Nathan Farragut Twining
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Nathan Farragut Twining (1897 - 1982) was a United States Air Force general. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force from 1953 until 1957. He then served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1957 to 1960 being the first member of the Air Force to serve in that role.
Gen. Twining came from a rich military background; his forebears had served in the United States Army and Navy since the French and Indian War. Nathan himself enlisted in World War I but soon received an appointment to West Point. Because the program was shortened so as to produce more officers for combat, he spent only two years at the academy. After graduating in 1919 and serving in the infantry for three years, he transferred to the Air Service. Over the next 15 years he flew fighter aircraft in Texas, Louisiana, and Hawaii, while also attending the Air Corps Tactical School and the Command and General Staff College. When war broke out in Europe he was assigned to the operations division on the Air Staff; then in 1942 he was sent to the South Pacific where he became chief of staff of the Allied air forces in that area. In January 1943 he assumed command of the Thirteenth Air Force, and that same November he traveled across the world to take over the Fifteenth Air Force from Jimmy Doolittle. When Germany surrendered, Arnold sent Twining back to the Pacific to command the B-29s of the Twentieth Air Force in the last push against Japan, but he was there only a short time when the atomic strikes ended the war. He returned to the States where he was named commander of the Air Materiel Command, and in 1947 he took over Alaskan Air Command. After three years there he was set to retire as a Lieutenant General, but when Muir Fairchild, the vice chief of staff, died unexpectedly of a heart attack, Twining was elevated to full general and named his successor. When Hoyt Vandenberg retired in mid 1953, Twining was selected as chief; during his tenure, massive retaliation based on airpower became the national strategy. In 1957 President Eisenhower appointed Twining chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
| Preceded by: Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg | Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force 1953–1957 | Succeeded by: Gen. Thomas D. White |
| Preceded by: Adm. Arthur W. Radford | Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1957–1960 | Succeeded by: Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer |