Time to Retire

One day in 1929, a trimotored Fokker monoplane bearing the name Question Mark took off and began swinging in lazy circles over Southern California. Every few hours, night & day, a second plane rose up, jockeyed a hose into position on the droning Fokker, poured gas into its thirsty tanks. After six days, the Fokker glided back to earth. Its bone-tired pilots, among them a stocky, ruddy-skinned Army lieutenant named Elwood Richard Quesada, * had just hung up a world's endurance record.

A hot, throttle-busting flyer, Quesada won his wings in 1925, studied engineering, learned to pilot every plane from wasplike pursuits to lumbering amphibians. At the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kans., he concluded from a year's study that close air support of ground troops is the key to modern war.

The Army made him a Brigadier General at 38, gave him the 12th Fighter Command in Africa in 1943. On D-plus-one, he landed on a shell-swept Normandy beach as a major general heading the 9th Fighter Command in Hoyt Vandenberg's Ninth Air Force. Harsh and driving, he was all over the front, browbeating airfield engineers, chewing out squadron commanders for not doing more, flying battle missions between times.

Quesada came out of the war surer than ever of the power of tactical air. But in the postwar era of demobilization and economy, the Air Force was cut to the nub and concentrated on heavy bombers. Quesada, then head of the Tactical Air Command, fought a bitter and losing battle. When Tactical Air was abolished as a separate command in 1948, impulsive "Pete" Quesada put in for retirement. He was independently well-to-do and married to the daughter of wealthy Publisher Joseph Pulitzer of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. But the Air Force persuaded him to stay on to take charge of the Eniwetok atomic tests.

Last week, the job finally done and his report ready, Lieut. General Quesada put in for his retirement and got it. A veteran of 25 years in the service, he is only 47.

* Others: Major "Tooey" Spaatz, later to become head of the Strategic Air Forces, and first Chief of Staff of the new Air Force (1947); Captain Ira Eaker, later commander of the Eighth Air Force and finally Spaatz's deputy.

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