Thomas Sarsfield Power - Arlington VA - Grave of a Famous Person on Waymarking.com

He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Section 30, Site 396

Description: US Air Force General. He was the commander of the US Air Force's Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska from 1957 to 1964. He was the last US general officer with no post-secondary education. He attended Barnard Preparatory School in New York City, New York and entered the US Army Air Corps flying school in February 1928. A year later he was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. In the 1930s he held assignments at most of the famed Air Corps fields of the day, including Chanute Field, Illinois as a student officer, Langley Field, Virginia as commanding officer of the 2d Wing Headquarters Detachment, Bolling Field, Washington, DC for duty as an Army air mail operations pilot, Randolph Field, Texas as a flying instructor, Maxwell Field, Alabama to attend the Air Corps Tactical School, and completing his early career as engineering and armament officer at Nichols Field, Philippines. During World War II, he first saw combat flying B-24 Liberator aircraft with the 304th Bomb Wing on bombing missions in North Africa and Italy. In August 1944 he returned to the US and was named commander of the 314th Bomb Wing, and moved his B-29 Superfortress aircraft to Guam in the Pacific as part of the 21st Bomber Command. From Guam, he directed the first large-scale fire bomb raid on Tokyo, Japan, on March 9, 1945. On August 1, 1945, General Carl Spaatz, then commanding general of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, moved him to his staff as Deputy Chief of operations, and he served in this capacity during the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. During Operation Crossroads, the 1946 atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, he was assigned as assistant deputy task force commander for air on Admiral William H. P. Blandy's staff. This was followed by assignments as Deputy Assistant Chief of Air Staff for Operations in Washington DC, and a period of air attaché duty in London, prior to his transfer to the Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, as vice commander in 1948. During the next six years, he assisted General Curtis E. LeMay, then commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, in building up SAC. In 1954 he was appointed commander of the Air Research and Development Command, a position he held for three years. In 1957 he was promoted to the rank of general and became Commander-in-Chief of SAC after General LeMay was named Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He was the architect of the controversial Operation Chrome Dome airborne alert program of SAC that ensured that a proportion of the nuclear-armed strategic bombers were always aloft in order to survive a first nuclear strike by the Soviets. On October 24, 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, SAC was ordered to "DEFCON 2," one step short of nuclear war. Although authorized to increase his alert level, he took the unprecedented and unauthorized action of broadcasting that message to the global SAC nuclear forces in "the clear" (on non-scrambled, open radio channels), presumably in an attempt to scare the Soviets into complying with the US's demands. Although he was widely criticized for revealing the readiness status of US strategic forces in an uncoded transmission (which was reportedly picked up by Soviet intelligence services), the message's major purpose appears to have been to encourage subordinate SAC officers to place priority on "calm judgment" and the prevention of mistakes in the crisis. He retired from the US Air Force on November 30, 1964 with 35 years of continued active military service. Among his military decorations and awards include the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal, the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit with one oak leaf cluster, the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star, and the Air Medal with one oak leaf cluster, the Air Force Commendation Medal with one oak leaf cluster, and the French Croix de Guerre with palm. He was a rated command pilot and aircraft observer. Date of birth: 01/18/1905 Date of death: 12/06/1970 Area of notoriety: Military Marker Type: Monument Setting: Outdoor Visiting Hours/Restrictions: None Fee required?: No Web site: [Web Link]

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Date Logged Log   10/09/2021 Don.Morfe visited it