The Longhairs

ARMY & NAVY

After three years of war service, mild-mannered Dr. Robert Lawrence Stearns announced that he was leaving the U.S. Army Air Forces in July to go back to his old job as president of the University of Colorado. Airmen, who knew the crack job Civilian Stearns had done, were almost as concerned as if one of their generals were retiring.

Dr. Stearns was one of a group of men General "Hap" Arnold had rounded up after Pearl Harbor to bring a keen civilian eye to the multifarious problems of the Air Forces. Hap Arnold laid out their duties, sent them out to rout the bugs from combat planes and men. Soon every U.S. war theater had seen eager little bands of middle-aged thinkers in uniform, tinkering, questioning, hot-seating around through enemy flak and fighters.

Imaginative, 52-year-old Dr. Stearns was typical of the group. One of his first jobs, when he was in the Solomons with the Thirteenth Air Force, was to find out what was ailing pilots and ground-crewmen. His verdict: acute boredom. His effective remedy: gardening, classes about the natives, flora & fauna, geology, etc.

When the Twentieth (6-29) Air Force was formed to bomb Japan, seasoned Dr.

Stearns was made chief of its Operations Analysis Division. For 14 months, he and his technicians, whom G.I.s affectionately dubbed "longhairs," have fought as hard as any pilot to tame the brand-new and radically different Superfortresses. Gradually, sometimes by means mystifying to zealous ground crews, the bugs began to come out. Sample exterminations: P: The B-29's big engines were exploding when they caught fire. Dr. William J. Crozier, a Harvard physiologist, suspected that the magnesium-alloy parts blew up when they were doused by the carbon dioxide in the automatic fire extinguishers. Tests proved him right, and combat crews were immediately instructed to use their extinguishers at the first slight hint of fire, or not at all. Later, aluminum alloys were substituted for the magnesium-alloy parts.

P: Precipitation static generated by B-29s was six times as great as that generated by a Flying Fortress, often knocked out radios completely. The professors found that the static could be neutralized by a small generator which would fill the ship with a countercharge.

One of the professors' toughest current problems is weather. Because Superfortress folk could get no weather reports from Siberia, where Japanese weather makes up, highflying B-29s had to be sent dangerously far up the Chinese coast and into the interior on weather-charting trips. To assist in this risky business, Dr. Helmut E. Landsberg, University of Chicago meteorologist, assigned experts to develop radio-sondes, dropped by parachute, to pick up vital ground-level weather data. When perfected, they will considerably bolster predictions of Air Force forecasters in the Marianas.

In the course of other persistent researches, Dr. Stearns's longhairs, working closely with thoughtful airmen, devised new flying formations to intensify B-29 gunfire. They developed greater bombing accuracy with a new technique of offset sighting, worked out fuel-consumption curves that greatly increased 6-29 range and bomb-carrying capacity.

General Arnold, who often chafes at the inscrutable workings of the Army mind, had wanted a fresh viewpoint when he hired Stearns & Co. He had got it, with something to spare.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.