First Superintendent

When the U.S. Air Force won its independence in 1947, it was practically inevitable that there should be an independent Air Academy too. But so many proposals and counterproposals poured in that the Air Force began looking for a topflight general to spearhead the whole project. Last week the man who more than any other made the Air Academy possible got his just reward. When the academy opens its doors to its first 300 cadets next year, it will have as its first superintendent Lieut. General Hubert R. Harmon, 62.

A West Pointer (class of '15), "Doodle" Harmon comes from a distinguished family of soldiers. His father was the commandant of cadets at what is now the Pennsylvania Military College, and one of his brothers was Lieut. General Millard Fillmore Harmon, who, as wartime commander of the Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, was lost at sea in 1945. In World War I, young Doodle served as an aviator in France; in World War II, he commanded the Thirteenth Air Force in the Pacific. Later he served as senior Air Force member on the U.N.'s Military and Naval Staff Committee; in 1949 he was given the job of coordinating plans for the new academy. With an earnest but easygoing diplomacy, he whittled down the bewildering array of blueprints, picked an able committee of civilians and airmen (among them: Charles A. Lindbergh, General Carl Spaatz) to choose a site. Finally, in 1953, having retired to San Antonio, General Harmon was summoned back to help push the whole project through Congress.

Gaunt, genial Doodle Harmon likes to pretend that his chief qualification for his new job is his "unprejudiced ignorance" about education. But in reality, he has already gone far with his plans for the academy's curriculum. On the technical side, cadets will start off with two months of indoctrination in everything from military drill to servicing aircraft. After that will come a three-year aircraft observer's course (355 hours on the ground, 171 in the air), which will qualify cadets as full-fledged navigators and bombardiers. In their last year, the cadets will finally start training as pilots. But for General Harmon, all this is only a part of what the academy will do. A sample of his plans:

P:To place greater emphasis on the liberal arts than either West Point or Annapolis--3,177 hours of the sciences, social studies and the humanities, compared to 2,176 of "airmanship."

P:To arrange such subjects as history and literature "horizontally," so that while cadets are studying the history of ancient Greece, they will be studying its literature too.

P:To offer languages only in the last year, and only to students with a real aptitude and an obvious desire to learn. Instead of big doses of grammar and reading, the academy will concentrate on conversation and speech--on the theory that "the cadet may put his language to use immediately, for many will be sent directly to foreign lands."

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