In the cold, early months of 1950, the eyes of the Western world were firmly focused on Europe. The Berlin Airlift, that stroke of logistics genius that had broken Stalin's encirclement, was recent enough. The buzz in the corridors of the Pentagon and in the State Department was of NATO, of defending West Germany, of the ever-present threat of Soviet tank armies pouring through the Fulda Gap.
It was under such circumstances of Eurocentric panic that Ezra Prentice requested a tense, closed-door meeting with some of the most senior generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not as some nuclear advisor that he went to meet with them, but as a Cassandra, a prophet bearing an unpleasant omen.
He stood before the stern, decorated men in a closed briefing room deep within the Pentagon. He unrolled a map, but it was not of Europe. It was of the Korean peninsula.
"Gentlemen," began Ezra, his voice serene but with an unsettling certitude. "As we rightly reinforce the gates in Western Europe, the Soviets plan on striking a spark of war in our back yard. My sources tell me of a massive arsenal buildup in North Korea. Tanks, artillery, aircraft. All of it supplied by Moscow."
One of the generals of the Air Force, vaunted commander of bombers at the last war, leaned back in his chair, bored and impatient. "Prentice, all due respect, it's a third-rate peasant army we're talking about. The constabulary of South Korea can eliminate them. Our strategy, as dictated by the President himself, is the defense of Europe."
"You're wrong, General," Ezra said, never looking away from his. "You see an army of peasants. I see a proxy. Stalin isn't ready yet for a head-to-head fight in Europe, not as long as we have the atomic monopoly. But he is the maestro of feeling out weaknesses, of probing enemies. And he is going to use the North Koreans as proxies in order to mount an enormous invasion of the South, in order to discover whether the United States has the political will to do the hard work of a conventional war half a world away. The Korean peninsula," he stabbed at the map with his finger, "is the next giant tinderbox. And we're danger-ously under-prepared for the war we're going to be forced to fight there."
His circumspection was greeted with gracious but skeptical disdain. The generals did not take him as any more than a brilliant but eccentric industrialist, an individual whose gift was with bombs and factories rather than geopolitics at the grassroots. They thanked him for his "contributions" and went back on their planning for war in Europe.
On June 25, 1950, the tinderbox was ignited.
The news broke like thunder. Ninety thousand North Korean troops, supported by over one hundred and fifty Soviet-produced T-34 tanks, burst across the 38th parallel. The United States capital went into panic. President Truman, as a measure of containment, committed the troops of the United States to the defense of South Korea.
The generals who had sneered at Ezra's warning were desperately reeling. The first American soldiers to rush to the peninsula were the "soft" occupying army of Japan, undertrained, underarmed, and emotionally unfit for the harsh realities of war. Armed with World War II's surplus inventory of useless anti-tank rockets, aged fighter planes, and tanks that couldn't keep their own against the hardy T-34.
The news at the front was a roll call of disaster. The American and South Korean armies were being beaten back in headlong retreat. The North Korean T-34s were merciless, seemingly impervious to the available firepower of infantry. The high-altitude, high-speed interceptors of the United States Air Force were not ideal for the dirty, close-in work of close air support at targets on the battlefield.
In the midst of the panic, Ezra Prentice made one fateful call. It was to General Groves, an old associate of Prentice, now linchpin of the Pentagon's brand-new research and development agency.
"General," Ezra's voice was unflappable, cutting through the panic of the day. "You remember that experimental design at the Seversky division? The one whose prospects the Air Force procurement board showed little enthusiasm for last year? The ground-attack plane."
Groves did not quite recall. "The 'flying cannon'? The sluggish type? The Air Force men told it was obsolescent. They insist on speed, altitude."
"The Air Force establishment is fighting the wrong war, General," said Ezra nonchalantly. "That 'relic' had only one task in life: defeating tanks. It is slow because it is very heavily armored. It carries a 37-millimeter cannon in the nose of it capable of tearing the top armor of the T-34 like sheet paper. It can prowl across a battlefield for hours. It is the very weapon you need today."
Prior to Groves being able to begin the process of navigating the bureaucratic war procurement thicket, Ezra did it himself. He himself telephoned the presidents of his own businesses. He issued only one demand: begin immediate, day-and-night mass production of the new plane, now officially the "A-1 Guardian." He did not await a government contract; he himself wrote the check for the first production order out of his own vast capital reserves.
Meanwhile, he reached for the telephone and called his head of division at Van Norman. "Initiate Project M20," he ordered. It was a top-secret project for the manufacture of a new, powerful 3.5-inch anti-tank rocket launcher—the weapon he himself knew by history as the "super bazooka," the only infantry weapon capable of routinely killing a T-34. Two years earlier, he had ordered it as the solution of an problem the army had not yet foreseen. The manufacturing facilities and equipment, financed with his own resources, already existed.
Weeks afterwards, in the wild, bloody battling within and outside the Pusan Perimeter, the last piece of land still under siege to the hard-pressed UN army, it occurred. American troops, on the verge of being beaten back into the sea by yet another armored thrust of the North Koreans, listened in wonder as an odd sound drifted down from the sky. It was not the high-pitched wail of the jet, but the deep, guttural grumble of an unfamiliar plane.
A twelve-ship formation of A-1 Guardians, recognizable by their dull olive green finish, materialized on the battlefield. These were not being flown by Air Force men, however, but rather by a group of hardened, civilian company test pilots, men who had "volunteered" in behalf of the war effort at Ezra's personal, and very generous, behest.
The planes plunged, paying no heed to the ineffective anti-aircraft rounds that plinked off their thick armour. The thrum of their engines was drowned by the deep pulsating pounding of their nose guns. The effect on the North Korean tank formations was catastrophic. The high-explosive rounds ripped through the thin top armour of the T-34s, destroying them as roaring pyres. The seemingly invulnerable armour spearhead was broken, shattered, and in retreat.
At the same time, on the ground, emergency airlifts were delivering the first lots of the new M20 super bazookas to the infantry troops on the front line. An individual GI could now stand on his own feet and kill a T-34 at one hundred yards.
The tide at Pusan had changed.
Back at the Pentagon, the generals gazed in awed, grudging respect. Ezra Prentice had predicted the character of the war with uncanny accuracy, yet had covertly conceived, paid for, and produced the very arms with which it was waged. These arms had long before, months, years perhaps, before the formal military establishment had doubtless sanctioned the very drawings, lain on the battlefield.
He had rebranded himself as his own, personal military-industrial complex, an independent entity that could identify the threat, conceptualize the solution, and implement it with celerity and élan that made the government look like a sleeping giant. He was no longer just any more contractor or consultant. He was an indispensable strategic partner, an individual whose private arsenal had saved an American army from being wiped out.