in all, 178 square miles of desolation and 330,000 dead.26 The two A-bombs in August punctuated a rain of horror that broke the proud Japanese. LeMay and his airmen had killed enough. The opponents stopped fighting.
In the Soviet Union after 1945, as the Cold War grew frigid; Russian leaders knew only too well the saga of the fire raids. They saw in Curtis LeMay a commander who would pull the atomic trigger, and they knew it because he already had. A man who could lay waste to Tokyo, Yokohama, and Nagoya could do the same to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev. Yes, SAC’s nuclear arms provided a deterrent, an assurance that a Soviet attack would be answered by total destruction. Curtis LeMay gave deterrence a face, and a grimly determined one at that.
Long after World War II, it’s easy to sit in a comfortable living room and paint Curtis LeMay as a heartless, knuckle-dragging monster, especially in light of his role in the Cold War, drilling his fliers to unleash Armageddon. And yet in our self-assured ex post facto moralizing we miss something important. Few men understood the horrors of war better than LeMay. Like others who had been there and done that, leaders who knew what it was like to shoot and be shot at—Grant, Sherman, Sheridan—LeMay understood that vicious as modern war was, it was better to get in, get on with it, and get it over. That’s doubly true in a country where the citizens run the show. General of the Army George C. Marshall, the great strategist of World War II and veteran of World War I and the ugly Philippine Insurrection, argued that “a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War.”27 Amen. In LeMay’s view, you did no favors by dragging it out. Use the big hammer. Finish it.
Curtis LeMay realized only too well how bad it could be. Like thousands of his airmen, LeMay made the long, cold, deadly runs over the targets. He’d watched bombers spinning down in flames, armless men tumbling through the thin air, comrades blown to dust in a single flak blast. LeMay knew the deal. He’d been there. He stood in quiet communion, sharing what went unsaid, as bomber crewmen came back from that first awful Tokyo raid silent, faces slack, eyes wide. Many had worn their oxygen masks, not needed below 10,000 feet, but only too necessary to block out the sickly sweet stench of roasting human flesh. Brown soot and a peppering of gritty flecks (wood? paper? skin?) coated the bottoms of their silver planes.28
And behind them? Below? Well, don’t even think about it. That was the answer, maybe the only answer. Stay busy. Keep working. Focus on the next mission. And the next. Go at it every day. And when the war ended, keep going. Keep doing what had to be done. Handle the next problem: height of burst, aerial refueling, where to put SAC headquarters, how many B-52s to build.
What did LeMay think about it? What did his airmen think about it? Like most combat veterans, they tried not to do so. And they sure as hell didn’t talk about it.
CHARLES DEAN HAGEL never talked about bombing Japan. He certainly took pride in his service. For a few years, he commanded American Legion Post 79 in Ainsworth, Nebraska, where he and his fellow veterans and their families gathered. They said the Pledge of Allegiance, carried the flag in local parades, and wore their distinctive Legion campaign caps. But late in the evening, after the wives took the children home to bed, when the blue haze of cigarette smoke lingered and the shots and beers went down one more time, the young men with old eyes said some things. The marine who’d hugged the black sand of Iwo Jima, the tank sergeant who’d pulled his stricken Sherman from a shell hole at Anzio, the submarine sailor who’d sweated out a depth charge attack in the Bungo Strait, and Hagel the B-24 tail gunner—well, they all talked a bit, usually about practical jokes, or stupid officers, or exotic sights. Never about the worst things. You didn’t have to say them. These guys knew. So you drained the stale beers and stubbed out the smokes and headed home. And next Saturday night you’d do it again.
Charles Hagel was just eighteen when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. His father, Charles Leo Hagel, known to all as Charlie, served in the Great War. So did Charlie’s two brothers, both so badly wounded that they drew disability stipends and still lived at home with their mother, Bertha, and the Hagel patriarch, Herman Christian, who spoke English with the strong accent of his native Germany. Herman, another immigrant homesteader among many, settled in Rushville. The very name Hagel, German for hail, suggested an elemental force of nature. Sometimes, if pressed, the old man’s temper erupted. But as a rule, Grandpa Herman kept it all well in hand. He epitomized the discipline of hard work. Herman drove a wagon for a living. Near the end of the Indian Wars, Grandpa Hagel often carried supplies north to Fort Robinson, Camp Sheridan, and the other U.S. Army posts rimming the Pine Ridge Reservation just across the state boundary in South Dakota.29 Two counties east of his grandparents in Rushville, Charles Dean Hagel grew up in Ainsworth. There was no doubt that when the army called, he’d go. That’s what Nebraskans did. That’s what Hagels did.
Charles entered the U.S. Army Air Forces as a private. After stateside training, in 1942, he joined the 42nd Bombardment Squadron in Hawaii. They were a hard-luck outfit. At that point in the war, most of them were.
The 42nd flew B-17E Flying Fortresses. Caught on the ground at Hickam Field on December 7, 1941, the squadron suffered nine killed and twenty-two wounded, as well as the destruction of five of seven assigned bombers. The squadron’s patch featured a snarling black panther leaping above a flaming Hawaiian torch.30 These airmen had a score to settle.
The 42nd and its nine B-17s deployed south to New Caledonia and began operations on July 24, 1942. Missions in support of the Guadalcanal campaign kept the crews busy. They staged forward to Espiritu Santo in November and continued reconnaissance and bombing flights until February 7, 1943. In 363 combat sorties, the squadron lost eight aircraft and eight crews, seventy-two airmen in all, plus another pilot killed in action and two ground mechanics dead in a jeep mishap.31 Hollywood made a wartime movie titled They Were Expendable. The 42nd lived it, and it didn’t end after two hours. The remnant returned to Hawaii to regroup.
With but one plane left, the 42nd converted from the graceful, iconic B-17E to the blunt-nosed, slab-sided, high-winged, twin-tailed, unloved Consolidated B-24D Liberator. The Germans called the B-24 dickewagon, the “furniture van.” It looked like one, and it handled like one, too, a flying semi-trailer truck laden with high explosives. But it had longer range than the B-17, and carried more bombs.32 Charles Hagel would be back in the tail for most missions, although he sometimes flew up front as the radio operator. He’d be one of six enlisted crewmen working with four officers.
Except for the pilot and copilot, every other man joined Hagel as a gunner, to include the officers serving as navigator and bombardier. Eleven .50-caliber machine guns firing inch-and-a-half slugs protected the plane. Three pairs of these long, dull gray-black weapons were twinned in electric turrets—one Plexiglas bubble on top, one on the belly, and Hagel in the back. The other five .50 calibers poked out of the plane’s nose and sides. 33 Whether in the motorized turrets or the single mounts, all the machine guns had to be aimed by hand. It helped to be young, to have good eyesight and fast reflexes.
In theory, all of this B-24 firepower meant an opposing airplane couldn’t get close, especially when the Americans flew in tight formations. But in reality, Japanese interceptor squadrons soon figured out the holes in the defensive gunfire arcs. The enemy’s single-seat, single-engine fighter planes proved fast, nimble, and tough to track for overmatched American gunners. Japanese Zero pilots swarmed in, determined to confuse and overwhelm the defending bomber crews.34 To coordinate shooting back at several speedy, twisting tormentors at once—and to avoid punching bullets into the neighboring friendly bombers—U.S. gunners used a clock technique to call out hostiles, with the right wing as three, the tail as six, the left wing as nine, and the nose as twelve. A favorite enemy tactic involved using a Zero or two to distract the American gunners to one side, then sending a bold fighter pilot, guns blazing, to dive right at the B-24 cockpit, the infamous “twelve o’clock high” position. Go straight for the brain. Kill the guys flying the bomber. That usually did not turn out well for Liberator airmen.
The 42nd trained with the new Liberator bombers in and around Hawaii through most of 1943. These weren’t milk runs. The B-24s looked for lost U.S. planes, searched for Japanese submarines, and bombed enemy-held Wake Island. During these months, three bombers crashed, with two complete crews erased and the third set of airmen injured but recovered. Among those missing, and subsequently captured, was First Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic athlete. His survival story became famous after the war.35 In May of 1943, he was just another lost bombardier. Mission after mission, loss or no loss, the pace did not slow up.
For bombing raids, missions followed a well-known routine. After taking off and forming up, each crew experienced hours of droning over-ocean flight. Bored gunners often dozed at their stations. Then the target came into view. Things got very interesting very fast. For thirty frantic minutes or so, ten young Americans, amped on pure adrenaline, fired away at swooping, rolling Japanese Zero fighters and hoped those black clouds of exploding antiaircraft shells didn’t do mortal damage. At the height of the mayhem, the B-24 steadied up and settled into the death-grip bombing run, straight and true over the aim point as flak fragments pounded on the hull. Now and then, a few hot chunks ripped through, exposing unexpected patches of blue sky where there should have been solid metal. When the bombs came loose, the plane rose like an elevator starting up. Then, duty done, each B-24 turned away, engines straining as each bomber worked to regain its place in the squadron array. Enemy flak batteries, already jumping on the next set of U.S. bombers, often tossed out a few parting shots. As fliers caught their breath, men looked around, counted friendly planes, and checked damage to men and machines. If any of the men aboard had been cut up or shot, young airmen wrestled in the freezing air to staunch the bleeding and keep the wounded alive. Battered bombers also needed attention; dead engine props had to be shut down, failed controls bypassed, and excess gear dumped out to reduce the stress on laboring motors. The sturdy Liberator could make it back with a hole in the wing or an engine out, or even worse, but the formation didn’t wait for stragglers. If a B-24 fell back, that crew was on their own. Then came another long, lonely trip across the wide water, headed back to the landing strip. Sometimes bomber crews avoided all the perils and did everything right. Then some control wire snapped or a flap came unflapped and the four-engine B-24 cartwheeled into the water right off the end of the runway. Nothing was guaranteed.
Its Hawaiian defense stretch complete, the 42nd Bombardment Squadron and its twelve new B-24s staged forward to Funafuti in the Gilbert Islands on November 12, 1943. For two months, the 42nd flew into the heat of the action, backing up the marine landing on Tarawa and the army landing on Makin, and then the follow-on efforts in the Marshall Islands. In sixty-nine tough missions, three more bombers went down, with thirty men lost.36 Charles Hagel found out how you made rank in the U.S. Army Air Forces. You stayed alive.
Another stint of retraining and replenishing in Hawaii followed, with more local search and surveillance operations. The crews traded in their remaining B-24D models for the latest J models, sporting a fully automated nose turret among other upgrades. By September of 1944, the squadron again entered combat, working from a forward airfield on Guam. The big, shiny B-29s also flew from that island, and nearby Saipan and Tinian, too. By now a sergeant, Charles Hagel and his crew flew reconnaissance and bombing runs against Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They dropped sea mines in Japanese home waters. Missions piled up: 96 in November, 124 in December, a similar number in January, and 115 in both February and March. U.S. aircraft still went down, with three more Liberators and more fellow airmen gone. As spring turned to summer, the unforgiving tempo continued. The squadron lost another two B-24s and more airmen in June of 1945.37 No matter how many missions you flew, the next one might be the last. You never knew.
One more move followed. On July 2, 1945, the 42nd repositioned to Okinawa. Missions went against enemy airfields, ports, and railroad lines in Kyushu, the southernmost of the four Japanese home islands. Other raids struck military sites in southern Honshu, the largest island. Squadron bombers hit Japanese facilities in China and Korea, too.38 These operations represented the opening rounds of preparatory strikes for the U.S. amphibious invasion of Kyushu itself, set for November 1, 1945. The Japanese fought back, but not like the old days. Their planes lacked fuel. Enemy ack-ack guns still banged away. But you could tell the shooting had gotten ragged, disorganized. The Japanese were barely keeping it together.
In July and early August, the 42nd bombed Japan in concert with Curtis LeMay’s fleet of B-29s. A dozen years later, when that SAC officer referred to LeMay’s plan to reduce the USSR to a smoking, radiating ruin, he might as well have been talking about Japan in the high summer of 1945. By August, even the radiation arrived right on schedule, courtesy of Enola Gay and Bockscar. The 42nd Bombardment Squadron’s Liberator crews saw the ravaged cities, and smelled them, and added their share to the pain. Charles Hagel went through it all, looking down from his perch in the tail, peering through the smudged plastic bubble over his double machine guns, gagging in his oxygen mask from odors he hoped never to smell again. If some wise guy later insinuated that, unlike riflemen on the ground, airmen didn’t really understand combat, Charles Hagel could have set him straight.
But then again, he didn’t talk about it.
CHARLES HAGEL CAME HOME from the Pacific and went to work at the Cook Paint and Varnish Store in North Platte. Only a few decades before, just outside the town, the great showman, sometime army scout, and self-proclaimed hero of War Bonnet Creek, Buffalo Bill Cody maintained a ranch.39 Charles Hagel’s prospects were nowhere near as grandiose. He’d already had his adventures. In December 1945, Charles married Elizabeth “Betty” Dunn, one of six hard-working daughters of an Irish-Polish farm family with roots in the homestead era. In October of 1946, the couple’s son Charles Timothy arrived, right on the baby boom timeline of that generation. The boy shared his first name with his father and paternal grandfather. They called him Tim, to avoid confusion with grandfather Charlie and father Charles.
With little Tim in hand, Charles and Betty moved back to Ainsworth. They’d be there for ten years. Charles took a position with the Hagel family lumberyard. Three more sons followed: Thomas Leo in November of 1948, Michael Patrick in 1950, and James Joseph in 1953. Family, the Catholic Church, school, and the American Legion defined the Hagels as they grew up among the thousand souls of dusty Ainsworth, a cattle town that proclaimed itself the “Middle of Nowhere.”40 Shadows of long-gone Indian braves stalked the low, windy sandhills and rustled the dry, waving prairie grass. And if you looked up in the cornflower blue dome of the sky, you could see the thin contrails of Curtis LeMay’s jet bombers—some launched from Offutt Air Force Base—the younger, faster siblings of the B-24s dad Charles flew in the world war.
Boys experience life as it is. For Tim, Tom, and their brothers, Ainsworth felt just fine. Thoughtful journalist Myra MacPherson later characterized it as a “hard-scrabble childhood,” and maybe it was. The Hagels worked from a young age. Beginning at age seven, Tim started his winter mornings by walking south to the Chicago and Northwestern railroad station. As a train rumbled by in the predawn gloom, somebody tossed out packs of Omaha World-Herald newspapers. Tim Hagel grabbed his share, clipped the binding wires, loaded them on his sled, then made deliveries around town.41 In Ainsworth, children did that. Nobody thought it unfair or harsh.
Writer Carlyne Berens tagged the Hagel upbringing as a “Beaver Cleaver kind of world,” echoing the popular 1957–63 television series. Perhaps that fit, too. The brothers played war, rode horses, hunted snakes, and threw around the baseball and the football.42 As Wally and Beaver did on many a TV show, the young Hagel boys “messed around.” But Beaver grew up in suburbia, not on the open prairie. June didn’t have to work outside the home. And Ward never went to the American Legion to say nothing much, nor did he ever take a drink, nor worry about his next paycheck.
In 1957, the same year so many American households met Beaver Cleaver, something went sideways in the Hagel family. For Charles, the occasional shots of liquor grew more frequent, maybe too frequent. Earning a living at the Ainsworth lumberyard became difficult, a “hostile workplace” in today’s verbiage, although nobody in Nebraska would have considered such a description back then. Tom Hagel later described his dad’s situation: “He was ill-treated by the man he worked for and refused to see it.”43 That unforgiving superior was Charles Dean Hagel’s own father, Charlie. They just could not work together.
So the moves began. Charlie sent his son Charles to the family’s other lumber store in Rushville in 1957. Handsome, engaging, with a winning smile, Charles had skills. “Dad could sell ice to Eskimos,” his son Mike remembered. True enough, but in the end, Charles was about as popular as you’d expect the boss’s son to be. He couldn’t fit in. Frustrated, he cut ties with the family business.
More jobs and more moves followed in short order: Cox Lumber Company in Scottsbluff later in 1957, the same firm’s place in nearby Terrytown in 1958, and then E.S. Clark Lumber Company in York in 1960. The boys switched schools year after year. The family moved in and out of houses, to include a six-month stint all packed into a basement efficiency apartment in York. Dad Charles struggled to keep his series of jobs. Mom Betty worked. “We didn’t have anything,” recalled the eldest Hagel son.44
In all of that shuttling around, Tim became Chuck. A Rushville football coach casually renamed him when he heard the eleven-year-old’s full name. Determined to make the team, the boy went with it. He’d be Chuck Hagel from that day onward.
With their nomadic life, the four brothers grew close. Chuck was the natural leader, the one with the good grades, the top athlete. When playing army, “Chuck was always the general,” brother Mike remembered. “The rest of us were privates.” Brother Tom, always a quick study and a cut-up, rebelled a bit, frustrating his busy mother and upsetting his distracted father. But Tom respected Chuck.45 Somehow, through it all, the oldest brother just kept doing things right.
In 1962, the family relocated to Columbus. Betty got a good job as a secretary at the Rural Electrification Association. Charles left the lumberyards behind and gave it a go at Gerhold Concrete Company. But he was drinking more. There were some binges and ugly interludes. For whatever reason, Charles took out his frustrations on Tom. Betty and even sixteen year-old Chuck tried to intervene. After each go-round, things would subside. But these seemed like truces at best. You never knew when to expect another bad day.
Christmas Eve of 1962 turned out to be one of them. Tom and his youngest brother, Jim, were horsing around. They knocked down the Christmas tree. Dad Charles didn’t like it at all. He’d been drinking. He chased Tom through the house. Bitter words followed from all involved, the father and the sons. When the uproar subsided, Charles went upstairs to sleep it off. He never woke up.
The medical report read “heart attack.” But an empty bottle of sleeping pills hinted at something darker.46 Suicide? Who really knew? Still, as with so many old soldiers, you had to wonder. “Broken heart” would have been just as fair a verdict on Charles Hagel. His own father had given up on him, he couldn’t keep a job anymore, the wife and sons he loved had been embarrassed by his drinking—and God knows what he saw or did out on all of those bombing missions in the Pacific. There wasn’t enough whiskey on earth to wash all of that away.
It was a very sad Christmas that year. Betty Dunn Hagel, always made of sterner stuff, pulled the family together. She kept working, and made it clear that her sons needed to step up. They did. All four boys took a series of jobs, and not for spending money, either. Their salaries went toward the family’s needs. Work, church, school—the Hagels stuck to their familiar routines. But they didn’t visit the American Legion post. Not anymore.
Chuck graduated from St. Bonaventure High School in 1964 as student council president and football stand-out. He earned a scholarship to Wayne State College. Tom managed to get “encouraged” out of the Catholic high school—too much comedy schtick and too many questions in theology class. He was so smart that he read encyclopedias for fun and cruised through public high school, skating along right above the bare minimums, but well on track to graduate in May of 1967. Mike and Jim hung in there, too. The four industrious brothers reflected the character and love of Betty Hagel. As Mike Hagel put it: “We are who we are because of that woman.”47
Yet at every meal there was an empty chair at the table. Each passing year allowed the sons to put aside the memories of the rough days. Instead, they remembered Charles Dean Hagel the combat veteran, the patriot, the guy who worked hard, the parent who taught them all to love their country and go when called. The missing man, their father’s hole, affected all four sons. They owed him, and each other, and their mom, and Nebraska, and the country.
Chuck Hagel didn’t do all that much after high school. An injury ended the Wayne State football opportunity, and an attempt to try again at Kearney State flopped, too. He went to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and enrolled at the Brown Institute of Radio and Television, a technical school. He earned a certificate and in 1967 found work at KLMS, a radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska. He liked the job, but he knew he wasn’t living up to his potential, not even close. “I couldn’t stay disciplined or focused,” he said. “Those were kind of lost years.”48 Restless, he didn’t know what he wanted to do.
The Platte County draft board solved Chuck Hagel’s problem. Alma Hasselbach had run the board for decades. She contacted Chuck and warned him to get enrolled in college or he’d soon be wearing a uniform. For a lot of young men in America in 1967, that amounted to a lethal threat. For Chuck Hagel, it seemed like an opportunity. Brother Tom, about to graduate from high school, thought it sounded good to him, too.49 They could go in as a package deal, the brothers Hagel as a team, just as they’d been for years back home. What better way to honor their father, make their mother proud, and do their part for America?
So Chuck volunteered for the draft, and reported to the military induction office in Omaha in April. Brother Tom was right behind him, as soon as he graduated from high school in late May. Some people who heard what the Hagels did, especially years after the Vietnam War ended in misery, figured the brothers as rural rubes from what one reporter described as “a land of superpatriots.” Yet both Chuck and Tom read widely growing up. Chuck subscribed to Time and Newsweek and the family dinner table often featured serious discussions of politics and history. Their parents were Republicans, like most in Nebraska, so Tom, of course, declared himself a Democrat.50 Neither brother could or would claim to be an expert on the ongoing Vietnam conflict. Then again, in 1967 America, who was?
The two knew they were not volunteering for World War III. Like all sane Americans, they counted on SAC to keep that possibility remote. Anyway, nukes, B-52s, and missiles were not for them. SAC would stand its long watch without the Hagels.
No, Chuck and Tom thought they were signing up for their father’s war, but smaller, like Korea. They had watched Combat on television and seen The Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day at the movies. This Vietnam confrontation looked to be more of the same, with some new stuff like helicopters. Go over there, fight the uniformed enemy—they did call them NVA regulars, after all—and then come home, put on an American Legion campaign cap, and get on with life in Nebraska.
It never occurred to the Hagels, nor to many others, that Vietnam resembled World War II only in the sense that both were wars. What the two men from Nebraska faced would look a great deal more like those grim, ugly, fleeting clashes with the Cheyenne and Lakota. Like their fellow citizens watching at home, Chuck and Tom Hagel had a lot to learn. Their education began soon enough.