History Friday

[pawnman]

I'll second that! Is the 94th Aero Squadron Restaurant still open? Was a great place to eat, overlooking the runway and considering the historical significance of the airfield. There was a similar restaurant adjacent to Craig Field in Jacksonville, FL when I was growing up there in the 70s, but that place, called 'Hendersons,' closed down in the early 80s...

Cheers! M2

We had one in Columbus, OH. I thought it was the coolest thing ever when my parents first took me (I was about 10).

[Cooter]

There's one in St Louis as well. Great place to go and have dinner and watch airplanes at lambert Intl.

Cooter

[Carpetbagger]

Plywood anyone? De Havilland Mosquito.

1. Probably the most versatile combat aircraft ever made...Start with the A model and work your way to Z, kind of like the Herk.

2. This guy fought for the wrong team, but you got to give him props for doing so much with a Stuka... Hans Ulrich Rudel

Warbird Resource Group - "According to official Luftwaffe figures, Rudel flew some 2,530 combat missions (a world record), during which he destroyed almost 2,000 ground targets (among them 519 tanks, 70 assault craft/landing boats, 150 self-propelled guns, 4 armored trains, and 800 other vehicles; as well as 9 planes (2 Il-2's and 7 fighters). He also sank a battleship, two cruisers and a destroyer. He was shot down or forced to land 32 times (several times behind enemy lines), but always managed to escape capture despite a 100,000 ruble bounty placed on his head by Stalin himself. He was also wounded five times and rescued six stranded aircrew from enemy territory. The vast majority of his missions were spent piloting the various models of the Junkers Ju 87, though by the end of the war he flew the ground-attack variant of the Fw 190."

[brickhistory]

A little lovin' for my GCI controllers, er, ABMs..............

WARNING! - EXTREMELY LONG - WARNING!

Fifth Air Force’s Army:

Signal Aircraft Warning Battalions in the Southwest Pacific

Air Force units are usually composed of the traditional flights, squadrons, groups and wings. During World War II, the US Army Air Forces also included platoons, companies and battalions. Some of the largest and most important of these “army” units were the Signal Aircraft Warning Battalions (SAW BN) which used the new technology of radar to provide early warning and air defense.

These battalions served in all theaters and developed somewhat differently depending on the tactical considerations of the specific theater. This article looks at the evolution and use of SAW units associated with the Fifth Army Air Force during World War II.

UNEASY ALLIANCE

At the onset of World War II, the Army Air Force* (AAF) was just beginning to come to grips with the concepts of radar and early warning. It also was grappling with the US Army Signal Corps for control of the equipment and personnel associated with these concepts.

It was only in 1937 that the first successful Signal Corps use of radar to detect aircraft was demonstrated at Ft. Monmouth, New Jersey. 1 The Signal Corps was responsible for developing, procuring and fielding all US Army electronics. Radar was just one more developing technology under their purview.

But even in the years preceding this historic event, the AAF struggled to gain control over aviation-related communication and other electronic equipment and personnel.2 The AAF argued that only airmen could know what specific equipment was needed for aviation. Radar was just one more bone of contention between the two organizations.

However, by the outbreak of the war, the Signal Corps and the AAF had established an uneasy working arrangement. The Signal Corps would develop, procure and logistically support the technical equipment needed to conduct radar early warning. It would also train the personnel to operate the equipment and extract the information the new technology provided. 3 The AAF would simultaneously form units that could use and act on the provided tactical information.4

The Signal Corps still a part of the larger ‘ground’ Army, organized its tactical radar units into platoons – usually led by a lieutenant with 40-50 men; companies – 2-4 platoons led by a captain, and battalions – 2 – 4 companies led by a major or lieutenant colonel.5 These standard Army formations had to be integrated into the AAF organizational chart that used squadrons, groups and wings.

Initially, the AAF used fighter control squadrons (FCS), complete with pursuit pilots, to process the tactical information provided by SAW BNs to intercept unknown radar tracks. The pilot controllers would use very high frequency (VHF) radios to scramble friendly fighters and place them in the most advantageous position to identify and, if necessary, shoot down the ‘bogey.’ This technique was, and is, called ground controlled intercept (GCI).6

The fighter control squadrons were a direct result of Gen Spaatz and other American observers to the Battle of Britain during the summer of 1940. The US Army Air Force personnel saw how the Royal Air Force used pilots as controllers to successfully direct fighter squadrons to defend the British homeland against a numerically superior enemy. The lessons learned were brought back and placed into practice albeit a bit differently than the RAF model. The RAF owned all facets of the airborne radar system, from the research facilities, the radars and operating personnel, and the end-users, the interceptors. 7 The US violated the basic tenet of war fighting in that the responsibility of radar for early warning and for intercepting the enemy was split between two commands, the Signal Corps and the Air Force. Eventually, this situation would be rectified, but not until nearly the end of the war.

Unfortunately, the first example of this “marriage” was tragically unsuccessful. On December 7, 1941, a Signal Corps operator working at a remote site on Opana Point detected a large formation of aircraft approaching from the north of Oahu, Hawaii. Only recently trained in the complexities of the SCR-270B radar set, Private Joe Lockard picked up a large plot of blips. Following his instructions, he telephoned the information to the radar information center at Ft. Shafter, Honolulu.8

There, a young P-40 pilot never trained in early warning procedures or in appropriate tactical response to such warnings made the now-famous command of “Well, don’t worry about it.”9 Thus, the last chance of challenging the outcome of the attack on Pearl Harbor was lost. The first engagement of the American war did use radar but not effectively.

ON THE JOB TRAINING

The Signal Corps, stretched like every other U.S. military function, expanded rapidly to meet the demands for radars and the men to operate them. A huge electronics training base was set up at Drew Field, near Tampa, Florida. Here the vast majority of radar men undertook their training in electronics, field living operations and even in some cases, basic training.10

The only operational early warning radars then in the U.S. inventory were the large, bulky SCR-268/270 long-range radars. These could provide excellent long-range coverage but as stated, were difficult to move in a hurry since they consisted of 66 tons of equipment. What was needed was a lightweight, smaller radar set that could go ashore on the first day of any offensive invasion or be situated quickly as the tactical situation dictated for a defensive campaign.

Mr. Jake Herring, a radar technician with the rank of T4 (a corporal with specialist technical training) eventually assigned to a SAW battalion in the Southwest Pacific, remembers that after his induction into the Army in September 1942, he went through six weeks of rushed basic training at Drew before beginning his radar training.

In a baritone, rich with the coastal accent of North Carolina, he recounts, “We did our basic training there at Drew Field, then I was sent to Kansas City, Missouri for a month of radio school. I was immediately sent back to Drew to begin radar training. We went through our course, learning to operate the SCR-602 mobile radar set.”11

The –602 was a US produced version of a British lightweight (LW) mobile radar set. It was designed to provide forward radar coverage for a sector, reporting its findings to a control center or filter center located further back from the front. 12The –602 had a range of up to 100 miles in optimum conditions although 60-70 miles was more common and more importantly, weighed only two tons. 13 It was used in conjunction with other LW sites and the larger and less mobile SCR-268/270 long-range radar to build a graphic representation or ‘picture’ for air battle commanders.

At the filter center, operators would track the overall picture of a developing air battle on a plexiglass plotting board and controllers would make adjustments to the number and placements of Allied fighters to deal with the approaching aircraft. Again, the concepts were based heavily upon earlier British experiences.14

Not coincidentally, the AAF developed Drew Field as a night fighter training base. Many radar warriors, both airborne and ground-based, learned and practiced their skills in mock maneuvers on the flat scrubby fields and in the dark, humid skies of central Florida. 15

Herring continues his reminisce, “After graduating from my course, we were sent out for a month-long field exercise. We set up six platoons, each with a –602 radar reporting back to the control center. Each platoon, by the way was a self-contained unit. We had two cooks, two medics, two truck drivers, and five four-man radar teams. We could load all our gear into two 2-½ ton truck s and a jeep and move out in just a few hours.

“Each team had four basic duties: one guy would work as a plotter, one as a radio operator, one as a guard – nobody was allowed into the tent if we were working, and one man as a radar operator. We would switch off duties about once an hour to keep ‘fresh’ and not miss anything on the radar scope.”16

In addition to the LW and heavy long-range radars, a Signal Aircraft Warning company and later battalion, had ground observer platoons. These were just what the name implies. The ground observer was a specially trained signalman who would go into areas where radars couldn’t be sited due to topography limitations or more commonly because the infantry was engaged in combat. Using portable VHF radios and field telephones, these soldiers would voice-tell their observations of aircraft sightings back to the filter center. Their reports were incorporated into the picture to fill out any gaps in radar coverage. 17

As experience with using the electronic realm to guide missions increased, the ground observers were also used later in the war to direct radar-guided ground attack aircraft. A strike squadron would be vectored to a target area by a controller using radar; once over the area, the ground observers would call in corrections for subsequent bomb drops.18

With all these personnel needed to meet the Signal Corps mission requirements of operating radar equipment and detecting aircraft, a SAW battalion could easily number more than a thousand officers and men all designed to get the information to the controller assigned to the fighter control squadron.19

Much smaller, a fighter control squadron (FCS) consisted of fighter pilots and enlisted radio operators initially. Later in the war, specialist officer radar controllers replaced some of the pilots guiding aircraft. In addition, the missions controlled via radar increased from strictly vectoring fighters into intercept position to controlling bombing strikes, providing navigational vectors to lost aircraft, controlling air-sea rescue missions, and weather reporting and warning among others.20

By the time Herring reported for duty at Drew Field, the Signal Corps and AAF had reached a more reasonable accommodation. In September 1942, the two organizations agreed to put the Signal Aircraft Warning units under Air Force operational control. While the Signal Corps continued as the supplier of equipment and troops to operate it, the SAW units would work under the operational orders of the Air Force.

This arrangement continued throughout the war.21

FIFTH AIR FORCE EXPERIENCES

On December 9, 1941, the 8th Fighter Control Squadron was activated at Mitchell Field, New York. It was immediately assigned for deployment to the Pacific. By June 1942, it was based at Milne Bay, New Guinea as part of Fifth Air Force’s V Fighter Command. 22

In the shoe-string days of the early Southwest Pacific campaigns, the 8th FCS used a hodge-podge of Australian and US radar equipment and an equally assorted collection of fighter aircraft to defend the hard-pressed troops of the New Guinea fighting. 23

The SAW units supporting the 8th were likewise challenged to support the air defense requirements of the theater. Trained personnel and replacement parts for existing radar sets were in extremely short supply and used a mix of US and Australian parts and troops to function.24

By November 1943, however, the Allied forces in the area were strong enough to press ahead with operations to drive the Japanese from outside the New Guinea archipelago. Based at Finchaven, the SAW BNs and 8th FCS first went on the offensive in support of the invasion of New Britain. By isolating or destroying the major Japanese port at Rabaul on that island, the Allies could continue to drive north, eventually towards the Philippines. Reaching that ultimate goal would be difficult however.

Finchhaven, New Guinea became “radar central” for the Southwest Pacific. New personnel destined for existing battalions and newly assigned battalions arrived at the jungle town to be incorporated into the theater.25

When not assigned to a combat operation, the radar men would conduct training. In addition to the technical practice needed to correctly interpret the data on a radar scope, the troops had to practice setting up and breaking down their sites. Units would spend a planned week out in the field, having simulated a combat assault. Then they would emplace their equipment, calibrating the radar for true north, making sure the equipment stayed dry in the unrelenting humidity of the jungle, and always, always seeking the best and highest place to site the antenna.26

The reason for the quest for height is due to line of sight consideration. If an SCR-602 was situated on a flat plain, an aircraft approaching at 1,000 feet wouldn’t be detected until it was within 15 miles. Put the radar on a 400 ft hill and detection range jumped to 50 miles. Higher flying aircraft could be detected at even longer ranges.27

Another consideration for radar placement is the need to avoid close by obstructions like buildings or trees. These obstructions would reflect the electromagnetic energy emitted from the transmitter and reflect it back in massive doses causing “clutter” on the radar scope. Clutter is simply an area on the scope that can’t be used for detecting aircraft because of the high level of background reflections.28

Not infrequently, these week-long jaunts went longer. The torrential thunderstorms so common to the area could and did change a rough dirt road into a raging stream. Many times the troops were cut off and had to be resupplied with C-rations and fuel from air drops until the remote jungle track dried out enough to support truck movement.29

For the first campaign not conducted on New Guinea, the SAW BNs went in with the infantry. On D+1 for the invasion of New Britain, the first LW radar platoon went ashore. Assisting the 1st Marine Division, and under fire from the Japanese, the radar proved its worth by picking up Japanese aircraft sortieing from Rabaul. With the 10 minutes or so of advanced warning thus provided, the Allies were able to gain air superiority over the battlefield in a relatively short time period.30

Jake Herring relates his experience from this invasion, “We set up our radar on a small island just off the main invasion beach called Duke Island. One day a ‘Betty’ bomber came over at tree-top level surprising everybody. He sprayed everything in sight with machine gun fire and dropped a bomb on a barge anchored out in the bay. He zoomed off without being shot at.

“That night we had a Major King, one of the better officers we had as far as I was concerned, killed by a Japanese infiltrator. We found the major’s body the next morning with his head severed by a bayonet or a machete.” 31

Herring remained on New Britain until April 1944. 32

By the time of the next planned Allied advance to the island of Biak, the integration of Signal Corps SAW BNs and Air Force FCS was nearly seamless. Indeed, retired Chief Master Sergeant Joe Newman was a Signal Corps radio maintenance man assigned to the 8th FCS and for his entire time in the Pacific was under the administrative and operational control of that Air Force squadron. Even though he wore the distinctive Signal Corps emblem on his garrison hat and the aiguillette on his seldom-worn Class A’s, he worked daily in the FCS filter center. At the end of the war, he actually found out he had been transferred to the Army Air Force but never informed. (The Chief went on to have a 30-year USAF career.)33

In April 1944, after a refitting period back at Finchaven, the Herring’s 596th SAW Battalion sailed aboard an LST (landing ship tank) to support the invasion of Biak. Landing at the neighboring islet of Los Negros, Herring’s unit ran ashore under Japanese fire. 34

As the battle progressed, the US troops were on the south side of an east-west oriented Japanese runway just up from the beach and the defending troops were on the north side of the runway. So close were the opposing forces that Herring recalls that the radar couldn’t operate at night because the little two cylinder gasoline generator that powered the radar gave off a blue exhaust flame at night. Like a magnet for rifle fire, the blue flickering drew danger onto the radar site. So at night the radar men shut down operations and manned defensive fighting positions.35

One of the advantages of the self-contained aspect of the LW units was the ability to conduct air intercept operations on its own. In the perfect world, as mentioned previously, the LW sites reported back to a master filter center. However when the radar units were first establishing themselves in a new area each site could work intercepts in its own smaller areas. A controller would be attached to the LW platoon and run fighters onto targets within the limited coverage of the LWs. Not nearly as efficient as the fully integrated LW and heavy SCR-271 designed operations, it was nevertheless better than nothing.36

As the war progressed, the pace of island recapturing increased. In July 1944, Noumfour Island in the Dutch East Indies was slated for seizure from the Japanese.

Herring’s battalion went in with the Army’s 503d Parachute Regiment.

It was during this operation that Herring first saw the fruit of his labors. A plot was picked up on the SCR-602 radar and the Air Force controller attached to the LW platoon vectored a P-61 nightfighter on the track. Continuing the intercept, the controller guided the Black Widow until the radar operator on the big black-painted fighter picked up the bogey. He, in turn, provided vectors to the pilot until the pilot visually sighted the target. Confirming it was a “bandit,” actually a Japanese “Betty” twin-engined medium bomber; the pilot proceeded to torch the bomber with the P-61’s four 20mm cannons and four .50 caliber machine guns. 37

It just so happened that the intercept actually took place overhead the radar site. Herring and his fellow soldiers were able to spill out of the radar tent and watch the streaks of light racing from the fighter to the victim. Then they saw a big flash, and then many streamers of flames float down from the sky. The fighter pilot radioed, “Splash one bandit.”38

Jake Herring’s battalion, the 596th SAW, was one of only many that served in the Southwest Pacific Theater. The author found references in the U.S. National Archives at College Park of 11 separate SAW BNs during V Fighter Command operations. With an average of 1,000 officers and men in each, one can readily see that there were substantial numbers of troops involved in air warning and defense missions.

With all the Signal Corps troops involved, the actually Army Air Forces-owned personnel involved with ground control of radar and fighter aircraft was relatively few in number. For most of V Fighter Command’s operations, the 8th Fighter Control Squadron did yeoman’s work for the theater.

The 8th FCS sent detachments of enlisted aircraft plotters and rated pilots to operations and sites throughout the Southwest Pacific. Initially, the pilots learned the job under fire. They did the best they could while learning how best to employ radar in guiding interceptors onto targets. The Air Force thought that only a pilot could properly translate the obscure oscilloscope tracings into a verbal ‘picture’ that an airborne fighter could understand.39

As time progressed many combat tour-expired fighter pilots were recycled into controller positions. Even this pool of resources was not enough to meet the expanding mission demands and ‘pure’ controllers were eventually trained and sent into combat. Freshly minted 2d lieutenants would attend radar and controller school back in the States and come to New Guinea for some seasoning. These controllers went on to become the backbone of the FCS units. In March 1942, the 8th had 6 flying officers and 83 enlisted troops. 40 By February 1944, the 8th FCS had four flying officers assigned, 11 non-flying officer controllers and 231 enlisted.41

Like the SAW BNs, the FCS personnel often fought under fire. In July 1942, the 8th was still based at Milne Bay, New Guinea. In August, Japanese troops landed from barges only six miles from the headquarters. The squadron endured mortar and artillery fire for several days. Due to a shortage of combat troops, the men of the 8th Fighter Control Squadron were pressed into service as infantry, bolstering an Australian infantry brigade. Several tense days in fighting positions ensued but the Japanese threat was eliminated before the airman cum-infantry had to be used.42

In a more serious example, a Sgt Brown, 8th FCS radio operator, was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor for combat action during the invasion of Biak. Coming ashore on D-Day, Sgt Brown killed several Japanese soldiers during an enemy infantry charge against the U.S forces. Sgt Brown later crawled out under intense enemy fire to rescue a wounded U.S. soldier. 43

The airmen of the 8th faced more than ground threats. A combat report dated March 4, 1944 from the commanding officer of the 8th FCS to the commanding general, Fifth Air Force, described a Japanese bombing attack on Gusap, New Guinea and results:

1. Weather: 4/10s cloud cover, vis 8 miles, cloud base 3,000

2. First radar contact: 1230L, last contact 1340L

3. 16 a/c scrambled, 42 a/c returning from mission

4. 4 ‘Tonys’ sighted, 3 destroyed, 0 friendly aircraft missing *

5. Several H/E bombs dropped; 2 A-20s damaged, 3 A-20s slightly damaged

No warnings given – enemy a/c came in low and timing of returning mission covered plot board with tracks.44

* ‘Tony’ was the Allied code name for the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force’s Ki-63single engine fighter/bomber

Finally, the 8th’s combat reports also include a Bronze Star citation for a Capt Lloyd Brooks who served as a ground control intercept officer aboard a US Navy destroyer supporting the December, 1944 invasion of Ormoc bay, the Phillipines. Capt Brooks was directing a flight of fighters to intercept a group of enemy tracks. Despite the picture-perfect intercept, one of the attackers broke through and performed a kamikaze attack on the destroyer. Capt Brooks continued controlling until the ship lost power and eventually sank.45

These examples are but dramatic interludes in the work-a-day business of providing early warning and ground controlled intercept of enemy aircraft. The 8th FCS, and later squadrons like the 1st, 35th, 49th and 56th, working with the Signal Aircraft Warning battalions expanded the roles that radar could play. By war’s end, GCI had expanded to include both the SAW BNs and the FCS to become Fifth Air Force’s primary means of command and control (C2) for tactical operations. Indeed, V Fighter Command had been designated primary agency for all matters concerning air warning and defense. As such, V Fighter was the sole source for using SAW BNs and FCS.46

The Allied advance into the Philippines was perhaps the culmination of the progress made in combining the SAW BNs and the FCS into a smoothly running air warning and effective air defense machine. Many radar sites spread throughout the islands as the campaign progressed covered virtually every square mile of territory. Radar supplies and replacements shipped from Signal Corps depots from the ZI (Zone of the Interior) arrived into Air Force supply dumps and were distributed as Air Force assets. The signalmen of the SAW BNs drew rations and pay from the Air Force. BN commanding officers took orders directly from V Fighter Command that in turn relied on the Signal Corps officers to lend advice on how best to place and use the equipment. Ground controllers and signalmen worked side by side in operations tents and at radar scopes, directing Allied aircraft in a myriad of missions.47

This unity was a far cry from the early divided concept between the Signal Corps and the Army Air Forces. As a fitting finale, in June 1945, the Signal Aircraft Warning Battalions officially transferred from the Signal Corps to the Army Air Force. 48

LEGACY

The legacy of these radar pioneer units lives on in today’s USAF ground tactical air control squadrons (ACS). The ACS’s in the active duty and Air National Guard are constituted much like their World War II predecessors and served in those original roles in Korea, Vietnam, the Cold War, and both conflicts in Iraq. They are designed to be self-contained, self-sufficient squadrons capable of providing early warning, air defense, and ground controlled intercept. The ACS’s personnel include their own operators, communicators, radar and computer technicians, medics, vehicle maintainers, and cooks. A true legacy; the progeny of the Signal Aircraft Warning Battalions and Fighter Control Squadrons are still providing service to the today’s Air Force.

[magnetfreezer]

Raising a for all the aircrew (and Army/USN/USMC/Allies) who fought 64 years ago today

[brickhistory]

Raising a for all the aircrew (and Army/USN/USMC/Allies) who fought 64 years ago today

2

[Mambo]

LR had a dining-in tonight and the guest speaker was LtCol (Ret) Jack Downhill. He was a pilot in the 62nd TCS and flew in the early morning hours of D-Day, dropping troops of the 82nd. What an amazing story...800 AGL over the coast of France, at night, tracer fire, getting a PI, taking a round into the fuel tank and still landing safely. All at the ripe old age of 23! Oh, and he was element lead. A true pioneer of Tactical Airlift.

[brickhistory]

Another WWII vet and a superb pilot who did the transition from the high-powered piston engine fighters to jets into the 1960s. I've had drinks with him here in the US and visited he and his wife in the UK. At 80, when I visited, he still was able to run hard.

Some of his stories in immediate post-War Germany had me rolling on the floor.

Things Were A Bit Different Then

“At the end of World War II, I led the capture of Tokyo. Well, actually, one of four forts that ringed the entrance to Tokyo Bay.” So began a fascinating morning with Commander John ‘Boot’ Nethersole, Royal Navy (ret.).

“I was just out of Dartmouth (the Royal Navy’s officer academy) and assigned to the cruiser, HMS Newfoundland. I led one of two Royal Navy (RN) landing parties against two of the forts while some US Marines captured the other two on the other side of the entrance.

“So here I am, a young midshipman leading my lot of sailors onto the beach and up the hill, yelling and screaming to keep our courage up since we really didn’t know what kind of reaction the Japanese would produce.

“It was all anti-climatic really, for when we got to the top, there was no one there and we were standing around kicking the sand with our boots and nothing to do. Finally, from behind a beached cutter (kind of a long row boat), up pops this white flag on a pole.

“I advanced to the cutter and stuck my .45 around the bow, to find three Japanese soldiers attached to the other end of the pole, kneeling and shaking in their shoes.

“So with their surrender, I lay claim to having captured Tokyo!” This is only one of the many stories ‘Boot’ recounted with tongue firmly in cheek.

Shortly after this episode, he applied to the RN’s Fleet Air Arm (FAA) to be a pilot.

At that time, the Royal Air Force taught FAA fledglings until they were awarded their wings at which point the new pilots posted to a FAA operational training unit (OTU). It was at OTU that Nethersole first flew in navalized variants of the famous Supermarine Spitfire.

Of these ‘Seafires,’ Nethersole recalled, “Really a lovely little airplane to fly; smelled strongly of petrol when you flew it upside down.”

Moving on to the second part of his OTU, he flew another 100 hours in the Hawker Sea Fury, learning basic fighter maneuvers, practicing air to air and air to ground attacks, including his first live firing of 20mm cannons, rockets and bombs before posting to his first operational squadron, No. 802. 802’s senior pilot was none other than famed test pilot Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown.

802 Squadron came aboard the carrier HMS Vengeance and cruised as part of both the Home and Mediterranean Fleets during Nethersole’s first squadron tour, 1949-1951. Nethersole recounts what flying the Sea Fury was like,

“Unless there was no wind over the deck, which almost never happened, we did free take-offs. Spotted as far aft as we could, we poured the power to the 18-cylinder Centaurus radial and released the brakes.

“When really heavy, carrying a full load of bombs for example, some Sea Furies could use RATOG – rocket assisted take-off. You fired these off as you started forward and the rockets provided several hundred pounds of extra ‘push’ to get airborne.

“Although RATOG was seldom used, my squadron commander had had an exciting experience while using them during the Korean War. He was carrying 1000 pounders under each wing, full fuel and ammunition, really rather heavy.

“During his pre-flight, he forgot to switch on the masterswitch for the RATOG bottles. Spotted in the front rank for take-off, he was about even with the carrier’s island. When the deck officer gave him the launch signal, he applied full throttle and started rolling forward. As he moved, he hit the ignition switch for the RATOG and, of course, nothing happened, but it was too late for him to stop on the remaining deck.

“Over the bow he went, everyone expecting the splash. That never happened and shortly thereafter, he pulled ahead of the ship at nil feet above the water. He had been unbelievably lucky and supremely skilled to take advantage of ‘ground effect’ and stay out of the water (Ground effect – the phenomenon where air is compressed between the underside of a low flying aircraft and the surface, in this case the ocean. It occurs when the height of the aircraft is less than one wingspan above the surface.)

“So he was really in a bind; too slow to climb out of ground effect or he’d stall and crash and unable to gain speed since he couldn’t dive to pick up some extra knots. When last seen, he was flying over the horizon with his tailwheel sometimes kicking up spray. He actually flew that way until he burned off enough fuel to lighten his airplane and manage to climb at the lighter weight!

“When returning to the ship, we’d typically be in echelon formation, entering the pattern on the starboard side of the ship, breaking off at ten second intervals to set up landings. We strove to land each aircraft within 15-20 seconds of the each other.

“When Mother Nature provided wind and the ship was charging into it for all she was worth, we’d usually have 30-40 knots over the deck when on finals for landing in a continuously curving approach to the stern. We had to fly like that so we could keep the batsman in sight. With the twelve feet of nose and engine in front of the cockpit, if we came straight in, we’d be blind in the three-point landing attitude.

“Holding 80-82 knots, we kept our eyes glued to the batsman’s signals, when he gave us the ‘cut’ we pulled the power and settled to the deck, hoping we’d catch one of the ten cross-deck wires with the tailhook. If we didn’t, we faced the prospect of taking one of two wire barriers that protected the aircraft parked towards the bow. The barriers would play havoc with the fighter’s propeller and wings, but it would stop the aircraft from plowing into the airpark on deck forward.

“If, as happened from time to time, a chap hit rather hard and bounced, he’d balloon over the wires and the barriers and go into the airpark. At best, the fighter would be a write-off and maybe, one or two others. At worst, a collision would trigger explosions and damage or destroy many aircraft.”

It was ashore,however, that ‘Boot’ tells one of his funniest ‘there I was’ stories.

“We had completed our last day of armaments camp, flying out of the airfield at Sylt, in the Friesian Islands off northern Germany. We had quite a party to celebrate the end of our encampment and I had a bit much to drink.

“Next morning, we were to be off back to our base at Wunstorf. Naturally, the weather was terrible - cold, wet, low hanging cloud that went up to who knows what altitude, so we delayed.

“I found myself a choice piece of hangar wall to lean against and had a nap. Next thing I know, I’m shaken awake with a “Right, your off!”

“I jumped in my airplane, started it up and fell into the taxiing queue and waited my turn for take-off. I lined up on the runway, added power and took off, immediately going into the clouds and onto instruments.

“When I finally broke out of the clouds on top, there wasn’t another airplane to be seen. I also discovered I’d lost my radio. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just set course for home and meet up with the chaps there.”

“Well, without the concentration required for formation flying and the soothing drone of the Centaurus, I soon drifted off for a bit. When I awoke, I found myself well off-course, and if my hurried calculations were correct, probably over the Russian Zone of Occupation!

“I wasn’t really sure of my position and couldn’t call for a fix, but I knew I didn’t want to be were I was and that if I flew west, I should eventually find the coast and from there, I could determine my position.

“So, I flew away, eyes open for either a recognizable landmark or a Russian escort. I desperately wanted the former and not the latter!

“Eventually, I did reach the coast over Belgium, so I flew north, looking for a more definitive navigational reference than the sea. Petrol, at this point, was becoming a real concern so I knew I had to do something soon.

“I spotted a lovely stretch of autobahn beneath me, so decided that would do. Remember, this is 1948, so there was not a lot of traffic on the road then.

“I landed quite nicely, folded the Fury’s wings, and taxied to a carriage way link shut down and waited for a car to come by. Luckily, the next one by was actually a German police car, so we were able to determine my position and what course I needed to get home.

“I had the German chap stop traffic, unfolded the wings, and took off.

I arrived back at Wunstorf to find my squadron thinking I had crashed as the time expired since we took off from Sylt had long exceeded the fuel endurance of my Sea Fury. Luckily, I was able to explain most of my story and no one was the worse for wear.”

In another episode, Nethersole tells of what might be the last time that a British aircraft was ‘fired upon’ by the recently defeated Germans.

“I was flat-hatting over the fields of northern Germany when I came upon a German farmer just finishing up loading his hay wagon.

“The farmer raised his three-pronged pitchfork like a javelin as I flew by. I thought, “There is no bloody way he can do anything thing with that,” so I pressed in.

“I roared right above his piled high wagon, leaving a cloud of dust and straw in my wake and an unloaded wagon. But I’ll be damned if I also didn’t feel a ‘thunk’ on my wing! When I landed, there, impaled in my port wing’s leading edge was the fork and foot or two of the handle of the man’s pitchfork. Nice shot, that!”

During his initial tour, Nethersole’s flying ability was recognized by ‘Winkle’ Brown as he was handpicked by Brown to be one of 802’s aerobatic demonstration team pilots. In his auto-biography, “Wings on My Sleeve,” Brown wrote of working the team to such a fine pitch of airmanship that he could feel pressure on his tailplanes from the air being compressed and bunching up in front of the ‘box’ man’s propeller. Tight formation flying, indeed!

After finishing his first operational tour, Nethersole was selected for the Air Weapons Officers Course where he became schooled in the latest weapons and tactics to best employ those weapons by tactical aircraft and assigned to 702 Squadron.

It was with 702 that he had a very close call in one of the early jets, the Supermarine Attacker.

“The Attacker was really just not a good airplane. I think the Navy bought it just so it could get a jet into service.”

Derived from Supermarine’s Spiteful which itself was a derivative of the Spitfire, the Attacker kept the Spiteful’s straight wings and tailwheel landing gear arrangement. Fitted with a 5,000lb thrust Nene turbojet, the Attacker had several fuel tanks, including an ungainly auxiliary ventral tank to increase its ‘legs.’ One feature in its fuel system that would directly and dramatically affect Nethersole is the one that had all tanks flow to one 73-gallon feeder tank.

If that tank should empty due to fuel pump failure or the other tanks not feeding for whatever reason, it didn’t matter how much gas was aboard, the thirsty Nene would soon sputter out. That is what happened to Boot.

“We made a formation take-off and climbed into very thick cloud cover. Trying to maintain my formation in those conditions, I really couldn’t afford to keep my head inside the cockpit. By the time we popped out on top and could gain a few feet of separation, the damage was done. A quick glance at my fuel gauges showed the other tanks still full, but my feeder tank nearly empty! Obviously, it wasn’t flowing and I was just a few minutes from a flame out.

“I nearly made it, but not quite. The fuel ran out and the engine quit while I was still a bit too far out. I couldn’t stretch the glide quite far enough and wound up about 100 yards shy of the airfield. Luckily, it was grass and I was able to touchdown with some control because the airfield boundary fence made of concrete posts with wire between them was quickly looming larger. I managed to kick enough rudder to steer the fuselage between two posts, sheering the port wing off completely. I came to rest very nearly on the runway edge inside the airfield.

“Now the thing was, there was a group of ‘plane spotters’ parked outside the fence watching the aircraft come and go. After I punched through the fence, they just kind of wandered in and stood in a semi-circle around my aircraft. Since it was now on fire that perhaps wasn’t the wisest thing they could have done.

“But I had other problems than the crowd’s welfare to worry about. My canopy was jammed shut and I couldn’t budge it. I tried with some hand gestures to get one of the crowd to come forward and grab the emergency canopy release lever on the side of the fuselage, but couldn’t get the idea across. As I was beginning to cook, I was not happy at the miscommunication.

“Finally, I was able to shoulder the canopy open enough to jump out and get away from the burning jet. I started shoo’ing the crowd away because there was still quite a lot of gas that would be going up any second. One wing tank did flare up just as I jumped, leaving me with burns on my face around the edge of my oxygen mask.

“About then, the station commander came along in his car. He had been driving along the peri track on his way to one of the other squadrons and saw me crash. He said, “Right, Boot, you take my car to the Infirmary and I’ll deal with this lot.”

A few years later, in a fortuitous meeting in the ‘loo’ at RNAS Lossiemouth, Boot ran into a friend, Lt. Cdr. Les Baker, the CO of 801 Squadron. Baker asked Boot what he was up to as 801 had need of a senior pilot. Nethersole, thinking quickly, said that was just what he was looking for. Baker then rang up the Admiralty and the deed was done.

Tragically, Baker was killed at sea during 801’s Far East cruise aboard HMS Centaur. Flying Hawker Seahawk FGA.4s, Baker missed a loose nose tank fuel cap during his preflight inspection, as did the Centaur’s deck crew. During the catapult shot, the acceleration forces flung the cap off and raw fuel streamed out and into the spring-loaded low speed engine bay air vents over the Seahawk’s Nene engine. The fuel ignited and Baker’s jet blew up right off the bow.

Nethersole picked up temporary, later permanent, command of 801. At that time, he was the youngest squadron commander in the Navy.

After rotating numerous times between sea and shore duties including command of his own ship, the frigate HMS Loch Alvie, he assumed the duties of Commander (Air) at RNAS Lossiemouth.

It was at Lossiemouth, that Boot claimed another bit of history. He made the last flight in the World War II-era Fairey Fulmar. The first eight-gun fighter in Royal Navy history, the Fulmar failed to live up to expectations during its operational service.

Lossiemouth’s Fulmar served as the station ‘hack.’ By Nethersole’s time, the aging fighter was unsupportable. Boot received a message from the Admiralty directing him to ground the aircraft.

Recognizing his chance for small piece of aviation history, Nethersole took the Fulmar up for one last flight. Upon landing, he shut down the Fulmar’s Rolls Royce Merlin, thinking, “Well, that’s that.”

A few hours later, back in his office, he glanced out the window to see the Fulmar taxiing to the active runway. The Chief Flying Instructor had decided HE wanted to be the last to fly the Fulmar and away he went.

Rank does have its privileges, so upon the instructor’s return, Boot again took up the Fulmar, landed, then ordered that no one else was to fly the damn thing!

Fast forward nearly 25 years to the FAA Museum at RNAS Yeovilton. Visiting the Museum, Nethersole overheard a guide lecturing a group on that very same Fulmar in the Museum’s collection. The guide got it wrong and Nethersole found himself unable to resist commenting.

Thrilled to be able to set the record straight, the Museum has since requested, and upon his death, will receive Nethersole’s logbook with its nearly 4,000 hours including the Fulmar’s final flight.

Says Boot now of his time as a pilot compared to today’s much more regulated times, “Things were a bit different then.”

[TacAirCoug]

Well, it sounds like a few folks out there have never heard of a YMC-130 before. So since it shows up in the bio of our yet-to-be confirmed new CSAF, I figured a history lesson was in order. Rather than clog up the CSAF/SECAF thread, I thought this would be a more appropriate spot.

Operation Credible Sport, also known as Operation Honey Badger, was a United States military operation plan in late 1980 to rescue the hostages held in Iran using C-130 cargo planes modified with rocket engines. The Credible Sport operation was a new plan to rescue the hostages after the dramatic failure of Operation Eagle Claw. Eagle Claw failed when a C-130 Hercules and a Sea Stallion helicopter collided in the Iranian desert, killing 8 servicemen. Credible Sport was abandoned after the election of Ronald Reagan as President in November, 1980.

The Credible Sport plan called for highly modified C-130 Hercules cargo planes to land in a soccer stadium not far from the American Embassy in Tehran and airlift the hostages out. Three aircraft were modified under a top secret project at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida to YMC-130H configuration with rocket packages blistered onto the forward and aft fuselage, which theoretically enabled the planes to land and take off within the confines of the sports arena.

During a demonstration at Wagner Field Not Duke Field, Eglin Auxiliary Field 3, on October 29, 1980, one of the modified Hercules fired its braking rockets a few seconds early. The aircraft suffered an extremely heavy landing, tearing off the starboard wing, setting off a fire, and resulting in the airframe, serial 74-1683, being written off. Despite this, the entire crew survived.

This failure, coupled with the defeat of Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan in the presidential election on November 4, 1980, led to the cancellation of this rescue mission plan. The hostages were subsequently released concurrent with Reagan’s inauguration in January 1981.

The other two airframes, serials 74-1686 and 74-2065, were stripped of their rocket modifications and returned to regular airlift duties. In 1988 74-1686 was placed on display at the Robins Air Force Base museum, Georgia, still retaining its JATO hard-points and surrounding thermo-insulating paint. As of 2005, 74-2065 is assigned to the 317th Airlift Group, 15th Expeditionary Mobility Task Force, at Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. More...

Here are the videos on YouTube:

[brickhistory]

Old Dog, New Tricks:

B-52 Operations in Iraqi Freedom

In the famous film, “True Grit,” John Wayne played an aging U.S. Marshall. In the climatic scene, the Duke, astride his horse, faces off across a field against four bandits, also on horseback. “Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!” he yells before taking the reins in his mouth and filling each of his hands with lethal western hardware.

So it is regarding the venerable Boeing B-52 “Stratofortress.” Definitely long in the tooth, the big Cold War bomber continues to face down bad guys, and like Wayne’s character, the “BUFF (Big Ugly Fat….Fella)” has “filled its hands” with a modernized arsenal to stay relevant in modern warfare.

Eighth Air Force Goes To England (again)

In early March, 2003, from bases in North Dakota and Louisiana, B-52H’s, the last of the breed, flew converging courses to arrive at Royal Air Force base Fairford. During the Cold War, Fairford was a thriving, bustling base, used to large aircraft reception and beddown. By 2003, however, it was in ‘caretaker’ status; only a handful of people on the base to keep it open.

A swarm of loaded B-52s and the airlift needed to support bomber operations soon had Fairford humming again. In addition to cooks, motor pool, and security forces, weapons loaders, computer and communication specialists, aircraft crew chiefs, as well as extra flight crews all flowed into the formerly quiet base.

Staff Sergeant (SSgt) Ben Morgan was a weapons loader who worked 12 hour days for weeks on end to support the long range strikes. Indeed, Morgan flew in one of the bombers in its initial deployment. Since the BUFF flew fully loaded for war with a full load of conventional air launched cruise missiles (CALCMS – pronounced “Cal-kums”), he had the responsibility of maintaining and monitoring the warload until it was used. On March 19th, it would be.

Shock and Awe Night I

Capt Jeremy ‘TB’ Holmes was a copilot on the opening night’s strikes. He flew in the right seat of the number 6 bomber of a formation of eight B-52s.

“We’d brief about three hours prior to the ‘fragged’ take-off. Our crew of five – aircraft commander, pilot, electronic warfare officer (EWO), radar navigator and navigator attended the mass briefing then split off for specialized portions.

“The navs checked the routing and timing that the mission planning cell had developed. The EWO updated his enemy order of battle planning; making sure he had the latest ‘gouge’ on what surface to air missiles (SAMs), triple AAA (anti-aircraft artillery), or fighter aircraft Iraqi’s could have and how they were likely to employ any of those.

“The pilots checked weather, filed our flight plan, and verified the status of our jet.”

Speaking of a flight plan, unlike the Eighth Air Force bombing missions of yore, modern day, limited warfare still required the niceties to be observed. Since most of Europe was not involved in the distant operation and those European skies were still filled with civil air traffic, even bombers had to file a plan to fit within the busy system.

At the far end of the plan, just prior to entering the combat arena, the bombers would “disappear” and conduct their missions. Afterwards, they’d pick up their plan and re-enter the ATC system. Times have indeed changed for bombers.

Holmes said that about one and half hours prior to take-off, the crew arrived at the jet and did pre-flights. The pilots did the standard walkaround, checking for ‘two wings and eight engines,’ the navs, who were responsible for targeting and dropping the weapons, would check over the load-out, make sure the correct fuse settings were in place, and pull the safety pins. Once the pins were pulled, the ordnance was live, so strict adherence to safety was mandatory lest bad things happen in an aircraft filled with jet fuel and explosives.

In military aviation, every airplane has a crew chief assigned to it. The crew chief is the individual responsible for making sure the aircraft is maintained, serviced and ready to fly whenever required. Such is the massiveness of the B-52H, that the crew chief can have up to five assistant crew chiefs. SSgt Kyle Helton was one of those and tells what it was like prepping one of the big birds for combat. His particular jet was named “Christine” of Steven King fame. When asked about it, he just says the nickname is well deserved.

“A lot of the work would have been done when the jet landed from its previous flight, but about eight hours before take-off, we’d get to the jet and begin checking everything – making sure all the panels were secured, the engines were free of FOD (debris that can get sucked into a jet called “Foreign Object Damage.”), the hydraulic systems were filled and serviceable, same for the tires, brakes, and flight control systems. That the jet was fueled properly and that weight and balance were within limits. If something isn’t right, we either fix it or contact the systems specialist to make the repair.

“When the crew arrives, we help them do their pre-flight, then plug in to headsets and stand by with fire bottles as they crank the engines; verify the control movements correspond with the pilot’s inputs, and send ‘em off with a salute and thumb’s up.

“Post-flight takes another six or so hours, so it can be a really long day. But once you see your baby take flight, the hard work is definitely worth it.”

‘TB’ says of launching that first night, “I was excited; there a lot of things happening. Launching out that night as part of an armada of eight B-52s fully loaded for war was one of the most impressive things I’d ever seen.

Even Holmes’ earlier 12 combat missions for Operation ENDURING FREEDOM weren’t as ‘exciting’ because the formations weren’t as large and the Taliban air defense threat against the high-flying BUFFs was almost non-existent.

Iraq was a different matter. Even though heavily degraded compared to DESERT STORM levels, Iraqi air defense still had lethal anti-aircraft artillery (‘triple A’), surface to air missiles (SAMs), and fighters. All of which could be deadly to the bombers.

Holmes’, as well as most of the other jets, was burdened with a full internal load of CALCMs. With the missiles and a full fuel load, the bomber was nearly at its maximum gross take-off weight.

Getting to the fight required hours of droning along, interrupted with aerial refuelings. Said Holmes of BUFF handling, “The saying I’ve always heard and agree with is, ‘It’s like driving a fully loaded beer truck with flat tires on a gravel road.’

It’s definitely not a Corvette and you have to muscle it around, but I like flying it.”

Major Doug Hill, a KC-10 tanker pilot, recalled what fueling a BUFF was like from his end. “They’d cruise up high and come down to the low 20s (in thousands of feet) to get gas. Up much higher than that and the thin air affected maneuvering too much to off-load fuel safely. It was too hard for someone to stay on the boom up high.”

Holmes’ description from the receiver’s end concurred with that assessment. “Getting gas is kinda like wrestling a bear. It takes a lot of work. Our wings are longer than either the –10 or the (KC)-135, so we get hit with the wingtip vortices coming off the tanker. That and the constantly changing CG (center of gravity) as the fuel comes in makes staying on the boom more art than science. You will definitely work up a sweat doing AR (aerial refueling).”

Entering the combat theater soon after sunset, the two pilots in Holmes’ jet put on NVGs (night vision goggles) and flew on. At about the same time, the CAOC (combined air operations center, the air war headquarters then in Saudi Arabia) changed the targets for the CALCMs. Scrambling madly amid the now cluttered blare of radios full of chatter, the navigators in their compartment below the flight deck reprogrammed the missiles guidance computers. Such is the pace of modern warfare that moving targets can be tracked even after a mission has launched but before any weapons are launched.

Holmes recalled those moments, “We could have had helmet fires in our jet and in the others with the stress of retargeting the missiles only minutes away from the launch point, but we got it done correctly and on time.”

Re-entering ATC control, all eight B-52s returned to Fairford that first night. The total sortie length was more than 14 hours. Add in the pre- and post-flight briefings and the crew’s day was more than 24 hours long. In a couple of nights, they’d do it again.

Night II

Major Alex ‘Coyote’ Wylie, a radar navigator, had his chance at combat on Night II. Wylie was also a veteran of the ENDURING FREEDOM missions the previous year, but this was different than those strikes. Like Holmes’ the night before, Wylie also had concerns about Iraq’s air defense capabilities. By now the defenders knew that the fight was on. Like kicking a hornet’s nest, missions into Iraq faced a stirred up, angry enemy.

After stepping to the jet, Wylie recalled the commander of the 23d Bomb Squadron, “The Bomber Barons,” came out to each jet and briefed the crews that headquarters had designated new targets and that the crews should contact the CAOC for updated targeting information.

“He said the new targets were classified as “high priority” and that loss of the aircraft and crew was acceptable.”

After mulling over those sobering words, Wylie said, “We didn’t have much time to waste if we were going to make our first refueling so we pressed and figured we’d see what would happen when we got there.”

Wylie and his crew flew as the number 2 of a two-ship strike carrying a mixed load of CALCMs and JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munition – a 2000lb bomb equipped with a GPS receiver and movable control surfaces to guide it to the desired point.).

Night II’s mission had similarities to the opening night’s in that the cell of BUFFs entered the European ATC system, had to hit a tanker several times and encountered mass confusion just before ‘showtime.’

Said Wylie, “We finished retargeting 13 weapons just minutes before our CALCM releases. After release, all players were told to slide south due to unknown hostiles west of Baghdad. We were fragged to go into the Baghdad MEZ (missile engagement zone – threat area where SAMs could reach out and touch an aircraft) to drop our JDAMs.”

After the cruise missile launches, Wylie’s jet was to support a strike package of fighters and SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) EA-6B “Prowlers.”

“We didn’t want to miss our strike package push and going south would have made us late, so we went east instead. We picked up the SEAD support, but the rest of the strike package never showed. We pushed without them due to the importance of the new targets.

“Over target, all our weapons malfunctioned. We scrambled like mad to fix the problem before we left the launch envelope and released with only one second to spare.

“We must have woke them up because right at weapons impact we were engaged by a SAM. The pilots did their thing and broke away from the missile while we tried to get out of the MEZ.

“We’d had an exciting 15 minutes over the target area and a long haul to get back home. We struck all our targets and the mission was a success. When we landed, our next mission was already on the schedule.”

After several weeks of operating from England, operational necessity called for moving the BUFFs to different operating locations. As of this writing, the hulking bombers are still flying missions in harm’s way. But for a time in 2003, the grandsons of original Eighth Air Force crews performed as they did, getting to the target no matter the odds.

(The author would like to thank the men and women of the 5th Bomb Wing, Minot Air Force Base, North Dakota for their help in telling this story.)

SIDEBAR – B-52 H “Stratofortress” and Crew

The B-52’s roots go all the way back to 1946 when the then-US Army Air Forces selected the Boeing Airplane Company’s XB-52 design as its replacement for the Consolidated B-36 long-range bomber.

The XB-52 was a straight wing, six piston-engine design. In 1948, the design was modified with swept wings and eight jet engines neatly contained in four pods slung beneath the wings. The prototype YB-52 first flew on April 15, 1952. Interestingly, it had the pilot and co-pilot seated in tandem vice the side-by-side seating of production models.

The US Air Force took delivery of its first operational models, the B-52B in 1953 with subsequent models making incremental improvements in the design.

Originally conceived as a high-altitude, long-range nuclear bomber, the B-52 adopted a plethora of roles and tactics throughout its more than 50 years of operational life.

For nearly 40 years, the BUFFs pulled nuclear alert duty. In the first stages of the Cold War, B-52s flew armed patrols, waiting for the order to strike targets inside the Soviet Union. Starting in the 1960s, the crews sat quick reaction alert at Strategic Air Command bases around the United States, awaiting the klaxon that would send them aloft on doomsday missions.

It was also in the 1960s that the bomber took on a less world-ending role. Probably most well known to the general public for its role in the Vietnam War, B-52s devastated large areas of North and South Vietnam with conventional bombs. Specially modified under the apt code-name of “Big Belly,” B-52 Ds could carry up to 85 500lb bombs – 60,000lbs of high explosive that obliterated large areas in one sortie.

The B-52 strikes at Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972, dubbed Operation LINEBACKER I and II are generally credited with demonstrating US resolve and thereby bringing the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table for serious discussions.

By the 1970s, however, most of the B-52 force was still involved in its primary mission of nuclear deterrence and if need be, delivery. In the face of increasingly effective Soviet air defenses, the B-52 adopted low-level flying to sneak under the Russian radar screen and strike the targets. The inherently flexible Boeing designed absorbed this mission profile change very well and the view of a cell of B-52s on the deck must have been awesome.

As the airplane aged, numerous successors were planned then cancelled due to political or budgetary restraints. The B-52s soldiered on, far beyond the time anyone could ever envision.

Despite its age, BUFFs performed its conventional bombing role again in Operation DESERT STORM in Iraq and again for ALLIED FORCE in Kosovo in the late 1990s.

By then, however, except for the H model, all other variants were gone from the inventory. Arms limitation treaties and antiquated equipment consigned hundreds of older B-52s to the boneyard.

The remaining aircraft, however, were updated yet again and have mastered another unique role in warfare. Equipped with precision munitions, the B-52 still offers military and political leaders unprecedented load carrying and loiter time capability. As described in this story, the old dog can still perform new tricks.

[brickhistory]

(again, mods or members, feel free to call KIO)

COLD WAR LEFTOVERS

After the Soviet Union collapsed and the world seemed it would be a safer place, I was a member of an E-3 AWACS (airborne warning and control system) flying from Japan. With no known military threats on the horizon, the many exercises and patrols we flew seemed to be ‘busywork.’ I found out that even a sedated, muzzled bear can bite.

My crew and I were conducting a joint Japanese Self-Defense Air Force (JASDF) and US exercise on the western side of the northernmost of the Japanese main islands, Hokkaido. Our jet was the radar control agency for a four ship of US F-15s Eagles that would be playing ‘red air’ or the bad guys in the scenario. Red air was defending their notional homeland against a ‘blue air’ strike force composed of JASDF F-1s escorted by US F-16s. The blue air side would be controlled by a fixed JASDF/US radar site at Misawa Air Base.

We had arrived on station in our orbit over the Sea of Japan and our F-15s had just checked in on their way to their combat air patrol (CAP) point to the east of us. As part of standard operating procedures, our surveillance section was busy scanning the entire coverage area of our radar which can be out to hundreds of miles. Within that coverage was part of the Russian coast off to our west.

Shortly after our arrival, our surveillance technicians pointed out a blip that had originated from the Russian interior and was on a fast beeline toward us. In the bad old days of the Cold War, the USSR and other countries had spent considerable time and effort in devising tactics to take out an AWACS. They knew that the ‘big picture’ we provided to both tactical aircraft and air battle commanders was a huge advantage that the Soviets couldn’t match. If they couldn’t have the advantage, they didn’t want us to have it either and were willing to sacrifice many fighters if need be to deny us that advantage.

As part of our training, AWACS and fighter crews had studied the fast flyer tactics and had developed countermeasures which for the E-3 consisted mainly of bravely running away while calling for help.

In this situation, the unknown ‘bogey’ was still screaming towards us so we decided to move and see if it was a coincidence that the blip was aimed towards us. We moved, it moved with us. It wasn’t a coincidence.

We had just about determined to abort the sortie when we came up with the idea to scare the bogey. Due to the geometry of the developing intercept, we figured the probable Russian aircraft didn’t know about the Eagles to our east so I radioed the F-15 flight lead to “go secure.” Moving to a scrambled frequency, I told the flight lead of our predicament and my intent to place his four ship between us and the rapidly approaching intruder. “You want what?” was the incredulous response. The F-15s expecting a training sortie were carrying no armament. An Eagle without weapons is akin to a supersonic Lamborghini. Neat to look at, but what do you do with it?

Nevertheless, I figured the approaching Russian wouldn’t know that the Eagles were declawed and faced with a wall of the best fighters in the world, he might decide that his mission of gathering intelligence on the E-3 wasn’t worth the confrontation.

The F-15s pushed up their throttles and hustled to place themselves between the E-3 and the adversary. Using their powerful APG-63 radars, they asked the electronic equivalent of the famous Dirty Harry movie line of “Are you feeling lucky, punk?”

I’m sure any Russian crewmembers on that aircraft that had any coffee sitting on their crew stations spilled it on their laps due to the rapid turn and equally rapid egress from the area.

For us, we went back on station and finished our part in the exercise but from then on and for the rest of our time in Japan, it was always with one eye peeled. You never knew when the bear might stir again.

[brickhistory]

The Sepecat Jaguar

https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play?p...id=000166507214

When one thinks of the country of Great Britain and the name “Jaguar,” images of the sleek, classic English sports and luxury cars spring to mind. While well deserving of such name recognition, another mechanical beast from the UK shares the name, and like the hunting feline of that moniker, this other ‘Jaguar’ is agile and deadly.

Conceived in the early 1960s as a collaborative effort between the French and British Ministries of Defense, the Jaguar initial design was supposed to be an advanced training aircraft with a limited ground-attack role. During its drawn-out, at times contentious development, each country changed its requirements until the Jaguar became not a trainer at all, but a ground attack aircraft with vastly different capabilities.

The French version had limited avionics and weapons delivery systems, but gave good service as a day-VFR strike fighter. The Royal Air Force (RAF), however, from the outset, envisioned their version to have advanced navigation and weapons delivery capabilities enabling their force to have a fast, low-level, all weather attack jet. The Jaguar GR.1, later GR.1a/b and GR.3, more than delivered that requirement. Two seat versions, the T2 and upgraded T2a, provide for type training in the jag while maintaining a combat capability should they be needed.

After a relatively trouble-free, although exceedingly long gestation, the first RAF Jaguars were introduced into squadron service in 1974. At the time, the Jaguar GR.1 (for ground attack/reconnaissance) featured one of the most advanced navigation systems in the world. The NAVWASS (navigation and weapons aiming subsystem) used a completely self-contained inertial navigation system that updated the jet’s position on a large moving map display in the cockpit. Combined with a HUD (head’s up display) for targeting and flight instrument cues, the total system allowed the Jag pilot to spend most of his time with his eyes outside the cockpit, vital to his survival since the jet was designed for high-speed, low-level attacks. Moving at more than 7 miles a minute, every millisecond spent looking inside meant a measurable increase in the chances of smacking into the ground at high speed!

Relatively small, shoulder-mounted wings flowed from the air intakes and provided a solid ride at low altitude while lugging a substantial bombload. The small wing didn’t have enough space to place ailerons, so spoilers mounted on the upper surface provided roll control, supplemented by a differential tailplane system. The tailplane itself, had a distinct anhederal, very much like the McDonnell-Douglas F-4 Phantom II and for the same reason. By dipping down below the wing, the horizontal stabilizers maintained their effectiveness at high angles of attack where the wings could have blanked them out.

The pilot had a good, if small cockpit that blended into the upper deck of the fuselage. Not as good as a ‘bubble’ type canopy, but then the Jaguar was designed to go fast low down and drop bombs, not search out enemy fighters.

With its two Rolls-Royce/Turbomecca (an Anglo-French Company expressly formed to design and build the Jaguar’s engines) Adour Mk 102s, each produced 7,300 lbs of thrust with afterburning. Although the Adours are highly reliable engines and relatively fuel-efficient, the Jaguar was never thought of as over-powered. With fuel and weapons, the Cat could scoot along at just over 1.1 Mach at low level, but any turning maneuvers quickly bled off airspeed.

Andy Papp, a serving USAF colonel, flew an exchange tour on RAF Jaguars in the late 1980s, says of the Jag in a turning fight, “Anything vertical quickly turned into a horizontal fight”

The Jaguar carried a variety of air to ground ordinance. When rushed to duty as part of Operation GRANBY, Jaguars were hurriedly equipped with AIM-9 Sidewinder infra-red air to air missiles on unique overwing pylons. The overwing design proved to be a bonus as sideways airflow along the upper surface of the wing was effectively blocked, a superior aerodynamic surface resulted along with improved fuel consumption despite the increased weight of a Winder on each wing!

RAF Jags have since served in operations over Bosnia and Kosovo. With each conflict, avionic and weapons upgrades have improved the jet’s abilities to deliver firepower on target.

Other than a lack of power, Papp has fond memories of his time in the jet. He had come into the Jaguar world from the USAF’s A-10 “Thunderbolt II,” otherwise universally known as the “Warthog,” a well-armored, heavy hitting, but slow, ground attack aircraft.

“The Jaguar was underpowered, but it was very stable at low level. Faster than the A-10, it was a good bomb dropper. The nav system was good and the moving map display outstanding. The map was almost like a filmstrip, and great to see while at low-level.

“The RAF routinely practiced down to 100 feet and the Jag flew well down there. We’d typically fly as two-ships, using the radar altimeter to warn of getting too low. One of the things I had to adjust to while flying with them were some differences in terminology. For example, they use ‘port’ and ‘starboard’ for left and right. Not a big deal, but a little different to get used to.

“The RAF trained to very high standards. They were very structured in their approach to flying and once I was qualified as an operational pilot in the jet, they were very welcoming to me personally.

“I really liked some of their life support equipment as compared to ours. For example, their flying gloves are just great. I still use them today instead of the USAF issued ones. However, the helmets at the time were just torture devices, heavy and the mask was cumbersome to use.

“I had one of their flight surgeons tell me that it was designed to hit a tree at 700 knots and not break. He had no answer when I asked what would happen to the rest of me if I hit a tree at 700 kts!”

Papp says of his time with the RAF Jaguars, “It was the best tour I had except for command.” And this from a man with several tours of F-117 “Nighthawk” in his logbook. As a matter of fact, at the time of the interview, Papp was the Vice-Commander of the ‘Stealth’ wing based at Holloman AFB in New Mexico.

The RAF plans to retire its remaining Jaguars during 2006.

(This was written in '04-ish.)

I hope others will cotinue post their photos/tales/why a particular airplane is their favorite

[stract]

Well, it sounds like a few folks out there have never heard of a YMC-130 before. So since it shows up in the bio of our yet-to-be confirmed new CSAF, I figured a history lesson was in order. Rather than clog up the CSAF/SECAF thread, I thought this would be a more appropriate spot.

Enjoy!

the one that crashed was "buried at Duke Field" WTF?

[DuckHunter]

That's good stuff Brick.

[brickhistory]

NEW GUY

(Not a reflective belt in sight)

New Wings, New Mission

“After only a twenty minute flight check, I was declared ‘operational’ and sent into combat.” So begins Morris Dalton’s World War II tale of nightfighter combat in Europe.

In the spring of 1943, Morris Dalton was finally old enough to enlist in the US Army Air Forces. After screening in Knoxville, Tennessee, with hundreds of other aspiring airmen, only he and a relatively few others made the cut for pilot training. He soon found himself in California starting his journey to win his coveted wings.

“By February 1944, I’d made it, getting both my wings and a commission as a second lieutenant. More importantly, I had qualified to be a fighter pilot, something I wanted badly.

“Then they hit us with some bad news. They wanted to roll most into being instructor pilots. After spending almost a year busting my butt to make it to combat, I sure didn’t want to go back into the training environment.

“They offered me a way out if I volunteered to become a nightfighter pilot. Since it was a way into combat and the name still said ‘fighter,’ I jumped at the chance,” he recalls.

Up until now, all his flight time had been in single-engine types culminating with the North American T-6 Texan as the most powerful he’d yet flown. All the U.S. nightfighters, however, were twin-engined so he went to Hamer Field, California to check out with multiple throttles.

He first checked out in the powerful Douglas A-20 Havoc, a big attack bomber with two Wright R-2600 Double Cyclone engines, each flogging 1600 horses and each putting out almost more than three times the power of the T-6.

“It was a big step up for a new pilot with less than 300 hours, but wartime created a sense of urgency so my transition was merely routine for those days.”

It was there that he also was introduced to the arcane science of radar-guided airborne interception (AI), first used successfully by the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Battle of Britain.

The RAF had a curtain of ground radar sites that searched the skies for any inbound aircraft. Once detected, controllers would scramble and vector fighters to an interception point where the battle was joined. Once the RAF had defeated the Nazis during days of the summer and fall of 1940, the Luftwaffe turned its bombing efforts to the long winter nights. The previously successful Spitfires and Hurricanes were nearly useless in the dark English skies, so the RAF placed smaller airborne radar in larger two-man aircraft and eventually recaptured the night.

Still using the ground radar sites, a GCI (ground control intercept) controller would vector the nightfighter into proximity where the fighter’s less-powerful on-board radar detected the target. The radar operator or R/O, would then provide directions to the pilot until the pilot was able to see the target. A good R/O could verbally ‘paint’ the air picture until the pilot could see and identify the target. Once the pilot had it, the classic hunter and prey scenario took over.

In Dalton’s case, the first nightfighter he flew was the bastardized version of the A-20, the P-70. The USAAF, lacking a nightfighter of its own at the outbreak of the war, had plans to introduce the Northrop P-61 Black Widow, a large, fast, very capable nightfighter. Delays in production, however, forced the Army Air Forces to bring out a stopgap fighter, the P-70.

By taking the very capable A-20 attack aircraft and placing a radar in the nose, the rear gunner with an R/O, and slapping a belly pack of .50 caliber machine guns, the USAAF produced a very modestly adequate nightfighter. The P-70 was now overweight and slow to climb to combat altitudes. The shortcomings of the P-70, in fact, were so severe that they were never placed in European combat. They did see limited action in the Pacific where they performed marginally through no fault of their crews however.

Instead, the P-70 was relegated to nightfighter training duties and so it was when Mo Dalton first took one up. “It was a big airplane but pretty steady to fly. The tricycle gear made it a cinch to land and taxi. Learning to fly with an R/O and follow his control was interesting, much more mentally absorbing than day flying.”

By August, Dalton finished his training and found himself on the way to France to join up with his operational unit, the 417th Night Fighter Squadron. It was on a troopship there that he acquired the nickname that would stay with him for the war. Indeed, at squadron reunions, most of his compatriots only know him as ‘Dirty’ Dalton, so monikered after a cartoon strip of the time. The fictional ‘Dirty’ Dalton character wore wide fur chaps and an enormous 10-gallon cowboy hat pulled low over a usually tobacco stained bushy mustache.

(Notice the many 'variations' of uniforms. Seems this generation could fight a war as 'adults.')

New Aircraft

In September 1944, Dalton arrived at La Valon, France, northwest of the French Mediterranean city of Marseilles. It was there that he first saw his wartime mount, the Bristol Beaufighter. A BIG, twin-engined tail dragger, the ‘Beau’ had served as the first effective British nightfighter back in 1940 and soldiered on still although most of the RAF nightfighter squadrons had traded in theirs for night variants of the De Havilland Mosquito.

The Beau was quite a change from the P-70. With big 1670 hp Hercules sleeve-valved radial sitting even with the cockpit which was perched on the nose while the rest of the Beau trailed aft, it had a strong reputation as a handling challenge. Dalton says about that, “A lot of guys complained about the Beau, but I enjoyed flying it. You had to fly it every minute, and the tail would swing on you in a heartbeat if you let it, but if you paid attention, it did what you wanted.

“On take-off, you wanted to get the tail up fast so the rudder was effective. You could use differential throttles to keep straight but that was usually more work than it was worth, just pour the coals to it and get the tail up and you’d be ok.

“Likewise, on landing, you kept flying it all the way to the ground. If you got slow, it would drop like a brick. After you landed, however, the pneumatic brakes on it weren’t much good. The Beau, like most British types, used this little paddle switch on the yoke versus the toe brakes we were used to. Since our aircraft were borrowed from the Brits anyway, they usually gave us ‘clapped out’ planes with worn out brakes. Combine that with a supply system that didn’t work (author’s note – The US only used four squadrons of Beaufighters, the 414th – 417th) since we couldn’t get parts for the Beau and, well, you had an ‘iffy’ airplane.”

After many hours of cockpit drill – sitting blindfolded in the cockpit until he could readily identify every switch, knob, and control by touch, Dalton took his first flight in the Beau. Since there was only one pilot’s seat, the instructor crouched behind the pilot and gave instructions.

Dalton continues, “After only 20 minutes in the local area, my check pilot, a Captain, told me to land, I was qualified.”

Placed in the operational line-up, he crewed with flight officer (FO), later second lieutenant, William Work as his R/O. The R/O’s office in the Beau was about two-thirds of the way to the tail underneath a plastic bubbletop canopy. In front of him, he had a set of primary instruments and a radar set, the SCR-720.

When scheduled for a mission, Dalton says the mission was usually preceded by a night flying test to make sure the aircraft and its many systems were working before they left on patrol. “We would take a Beau up for 30 minutes or so and check out the aircraft, fire up the radar to make sure it was giving a good picture and so on. I usually didn’t test fire the four 20mm cannons because if I did, then the armorers would have to clean the guns after I got back. A lot of other guys did test fires on a bunch of old landing barges down off the coast, but I rarely did. I trusted the ground guys to do their job and I didn’t want to make extra work for them if I didn’t have to.”

As for flying the Beau on patrol, Dalton says, “The Beau had great visibility. I had a big flat panel in front of me and large side windows. Being way up front, I could see in every direction except directly behind me and my R/O would keep an eye out there.

“With no superchargers, it wouldn’t get very high. I can remember trying to intercept a German photo ship that would fly over Marseilles every few nights. He would be in the 20’s (20 thousand plus feet), and I’d be hanging on the props at maybe 19. Never could get a shot at him.

“At lower altitudes, I thought it handled well. It had pretty good maneuverability and wasn’t really heavy on the controls.

“I also got pretty good at crosswind landings in the Beau, I had to. Our field at La Valon, had a dirt runway lying east-west. The predominant weather there was a strong wind from the north called “Le Mistral.” When I say strong, I mean in the 40-60 knot range, sometimes more!

“We still had to fly our assigned missions no matter the weather, so I just had to get good at handling the crosswind. Sometimes, when the weather was so bad during the day that it grounded the single engine guys, we even had to send up planes to cover their patrol areas.”

Regarding the Luftwaffe reconnaissance ship mentioned above, Dalton tells a story of good ol’ fashioned Yankee ingenuity combining mission accomplishment with ‘acquiring’ badly needed spare parts.

“Since we couldn’t get this guy in our Beaufighters, the RAF sent in a Mosquito nightfighter to take care of him. When the ‘Mossie’ landed at our field, we took the crew off for some chatting and dinner in the field mess. Meanwhile, our maintenance guys swapped out the Mossie’s landing gear – wheels and all – with one of our tired Beau sets. They were the same wheels so it worked.’

Dalton continues, “It wasn’t just a prank or to be obnoxious. As I said, parts for the Beau were non-existent in the US supply system. We had a squadron ‘hack,’ a worn out B-25 that we used to search all over the Mediterranean for parts. We even took a load of tires once from a trash dump in North Africa, so you can see that a new set of wheels was a big deal to us.

“The Brits were fairly good-natured about the switch and even shot down the pesky photo intruder so everybody got something from the deal.”

New Experiences

Some other Dalton experiences, “For a time in late 1944, the Germans were flying high ranking officials, gold, and artwork from northern Italy, down the Po Valley, out over the Med and into a place near neutral Barcelona, Spain. This run became so regular that it got a nickname ‘Barcelona Charlie.’

“Our squadron got detailed to stop this run so we patrolled for weeks in December, in some of the worst weather you can imagine. The Germans had a radar altimeter coupled to an autopilot and would routinely fly at 20-30 feet above the water.

Whenever we got a crack at him, which wasn’t often because it was difficult to see him on radar that low, our guys had their hands full. We didn’t have an autopilot so we were trying to intercept this guy, at night, in bad weather, right on the waves.

“I usually set my radar altimeter to 50 feet so that if I got too close, I’d get a big ol’ red light to get my attention. I never had a crack at him, but one of our crews finally did on the night of December 28, 1944.

“That kill got our squadron a Presidential Unit Citation and was, incidentally, the last US Beaufighter kill of the war.

Dalton says he never had an enemy engagement despite many intercepts. Since all AI contacts had to go to visual range to ensure the ‘bogey’ wasn’t a friendly, it was fairly common to intercept lots of Allied aircraft that were off course.

“One night, a group of B-24s out of Italy flew a night time mission. They wound up being scattered all over southern Europe. We flew a lot of intercepts, creeping up on a target only to see a B-24 lumbering along, completely lost.”

Most of the time, Dalton says his patrols were boring unlike another squadron crew, “These guys, and I won’t name names, had bailed out twice due to mechanical problems and ditched at least once during their tour. By then, the R/O was pretty ‘twitchy,’ as you could imagine.

“Anyway, this crew took off one night for a patrol and soon after take-off, developed a rough running engine. The pilot told the R/O over the intercom that he was heading back to circle base until the engine ran smoother. If it didn’t, he planned to land.

“Well, the engine only got rougher, so the pilot told the R/O, “We’re going in,” meaning “we’re going to land.”

“The R/O, however, was spring loaded to leave after all the bad luck in the Beau so far, and bailed out. The pilot didn’t know the R/O had jumped until after landing when the ground crew asked where his R/O was.

“The R/O, meantime, had come down several miles away from the field. His chute snagged on the corner of a convent of all places and he just hung there, too high to unbuckle his harness.

“The French at first took him for a German and were about to give him a rough time before they realized he as an American. After that, he was ok except the Mother Superior of the convent gave him an earful for some reason!

“This R/O was shipped home soon after.”

Soon after the war ended in May 1945, the 417th swapped its tired Beaufighters for shiny, new P-61s, but ‘Dirty’ Dalton recalls his first fighter with affection. “I really enjoyed flying that thing.”

Sidebar – Sleeve Valve Radial Engines

A sleeve valve radial contains the valves in a sleeve mounted between the piston and the cylinder unlike a conventional radial engine with its valves mounted on the top of each cylinder Using a smaller crank that turned at half the speed of the crankshaft, the sleeve moved in an elliptical path, lining up ports on the sleeve with the cylinder that allowed fuel and air to enter the cylinder and expelled the exhaust at the completion of the power stroke.

The advantage of the sleeve valve is improved volumetric efficiency because the sleeve’s larger ports improved gas flow into and out of the cylinder and created a higher compression ratio. Aerodynamically, the sleeve valve radial presented a smaller frontal area and thus created less drag for the aircraft to overcome.

From a maintenance aspect, however, a sleeve-valved design was a nightmare. It leaked oil like a sieve and had many more moving parts than its more conventional brethren. The design rapidly fell from grace after the war.

Sidebar - US Beaufighter kills

Although the RAF and other Commonwealth flew Beaufighters in dozens of nightfighter and strike squadrons, only four USAAF squadrons were so equipped, the 414-417th NFS, all in the Mediterranean and European theaters.

Even the thought the US Beaus were few in number, they did account for a fair number of enemy aircraft destroyed or damaged.

NFS 414th 415th 416th 417th TOTALS

Confirmed kills 8 11 4 7 30

‘Probables’ 1 5 2 4 12

Damaged 1 1 1 11 14

Some of the Beaufighter victories include two by the 415th’s Dr. Harold Augspurger, now a retired dentist. He recalls the Beau as “an aircraft that needed constant attention to detail. It wouldn’t stay trimmed up no matter what you did and you had to work the throttles and brakes carefully once the speed dropped, but it flew just fine.” Dr. Augspurger had two confirmed kills in the Beau.

The 417th’s only two kill crew of F/O Jeffery (pilot) and F/O Henderson (R/O) combat report on March 28, 1944 reads, “Took off on a freelance. At 0758, sighted a Ju-88 flying on the deck, heading 030, doing 280 mph. We slowly were able to overtake the ‘bandit’ and opened fire at 800 yards, right on the deck. Fired until within 200 yards when enemy a/c returned fire, hitting us in port engine exhaust and wing. Claim one damaged (later confirmed as a kill).

Their second combat was only 3 days later, “Scrambled at 2245 and controlled by “Perform” GCI station. Vectored to within two miles of ‘bogey.’ At 2350 hours, we sighted one Ju-88, heading 240 at about 50 feet off the water. Opened fire at 130 yards, enemy aircraft taking hard evasive turns. Got in a second burst at 110 yards, breaking off at 75 yards. One Ju-88 destroyed.”

The above is a magazine article that formed the basis for my book:

Assuming the mods ok it, I'll copy Steve's example and gladly sign/ship to anyone who wants to PM me. It not, I'll delete this ASAP.

[brickhistory]

An Interesting Detour:

Flying the RAF’s Lightning

“In 1966, I was a Weapons Instructor at the Interceptor Weapons School at Tyndall Air Force Base, flying F-106s. I’d been an air defense guy since I first started flying for the Air Force, first as an F-89 ‘back seater’ then as a pilot. With Vietnam heating up, the need for ‘Thud’ drivers was urgent, not air intercept pilots, so I had my application for F-105 training ready and ready to submit for an assignment.

“I got an assignment alright, but instead of going west, I was sent east and the best tour of my career.”

So begins Colonel Robert ‘Bob’ Priest’s tale about his flying tour in the Royal Air Force’s jet interceptor, the Lightning.

Classic sports car

Conceived in the late 1940s by the then-English Electric Company, the Lightning first flew in 1954. Sleek, elegant and with all the necessary bits crammed into as small an airframe as possible, the Lightning was the first British-built aircraft to exceed Mach 1 in level flight. Eventually, the jet’s top speed clocked at over Mach 2. American designs of the time, like the Republic F-105 ‘Thunderchief’ or the Convair F-106 ‘Delta Dart’ were going bigger; much bigger. The ‘Thud,’ in which Bob Priest thought he’d see action in Vietnam, was twelve feet longer and more than six tons (!) heavier than the RAF’s Lightning. To put it in automotive terms, the Lightning was more like an MG sports car as compared to the large-block Chevys and Dodges of the day.

Pure and simple, the Lightning’s design was that of a point interceptor against the perceived Cold War threat of Soviet bombers. Thus, time to altitude and speed were of paramount importance to intercepting the enemy as far from the United Kingdom’s shores as possible.

The P1 prototype had two turbojet engines; mounted in a unique ‘over and under’ configuration, shoulder-positioned sweptback wings, low mounted horizontal stabilizers, nose mounted intake and cockpit recessed into the fuselage above the intake. From some aspects, the Lightning looks remarkably like a MiG-21. The placing of the wings also dictated a long, spindly undercarriage for the jet complete with narrow, high-pressure tires.

One of the first things manifested during the testing period was the Lightning’s lack of endurance. This was a problem that would dog the fighter throughout its career, although much time and effort went into increasing its ‘legs.’

Another item brought out during testing was the aircraft’s phenomenal climb ability. From releasing the brakes to reaching 40,000 ft, just over two and half minutes would pass. For a 1950s jet, this was stunning performance; indeed it was still able to hold its own in this category well into the 1980s.

Never produced in great numbers, only 329 being built, the Lightning was supposed to have a service life of around ten years. Due to many policies and decisions that are beyond the scope of this article, it soldiered on for a quarter century in several variants starting with the original production run of the F1, armed with two 30mm cannons and two infra-red air-to-air missiles, the Red Top. Later marks went all the way to the F6, which featured an improved avionics suite, better missiles, a large ventral tank and the ability to carry overwing fuel tanks (overwing because the stork-like landing gear precluded hanging anything below the wings). This extra fuel capacity went a long way to curing the Lightning’s ‘short legs’ as did the retro-fitted aerial refueling capability using the ‘probe and drogue’ method of tanking.

A Yank in the RAF

Similar to the famous ‘Eagle’ squadrons of World War II where Americans manned RAF squadrons and served under British orders, the RAF and the Americans had had a robust exchange program for many years. In the program, a pilot or crew, depending on type of aircraft, would serve in a sister nation’s squadron, fully immersed in that country’s way of operating and living. As an example, the RAF had one of its pilots flying in a USAF F-117 squadron as recently as 2003.

Thus, then-Captain Bob Priest was surprised, but pleased to find he’d been selected for the program in 1966. In November of that year, he arrived in the UK to serve the tour he calls “the best time of my career.”

Before being allowed to climb into the Lightning, however, Priest recalls having to prove himself in a more docile jet, the Hawker Hunter.

“At RAF Chivenor, in the southwest of England, I had to go through a check out. It was not particularly challenging, but it gave the RAF a chance to size me up. They were checking me out to make sure that I could really fly before trusting me with anything hotter.

“It also gave me a chance to learn the language and get used to some of the idiosyncrasies of English jets versus American aircraft.

“For example, the Hunter used a hand brake control system instead of the toe brakes I was used to. You had to squeeze the handle on the stick to apply brake pressure while moving the rudder to steer. You could always tell a new guy by the weaving around during taxi. Looked like a drunk was taxiing. But, the Hunter was a lot of fun to fly.

“After that, I moved to the RAF’s Lightning training base of the time, RAF Coltishall. I was put in with a class of other RAF pilots, from guys coming right out of flight school to those transitioning into the Lightning from other types.

“It was because of that mix that my initial assignment changed. The Wing Commander who was going to take over the newly reformed 11 Squadron was in my class and we hit it off during the course. He asked me if I’d go with him, along with several others in the class already assigned to the squadron. I said “Sure.”

“So it was that I went to RAF Leuchars and had the time of my life.”

At Leuchars, Priest joined the squadron, flying the brand new F6 model, with his first operational flight on July 3, 1967. A year later, he had racked more than 600 hours in the jet.

Says Priest of the jet, “The cockpit was tiny; my shoulders touched both sides. The instrumentation was ‘unusual’ to say the least. For example, the airspeed/mach indicator was a horizontal tape display. Other instruments were scattered around the cockpit wherever they could find room.

“To operate some switches, you had to cross hands and switch the stick to your left in order to get to everything. It was a handful as compared to flying the F-106.

“It took me a lot longer than I liked to get comfortable with instrument flying in the Lightning. Since that had to be second nature to be a good intercept pilot in order to focus on operating the radar and weapon systems, I didn’t like the initial adjustment. But I managed eventually.

Climbing into the jet required a long climb because ladder had to go up nearly 12 feet. In addition to a flight suit, G-suit, helmet and gloves, another necessary garment was the infamous ‘poopy’ suit. This hot, uncomfortable immersion suit gave at least a small chance of survival to an unlucky pilot forced to eject at sea.

Once settled into the tiny space, Priest set up the cockpit like he wanted, flipping switches and setting knobs in preparation for engine start. If he were sitting active alert, waiting on the klaxon to send him aloft against a target, all of those actions would have already been accomplished.

Cranking the two Rolls-Royce Avon Mk. 301 jets was fairly straightforward. A small starter motor fueled by a noxious mixture called “avpin” spun up to very high RPMs with a distinctive “whee” noise, followed by the spool up of the Avons.

A check of engine temperatures, fuel flows, etc. and it was time to taxi. With the limited endurance of the jet, ground operations were held to a minimum. Indeed, if the launch were an actual ‘scramble’ against a target, Priest would have been rolling, with a wingman, in 90 seconds or less.

“At take-off,” Priest recalled, “I’d climb out with GCI (ground control intercept – a radar station) control, using 100% power to get to altitude.

“For a VIP or airshow-type of take-off, I’d use full afterburner (the Brits call it ‘reheat’), level out, then pull about 4G’s and go straight up If I held the jet down on the deck before climbing, I could get 450 knots before the runway’s end and then go vertical.

“The Lightning was a decent dogfighter and handled okay, but that really wasn’t what it was designed to do. It accelerated well and slowed down quickly as well. With its almost 1:1 thrust to weight ratio, it was an excellent climber. It was very responsive to throttle inputs, but you had to be sensitive at some settings.

“Landing was fairly hot due to the high wing loading, but unless you had a crosswind, it was no big deal. With a crosswind, however, it could be a handful to get down. With the slab-sided fuselage and a 60-degree swept wing, a crosswind could really shove the jet around close to the ground.

“One of the things I used was the F-106 technique of landing in a crosswind with one wing low. It was a bitch to do at night, but it really helped under those conditions. The RAF, however, looked askance at my wing down landings.”

Scramble!

Of course, the sole reason for the Lightning’s existence was to defend the UK from air threats. During Priest’s tour with the RAF, that threat occurred primarily from the Soviet Union’s long-range bomber force. The most numerous foe that Priest intercepted as the Tupolev Tu-16, NATO code-named “Badger.”

The Badger was a large, four engine jet bomber, capable of intercontinental range and able to carry nuclear weapons. It was a definite threat and one the RAF took seriously.

Priest described what a scramble was like, “We always had two birds on alert, 24/7. They sat in what was called the ‘QRA’ hangar (quick reaction alert). The pilots and ground crews lived there while on alert, always dressed and ready to respond.

“We had a ‘squawk’ box in the crew room that connected us to the local GCI site. We could get the information from GCI as they detected a target and determined what to do about it.

“For instance, they’d call, “Two Lightnings to two minutes” which meant for us to strap in and be ready to crank engines.

“If the scramble was given, we started and taxied to the runway, lit the ‘burners, and climbed while taking the heading GCI was feeding us via radio.

“The Lightning’s FCS (fire control system) was not that sophisticated and would bite off on chaff (bundle of radar reflective material ejected by a pursued aircraft) pretty easily, so we stayed tuned to GCI and used our eyeballs quite a bit. With only an IR (infra-red) missile for a weapon, we had to get in close anyway.

“We usually picked up the ‘bogey’ about 300 miles out, over the North Sea and shadowed him until another flight relieved us as the bomber flew down the British coast outside of controlled airspace.

“I intercepted this one Badger and the Russian pilot and I exchanged waves and camera shots. He indicated for me to do a roll, so I did. After I pulled in again on his wing, I motioned for him to do it. He declined.

“Another time, I intercepted a Badger over the English Channel and tailed him until the (RAF) Wattisham jets took over. That Badger later buzzed a US Navy aircraft carrier at low level and crashed when he went too low. I watched the news replay later the same day.”

Mach 2 Flameout

It was while flying chase during a missile test that Priest recalled one of his most memorable Lightning flights.

“The IR missile seeker heads kept getting pitted from flying through rain and snow. This pitting really reduced their ability to detect any kind of heat source so they were not the greatest thing to take to a fight should we need them.

“The RAF engineers came up with a seeker head cap that could be ejected by compressed air if you needed to lock to a target. That ejection capability had to be tested throughout the full operational speed range of the jet; so 11 Squadron drew the task.

“I was flying chase on an RAF test pilot who was supposed to test the system going full out. We had just gone through Mach 2 when a fire warning light in my cockpit got my attention. It’s never a good time to get a fire indication but going that fast was even worse.

“I stopcocked the number 1 (lower) engine. I was later told that had never been done in the Lightning going Mach 2 so I had no idea how the jet would handle the stress. Next, I hit the fire extinguisher, called “Mayday,” and took a heading for home.

“Luckily, the fire light went out and the jet stayed together, but now I had the problem of getting down in a hurry with only one engine. I set up for a simulated flame out approach which was not something Lightning pilots trained for, but I remembered it from my F-106 days and it worked in this case In case of ejection, I wanted all the altitude I could get right up to landing.

“I landed ok and after the jet was taken apart, we found that a burst air duct had let hot air from the 15th compressor stage burn into the fuselage. Could have been worse, but I’m here to tell the story, so it turned out okay.”

Postscript

In August 1969, Bob Priest’s English interlude came to an end. It was time for him to rejoin the USAF. When he did, he did find himself with orders to Vietnam but not in a ‘Thud.’ The McDonnell-Douglas F-4 was assuming the workload of the F-105 so after checking out in the ‘Phantom,’ Priest did find himself in Vietnam.

After nearly a year of combat there, he was shot down by a surface to air missile, but was rescued by the USAF’s search and rescue forces.

[brickhistory]

A little lovin' for the USN Cold War shore-based warriors...

Between The Rock and a Hard Place

“We were getting our socks jammed off by the cabbies in Morocco on one side and other ones on Gibraltar on the other side. The only way we could maintain contact was to take it down on the deck.”

This is how former Lockheed P-3 Orion pilot John Maffei describes tracking a Soviet nuclear submarine entering the Mediterranean Sea during the Cold War. His quarry in this case was a ‘Victor I’ class Soviet attack boat. Attack subs in any navy have a primary responsibility for taking out the other side’s ballistic missile-carrying submarines (nicknamed “boomers” for obvious reasons) as well as preying on adversary attack boats. Additionally, many subs, can lob cruise missiles and carry the sobriquet of “shooter.”

In Maffei’s case, the taxi drivers on either side of the busy Strait of Gibraltar weren’t engaged in some massive James Bond-style operation to thwart the good guys, it was just that their dispatch radios in the cabs operated on some of the same frequencies that the P-3 used to track underwater targets via sonobouys.

Coming in a variety of flavors, sonobouys are disposable, self-contained sonar receivers and radio transmitters. Dropped at low level, the sonobouys listen below the waves for sound and transmit those sounds to the P-3’s highly trained crew to classify and identify. Each sonobouy is programmed to transmit on a separate frequency so as not to interfere with another, but with only so many frequencies available, the cabbies’ chatter was interfering with prosecuting this contact. After a set time, the sonobouys run out of electrical power and sink.

By getting below the line of sight transmissions of the cabs, the sensor operators in the P-3 could better listen to the string of sonobouys that Maffei and company had dropped to pick up the Victor.

The US Navy spent an enormous amount of time, effort, energy and money to negate the massive USSR submarine fleet during the Cold War years. There was a real fear in the Pentagon that the Russian’s submarine quantity would overwhelm the U.S. and NATO’s maritime quality, thus stopping any reinforcements from reaching Europe in the event of another war on that battered continent. Likewise, if the Soviets could take our US boomers in the opening stage of a nuclear Armageddon, then a very large part of U.S. retaliatory capability was lost. Thus the USN wanted to know where the bad guys were, 24/7.

To track those subs and if need be, kill them, the Navy invested in many squadrons of P-3 sub-hunters. Deployed around the world, these aircraft spent hundreds of thousands of hours airborne searching for, tracking, monitoring, occasionally annoying, and sometimes helping Soviet subs.

Thus it was that Bronx-born Naval Academy graduate aviator Lieutenant John Maffei found himself launched from Rota Air Field, Spain to find this sub entering the Med. He and his crew (see sidebar for crew composition) gathered their flight material and received a briefing from the ASWOC (Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Center).

“The ASWOC gets its data from a variety of sources – the Sound Surveillance System, a multi-billion dollar network of underwater microphones scattered around the world’s oceans; from contacts gained by US or allied submarines, other P-3s as well as other means still classified. In any event, the crew knew that a Victor sub was lurking in the Atlantic not far from the Strait of Gibraltar and that it was probably there to relieve another Soviet sub already on-station within the Mediterranean. My crew’s job was to find this sub and track it until relieved by another ASW platform,” says Maffei.

As mentioned earlier, the Navy took sub hunting seriously. In peacetime, careers were made or broken over successful sub tracking whether in an aircraft, ship or submarine. If you found a bad guy sub, you tailed it until the higher ups said “enough.” If you lost contact and the sub got away, you could expect to “dance with the skipper” upon your return. And that dance was usually not very enjoyable.

The commander of the attack sub USS Lapon, legendary within the ASW community, tracked a new Soviet boomer for 47 days without being discovered. By that time, the US sub, in conjunction with P-3s orbiting overhead, recorded every sound, captured via underwater photography every rivet and detail, and monitored every transmission the unsuspecting Soviet boat made. Think of the sub tracking scenes from the movie “Hunt for Red October” and you’ll have a fair idea of the game.

In wartime, these abilities to find and monitor had to be quickly adjusted to find and kill. If the nuclear balloon was to ever go up, it is fairly safe to say that a boomer opening his missile launch tubes would have found himself in small pieces before the launch order was given.

Back to Maffei’s problem; he had a fixed target time to arrive where the intel shop thought the sub would be so he and his crew backed all their preparations, pre-flight, equipment checks, start/taxi/take-off times to mesh with the required overhead time. With a big, complex aircraft like the P-3, prepping the plane and preflighting was no “kick the tires and light the fires” affair.

Maffei describes what it was like, “The pilots, the TACCO and nav, Sensors 1 and 2 would meet at the ASWOC to get the ‘gouge’ for this mission. Meanwhile, the ‘Ord,’ (Ordinanceman) would take a truck to the munitions area and get the number and type of sonobouys that he and the TACCO had previously briefed.

“The Eng (flight engineer) would head out and start looking over the aircraft. Soon the 3P and the nav would arrive carrying the box of crypto codes. While the 3P and eng pre-flighted, the nav would load up all the crypto in the secure radios and other equipment, ops check the radios to make sure they worked.

“Meanwhile, whoever was the mission commander, could be the PPC or the TACCO depending on seniority or training, would fine-tune the mission and prepare the expected sonobouy patterns we thought would work best to acquire the contact.

“As it got closer to take-off, the 2P would file at base ops for our ATC clearance. Once we were away from traffic, we would leave ATC freq and go tactical for the mission until we were heading home again.”

“Ord has loaded the sonobouys on the aircraft per the TACCOs instructions; we carried 48 externally in the belly and as many as we could stuff internally that we dropped via sonobouy chutes in the fuselage. He would load those when it came time to drop.

“Ground ops were pretty standard and off we went.”

Transit time varied from one to several hours depending on where the plane was based and where the sub was thought to be.

“We arrive overhead our patrol area, drop an area search pattern called a “a barrier” of sonobouys to try and pick our boy,” says Maffei of this hunt.

“The Med is one of the busiest areas of shipping in the world and the Strait of Gibraltar is a very busy choke point for traffic entering or exiting the Med. Only eight miles wide and less than a thousand feet deep, everything has to funnel through it. All that traffic makes for a lot of noise underwater. Noise is a sub’s best friend when he’s trying to evade detection and an ASW platform’s worst enemy.

“In quiet, deep water like the North Atlantic or North Pacific, we might get sonobouy ‘hits’ from 30 miles or more. In churned up, busy water like the Straight, detection drops to a few hundred yards. In fact, the ASW in-house joke is that the Strait is actually much shallower than it used to be because of all the sonobouys dropped in it over the years.

“A favorite tactic of sub drivers entering a congested area is to hide underneath a surface ship. By using the ship as a shield in both noise and metal detection, a sub can get away if you are not careful. That takes some skill on his part to get in close and stay there.

“We picked up our contact just west of the Strait, with a faint acoustic contact. We stayed with him, but just barely. With intermittent contact due to all the shipping noise and the radio interference, we were sweating this one. If we didn’t establish a solid track on him soon, we might not find him until he was within potential shooting distance from a battle group or such.”

“Finally, our contact made his move. Trying to mask himself underneath an inbound freighter, he entered the Strait. Here we were darting low level at 200 feet or less, trying to maintain a plot, avoid going over somebody else’s territory and setting up an international incident, and we are about to lose this guy.

“Finally he did fade. We went to our back up plan and zipped over to the eastern exit of the Strait. We laid our last line of sonobouys across the Strait and set up an orbit listening until our ears were just about bleeding.

“As the time for likely intercept wound down, we were only getting confusing garbage – many ships’ screw noises, marine life like shrimp, whales and who knows what else, but no Victor noise.”

“We were just about out of gas and ideas when on the last sonobouy at the end of the line when we could reasonably expect to hear him, we saw a feather of breaking water just about directly underneath us.

“As I racked the P-3 around for another pass, marking the spot of our contact, I directed Sensor 3 to ready the MAD (Magnetic Anomaly Detector –essentially a tail boom mounted metal detector). Normally, we depend on sound for detection, but with all the scrambled noise in the area, I chose the MAD even though it is a close in sensor.

“As we passed over the spot, Senor 3 bellowed “MAD, MAD, MAD!” which was a short way of letting the crew know he had a good, solid contact. We had just gotten extremely lucky because the Victor’s captain had brought his boat up to periscope depth for a quick look around.

“We were able to drop down on top of him and take pictures at low level. Even if the Soviet skipper didn’t see us through his ‘scope,’ he could hear us through his own sound systems. The four turboprops set up quiet a harmonic disturbance in the water that he’d have to be deaf not to hear.

“He wasn’t and he went just about ape-s*** to lose us. He tried the whole ‘Crazy Ivan’ dance, diving while turning sharply, ascending and changing speed, the whole pocketful of tricks he had to lose us.

“We had him solid now though. Since he was through the Strait and had to go relieve the other waiting boat, he was committed to staying in. That fact really simplified our targeting.

“Eventually, he settled down and resumed his course towards his patrol area. We stayed with him until another of my squadron’s P-3s relieved us. We turned for the barn and landed after nearly a 12-hour mission.

Now a United Airlines pilot, Maffei concludes his tale, “The beer tasted really good that evening.”

SIDEBAR P-3 Crew composition

PPC- Patrol Plane Commander – the aircraft commander, the head guy responsible for aircraft safety and operation. Can also be the Mission Commander, person responsible for successful specific mission accomplishment. Since most P-3 missions were 8-14 hours long, much of it at low level, an extra pilot is a vital part of the crew’s safety.

2P – 2d Pilot – a more experienced pilot than a new guy, but still in upgrade to becoming a PPC.

3P – 3d Pilot – most junior of the pilots, usually just reported in from pilot training/type conversion. Does most of the ‘grunt’ work; preflighting the aircraft, inventorying and guarding the extensive cryptographic codes used by the crew to carry out a mission as well as gaining flying experience.

Flight Engineer – enlisted aviator monitors engine and aircraft performance, fuel flow, and assists in flight deck duties. Acts as the plane’s crew chief if the P-3 has to land at other than home station during a mission. Usually due to mission lengths, two are aboard.

TACCO – Tactical Coordinator – senior of the two naval flight officers (navigators), responsible for coordinating the use/presentation of the P-3’s multiple sensor systems in conducting the assigned mission., positioning the aircraft during the tactical portion of the mission.

Navigator – junior of the NFO’s, responsible for the ‘point A to point B’ positioning, monitoring the various communication systems; obtaining, loading, accounting for the crypto items.

Sensor 1 & 2 – enlisted acoustic sensor operators; monitor and interpret the data collected from the sonobouys; air dropped miniature sonar receivers used to listen for underwater activity. From detected sounds, the sensor operators can classify and identify most things in the water. Once a target is acquired, they will track it until the mission is completed.

Sensor 3 – enlisted non-acoustic sensor operator- uses the P-3’s radar, forward looking infrared (FLIR) pod, magnetic anomaly detector (MAD), and electronic support (ESM) equipment to aid in mission accomplishment.

Ordinanceman – enlisted weapons specialist; responsible for loading, setting directed parameters, on-board caretaking of the aircraft’s various weapons when loaded and for the same functions for the multitude of sonobouys carried.

In flight Technician – enlisted electrical repairman; performs on-board trouble-shooting/repair of the electrical components on the P-3.

Typical P-3 Missions

Primarily developed from the Lockheed Electra airliner of the 1950s as a long-range patrol and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft, the continuously updated P-3 conducts a variety of missions

ASW – using on-board sensors, the P-3 locates, identifies, tracks, and if need be, kills enemy submarines. The P-3’s weapons inventory for this mission includes torpedoes and depth charges.

SSC- Surface Search and Control – the P-3 identifies all surface shipping within a defined area. Ducking down to 200 feet above the water, the P-3 will fly close to a ship and “rig” it; inspecting it visually and photographically. Often used against warships in open water, it is also useful in counter-drug operations, environmental maritime patrol and anti-terrorism missions.

Strike – the P-3 can carry an amazing variety and amount of ordinance. For anti-shipping strikes, HARPOON anti-ship missiles and torpedoes are the weapons of choice. For ground targets, everything from iron bombs, Maverick anti-armor missiles, cluster bomb units (CBUs), to Zuni rockets are pickled from the Orion.

CSAR – Combat Search and Rescue – with a long loiter ability and extensive communications capability; the P-3 can serve as the airborne command post for any rescue operations.

[brickhistory]

One (kinda) for the space and missile dudes...

THROUGH THE BACK DOOR

In the movie “Space Cowboys,” Clint Eastwood plays a Chuck Yeager-ish test pilot/engineer who leads a group of aging astronauts to rescue a former Soviet nuclear-armed satellite. In a case of art imitating life, during the height of the Cold War and space race, both superpowers contemplated basing nuclear weapons in space. One side, the former USSR, actually had an operational system during much of the 1960s.

At the beginning of the space confrontation between the two countries, begun with the October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik, just lofting an object into orbit was a major achievement. Within a very short span of time, the ability to carry useful payloads whether man or machine, became a primary focus. The Soviets jumped out to an early lead in the race by the successively bigger payloads of capsules containing dogs and finally the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin on April 4, 1961.

The Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, boasted of the Soviet superiority of his country’s space accomplishments. On August 9, 1961, at a reception for the second Soviet astronaut, Gherman Titov bragged “You do not have 50 or 100 megaton bombs; we have bombs more powerful than 100 megatons. We placed Gagarin and Titov in space and we can replace them with other loads that can be directed to any place on Earth.” (A megaton is the equivalent of one million tons of TNT.)

Detecting ICBMs

Both sides spent considerable time and energy developing methods of monitoring the nuclear capability of the other. For detection of incoming Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), the United States developed both ground and space based systems.

One of the earliest and still effective systems was the BMEWS (Ballistic Missile Early Warning System), a network of high-powered long-range radars placed around the northern periphery of the Western Hemisphere. An approach over the North Pole was considered the most likely for any Soviet missile or bomber strike since it was the point of closest approach between the U.S.’s and USSR’s landmasses.

By utilizing these radars, and eventually, launch detecting infra-red satellites, the U.S. hoped to gain a good 30 minutes of advance warning of a Soviet nuclear strike. With that much warning, the mighty Strategic Air Command fleet of B-47 and B-52 bombers could be flushed from their mid-western bases and sent on a retaliatory mission. Likewise, the U.S. Titan and Minuteman ICBMs could be launched in a massive counterstrike.

Similarly, the Soviets developed missile tracking radars and satellites to counter any U.S. first strike. This standoff between detecting the enemy’s force before he can destroy you and negate your ability to destroy him in turn was known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Neither side supposedly had an incentive to hit first because the return blow would wipe out the first side’s country.

The Back Door

The Soviets calculated that a missile fired into a low orbital trajectory would greatly lessen the chances of detection since it would appear above the horizon and thus be visible to the searching radar beams of the Americans much later than would a conventional ICBM profile. For example, the first operational Soviet ICBM, the R-7 (NATO code name SS-6), could loft a nearly three thousand pound payload into a ballistic trajectory of between 600-1200 miles altitude for a target 3,000 miles away. The instant the ascending missile cleared the radar horizon radar and other sensors would detect the rocket and sound the alert.

A low orbit weapon using only a 100-200 mile apogee orbit would decrease the warning time to five minutes and that only if the incoming warhead was coming from over the Artic area. If a bomb were to make an approach from the south, the U.S., in the early 1960s, was woefully unguarded. The time from detection to impact would have been only a few minutes.

In March 1962, Khrushchev stated, “We can launch missiles not only over the North Pole, but in the opposite direction, too…Global rockets can fly from the oceans or other directions where warning facilities cannot be installed. Given global missiles, the warning system in general has lost its importance. Global missiles cannot be spotted in time to prepare any measures against them.”

It was a clear statement of Soviet intentions to place nukes in orbit.

By 1967, United Nations Resolution 1884 and the Outer Space Treaty called upon States to refrain from placing in orbit around earth any objects carrying nuclear or other mass-destruction weapons. The USSR promptly dubbed its orbital weapon system a “Fractional Orbital Bombardment System” or FOBS. By simply not inserting the payload into a complete orbit, the Soviets continued with their research into delivering thermonuclear bombs via a low-trajectory, low visibility route.

The Equipment

In Soviets started a three-pronged approach to get a nuclear orbital system in place. The first proposed orbital missile was the Vladimir Chelomey design based on the UR-1 ICBM. The Soviets gave the ok to proceed with work on this system on March 16, 1961. This was a two stage design, known as the UR-200A, used an RD-0202 first stage engine developing 228 tons of thrust and an RD-0205 second stage with 62 tons of thrust.

The second proposal came from the legendary designer Sergey P. Korolev. He had begun preliminary work on the Global Missile No.1 (GR-1) in 1960. The Soviet Central Committee and the USSR Council of Ministers gave the formal go-ahead on September 24, 1962.

The GR-1 was a part of Korelev’s N1 lunar program booster. The GR-1 and N1 shared many common design features to aid in the development of both systems. For example, the GR-1 used NK-9 and –9V engines, each developing thrust in the 45-ton range. Korolev’s design team used these same engines as the basis for all of the N1’s stages. It was a three-stage beast using several of the NK-9s. The total mass of Korolev’s GR-1 project was 117 tons, carrying a 2.2 megaton warhead. It would have been accurate to within 3 miles.

The third proposal originated with Mikhail K. Yangelis’ R-36-0, approved for development on April 16, 1962. Yangelis based his orbital weapon on the existing design of his R-36 super heavyweight ICBM (NATO called it the SS-9). The –0 variant was a multi-stage missile using storable hypergolic fuels of nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine. The first stage used a single RD-251 engine actually composed of three twin-chambered RD-250 engines for a total thrust of 241 tons. The second stage used a single RD-250 with 96 tons of ‘oomph.’ The third stage consisted of a guidance section, a retro-rocket and the warhead. The whole contraption was 108 feet long and weighed 180 tons fully fueled.

In 1965, the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces (RSVN) conducted a study to determine the best proposal. Although all three designers had produced hardware, none had yet flown. During the study, Yangelis’ project was chosen as the most promising and work on the other two was stopped. Korolev, however, did continue to work on his GR-1’s third stage, using it as the basis for the upper stage on the N1 and Proton boosters.

Having won the design competition, Yangelis was under the gun to make it work.

One of the keys to making the rocket perform its deadly mission was the third stage. The instrument section contained an autonomous inertial navigation system, but because of the ‘drift’ inherent in gyroscopic instruments, the system was supplemented by a radar altimeter that would aid the trajectory at two points; once at the start of the orbit and the second just prior to de-orbit burn.

The reentry vehicle tipped the scales at 3,000 lbs with an explosive yield in the 2-3 megaton range. Part of the mass of the vehicle included the retro-rocket. That engine used a single chamber RD-854 engine packing 7.7 tons of thrust. It was used to change the plane of the vehicle from an orbital trajectory to a ballistic one. Four nozzles on the sides used bleed thrust from the main chamber yawed the vehicle and four additional corner-mounted thrusters provided pitch control.

Testing and Operations

The R-36-0 was tested from both aboveground launch facilities at the Tyura-Tam missile range and from in-ground launch silos. The in-ground system was to be the basing mode for the missile.

At Tyura-Tam, the 2d Testing Directorate led a series of test launches beginning in December 1965. The table below gives the launch designation, if known, the date, and the CIA assessment of the shot.

Designation Date Comments

1 Dec 16, 1965 inertial nav. system malfunction

2 Feb 5, 1965 retrorocket malfunction

3 Mar 16, 1966 fire on launch pad

4 May 20, 1966 successful, apogee of 136 miles

5 Sep 18, 1966 first silo launch, failed during second stage

6 Nov 2, 1966 same as Sep 18 launch attempt

7 Kosmos-139 Jan 25, 1967 success, reentry vehicle impacted at Kapustin Yar test range

8 Mar 22, 1967 failure

9 Kosmos-160 May 17, 1967 successful

10 Kosmos-169 Jul 17, 1967 successful

11 Kosmos-170 Jul 31, 1967 successful

12 Kosmos-171 Aug 8, 1967 successful

13 Kosmos-178 Sep 19, 1967 successful

14 Kosmos-179 Sep 22, 1967 successful

15 Kosmos-183 Oct 18, 1967 successful

16 Kosmos-187 Oct 28, 1967 missed target by 7 miles

17 Kosmos-218 Apr 25, 1968 successful

18 May 21, 1968 successful

19 May 28, 1968 successful

20 Kosmos-244 Oct 2, 1968 successful, first operational missile test launch

21 Kosmos-298 Sep 15, 1969 successful operational test

22 Kosmos-354 Jul 23, 1970 successful operational test

23 Kosmos-365 Sep 25, 1970 successful operational test

24 Kosmos-433 Aug 8, 1971 successful operational test

According to declassified CIA documents, the FOBS mission profile consisted of three phases: 1) launch, 2) coast, and 3) reentry.

Prior to launch, the system was targeted while in its silo and cannot use external tracking or guidance after launch. During launch, the SS-9 uses its first and second stages to reach orbit discarding each stage as its fuel empties. The orbit was generally along a near polar orbital path with an inclination of 49.6°. Arriving from the Southern Hemisphere, this would put the warhead on track to hit targets in the central US; a little higher inclination would get the warhead to West Coast targets, a little lower would hit the East Coast.

During the coast phase and just prior to reentry, the vehicle initiates a pitch maneuver to reorient itself for reentry. During the reentry phase, the retro-rocket fires for one minute, changing the plane of flight from orbital to ballistic. After the retro-rocket fires, the warhead separates from the vehicle and continues on its trajectory until impact.

The launch schedules matched US expectations of a test period to get the system configured (1965-1966) followed by the robust schedule of preparing crews for operations (Jan-Oct 1967). The six-month gap between most subsequent launches fits the profile of an operational system getting a workout for crew training. Indeed, US ICBM launches followed somewhat the same pattern during the 1960s and 1970s.

Eighteen operational silos were constructed west of Tyur-Tam. The first officially operational unit was RSVN unit 21422 under the command of Lt Col Eng. A. V. Mieyev, activated on August 25, 1969. Two more battalions joined the first and eventually comprised the 98th Missile Brigade.

US Assessment of FOBS

FOBS was never assessed as a precision weapon since the circular error probable (CEP – circle in at least 50% of the bombs are expected hit a fixed point) was more than three miles. It wouldn’t be used to destroy hardened US ICBM silos or other protected sites. Instead, the US strategic planners and policy makers thought the more likely FOBS use would be as a ‘pathfinder’ to take out command and control centers like the numerous sites in Washington, DC – the White House, Pentagon, etc. Much like a World War II fighter sweeping enemy aircraft before the bombers come through, the FOBS would take out the ability to launch the retaliatory strike that was sure to come if ICBMs were detected.

Because of the interest in the US of more accurate, smaller warheads versus the often times ‘bigger is better’ thought of Khrushchev and a greater reliance on the manned bomber, the US never seriously pursued a nuclear orbital weapon system. (See X-20 DynaSoar sidebar) Also, the thought of a nuclear weapon coming down accidentally was politically more dangerous to US leaders than their Soviet counterparts.

By the time of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) II of 1972 and the emergence of the submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) as a safer, stealthier, means of launching nuclear weapons from different areas than over the North Pole, the FOBS weapon was nearing its finale.

Although never ratified by the US, but abided by both superpowers, SALT II specifically mentioned the SS-9 FOB system as one marked for deactivation. Additionally, 12 of the 18 silos had to be destroyed and the others converted to different use. By 1982, the RVSN began dismantling the R-36-0 launch installations and retiring the missiles. By February 1983 the last missile was pulled from its silo and in May 1984, the last silo destroyed.

Aftermath

So unless Hollywood is on to some secret that remains undiscovered, no satellites orbit overhead with the capability to rain mass death and destruction on an unsuspecting populace. Thankfully, both the USSR and the US stepped back from the fallacy of placing nukes in space.

Now if we can only find another good space movie, we’re all set.

SIDEBAR – American Nuclear Weapons in Space

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the U.S Air Force made a strong run to be the space force for America. As part of that attempt, they proposed a reusable spaceplane, the X-20 DynaSoar (Dynamic Soaring) designed for military use. Unlike the concurrent X-15 research program, the X-20 was intended to become an operational system, conducting space missions ranging from reconnaissance, satellite inspection and repair, orbital resupply, and bombardment. The third version of the X-20 would use a Titan IIIC rocket booster and have an orbital capability. This version would contain a bomb bay for delivering nuclear warheads requiring precise targeting and the ability to approach a target from any direction.

Deciding against placing nuclear weapons in space the Department of Defense cancelled the first test version of the X-20 less than a year before testing was to have begun in 1964.

[brickhistory]

A magazine hired me some years back to write a short piece on this company and it's centrifuge trainer used for a full motion simulator. The company is the same one who does the Disney "Mission Space" and other motion rides. They branched out into this. They've got some of these with several military's around the world.

Impressive technology and engineering.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Turn, Grunt, Learn, Live

If you ever become insanely rich enough to buy the ultimate in toys or are a government wanting an air force, consider purchasing a modern jet fighter. If the very real possibility, however, of turning one’s expensive toy into a smoking hole in the ground discourages you, consider one of Environmental Tectonics Corporation’s (ETC) full fidelity advanced tactical flight simulators.

ETC has developed a multi-axis centrifuge combined with a high fidelity cockpit simulator that does a remarkable job of reproducing gut-straining, sweat-dripping realistic air combat missions.

Using the actual controls of a fighter, in this case an F/A-18 (although any modern fighter could be replicated), a pilot enters the ATFS-400 gondola and straps in. The 110-degree field of view display provides a great window to the “outside” world including providing cues to one’s peripheral vision, important to properly interpreting subconsciously the many sensory inputs that are about to rush at him.

The gondola is spun quickly to a starting state of 1.2G, the additional .2 load being imperceptible. Once the machine is spinning, it’s “Fight’s on!” The centrifuge adds (“loads”) or subtracts (“unloads”) G’s in precise responses to the control movements the pilot is making.

Roll left, suck the stick into your gut and the resulting 6-7 G’s build and hold just as in a real jet. Based on computer modeling of actual aircraft characteristics, ETC’s system reacts almost flawlessly to provide the correct visual, audible and tactile sensations. The pilot gets direct, accurate feedback on his handling of the “jet.”

In the split-second environment of modern jet combat, experience in knowing how your jet “feels” as you crank it around to get a shot saves crucial time. You don’t have to monitor a gauge to know that the hard turn you’re in will run you out of airspeed quickly, rather your brain and body act as an internal gauge to know that you can only hold this much straining “uggh” for a given turn. ETC’s remarkable machine is spinning and tilting in fractions of a second to produce the realistic ride inside.

While they haven’t worked all the kinks out yet, transitioning from positive to negative G’s, for example, is one area they are really focusing on, the overall impression is of a well-thought out, highly realistic combat simulator. The device can be linked to other simulators as well, increasing the realism. You can fly with wingmen and/or against adversaries and have real-time reactions and counters to a combat situation and all at a fraction of the cost and without the risk of losing a valuable resource, whether flesh and blood or metal and composites.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When I went to visit, I got the 'full Monty' press treatment and, frankly, I was digging it. They couldn't kiss my ass enough. Their PR handler got me in to see a fight between two dudes in two 'fuges/trainers. One was a Guard F-16 guy in the F-18 gondola mentioned above. The other guy was the ROK AF attache, also in an F-18 configured set up. He too flew Vipers in his own Air Force.

The Guard guy was current, the Korean not as he was doing a staff tour in DC.

Besides the cameras viewing each pilot, there was a computer generated program giving a God's eye view of their fight. Talking with the Guard guy afterward, he said it was pretty good at doing positive g stuff, but stuttered/shook when pushing over to negative g and was counter-productive. The ROK guy had to call KIO after he started getting sick. You could see it coming (sts) on his face. No slam intended, the guy just was out of practice.

After all the dog and pony was over, they asked if I wanted to try. "Sure!" so they suited me up, including g-suit, stuck me in the F-18, gave me a quick run down on the basic stuff and said I'd be going against one of their retired fighter guys who worked for the company.

It was about then that I realized that I could seriously hurt myself by being stupid. As this thing could pull better than 9 g's in a f'in' hurry, I asked them to limit me to 5.5.

I sucked, I got sick as a dog (luckily never hurling, but damn close), and the opponent was bored out of his mind at the squashed grape I was.

[Guest PerArduaAdAstra]

Not Friday but.....

It's nice to see a few aircraft in this thread representing the RAF so well so I had to add another favorite of RAF (and many other countries) pilots of the 60's, 70's, 80's AND 90's, the Hawker Hunter.

The Hunter was loved by everyone that flew it (after a few initial problems of engine flameouts when the Aden cannons were fired), and was considered to be a "sports car" of an aircraft. In the RAF the Hunter was flown in the RAF flight demonstration team, the "Black Arrows" which was formed in 1957 and at their peak flew 16 all-black F.6s. They made aviation history during the Farnborough air show in 1958, when Hunters from other units joined them to perform a double loop with 22 fighters, a record that at last report was still standing (?).

It flew with more than 19 Air Forces and saw action all over the world, from "police actions" in Aden, Malaysia and the Suez Canal crisis, to full blown combat in Rhodesia. As the mainstay of the Rhodesian Air Force the Hunter took part in many raids against terrorist camps including the famous "Green Leader" raid when the RhAF took over Zambian airspace (hear some of the radio exchanges from the raid,

on YouTube). Hunters of the Iraqi Air Force (flown by Pakistani Air Force pilots) were reported to have shot down two Israeli Air Force fighters during the six day war.

Although retired from frontline service as a fighter with the RAF in the late 60's the Hunter carried on in the ground-attack role until the early 70's, and in the two seat variant as a trainer until the 90's. The Swiss flew the Hunter as a front line aircraft from 1958 until 1994, proving its longevity. The Hunter also flew with many of the Arab Air Forces for a number of years, giving many ex-RAF Hunter pilots employment well past their usual sell-by date.

A number of Hunters are still flying today as display aircraft and rich boys toys.

(Hunter in Aden)

Edited January 13, 2009 by PerArduaAdAstra

[Stuck]

There's another 94th Aerosquadron at Van Nuys right on the flightline, where I spent countless hours reading flying books, drinking cokes, and watching airplanes at 16 years old. Great times.

Cheers!

-Stuck

[brickhistory]

Old School

*Obviously, written/published some years back

Around the World Eighty Years Ago*

The U.S. Army Air Service’s 1924 epic flight

Some things never change. Many tourists have experienced a snooty French waiter looking down his nose at them. Eighty years ago, a tired group of Americans faced the same situation. Seems that at this particular French sidewalk café, steaming in the heat and humidity of Saigon, a waiter refused to serve the Americans because they were not wearing dinner jackets!

Never mind the fact that these Americans were in the midst of an epic adventure - trying to be the first to circumnavigate the world by air and couldn’t afford to carry along non-essential items such as formal wear - this restaurant had standards and “Messrs would have to leave.”

This is just one amusing anecdote from the incredible journey undertaken in 1924 by eight US Army Air Service pilots. Along the way, they battled incredible odds, untested equipment, diplomatic snafus, mechanical failures, and social exhaustion. Despite the hurdles, they made history.

In 1924, the US Army Air Service was in danger of becoming extinct with fewer than 1,000 pilots and less than half that number of obsolescent aircraft. One method encouraged by the Air Service leadership to stave off extinction was to win various aviation contests and the attendant headlines.

Congress could be counted on to fund things popular with the public. Garnering publicity by setting speed and altitude records or winning air races kept the Air Service popular, but not enough to keep it growing. As war-era planes atritted through crashes or simply wearing out, Congress was not buying enough to keep pace with the losses.

Major General Mason Patrick, Air Service boss, had been studying the chances of making an around the world flight as far back as 1922. He thought that a successful mission would get enough attention from America’s people that Congress would be forced into providing more money.

Eventually Major Fred Martin led pilots Lieutenants Lowell Smith, Leigh Wade and Erik Nelson in this mission. Each pilot was allowed to select his own mechanic so Technical. Sergeant Arthur Turner, Staff Sgts. Alva Harvey, Henry Ogden, and one officer with a mechanical background, Lt John Harding found themselves in the rear cockpit of the flight’s chosen mounts: the Douglas World Cruiser (DWC).

The DWC was an adaptation of an existing Navy design, the DT-2, powered by a 425 hp 12 cylinder liquid-cooled Liberty engine. Those engines would be a great source of aggravation and effort to the crews during the flight. The DWC won the competition use due to its great structural strength and ability to operate as both a wheeled land plane and by swapping wheels for pontoons, as a seaplane.

The crews began the flight from Seattle, Washington. Prior to starting, however, Gen Patrick knew that the press would write more interesting stories if the planes had names rather than simply listed as “No. 1, 2, 3, or 4.” He gave the men leeway to name each aircraft after a U.S. city, as long as the names covered the breadth of America. Seattle (1), Chicago (2), Boston (3), and New Orleans (4) hit all the compass points.

Just prior to that take-off, mechanic Turner removed himself from the flight due to illness. Lt Smith chose alternate pilot Lt Leslie Arnold to take Turner’s place. Arnold would say, “No man was ever more astonished than I when I found I was going along.”

On April 5, 1924, the adventure began. Lt Arnold wrote in his notebook of the flight,

“As I look down on Lake Washington and Seattle…I wonder how many of us will get all the way around…..

Visibility is only fair this morning, but above the haze that half veils the earth the summit of Ranier stands out as clear as crystal. No wonder the Indians call it Iahuna, the mountain that is God. I saw Lowell glance back over his shoulder at it several times and I’m sure the memory of its grandeur will inspire us all the way around the world. This undertaking somehow makes you feel the presence of the Ruler of the Universe as you have never felt it before.”

Airborne for nearly seven hours each flying day, the crews cruised at just over 72 mph. Seven hours of handling a large aircraft with no autopilot, sitting only feet behind the unmuffled V-12 Liberty engine and wind noise, all the while having their faces either stung and frozen when flying in Arctic conditions or stung and baked in the jungles and deserts of Asia. It is little wonder that the early generation of aviators were universally hard of hearing after a career spent flying.

On April 30th, Major Martin and his backseater Sergeant Harvey crashed while trying to cross an Alaskan mountain range. Separated by lousy visibility, the other crews didn’t see the mishap and continued on to that day’s goal. Martin and Smith survived the crash and, after many days, hiked to rescue.

After flying all day, the beat up crews were usually reliant on themselves to maintain their aircraft. At each stop, they performed “general inspection, routine work, and servicing.” This was their way of saying that after landing, no matter what the weather or field (or water) conditions, the crews inspected all wires, fittings and visible parts, flushed gasoline line strainers, oiled thrust bearings and valve stems, wiped clean the fuselages and cowlings, replenished oil and gas tanks, topped off the radiator, and when in floatplane mode, removed the port hole covers and inspected the pontoons morning and night. “Routine” maintenance indeed!

At several scheduled and unscheduled stops, the DWCs required major repairs. 22 of the cantankerous Liberty engines were eventually changed. Other than tedious, this was no big deal at a proper facility. However, an engine change in the Aleutians meant a long, freezing night in knee deep Arctic waters. Another engine failure on the flight from Haiphong to Tourane (modern day Da Nang, Vietnam) forced the Chicago to land in a lagoon several hours short of Tourane.

The other crews waggled their wings after seeing the Chicago land safely and continued on to Tourane. Once there, they summoned a Navy destroyer to carry a spare engine back to the stranded crew.

They tied the DWC to a bridge and used the bridge as a fulcrum to work a block and tackle arrangement to hoist out the old Liberty and attach the new one. Once this impromptu exchange was completed, Smith cranked the engine and they flew on to Tourane. From there, the remaining three airplanes flew to Saigon and a meeting with the snobbish garcon.

The incident with the waiter actually highlights a chronic complaint of the goal-oriented aviators. At every stop, public clamor for elaborate receptions and photo opportunities with local gentry piled on the airmen. Since the flight was representing the Air Service and in a larger sense, the United States, the airmen had to grit their teeth and bear the Chinese, Turkish, or British equivalent of the ‘rubber chicken and peas’ circuit.

Besides making the flyers uncomfortable, the social pressures extended their work day. After hours of the most demanding flying, then three-four more spent servicing the aircraft, the crews had to then clean up and present themselves for the toasts and cheers of the locals. It was often midnight or later before they saw a bed and the next morning’s take-off loomed only a few hours away. They thus flew every day completely tuckered out.

After a ten hour day getting into Paris, the crews changed into formal uniforms (sent ahead by the Air Service!) and attended a special showing of the Folies Bergere. When the lights went down, so did six pairs of eyelids! All six promptly fell asleep during the most famous show of its day.

Returning to their hotel, the still tired men hung hand lettered signs on each door:

Please do not wake us

Until nine o’clock tomorrow morning

Unless the hotel is on fire

And not even then

Unless the firemen have given up all hope.

The next day, they alighted for London where Lt Wade demonstrated the Americans can be as polished as any Old World denizen. Hosted by the Royal Air Force at its club in Piccadilly, Erik Nelson recounted the tale:

“It was at the table and on one side of Leigh sat a dignified general and on the other sat Lord somebody. Well, with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, Leigh fell sound asleep - and snored. Nor was this his first offense for he had done the same thing at a dinner after one of our long flights in the Kurile Islands. But folks insisted on entertaining us, so listening to Leigh’s imitation trombone solo was the price they paid.”

On their first attempt to leave the British Isles on the way to Iceland the Chicago and Boston encountered fog soon after takeoff and elected to turn back and wait for better weather.

Lt Nelson, in the New Orleans, also took off but elected to proceed. After a harrowing incident, he arrived in Iceland and sent back this laconic telegraph to his comrades in the UK:

GOT INTO PROPELLOR WASH IN THE FOG WENT INTO SPIN PARTIALLY OUT OF CONTROL CAME OUT JUST ABOVE THE WATER CONTINUED ON LANDING AT HORNA FJORD ALL OK NELSON

The next day, Chicago and Boston took off again for Iceland. This stretch of the journey was ill-fated. The Boston’s oil pressure dropped to zero and Wade was forced to land on the open ocean. Smith, in the Chicago, watched as the Boston touched the waves but due to fuel concerns, couldn’t stop. He dropped notes to a US Navy destroyer posted 100 miles away and later to a telegraph station on the Icelandic coast. The crew was rescued but the aircraft was battered to a pulp in the rough ocean and sank.

Speeches, awards and civic honors piled on the men after they finally landed back at Seattle on September 27th. Reporters constantly harassed the flyers for quotes. One newsman asked Lt Smith, “Would you do it again?” Smith summarized the feeling of all the Army men when he said, “Not for a million dollars…..unless I was ordered to.”

The Chicago, now resting in a place of honor in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum, flew more than 26,000 miles in 363 hours, 7 minutes of flying time. Or out of the total trip time of 175 days, just over 15 days were actually spent airborne. The other days were consumed by weather delays, maintenance snags and the incessant need to socialize on behalf of the United States.

If publicity is what the Air Service wanted, publicity is what it got. The flight paid the hoped for dividends. Within two years, Congress had tripled funding for airplanes.

SIDEBARS

The machines:

Douglas World Cruiser Chicago:

Type: Single engine tractor, two-place biplane

Construction: Tubular steel and wood framework with fabric cover. Metal fittings and cowling. Floats are 3-ply veneer and mahogany planking

Wingspan: 50 ft

Length: 35 ft, 6 in

Engine Liberty V-12 rated 400-425 hp

Fuel capacity: 450 US gal

Oil capacity: 50 US gal

Cooling: Water

Landplane Seaplane

Weight lbs

(empty/max) 4300/6915 5100/7715

Max speed 104 mph 100 mph

Cruise: 90 mph 85 mph

Rate of climb 500 fpm 500 fpm

Ceiling: 10,000 ft 7,000 ft

Endurance: 2,200 miles 1,650 miles

The Men:

Major Frederick L. Martin, commander: Initially a Coast Artillery officer, he became a pilot after 12 years in the Army. At the journey’s start he had 700 flight hours, the least of any of the pilots. Later in his career, he was the Commanding General for the Hawaiian Air Forces, December 7, 1941, the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

1Lt Lowell H. Smith, adjutant, later commander of the flight: Learned to fly while working as an airplane mechanic for Pancho Villa during the Mexican revolution. Earned the Mackey Trophy for the 1919 Transcontinental Reliability and Endurance Test, flying coast to coast in 54 hours. In 1923, was a pilot for the first air to air refueling. Eventually held 16 national and world aviation records.

1Lt Leigh Wade: WW I flying training squadron commander, became a test pilot at the US Army’s McCook Field, establishing an altitude record of 27,120 feet the early 1920s. An expert in aerial photography, he left the service for a civilian job but was recalled for duty during World War II. The year after the 1924 Flight, he was a driver in the first transcontinental non-stop auto race, traveling from Los Angeles to New York in 165 hours, 50 minutes.

1Lt Erik H. Nelson, engineering officer: Swedish born, he served as a merchant seaman before emigrating to the United States in 1909. Enlisted in the Air Service as a mechanic and went on to become a pilot during WW I. A mechanical wizard, he left the Army to help form the Boeing Aircraft Company, serving as a consultant in the development of the B-29 Superfortress for WW II.

1Lt Leslie P. Arnold, alternate pilot/replacement mechanic: A theater actor before joining the Army, he participated in the 1921 Army bombing of obsolete battleships off the Virginia coast. He left the service in 1928 to help found what became Trans World Airlines. Recalled to active duty during WW II, he served as a colonel with the US Eight Air Force in England.

1Lt John T. Harding, mechanic: A mechanical engineer with a law degree, he enlisted as a private in the Air Service during WW I. Later he was granted a reserve commission and worked as a civilian mechanic at McCook Field. He held the patent to an electric fuel valve that was used extensively in American fighters during WW II. An interesting physical feature of Harding was that he had one brown eye and one blue.

SSgt. Henry H. Ogden, mechanic: The youngest of the World Fliers at 23, he was a marvel at trouble-shooting mechanical faults. He also performed plane-to-plane transfers during airshows during his off duty time. He later helped organize the Michigan Air National Guard and became a commercial test pilot.

SSgt Alva L. Harvey, mechanic: A hard working mechanic, Harvey had caught Fred Martin’s eye when the latter was the commander of the Air Service’s mechanics school. Harvey was also an accomplished parachute jumper. He became a pilot in 1926 and commanded a B-29 bomb group in the Pacific during WW II.

Crash and Rescue of the Seattle’s crew

In the early stages of the trip, on April 30, 1924, flying from one stop on the Alaskan coast to the next, Maj. Martin and SSgt Harvey encountered dense fog that reduced their forward visibility to a few feet. While trying to clear a mountain pass, they crashed and were lucky to survive with only minor injuries. Unfortunately, they were stranded miles from anywhere with no means of communications.

They spent the first night huddled in the wreck of the Seattle, then set out to find help. After eight days of hiking through the wilderness with almost no food, they stumbled onto a lake cabin that had canned supplies inside. A day of rest and nourishment there and they set out again. They spotted a boat of Aleut Indians who took them to a nearby fish cannery that had a radio. They were finally picked on May 14th.

Offered the chance to travel east around the world to meet the flight in Turkey and assume command again, Martin magnanimously declined saying:

“While there is nothing I should like better than to rejoin the flight….a considerable portion of the flight will have been accomplished without me. In fairness to Lt Smith, who succeeded me in command, I think he should so continue…and bring the flight back to the United States.”

Edited February 1, 2009 by brickhistory

[donkey]

Some light reading for you guys, enjoy.

Combat report of the 428th FS leader, Captain Ernie Nuckols, 25 August 1944

DATE/TIME/PLACE: 25 August 1944, 1330-1400, approx 15 miles south of Beauvais, France.

WEATHER: 3/10ths-5/10ths, broken, tops 5000, base 2500

TARGET: E/A (Me109s, FW 190s)

PILOT: Capt. Earnest B. Nuckols Jr.

A/C MARKINGS: P-38J-15 #4328280, F5-X, Black square on vert fins, zebra striping.

AMMUNITION EXPENDED: 22 rds 20mm, 16000 rds Cal .50

ACCOUNT OF COMBAT: I was Red Flight leader of the 428th Fighter Squadron and also Group Leader for

both the 428th and 429th Fighter Squadrons. Our mission was the dive-bombing of airfields in the Reims-

Laon area and also armed recce against rolling stock. I set course over base at 1250 and reached the

area about 24 miles northeast of Paris at 1325 when the controller called me and repored 40-plus bandits

southwest of Rouen. I immediately requested his permission to change our mission to look for the bandits.

The controller told me to continued on assigned mission unless we sighted bandits, in which case we

were to jettison our bombs and go after them

At approx 1330, Geyser Blue Three called in 40-plus bogies on the cloud deck going 180 degrees to

our course. I called for a 180-degree turn for the two squadrons to go identify the bogies. We were approx

9000 feet at this time and we were climbing. The bogies then spotted my squadron and turned towards us, climbing

at which time we could identify them as Me 109s. The 109s jettisoned their belly tanks and we jettisoned our bombs,

and we met in a head-on pass at about 12000 feet. After firing on several of the E/A in the head-on pass

with no damage observed, I made a head-on pass at one of the 109s in the last wave and observed strikes on

him beginning at about 2500 feet. I kept firing until the E/A blew up just as he passed slightly to my right.

The pilot did not bail out and the aircraft went down in flames. I had observed hits all around the engine

and cockpit before the E/A burst into flames. One other 109 blew up right beside the one I was firing at

and I'm sure that my wingman, Lt. Spiker got that one.

After the initial head-on pass, I broke left and came back in behind numerous 109s. I fired on one on

the tail of a P-38 but failed to get in range before he shot down the P-38 in flames. I observed no

parachute from the P-38. I followed the 109 in a climbing turn to the left and closed to about 300 feet

behind him and began firing. I observed hits around the wing root, engine and fuselage. The E/A

was smoking badly at this time and was heading for the deck apparently out of control. I was being fired

at by two 109s from behind so I had to break off and engage them. Although I did not see the E/A crash

or the pilot bail out, I claim this 109 as probably destroyed.

I succeeded in out-turning the two 109s on my tail and got on the tail of the second one and observed

hits on the wingroot and fuselage, but I had to break off combat with this one as my wingman Lt. Spiker,

called and said we were being bounced by 20-plus FW-190s from above.

Lt. Spiker had been with me all this time. but I lost him when we were bounced by four 190s from

above when we were trying to gain altitude. At this time I was at about 6000 feet. The 190s had too

much speed and overshot me without getting in a good burst. They kept going down so I turned and

tagged on to the number four man in the flight. The latter kept going straight ahead, trying to reach

the deck before I could get within closer range. I kept closing on him and got within 75 yards before

opening fire. I fired three long bursts, observing hits all around the cockpit and wing roots at point-

blank range. The E/A had now gotten down to about 200 feet and I was throttling back to keep from

overrunning him. I fired one more burst and apparently got his engine, as he then pulled up to about

1200 feet and bailed out. The airplane crashed and burned. I was all alone at this time, so I began

climbing back up, as I could see five P-38s still engaging 190s above me at 9000 feet. At this time

someone called in 20-plus more Me-109s coming in from above, so I called to all of our gang to

hit the deck and get out of there. Yellow and Blue Flight Leaders of the 428th acknowledged, as

did several individual pilots.

One of the pilots, Lt. Guyon, joined up with me at this time. In about five minutes we crossed

the Seine at Vernon. At this time I was having trouble with my right engine and could get only about

20 pounds of oil pressure in it. I circled with my wingman over the town of Evereaux and began

calling the rest of my squadron. Blue Leader was headed home and Yellow Leader told me to

proceed to base as he had two men with him and was in no trouble and would be crossing

out over the Siene in a few minutes. Lt. Smith of the 428th also checked in and said he was

on single engine but doing OK. Time was about 1410 when I left and proceeded to base

landing around 1430.

CLAIMS: One Me-109 destroyed, one FW-190 destroyed, one Me-109 probaby destroyed,

one Me-109 damaged.

P-38 Training Manual: https://www.tailwheel.nl/downloads/p38trainingsmall.pdf

Might have read this one before, but it's still a good one.

**Warning, Long**

At dawn on December 31, 1944, while the Battle of the Bulge raged, two young airmen took off from Thorpe Abbotts, England, and flew their Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress in formation with hundreds of others in what was to be a ‘maximum effort’ over Germany by every available flier. That New Year’s Eve would soon require the maximum effort these two men could muster to stay alive in what has to be considered one of the most unlikely incidents in aerial history.

It was the 22nd mission for 1st Lt. Glenn H. Rojohn, a native of Greenock, Pa., the pilot of B-17 No. 42-231987, and 2nd Lt. William G. Leek, Jr., from Washington state, his co-pilot. Both men had been scheduled for leave after flying several missions in a row. But their plans were interrupted at 4 a.m. that day when they were awakened for the so-called maximum effort, which meant, as Rojohn later explained, ‘Everyone flies.’ Thirty-seven heavy bombers took off with the 100th Bomb Group that day. Only 25 planes returned to England.

Following breakfast and briefing at the base, home to members of the 100th Bomb Group from June 1943 to December 1945, Rojohn and Leek learned that their target would be Hamburg, a port city with numerous oil refineries and submarine pens. Second Lieutenant Robert Washington, the ship’s navigator, recalled the start of that, his 27th, mission: ‘Takeoff on the morning of December 31, 1944, was delayed because of fog, and when we assembled the group and departed the coast of England, we learned that the fighter escort had been delayed due to the weather.’

It took ‘almost as much time to rendezvous to go on a mission as it did to complete a mission,’ Rojohn recalled, ‘because the weather in England was always bad, and we had to circle around and around until we broke out above the overcast. Our squadrons [Rojohn flew in C Squadron] then formed, and we met other groups until we got into a long line of traffic heading toward Germany. This particular day we flew over the North Sea to a point south of Denmark and then turned southwest down the Elbe River to Hamburg. We were somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 feet [altitude]. At that time I don’t think much was known about the jet stream, but we had a tail wind of about 200 nautical miles an hour. We got into the target pretty quick. Over the target, we had just about everything but the kitchen sink thrown at us.’

Leek’s recollections of the Hamburg mission were equally vivid: ‘The target and the sky over it were black from miles away. The flak was brutal. We flew through flak clouds and aircraft parts for what seemed like an hour.’

While Rojohn does not like to criticize his commanding officers, he thinks a mistake was made that day. ‘Instead of hitting the target and angling out over Germany still on a southwesterly direction and then out over Belgium, they turned us at 180 degrees back toward the North Sea,’ Rojohn said. ‘So an 80-knot tailwind became an 80-knot headwind. We were probably making about 50 or 60 mph on the ground.’

‘When we finally got clear of the coastal flak batteries,’ recalled Washington, ‘we turned west and skirted the flak area by flying between Heligoland and Wilhelmshaven. The flak was heavy as we crossed the coastline. I’m not certain whether we headed northwest between Bremerhaven and Kuxhaven, or due west over the little town of Aurich and across the coastline near Norden.’

Over the North Sea, Rojohn remembered, they were flying at 22,000 feet when they ‘encountered wave after wave of German fighters. We just barely got out over the North Sea, and the sky was rumbling around us with exploding flak and German [Messerschmitt] Me-109 fighter planes so close I could see the faces of the young German pilots as they went by. They were just having a field day with our formation. We lost plane after plane.’

According to an account written by Tech. Sgt. Orville E. Elkin, Rojohn’s top turret gunner and engineer: ‘The fighters came from every direction, 12 o’clock, 6 o’clock, from the bottom and from the top. Your body becomes cold and numb from fright as you realize that only one-sixteenth of an inch of aluminum stands between you and this battery of firepower.’ Ten planes were quickly lost.

Leek had been at the controls when the crew came off the bomb run. He and Rojohn alternated the controls each half hour. ‘On this mission,’ Leek recalled, ‘the lead plane was off Glenn’s wing, so he flew the bomb run. I should have kept the controls for at least my half-hour, but once the attack began, our formation tightened up and we started bouncing up and down. Our lead plane kept going out of sight for me. I may have been overcorrecting, but the planes all seemed to bounce at different times. I asked Glenn to take it, and he did.’

Rojohn maneuvered to take a position to fill the void created when a B-17 (No. 43-338436) piloted by 2nd Lt. Charles C. Webster went down in flames and exploded on the ground. ‘I was going into that void when we had a tremendous impact,’ Rojohn recalled. Feeling the bomber shudder, the men immediately thought their plane had collided with another aircraft. It had, but in a way that may never have happened before or since.

Another B-17 (No. 43-338457), piloted by 1st Lt. William G. MacNab and 2nd Lt. Nelson B. Vaughn, had risen upward. The top turret guns on MacNab’s plane had pierced through the aluminum skin on the bottom of Rojohn’s plane, binding the two huge planes together, as Leek said, like ‘breeding dragonflies.’ The two planes had become one.

Whether MacNab and Vaughn lost control of their plane because they were seriously injured or the planes collided because both Rojohn and MacNab were moving in to close the open space in the formation is uncertain. Both MacNab and Vaughn were fatally injured that day and were never able to tell their own story.

Staff Sergeant Edward L. Woodall, Jr., MacNab’s ball-turret gunner, remembered that when a crew check was called just prior to the midair collision, everyone had reported in. ‘At the time of the impact,’ Woodall said, ‘we lost all power and intercom on our aircraft. I knew we were in trouble from the violent shaking of the aircraft, no power to operate the turret, loss of intercom, and seeing falling pieces of metal. My turret was stalled with the guns up at about 9 o’clock. This is where countless time drills covering emergency escape procedures from the turret paid off, as I automatically reached for the hand crank, disengaged the clutch and proceeded to crank the turret and guns to the down position so I could open the door and climb into the waist of the airplane. I could see that another aircraft was locked onto our aircraft and his ball turret jammed down inside our aircraft.’

In the 1946 book The Story of the Century, John R. Nilsson reported that E.A. Porter, a pilot from Payton, Miss., who witnessed the midair collision, had sounded the warning over the radio: ”F for Fox, F for Fox, get it down!’ — however MacNab, whose radio was dead, did not hear. Not to see the collision which seemed inevitable, Porter turned his head, while two of his gunners, Don Houk of Appleton City, Missouri, and Clarence Griffin of Harrisburg, Illinois, watched aghast, as MacNab and Rojohn settled together ‘as if they were lifted in place by a huge crane,’ and many of the 100th’s anguished fliers saw the two Fortresses cling — Rojohn’s, on top, riding pick-a-back on MacNab’s, how held together being a mystery. A fire started on MacNab’s ship, on which three propellers still whirled, and the two bombers squirmed, wheeled in the air, trying to break the death-lock.’

Washington opened the escape hatch and’saw the B-17 hanging there with three engines churning and one feathered. Rojohn and Leek banked to the left and headed south toward land.’

‘Glenn’s outboard prop bent into the nacelle of the lower plane’s engine,’ recalled Leek. ‘Glenn gunned our engines two or three times to try to fly us off. It didn’t work, but it was a good try. The outboard left engine was burning on the plane below. We feathered our propellers to keep down the fire and rang the bail-out bell.’

‘Our engines were still running and so were three on the bottom ship,’ Rojohn said. When he realized he could not detach his plane, Rojohn turned his engines off to try to avoid an explosion. He told Elkin and Tech. Sgt. Edward G. Neuhaus, the radio operator, to bail out of the tail, the only escape route left because all other hatches were blocked.

‘The two planes would drop into a dive unless we pulled back on the controls all the time,’ wrote Leek. ‘Glenn pointed left and we turned the mess toward land. I felt Elkin touch my shoulder and waved him back through the bomb bay. We got over land and [bombardier Sergeant James R.] Shirley came up from below. I signalled to him to follow Elkin. Finally Bob Washington came up from the nose. He was just hanging on between our seats. Glenn waved him back with the others. We were dropping fast.’

As he crawled up into the pilot’s compartment before bailing out, Washington remembered, ‘I saw the two of them [Rojohn and Leek] holding the wheels against their stomachs and their feet propped against the instrument panel. They feathered our engines to avoid fire, I think. [shirley] and I went on through the bomb bay and out the waist door, careful to drop straight down in order to miss the tail section of the other plane which was a little to the right of our tail.’ Because of Rojohn’s and Leek’s physical effort, Shirley, Elkin, Washington, Staff Sgt. Roy H. Little (the waist gunner), Staff Sgt. Francis R. Chase (the replacement tail gunner), and Neuhaus were able to reach the rear of the plane and bail out. ‘I could hear Russo [staff Sgt. Joseph Russo, Rojohn's ball-turret gunner] saying his Hail Marys over the intercom,’ Leek said. ‘I could not help him, and I felt that I was somehow invading his right to be alone. I pulled off my helmet and noticed that we were at 15,000 feet. This was the hardest part of the ride for me.’

Before they jumped, Little, Neuhaus and Elkin took the hand crank for the ball turret and tried to crank it up to free Russo. ‘It would not move,’ Elkin wrote. ‘There was no means of escape for this brave man.’

‘Awhile later,’ recalled Leek, ‘we were shot at by guns that made a round white puff like big dandelion seeds ready to be blown away. By now the fire was pouring over our left wing, and I wondered just what those German gunners thought we were up to and where we were going! Before long, .50-caliber shells began to blow at random in the plane below. I don’t know if the last flak had started more or if the fire had spread, but it was hot down there!’ As senior officer, Rojohn ordered Leek to join the crew members and jump, but his co-pilot refused. Leek knew Rojohn would not be able to maintain physical control of the two planes by himself and was certain the planes would be thrown into a death spiral before Rojohn could make it to the rear of the plane and escape. ‘I knew one man left in the wreck could not have survived, so I stayed to go along for the ride,’ Leek said.

And what a ride it was. ‘The only control we actually had was to keep [the planes] level,’ said Rojohn. ‘We were falling like a rock.’ The ground seemed to be reaching up to meet them.

Washington recalled that, from his vantage point while parachuting, ‘I watched the two planes fly on into the ground, probably two or three miles away, and saw no more chutes. Shirley was coming down behind me. When the planes hit, I saw them burst into flames and the black smoke erupting.’

At one point, Leek said, he tried to beat his way out through the window with a Very pistol: ‘Just panic, I guess. The ground came up faster and faster. Praying was allowed. We gave it one last effort and slammed into the ground.’ As they crashed in Germany at Tettens, near Wilhelmshaven, shortly before 1 p.m., Rojohn’s plane slid off the bottom plane, which immediately exploded. Alternately lifting up and slamming back into the ground, the remaining B-17 careened ahead, finally coming to rest only after the left wing sliced through a wooden headquarters building, as Rojohn recalled, ‘blowing that building to smithereens.’ Russo is believed to have been killed when the planes landed.

‘When my adrenalin began to lower, I looked around,’ Leek said. ‘Glenn was OK and I was OK, and a convenient hole was available for a fast exit. It was a break just behind the cockpit. I crawled out onto the left wing to wait for Glenn. I pulled out a cigarette and was about to light it when a young German soldier with a rifle came slowly up to the wing, making me keep my hands up. He grabbed the cigarette out of my mouth and pointed down. The wing was covered with gasoline.’

Rojohn and Leek sustained only slight injuries from the crash, which shocked even the two pilots when they took a look at the wreckage of their B-17. ‘All that was left of the Flying Fortress was the nose, the cockpit, and the seats we were sitting on,’ Rojohn later recalled.

Following their capture, Rojohn said, he and Leek were forced to undress’so they could search us for weapons, which we had thrown out on the way down. They put us into a truck and drove through the countryside to pick up the survivors. The Germans then put us all into an old schoolhouse where we were finally able to talk with each other.’

Even though their lives were now in the hands of the Germans, the Americans were able to find a little humor in the situation. ‘Our captors didn’t know what to do with us because we were in a part of Germany where they didn’t take many captives,’ Rojohn said. ‘They put us in a dark, damp building way out in nowhere. All of a sudden the door opened up and everybody popped to attention. A German captain came in and barked something to his men. I didn’t understand what he had said, but Berkowitz [2nd Lt. Jack Berkowitz, MacNab's navigator] heard the same words and fainted dead away. The next day they brought us back to the schoolhouse. Berkowitz, the only one of us who could understand German, told us the German captain had said, ‘If they make a move, shoot ‘em.’ That was too much for him and he fainted.’

Watching the planes fall piggyback to earth, German soldiers on the island of Wangerooge could not believe what they were seeing — ‘crazy Americans flying with eight motors.’ In fact, the Germans were so concerned that the Americans had developed a devastating new weapon that Berkowitz was shipped to an interrogation center in Frankfurt, Germany, and put into solitary confinement. After questioning him for two weeks, his interrogators gave up on the idea of a new American aircraft threat, and Berkowitz was transferred to a prison camp near the North Sea.

Seventeen-year-old Rudolf Skawran, who was shooting at the American bomber formations from Wangerooge, said his fellow soldiers were ordered by flak commander Captain Dinkelacker to leave the connected planes alone. Dinkelacker wrote in his log book at 12:47 p.m. that day, ‘Two Fortresses collided in a formation in the NE. The planes flew hooked together and flew twenty miles south. The two planes were unable to fight anymore. The crash could be awaited so I stopped the firing at these two planes.’ There was no way for Rojohn, Leek or the crew members to know that the Germans on the ground had ceased firing at them.

Civilians on Wangerooge stood and watched with amazement as the two planes flew over them. The youngest spectators ran to Rojohn’s plane and removed what they could get away with quickly — a machine gun and ammunition, some rations and chewing gum.

Little and Chase did not survive their jumps from the plane. Technical Sergeant Herman G. Horenkamp, Rojohn’s friend and the tail gunner for all of his 21 previous missions, had not reported for the mission that day because he had frostbite from the mission the previous day. Chase, who Rojohn and Leek had never seen before and never did meet face to face, was Horenkamp’s replacement that fateful day.

All of the survivors from the B-17 piloted by Rojohn were captured by the Germans almost immediately, as were four other men who bailed out of MacNab’s plane — 2nd Lt. Raymond E. Comer, Jr., Tech. Sgt. Joseph A. Chadwick, Berkowitz and Woodall.

Woodall told Rojohn years later that he was grateful to him and Leek because they carried him for several miles when broken bones sustained in his parachute landing kept him from walking after his capture. Rojohn has no recollection of that.

After the war, like thousands of other soldiers, Glenn Rojohn came back home to marry and raise a family. He eventually went to work with his brother Leonard in their father’s air conditioning and plumbing business in McKeesport, Pa. Rojohn, who received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Purple Heart, said he owes his life to Leek: ‘In all fairness to my co-pilot, he’s the reason I’m alive today. He refused my order to bail out and said ‘I’m staying with you.’ One of us could have gotten out of that plane. He’s the reason I’m here today.’

Rojohn searched for 40 years through Social Security and veterans records to find his co-pilot, Leek, but was unsuccessful until 1986, when he was given a telephone number in the state of Washington. Rojohn called the number and reached Leek’s mother, who asked him if he wanted to talk to Bill, who was visiting from California at the time. The two pilots were reunited for one week in 1987 at a 100th Bomb Group reunion in Long Beach, Calif. Leek died the following year.

But Robert Washington, the navigator that day over the North Sea, still remembers the pilots’ remarkably cool handling of the bizarre situation. ‘Glenn said that he doesn’t consider himself a hero; but I do!’ said Washington. ‘I will never forget his calm, matter-of-fact response as I paused at the flight deck on my way out through the bomb bay and waist door. He may have said, ‘Get on out, Wash,’ or merely motioned with his head, but I knew he and Bill Leek had made their decision and several of us who jumped over land probably owe our lives to their courage.’

This article was written by Teresa K. Flatley and originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of World War II. For more great articles be sure to pick up your copy of World War II.

[brickhistory]

Wow.

[MKopack]

Wow is right - what a great read. I hope you didn't just type that in...

Mike