Angry Sascha

The U.S. has no real air power. For all its billions, the U.S. is getting no real air power. The U.S. will have no real air power until the U.S. people wake up themselves and the men responsible for U.S. air policies.

Thus a loud, brash, and angry voice cried this week to the U.S. people. The voice belonged to Major Alexander Procofieff ("Sascha") de Seversky, who won all available decorations, and lost his right leg when he flew for his native Russia in World War I (see cut). Sascha de Seversky is now a columnist and author who designed and manufactured military aircraft in the U.S. before he turned to writing. Into a new book, Victory Through Air Power (Simon & Schuster; $2.50), he has crammed much knowledge, enthusiasm, bitterness, and a limitless faith in the airplane. The result is a blast of gusty. prophetic criticism -- the kind of criticism which frequently overlooks qualifying facts, but is heard all too seldom in a country at war.

Wrote angry Sascha: "Air power is not a matter of numbers, but of proper strategy, tactics, psychological attitudes toward the new domain of conflict. . . ." The root of his criticism is that many Army, Navy and civilian officials now directing the U.S. air program still fail to grasp the fabulous possibilities of global air power.

If the U.S. gets air power on the Seversky scale, it will have bombers and multi-engined fighters able to fly 15,000 and even 25,000 miles, demolish any city on the globe, then return to their U.S. bases without refueling. And by the same token, says Sascha de Seversky, U.S. enemies will have fleets capable of visiting the same destruction on the U.S. He thinks that fleets of such planes can just about take over the main jobs of war, leaving only incidental mopping-up to ground armies and surface navies.

Author de Seversky pregnantly observes that already big, experimental bombers like the Big and the Martin Mars can carry 18 tons of bombs nearly 8,000 miles. He charges that the U.S. would now-- in 1942 --have great fleets of such bombers, able to assault Japan from Alaskan bases, if U.S. officialdom had been properly awake. But he fails to concede that the U.S. is now going into quantity production of bombers able to do many of the things which Sascha and the citizenry want done.

Seversky argues that the men who made the air mistakes have no business ruling the U.S. air in 1942. From the recent past, he hauls many a U.S. mistake to prove his point. He declares that U.S. pursuit planes were scandalously lacking in power, arma ment, range and over-all combat efficiency when World War II began, that many models now in production are already out-of-date. Says Sascha: "It is about time we stopped bragging. ... If we continue to live in a fool's paradise of self-congratulation and far-fetched alibis, there is nothing ahead of us but brutal disillusionment." To Author de Seversky, the case for a completely separate air force is obvious.

Only with a separate air force, says he, will the men who understand global air power be able to create real -- and by real he means -of air-- power for the U.S. Meantime, says unmodest, sin cere Sascha de Seversky: "Those of us who have grasped the meaning of genuine air power have a clear function to per form. It is to hammer away, day and night, even at the risk of making ourselves a nuisance, at the mind and conscience of our country."

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