The Moving Man

Three miles from the city of Koto on the narrow mountain road which led to safety, encircling Communist troops had blown the only bridge across a reservoir. With the bridge gone, the 20,000 men of the 1st Marine Division and the Army's 7th Infantry Division last week apparently had no choice but to abandon their vehicles, take out on foot and make a 20-mile detour through enemy-infested hills.

Had they been members of any other army the marines and soldiers would have made the detour and perhaps been annihilated in the process. As it was, even before the crucial crossing was reached, eight spans of a 16-ton bridge had been parachuted down out of the sky to the U.S. troops seemingly isolated in the midst of the enemy. Eight C-119s of Major General William H. Tunner's Combat Cargo Command, each hauling a single span, had carried out the world's first airdrop of a bridge. The retreating column was free to move ahead, vehicles and all.

Symbolically, the Combat Cargo Command had repeatedly provided the beleaguered troops with an aerial bridge to their bases. Day after day "flying boxcars" had swung low over the column to drop ammunition, medical supplies and rations. And eight miles back up the road at Hagaru, C-475 had set down on an improvised airstrip to pick up long lines of wounded and frostbitten men. Said Combat Cargo Command Pilot Lieut. James Wood: "The marines scraped out the field at Hagaru one afternoon while we circled over it." Every plane in Wood's squadron was damaged by enemy small-arms fire during operations in the northeast, and on one flight Wood himself was forced to fly back to base on trim tabs after Chinese ground fire had crippled the control surface of his elevators. But in four days Combat Cargo Command lifted 2,650 casualties off the improved airstrip at Hagaru and whisked them off to hospitals in Japan.

"Anything, Anywhere." What had happened in northeast Korea was proof that even in disaster and defeat the most significant element of U.S. power was mobility. In the amphibious campaigns of World War II the U.S. had developed with stunning success the techniques of transporting power by sea. Those techniques were by no means obsolete, but they were faced with a formidable new obstacle. Amphibious landings on the World War II model required vast supply dumps in ports or beachheads which would present an irresistible target to an enemy with the atomic bomb. Said General Omar Bradley, not long ago: "The atomic bomb, properly delivered, almost precludes . . . another amphibious operation like the one in Normandy."

Most U.S. military men agreed that greater reliance on direct air supply would be a vital supplement to sea and land transport in any major future war. The most extreme advocates of air supply maintained that it was already possible to fly combat forces to any point in the world and keep them supplied. Nobody had argued along these lines more persistently than Combat Cargo Command's General Tunner, who believes that "We can fly anything, anywhere, any time."

"Completely Average." Tunner was born (1906) in Elizabeth, N.J. One of five children, he was, his mother remembers, "a completely average boy" until his last year in high school, when he got steamed up over the idea of going to West Point. He took the competitive exams for the Academy twice, once in Elizabeth and once in New Brunswick, N.J. In Elizabeth he stood first among the applicants, in New Brunswick second.

At the Academy Tunner got adequate grades fairly easily, cut his share of capers. There were frequent poker sessions--"He's the world's worst poker player and crap shooter," says his brother-in-law--and there was one glorious weekend in New York when he met four girls from George White's Scandals. Attracted by Tunner's ' strong-jawed, straight-nosed good looks, all four of the girls took to visiting him, in bevy, at West Point, a development which permanently endeared Tunner to his Academy friends.

At West Point Tunner first met his roommate's sister, pretty Margaret Sams. Will fell hard for her, and took her out horseback riding, a sport at which he excelled. Margaret, too, fell hard--off her horse. She went home with a broken leg and a faithful correspondent at West Point. In June 1929, after Tunner had graduated from the Academy and from the Air Corps Flying School at Kelly Field, Texas, he and Margaret were married.

"Willie the Whip." Thirteen years after his graduation from West Point came the assignment that determined the shape of Tunner's Air Force career. In June 1941 he was named personnel officer of the newly formed Air Corps Ferrying Command and promptly began to eat and sleep air transport. Within a year he was a colonel and had command of the Air Transport Command's Ferrying Wing, charged with delivering aircraft to U.S. and allied forces in every theater of war.

Novelist Oliver LaFarge, a wartime Air Force officer, remembers Tunner as "cold in manner except with a few intimates . . . brilliant, competent . . . the kind of officer whom a junior officer is well advised to salute when approaching his desk." One of Tunner's fellow professional officers expanded on LaFarge's theme. Said he: "Will's great fault is his impatience. That business of wanting something yesterday, not today, is a little hard to take." But Tunner's toughness, which has led some of his present subordinates to christen him "Willie the Whip," gave his men efficiency and esprit de corps. Even when removed from his command they remained "Tunner's men."

Tunner's success with the Ferrying Command brought him a brigadier general's star. In August 1944 he was sent to India to take charge of the A.T.C. airlift which flew "the Hump" between Assam and Kunming in China. The month that Will Tunner took command, the Hump lift carried 23,700 tons of supplies; eleven months later, it moved 69,300 tons. Said Lieut. General Albert Wedemeyer, then commander of U.S. forces in China: "Tunner created an epic in air operation."

The Hump permanently expanded Will Tunner's vision of the possibilities of air transport. "We who worked the Hump," said Tunner once, "always knew that what was done there could be picked up bodily, carried to any part of the world and started up again."

"Persistent Beat." Two and a half years after he had left the Hump, Tunner got a chance to prove his point. In July 1948 Major General Laurence Kuter's Military Air Transport Service was given responsibility for the Berlin airlift, which General Curtis Le May's U.S. Air Force in Europe had instituted only one month before. Kuter promptly ordered Tunner to take command of the Air Lift Task Force.

Tunner went to Germany with personal problems much on his mind. The death of his wife not long before had left him lonely. He was worrying over how to bring up his two sons, William and Joseph. William, 16, is now at Taft School in Connecticut, ten-year-old Joseph with his uncle, Colonel Williams Sams, in Macon, Ga.

Tunner settled down in a small room in a Wiesbaden hotel and began to apply his extraordinary powers of concentration to the problem of getting more flight time and hence more payloads out of his airplanes. (A Tunner-made truism: "When an airplane is sitting on the ground, it's going to waste.")

With the aid of officers and men who still wore the bright CBI theater patch, Tunner worked to give the Berlin lift a regular pulse. Said he: "The basic concept ... is to get the entire lift procedure down to a steady, even rhythm with hundreds of airplanes doing exactly the same thing every hour, day & night, at the same persistent beat." Soon his airmen were getting their between-flights lunch from a jeep-borne snack bar on the airfield and listening to a briefing for the return flight before they had finished their hot dogs.

The pilots accepted such unprecedented regimentation and the humble nature of their cargo (much of it coal) with surprising equanimity. Tunner still remembers with amusement the coaldust-covered pilot who told him: "General, there is one thing we can be thankful for in hauling all this coal to Berlin. At least we don't have to carry out the ashes." And by imposing rigid synchronization on every aspect of the lift, Tunner upped the daily tonnage moved from 3,000 to 13,000 during his 15 months in command.

"Hell of a Hurry." Armed with the lessons of Berlin, Tunner returned to the U.S. late in 1949 firmly established as the leading theorist and practitioner of air transport in the U.S. Air Force. When the Korean war began, 5,000 miles from the U.S., Will Tunner's talents suddenly became all-important.

As deputy operational chief of the Military Air Transport Service, Tunner spent the early weeks of the war helping to set up the vital trans-Pacific airlift between California's Fairfield-Suisun Air Force base and Japan (TIME, Aug. 21). By the time the trans-Pacific airlift had hit its stride, it had become necessary to expand the intra-theater Japan-to-Korea lift, which until then had been handled chiefly by Fifth Air Force C-47s flying into Taegu and Pusan. (The sea end of the Pusan strip, barely long enough to get a C-47 into the air, was marked by a sign reading "Oops! That's all.")

To provide the increased air supply required by the rapid U.N. advances after the Inchon landings, the Far East Air Force's General George Stratemeyer set up the Combat Cargo Command and called on the services of Will Tunner.

Tunner set up headquarters at Ashiya air base in southern Japan, brought with him, as usual, assistants of long standing. Tunner's chief of staff Colonel Glen R. Birchard had been with him in Germany. Both his communications officer, Colonel Manuel Hernandez, and his operations officer, Colonel Robert ("Red") Forman, were holdovers from the days of the Hump. Says Tunner: "When we start a new airlift, we start in a hell of a hurry. It is a whole lot easier to start with people you know."

Old friends, though they were Tunner's assistants, did not have an easy time of it. With Combat Cargo Command, as with all his other operations, Tunner worked 14 to 16 hours a day, pushed his subordinates to the limit. Along with his staff, Tunner moved into a stucco and plywood duplex house on the air base. In the evenings he brought work home and labored far into the night, frequently calling staff members in for consultation or for rawhiding rebuke. Ruefully, the staff christened their quarters "Soreprat-by-the-sea." Said one staff officer last week: "There are just two things we talk about around here--girls and tin birds. And the general sees to it that it's mostly just tin birds."

"Small-Scale Berlin." Combat Cargo Command's first big operation was the lift to Kimpo Airport outside Seoul. Once again Tunner worked for a pulselike beat in operations, and got it. After Kimpo, as U.N. forces drove farther north. Tunner's men flew supplies--mostly gas and rations --into one airfield after another right up the line of advance. For over a month.

Tunner believes, the Eighth Army advanced chiefly on supplies brought in by airlift.

Combat Cargo's priority system was a flexible one, permitting fast change when the tactical situation required it--which was often. Last month, when the early winter caught many front-line troops without winter clothing, Combat Cargo offloaded other supplies and flew in tons of shoepacs, parkas, woolen underwear and ski socks. And within hours after the ist Cavalry Division had run into the Chinese counterattack of last Halloween, the airlift had switched from gas and C rations to ammunition and medical supplies. Sometimes, too, the situation called for a fast switch in reverse. Just before the last transport plane pulled out of Sinanju last week, one of Tunner's men noticed on the airfield 25 loaves of specially baked and blessed Moslem bread, the remnants of four tons flown in to supply the Turkish Brigade. The pilot carefully poured gasoline on the bread and set it afire before he departed. Said he: "I thought the Chinamen would like some toast."

Tunner used six Japanese airfields and a fluctuating number of Korean bases, now steadily decreasing from a high of 20. As the demands on his command increased, Tunner acquired more personnel and aircraft until he had at his disposal about 5,200 men and 214 planes. Last week Tunner got the use of three more C-47s, flown by pilots of the Royal Hellenic Air Force. The Greeks helped fly wounded out of the northeast front, thought the show was fine. Said one: "A bad airstrip, hah! You should see some of the airstrips in Greece."

"What we've got here," says Tunner, "is a small-scale Berlin airlift operating from and to many more bases than we had there. And we deliver a hell of a lot more tonnage than most people realize." In the almost four months of its existence the Combat Cargo Command has carried 100,000 passengers, 52,500 medical evacuees, and vast loads of materiel--a total weight of 90,000 tons. This impressive tonnage included everything from napalm to nurses and from beer to Bibles, as well as certain items such as whisky carried on an unofficial "You can take it but we don't see it" basis. It also included band instruments shipped to Korea in response to a ist Marine Division plaint that it had no instruments to provide music for the triumphal entry into Seoul last October.

"Months & Years." Early last week, chain-smoking Will Tunner, the aerial moving man, took off on another of his missions to Korea. He went first to Yonpo on the east coast, then in rapid succession to Hagaru, Seoul, X Corps Headquarters, to Yonpo again and finally back to Ashiya. And at week's end he was boarding his staff C-54 once more to fly to Tokyo for a conference with his boss, General Stratemeyer.

But for all his flying trips and cavalier treatment of distance, publicity-shy Will Tunner has little in common with the legendary dashing airmen, the "wild blue yonder" boys. A man who has heard relatively few shots fired in anger, Tunner is far more akin in outlook and operation to the Detroit executive, the industrial leader who makes mass production tick. Like most such executives, he is preoccupied with costs and time-study. Said he last week: "The cost of an airlift compared with surface transport is really formidable on the face of it, but when you compare the cost of cargo perhaps rotting in ships at harbors whose docks have been heavily bombed or on a month's trip at sea, the comparison gets progressively more favorable.

"An airlift permits an army to accelerate its tempo . . . Where a campaign supplied by surface might take months or years, an airlift may make it possible to finish it in weeks or even days. Who can assess the cost of months and years?"

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