Air University Review, March-April 1967

De Gaulle: Enigma in the Western Alliance?

Major Alfred R. Uhalt, Jr.

I represent a party which does not yet exist; the party of revolution, civilization. This party will make the twentieth century. There will issue from it fir8t the United States of Europe. . .

                                                                                                            —Victor Hugo

General Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle is president of the Fifth French Republic. It may even be accurate to say that Charles de Gaulle is the Fifth French Republic. His dominant personality and powerful leadership have brought much stability to a historically chaotic political arena. Out of the inadequacies and failures of past parliamentary democracies has come an innovation in French government brought about largely by the pre-eminence and uniqueness of De Gaulle himself. He has brought unprecedented power, prestige, and dynamic leadership to the previously weak and ineffectual position of the French presidency. Under his hand, France has prospered and is gaining a dominant position in Europe. So well has “Gaullism” shown itself a unifying, directing force on the French political stage that it will undoubtedly remain long after the General has passed from the scene.

With the emergence of Gaullist France as a strong political and military power, an era appears to be coming to an end in Western Europe—an era in which the United States has played the leading role in European defense and political direction. In the era now opening, the nations of Western Europe are becoming more and more aligned with each other in terms of European self-interests. Great Britain has moved to enter the European Economic Community and strengthen its ties with the Continent. The Russians are wooing the Italians both politically and economically, with some noticeable results. Turkey and Portugal have both recently recoiled from U.S. influence, Turkey moving toward closer ties with the Arab nations. To the north, Denmark and Norway show signs of wavering in their commitments to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Even West Germany, still publicly holding very close to the United States, is beginning to talk “unofficially” with the Communist rulers of East Germany.

Thus, while certainly not alone in deciding the time has come to change course, France has made the most dramatic break to date. On 14 January 1963 President de Gaulle flatly rejected the United States’ plan for a NATO combined nuclear force, restated France’s intention of developing her own independent force de frappe, and indicated France’s intention to withdraw from the integrated NATO military establishment by 1969. He has since strengthened his position, with the result that foreign NATO forces are currently leaving his country.

In general, the United States feels let down if not virtually betrayed by the French action. Americans cannot understand this reaction to what they consider their freely offered helping and guiding hands, under which the French nation has recovered from the ravages of war and grown to her present stature and position in the world community. In the last half century, Americans feel, the United States has done more for France and the French people than any nation in history has ever done for another. Twice in this time when Europe vividly demonstrated that it could not handle its own affairs, America rescued her old-world allies from major war and then underwrote the rebuilding of a devastated Europe, including France. Following World War II, when the threat of Communist aggression hung heavy over the West, the United States provided the military bulwark behind which France and the rest of Europe rebuilt with Marshall Plan and other aid from the United States.

Now we are witnessing the payoff, and for the United States and the Western Alliance it is not a pleasant prospect. Under President de Gaulle, France is moving with a strong bid to replace the United States as the keystone of the European defensive alliance. De Gaulle makes no pretense of his aim to recoup for France the “grandeur” of days gone by. To accomplish this purpose and restore France to a position of world leadership, De Gaulle has consistently sought to undermine and downgrade the position of the United States in both European and world affairs. By and large the American people have not been very favorably impressed with this response to the immense investment in lives and money they have made in France and all of Europe over the years.

To save the European allies from defeat in World War I cost the United States 36,000 lives and 224,000 wounded. France received $27 billion in direct military aid and $12.2 billion in loans (of which she still owes $6.7 billion and shows no inclination to pay). To wrest a defeated France from the Axis powers in World War II, the American people sacrificed 184,000 lives and 479,000 wounded. To bail Europe out of her second political breakdown in less than a quarter century, the American taxpayer paid $250 billion and then proceeded to pour $11 billion more directly into France in Marshall Plan aid and direct grants ($4 billion). In addition to direct financial aid, the United States provided large military forces in Europe through the postwar years to insure against a new military attack from the east while Europe, including France, rebuilt without having to bear the heavy burden of defense. These troops also had the secondary effect of providing additional dollars to the European economy. To further assist in the economic rebirth of Europe, the United States government during this period encouraged an outflow of gold to Europe, thus helping her European friends regain financial liquidity and soundness in their own currencies. This action has resulted in severe gold flow problems for the United States in later years.

Cynics retort that this support was in the self-interest of the United States and not really for the benefit of the receiver nation. In retrospect, however, one need only point out the unprecedented nature of the action, even including restoration of the vanquished by the victor. To restate an oft-quoted phrase, “No man is an island.” What affects one nation affects another. While there may be some degree of truth in the cynical proposition, the undeniable fact remains: America was needed; history records that she responded willingly, wholeheartedly, and “in spades.”

For this, Americans asked nothing in return except a proclivity among the people of Western Europe to cooperate in building a unified defensive force that in the future could do more to protect itself. For a while, the outlook was good; but now, largely due to the actions of General de Gaulle, the defensive structure of the Western Alliance is badly split, and with just another small push the whole thing will certainly come tumbling down.

Why has France moved in this direction? To most Americans and even many Frenchmen (e.g., General Salan), De Gaulle’s military policy, if not also his economic and social policies, has appeared an inconsistent paradox to say the least. On the one hand France has abandoned Indochina (Vietnam), withdrawn from Algeria, and virtually eliminated the elite Foreign Legion as an effective fighting force, while on the other hand she has built an impressive modern army backed by over one million reservists on 24-hour call, a modern air force boasting both supersonic fighters and supersonic bombers capable of delivering impressive self-developed nuclear weapons, and her own nuclear-tipped 2000-mile intermediate-range ballistic missile. In 1965 she demonstrated to the world the efficacy of this missile by using it to boost the first all-French satellite into orbit. Further, France intends to equip her navy with French-built, missile-launching, nuclear-powered submarines, also capable of delivering her nuclear punch.

What is the purpose behind this extensive and expensive buildup of French military might, apparently redundant with United States weaponry candidly offered in good faith in defense of the free world? What is General de Gaulle’s “grand design” about which Washington is having such misgivings? Why has France appeared the stumbling block in the path of NATO military integration and European political and economic unity? De Gaulle has often been accused of deliberate disruption of the drive toward Atlantic cooperation and European unity in order to foster the dominance of France. He has been accused of having delusions of grandeur and has even been called “Charlemagne II.” Why? Let us try, as best we can, to view the French position as a Gaullist might.

the world from Paris

There may be a mystical streak in Charles de Gaulle, but there is really little mystery in his policy. Ever since returning to power eight years ago, he has been trying to drive the same point home to Washington: France must share in the big decisions. Rebuffed by Roosevelt and Churchill during World War II, he proposed to his old comrade-in-arms, President Eisenhower, the establishment of a triumvirate, the United States, Britain, and France, which would more or less run the affairs of the Western world and manage the cold war. That proposal was met initially with silence; then, somewhat later, with a flat “No.” When De Gaulle asked to share in the Anglo-American atomic arsenal, the answer was the same. For a brief time it appeared that President Kennedy might take a different tack, but White House advisers decided that, after all, France was a “negligible quantity” and it was sheer arrogance for De Gaulle to demand equal status with the all-powerful United States. The proposal for a multilateral force, conceived in the Kennedy era, was considered by Paris as having only one objective: the integration of France in an Atlantic community and the strengthening of U.S. hegemony.

When Lyndon Johnson assumed the Presidency, De Gaulle put out a few feelers, but there was no change in the reaction from Washington. De Gaulle finally grew impatient and shifted his tactics: he acted so that Washington simply could not ignore him. Perhaps in a bit of French pique, he engaged in “nuisance diplomacy.” This was the period of bitter recriminations and harsh statements about American policy. It was the time of De Gaulle’s unprecedented tour of South America, of French anti-American initiatives in the United Nations, and of France’s recognition of Communist China. President Johnson remained unimpressed.

The French insist that the United States has either ignored or misunderstood what De Gaulle is trying to do—jolt Britain and the United States out of their euphoric vision of a quickly carpentered “new Europe,” which, as André Malraux has said, “will not be made merely by singing songs.” Action is needed, and De Gaulle’s attitude is based on his vision of what Europe must be by 1980 or 1990. He sees five long processes evolving:

·  the changing nature of government in the United States
 

·  the changing relationship of the United States to Europe
 

·  the changing nature of the Soviet Union
 

·  the growing threat from China
 

·  the new emergence of Europe.

Too long, he insists, the policy of the Western democracies has been that of response. Indeed, President Johnson has repeatedly referred to U.S. world military policy as one of “measured response.” An impasse has been reached, De Gaulle feels, and it is time to discard a governmental strategy that is both bad and obsolete. France must seize the initiative and capitalize on these five “obvious” world factors, to lead Europe in creating a new, dynamic, and forward-looking government, oriented to the modern world, substituting it for the obsolete ideologies of U.S. responsive democracy and Soviet atheistic materialism.

the United States and Europe

The first two of these factors, as France sees them, must be examined together. They are inexorably intermeshed and involve both military and political considerations.

Western military structure. De Gaulle’s central military concept is simply this: In an age of nuclear power and in a world made up of sovereign nation-states where no real world-state exists, every individual nation with an important stake in the world situation must be unilaterally strong, able to fight at least a limited war with limited objectives, and, if unable to defend world interests in general hostilities, at the very least be able to defend herself effectively in the event of general war, as well as join in the common offensive against the enemy. This nation must be free and able to use all its skill, power, fortitude, and know-how as it sees fit without being subject to nuclear blackmail. This freedom of choice in the international amphitheater is what Mortimer Adler calls “external sovereignty,” i.e., freedom of a nation to risk nuclear war by fighting or threatening to fight a conventional war and, in so doing, forcing the option of escalation or de-escalation upon the enemy, as President Kennedy did in the Cuban missile crisis.

General de Gaulle contends that this position of independent national strength contributes even more materially to the overall deterrent posture of the Western allies than NATO at its best, in that the Communists not only must concern themselves with Western collective interests but also must be even more sure not to tread on any individual toes lest they touch off a world nuclear holocaust. Obviously then, says De Gaulle, any nation such as France that wants to be both free and influential in this world of sovereign states must have a nuclear-capable striking force of its own, for only thus can such a nation use its military power to political advantage by being able to fight or threaten to fight, deploy force in its own interest, or shoot or be shot at without undue risk of nuclear destruction at the hands of the enemy. Thus, rather than look to NATO, France is leaning heavily on her own developing force de frappe, to include a truly modern army, navy, supersonic air force, and both silo-based and submarine launched missiles, all combat-ready and nuclear equipped by 1970. Rather than divide Europe, De Gaulle feels he can provide a first line of strengthened defense for a unified Europe (at least militarily for now) under a European, French-led protective nuclear umbrella.

No one pretends that France’s nuclear deterrent will ever be anything but small, yet it would add heavily to the price the Russians would have to pay for any aggression in Europe which an American politically minded administration did not consider immediately menacing to the United States itself. “Suppose,” said a French minister in 1963, “the Hungarians had had only three atomic bombs during the 1956 uprising. Do you think the Russians would have behaved the way they did? I don’t.” And neither does Charles de Gaulle.

Grandeur and the new view of government. Some accuse the French President of having dreams of grandeur—a word so hateful to the American democratic soul that no reporter or commentator on this side of the Atlantic is able to mention it without sarcasm. What the American forgets is that, although Charles de Gaulle is a politician as chief of his party and president of the French Republic, he is nevertheless a military man through and through, and his every action and every utterance must be viewed and understood with respect to his concepts of military power and its employment in affairs of state.

De Gaulle sees himself as the central and principal actor in the new European political structure he is trying to mold. He objects to unlimited parliamentary debate prior to action in international affairs, viewing it as incompatible with his concept of a “new government of the future.” He does not think of this government as a dictatorship but rather as a new form of democracy to which France (and eventually all of Europe) must come in order to survive in a nuclear age. The essence of this concept is that the international situation now demands dynamic leaders with full authority to commit the nation and thus make its position, policy, and military capability credible at the summit.

The General thinks, for example, that it is precisely the citizen’s unwillingness to incur the risk of war that places the military system and policy of an old-line democracy in the hands of its politicians and so prevents it from achieving credibility in a time of crisis. Only when war is the inevitable alternative, only when the issue is narrowed to a stark “Yield or perish!” situation will the citizens of such a state make the act of sacrifice upon which diplomatic credibility and international adequacy depend. But by this time, in a nuclear age, it is already too late: peace is dead and diplomacy is wringing her hands over the corpse of civilization.

In De Gaulle’s view, there is a basic truth which the democracy of the future must take into consideration if it is to survive: in an age of total nuclear destructive capability, a clearly defined opposition exists between politics on the one hand and diplomacy with its handmade strategy on the other. For politics (the partisan politics of a democracy) has formed the habit of being primarily concerned—all too often to the exclusion of everything else –with domestic headship, which means winning votes that might otherwise be attracted to the more soothing platform of the opponent. And winning votes amidst the unending international crises of our time means taking into account not the enemy’s preparations, manifest intentions, and opportunities but primarily the voters’ fear of war and the risk of escalation, which induces a “security complex” utterly opposed to the steely mental makeup that is fast becoming as indispensable to successful statesmanship as it is to military victory.

In his most famous book, Vers L’Armée de Métier (The Army of the Future), written in 1934, De Gaulle points out that immediately after the battle of Sadowa in 1866 France should have positioned her armies along the Rhine but did not do so. “With how much blood and tears,” he observes, “did we pay for this error of the Second Empire!” To confront Prussia with such a fait accompli would have required calling up the reserves. At the time, this was politically unpopular, even though called for by the French General Staff as essential to the defense of France. In retrospect, such a move in 1866 might well have prevented the wars of 1870, 1914, and 1939. A century later, in a world armed with weapons of mass annihilation, De Gaulle sees even more incipient tragedy in the inability of a democracy to formulate and execute a swift and timely strategic decision.

The small war that aborts the great war, the small threat that averts the great threat, the small risk that presents the enemy with a greater risk than he is willing to take—all these have one single ineluctable requirement in common: to be effective, they must be in time. And unfortunately, the capacity for strategic timing—the timing of a war or threat or risk that strikes the enemy like a bolt of lightning from an apparently cloudless sky—has not hitherto been an outstanding attribute of the parliamentarian.

So democracy, thinks the French President, is now faced with the necessity of taking a more intelligent view of a type of man that for the last fifty years has been the “whipping boy” of politicians in time of peace but the national idol of millions when he forges to the front during a war—a war which he feels could have been averted had the politicians listened to him in time of peace. This man is the strategist in politics, the politico-strategist, the man who can take his well-calculated risks and submit himself and his policies to the heaving billows of time and circumstance precisely because he is aware of the situation “on the other side of the hill”—the same situation which the mere politician, adept at partisan politics with his eye on the ballot box and his hand on the voter’s pulse, refuses to admit even to himself, much less to his constituents.

In any event, after his long observation (often first-hand) and studied analysis of war in its relationship to free men and democracy (particularly the French democracy), Charles de Gaulle seems to have learned his lesson well. It is essentially a lesson in the proper use of might and power (Clausewitz’s “continuation of politics by other means”) in pursuit of the utmost goal of the modern Western democracies: peace—but peace with honor, integrity, security, opportunity, and, above all, freedom.

The myth of military alliance. So now we may understand, if not appreciate, De Gaulle’s idea of grandeur or, more properly put, his concept of direct personal power as the head of state of a modern, powerful, and influential nation in a dynamically moving and rapidly changing world. While some may not approve of such immense power at the virtual beck of the French president, there is nothing in this particular kind of government, per se, that would cast impedimenta along the path of international cooperation. Why then have we found it so increasingly difficult to work with France in moving toward the common goals sought by all free men?

Why indeed? Perhaps we had best look away from the Tricolor to find the answer to this question. If we remember how France has been denied both nuclear secrets and nuclear weapons by the United States and Great Britain, then we will have the key to understanding of De Gaulle’s conduct toward the United States and Great Britain as well as toward NATO and the United Nations. General de Gaulle sees one point absolutely crystal clear: only by possession of effective nuclear power today, and not by negotiations or alliances, can a sovereign nation avoid nuclear limbo—that is, be free to use power in a world where only power counts.

While many will deny it and counter with voluminous and vehement testimony as to the worth of the Western Alliance and NATO, the truth is that we have never really learned the lesson so vividly displayed by the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. But De Gaulle has learned it. It has confirmed his stated position, and he is moving to take advantage of the knowledge thus gained as rapidly as he can. In that crisis situation, two observations were outstanding: First, there was no prior consultation by the U.S. with allies, with NATO, or with the U.N. To such an extent was this true and obvious to the world that a member of the British House of Commons lamented publicly that the United States had threatened England with “annihilation without representation!” Second, without any publicly stated overt threat to use our nuclear military power (which was never explicitly brought into the picture), we were able to get our way simply and solely by the use (the blockade) and the threat (the airborne divisions poised for invasion of Cuba) of conventional power. All this, of course, operated under the implied threat of our nuclear arsenal directed at the Soviet Union—as, in fact, do our conventional operations in Vietnam today.

As General de Gaulle saw it, all this ponderous international machinery represented by NATO and the U.N. was regarded as useless by the United States in the grave Cuban missile crisis. Thus the French President’s position was confirmed: International diplomatic ragtag and outmoded encumbering machinery was and would continue to be useless in any real crisis. It did not take him long to see in dynamic action that, the world being what it is today, the only thing useful in a military crisis is unilateral power absolutely at the disposal of the unfettered, uninhibited national sovereignty concerned. Moreover, this conclusion has a corollary, also graphically demonstrated by the missile crisis: The use of or the threat to use unilateral conventional power as a tool of international diplomatic persuasion was credible and possible without undue risk of nuclear retaliation only if the sovereign nation concerned possessed a nuclear umbrella; that is to say, a nuclear force absolutely at its own disposal and at the disposal of no other nation or group of nations.

Thus, if consultation is out (as it certainly was during the Cuban crisis), then there is no sense in having allies who must be consulted prior to any power act or power threat. The course for a strong nation to take, then, is to rid itself of all encumbering military alliances and get hold of some real nuclear power, free of any strings, so that the nation can effectively employ its own power in its own interest as it sees fit.

The Cuban crisis did not move De Gaulle to this position and conclusion; it only confirmed the position he had adopted and proclaimed to his countrymen and the world years before. In the 1930’s, he warned that France’s static military concept based on the defensive Maginot Line policy was basically unsound from both a military and a diplomatic point of view. He urged the French government to adopt a mobile and offensive strategy based on tanks, but it was only the high command of the Third Reich that heeded his advice. He foresaw that a nation geared to defensive armaments was incapable of carrying out a diplomatic offensive against a potential aggressor, and the Anglo-French diplomatic surrender to Hitler and Mussolini at Munich only confirmed the same position he still advocates today.

Many Americans maintain that France “owes” the Western Alliance her unfailing allegiance. Based on a centuries-old moral bond, cemented in this century by two World Wars, it is obvious that her allies will always come to her aid. General de Gaulle has some reason to doubt this. In France’s three postwar military crises, Indochina, Suez, and Algeria, where were her allies? Being a member of NATO and the U.N. did not help France in any of these crucial hours when her own vital interests were at stake (nor did it help Portugal in Goa and Damão). In fact, at Suez France’s strongest partner in NATO opposed her and deliberately undermined her position. A lot of “moral debt” was wiped from the slate by that debacle.

Thus, says Charles de Gaulle, NATO is dead and it was the United States as much as or more than any other that killed it. All that remains is to bury it with honor before it rots. If the “total commitment” of the United States government to defend Europe as it would “Main Street U.S.A.” ever really existed, it exists no longer. However politely the realities may be disguised, the deterrent strength of NATO is based, in the last analysis, on U.S. nuclear power, over which the American President exercises absolute control; and thus he exercises a de facto hegemony over Western Europe, including France. De Gaulle feels it intolerable that the countries of Western Europe should have to entrust the decision of their national survival to a foreign ruler in a distant land. Whatever the protestations of successive U.S. Presidents that the defense of Europe is essential to the survival of America, De Gaulle maintains that no one can predict absolutely that the United States will act in the best interest of Europe. In fact, her propensity not to do so has already been repeatedly demonstrated. Thus, Europe cannot afford to depend upon the United States in this dynamically changing world and in time of crisis stand by while the American body politic debates whether or not any new escalation in the world situation warrants U.S. action. If action is in the best interest of France, France must be free and able to act. As the only solution to this situation, De Gaulle returns to his main theme: Europe must have its own nuclear deterrent, and as part of this eventual European deterrent France must have her own nuclear force, over which she has complete control. Since nuclear weapons are the ultimate armament in the modern world, De Gaulle contends that French diplomacy can speak meaningfully in world affairs only if it is backed by a French nuclear force. As long as a country does not have national military independence, it cannot be said to have national political independence, and without political independence national prestige and ambitions for influence among the world community of nations are only pipe dreams.

the Soviet Union and Communist China

The third and fourth points underlying Gaullist philosophy are France’s belief in the changing nature of the Soviet Union and the growing threat from Communist China. While still a threat to Europe, Russia is no longer the hulking, ponderous menace, waiting only for the opportunity to spring, that she once was. “Perhaps,” says Couve de Murville, “the day will come when the evolution of the Soviet Union is sufficient for it to dispense with the idea of conquest of the world. Then it might be possible to establish conditions for a lasting peace.”

In this benign vision there is a great deal of André Malraux. Malraux, a close adviser to President de Gaulle and a world-renowned expert on China, believes the real threat to the world now lies not in Moscow but in Peking. He believes that Communist China is at the moment a faltering giant. When the giant stops stumbling around amidst its own misdirected egomania and rises up as a nuclear-powered nation of one billion people, then despite any efforts of the West the Communist Chinese will certainly dominate, if not physically overrun, all of Southeast Asia and possibly even the Indian subcontinent. For this reason De Gaulle feels that further action in Vietnam is senseless and a useless waste of resources that could be better applied elsewhere. If this De Gaulle-Malraux view of the future should prove correct, the Russian regime will undoubtedly be forced to associate itself with the West as the lesser of two evils, much as she did when her late ally Nazi Germany turned against her in 1941.

the new Europe

Here, then, in De Gaulle’s view of future world alignments, lie the roots of the fifth and final factor of his philosophy, embodied in his oft-quoted but much-misunderstood reference to a united Europe reaching all the way from the Atlantic to the Urals.

Americans have condemned the French President for his recognition of and association and trade with the Communist nations. On 20 June 1966 he traveled to Moscow, a gesture itself indicating he no longer considers the Soviet Union to be a real threat to the security of today’s strengthened Western Europe. There is talk of the renewal of the wartime Franco-Soviet alliance, much to the displeasure of Washington. Such a move would further undermine NATO and effectively isolate Germany—but it is another step toward De Gaulle’s vision of a Europe extending from the Atlantic to the Urals.

De Gaulle realizes this new European community will not be created in the next few years or even during his lifetime, but if the Soviet bloc in Europe can be pulled by the West while being pushed by China, he feels that the European politico-ideological conflict can be made to disappear and a united Europe would then make sense. The present French president, would no longer be around, of course, but it is completely in character and in keeping with his consuming sense of history that Charles de Gaulle should now be thinking and acting audaciously on behalf of the country he loves and for a new Europe which cannot possibly emerge until he has been years in his grave—if ever.

And so France is rushing headlong toward military and political autonomy, holding aloft her great vision of leading Europe into a new unity. At the helm is President Charles de Gaulle, whose commanding personality has been alternately admired and detested for his single-minded determination in pursuing goals that sometimes coincided but more often collided with the policies of his partners in the West. Yet, however much one might disagree with le grand Charles’ vision of the future, one would be ill-advised to disregard it, since for almost four decades his views have so often proved prophetically correct.

From the Maginot Line to the DEW Line, Charles de Gaulle has proclaimed his message consistently and loudly. Should his words seem strange, his logic is sound: “If America wants Europe to be a partner, she must let it be itself and not what she chooses to make it.”

On 20 May 1966 the following press release appeared on the world’s news wires:

London (AP)—A new idea for modernizing the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was reported under official study Friday. It would allow the Atlantic Alliance to work ultimately with the Soviet Union if Red China emerges as the world’s third superpower.

“In reorganizing NATO we should concentrate less on keeping it as a purely defensive organization to meet military threats,” said an authoritative British source. “We should see it more as an organization of Western nations that could negotiate from strength with the aim of arriving at some common ground with Russia about attitudes to the world of the 1980’s and 1990’s when we might have to contend with a third superpower.”

The informant, who made plain he was thinking of Communist China as the third superpower, said this idea is under consideration by various allied officials concerned with plans for streamlining NATO.

There are two sides to any coin. Perhaps the world has just turned up the side that bears the Cross of Lorraine.

Carn Ranh AB, RVN

This article is an expansion of a research paper prepared by Major Uhalt as part of his academic work at the Air Command and Staff College, Class of 1966.

Contributor

Major Alfred H. Uhalt, Jr., (B.S., University of Illinois) is a tactical fighter pilot assigned to Cam Ranh Air Base, Republic of Vietnam. After completing pilot training in 1953, he served with the Air Defense Command at Portland, Oregon, and Keflavik, Iceland, until 1958. Then under the Air Force Institute of Technology he earned a degree in aeronautical engineering. He graduated from the USAF Experimental Flight Test Pilot School, Edwards AFB, California, in 1959, and has since worked as an experimental test pilot on fighter-interceptor aircraft except for the periods spent attending the Space Pilot Course, USAF Aerospace Research Pilot School, 1962-63, and the Air Command and Staff College, 1965-66. He was Chief of Data Collection and Analysis and flew the qualitative flight tests on the original Air Force evaluation of the Navy F-4 Phantom II fighter-interceptor, which he now flies in Vietnam.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor