History's Child

An admiral who could boast of having served with Nelson at Trafalgar would still have known only a fraction of the history of war at sea. But, like a considerable group of still serviceable flying officers, silver-haired, cigar-smoking General Nathan Farragut Twining has personally navigated sloops, junks and frigates of the air. When he was named to succeed General Hoyt Vandenberg as chief of staff of the jet-age Air Force last week, he had already lived, airwise, almost since the beginning of time, and had participated actively in three of four major eras of warfare in the sky. Nate Twining, military airman since 1923, came to high command heavily fueled with experience.

The new chief of staff, who is now an active and athletic 55, comes from a military family. One Annapolis-bred brother, Merrill, is a major general of Marines, another, Robert, is a retired Navy captain. At West Point, Nate Twining, a good end on the football team and a middle-of-the-class student, was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant of infantry in 1919, and was becalmed for almost four years in the doldrums of peacetime Army life. Then he made his way into the Air Service, trained on Jennies and became a pursuit pilot. He rolled up 4,444 hours of single-engine flying time before he moved on to become one of the authors of U.S. suc cess in heavy aerial bombardment during World War II.

Twining is a man of muscular geniality, hope, luck and an administrative flair as well as a noble, oil-grimed background. During World War II, he was named chief of the Thirteenth Air Force in the South Pacific, distinguished himself not only as a commander but as a castaway--he spent six days on a raft eating raw albatross and being parboiled by the tropic sun after a 6-17 crash at sea, near Espiritu Santo. He went to Italy, where he commanded the Fifteenth Air Force for 20 months, and then came back to the Pacific as commander of the Twentieth Air Force, whose 6-293 dropped the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Two and a half years ago. after a tour in Alaska where he hunted big Northern brown bear, he became vice chief of staff and No. 2 man in the Air Force. Last year, when Vandenberg was out of action for months recuperating from surgery, Nate Twining ran the Air Force in all but name, distinguished himself for evenhandedness and loyalty to Vandenberg's policies. Twining is near retirement age. President Eisenhower was thus able to appoint him for two years instead of the usual four, and still reserve the chance to appoint youngish (46) General Lauris Norstad, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, to the top Air Force rung before the next presidential term.

Handsome, ramrod-straight Air Lieut. General Thomas D. (Tommy) White, 51, was picked to succeed General Twining as vice chief of staff. He is a linguist (five languages), an amateur ichthyologist, a notably competent officer and a good airman, but his most enduring fame stems from a bad landing which he made on a Leningrad airstrip in 1934. As U.S. air attache in Russia, West Pointer White flew Ambassador Bill Bullitt from Mos cow to Leningrad in a two-place Douglas O-38F, found he had no power as he came in to land. The plane hit the runway, nosed over, and skidded grandly on its back to the far end of the field. Neither man was hurt, and, as they crawled out, Bullitt muttered, "Tommy, never let the Russians know there was anything unusual in that landing." Both men nonchalantly lighted cigarettes, strolled across the field, and greeted the astonished reception committee without saying a word about their spectacular arrival. "I'm not sure," White says, "that they still don't think that was the way to land an 0-38F."

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