At 0700 hours the morning of April 28, 1965, Lieutenant Colonel Mattison released the brakes on RB-47H, tail number 4290. The sleek jet hurtled down the 10,000-foot Yokota runway, blanketing the base with its thundering noise and black exhaust. The aircraft slowly vanished into the morning mist. The mission was scheduled to be a short seven and a half hours, with no need for aerial refueling. The plane was flying one of the “canned” routes over the Sea of Japan, that would take them close to the southern tip of Sakhalin Island, then along the coast of the Soviet mainland past Vladivostok, the major Russian naval base in the area, and along the east coast of North Korea—and home again. Once the Ravens transferred to their aft compartment, they pressurized and turned on their equipment. By the time the aircraft reached its assigned altitude, the equipment had warmed up and stabilized and the USQ-18 clock was set to Greenwich mean time, putting its tick marks on every audio and video recording. The Ravens settled back, looking at their world of green scopes and red lights, ready to go On Watch once the navigator announced over the intercom that the On Watch point had been reached. They scanned their assigned frequencies with their APR-17 receivers. The automatic ALD-4 external reconnaissance pod as well as other independently operating systems were turned on at the On Watch point, recording pulse width, frequency, location, and other pertinent parameters for every intercepted radar emission. It was, according to George Back, “one of those ho-hum missions.”
“Nothing exciting came up, other than the usual Soviet early warning radars. Occasionally a height finder would give us four or five scans to confirm our altitude. The Russians knew what we were doing. They knew the ‘canned’ route we were flying as well as we did. They knew we were no threat to them as long as we didn’t deviate from our route. Therefore, there was no need for them to turn on any of their threat radars [SA-2 surface-to-air missile or Firecan AAA–associated radars] or use any unusual techniques. But the Russian operators monitoring our aircraft probably passed our route information via landline to their North Korean comrades.”
“As we passed Vladivostok,” recalled Joel Lutkenhouse, “I picked up Russian shipborne gun and missile radars. Our pilots looked for them, but couldn’t see the ships because of a low-lying cloud layer. Bob, our navigator, saw the ships on his radar. They were tracking us with their antiaircraft and SAM radars, but the ships were in international waters and no obvious threat to us.”
“We were six hours into our mission,” recalls Bob Rogers. “Only another ninety minutes and we would be back at Yokota enjoying a hot shower and a good meal. We turned to a south-southeasterly heading abeam of Wonsan harbor on the east coast of North Korea. Then we tracked down the Korean peninsula and initiated a 180-degree turn at 37 degrees north latitude, heading north-northwest, back toward Wonsan, back the way we had come.” At that time, copilot Hank Dubuy recalled, “we were routinely monitoring our instruments. Everything looked normal. The autopilot was tracking, temperatures, fuel flow, everything was within tolerance. Matt and I scanned the horizon out of habit. Nothing but clouds above and below us. We had an unobstructed view from wing tip to wing tip, but not the low rear quadrant, which was obstructed by the aircraft fuselage and wings. There was a layer of stratocumulus clouds below us, preventing us from seeing the water below or the coastline of North Korea. Another layer of gray stratus clouds was above our cruising altitude of 36,000 feet.”
“We rolled out of our turn and headed north again,” Bob Rogers, the aircraft navigator, recalled for me, “and stabilized the aircraft on its new heading, when suddenly a loud single-sideband warning came blasting into our headsets over HF radio. It was a message broadcast in the blind from a secret American monitoring station somewhere in South Korea or Japan, warning aircraft of bogeys in the area around Wonsan. It was a strange warning for a reconnaissance aircraft flying over international waters off the coast of one of the more hardline and belligerent communist countries. I had never received such a warning on any other mission. Briefly, I wondered if the monitoring station had overheard a radio call of intent to shoot us down. But I was busy navigating my aircraft, and as quickly as the cautionary thought entered my mind, I pushed it aside.” Raven George Back put it this way: “No matter how much preparation I had, how much I knew about the bad guys, I never thought that some North Korean would try to kill me on my first operational deployment. But the North Koreans were deemed unpredictable and their actions frequently irrational. After that mission, I knew this for a fact.”
The two pilots, Mattison and Dubuy, continued to scan the horizon, seeing nothing but empty sky. Copilot Hank Dubuy, who in the RB-47 sat directly behind the pilot, swiveled his seat around. “I raised my camera and took a couple of shots off the wings. I had switched the A-5 fire control system to warmup soon after our departure from Yokota. In the off and warmup position, our two 20mm tail guns remained stowed, pointing upward. Over open water I had switched the system to standby, the two guns then pointed straight back. I switched to operation, firing a couple of short bursts over open water to ensure the guns were working properly—if not, it was a condition for which we would have to abort the mission. Maintenance before a mission taped over the gun barrels, to make sure we did not fly a mission with inoperable guns. Everything looked good to me, and I had put the system back into standby.” The ammunition load for each 20mm gun was 350 rounds. Normally, in an aircraft’s standard combat load, every fifth round was a tracer, to give the gunner a visual indication of where he was firing. But Hank didn’t carry tracers in his ammunition load. General Curtis E. LeMay, when in command of the Strategic Air Command, had prohibited the use of tracers for his bombers, and that ruling had not been changed after his departure.
The gun radar system was designed to automatically track rear-hemisphere attackers approaching within 45 degrees of azimuth to either side of the aircraft, and 37 degrees of elevation up or down. Targets outside this automatic tracking window had to be fired on by going to emergency manual operation, using the antenna control handle, manually positioning the gun system’s tracking antenna on the target azimuth, and then spotlighting the target in elevation. The antenna control handle was spring loaded to position the guns at zero elevation and azimuth, which gave the gunner, the aircraft’s copilot, the ability to quickly baseline his guns and know where they were pointing. As the warning message still echoed in the crew’s ears, the Raven 1, Red Winters, picked up the distinctive scan of an airborne intercept radar on his APR-17 receiver. The signal was weak and faded quickly, but Red had heard it and seen it long enough on his receiver trace to identify it as an airborne threat signal emanating from the rear of the aircraft. It sounded to Red like the scan of a MiG-17 radar in search mode—squak, squak. Red Winters notified the crew and simultaneously started his recorder in case the signal reappeared, but it didn’t. George Back at that time was working a North Korean GCI radar (Ground Control Intercept used to guide fighters to their target). “I was unaware of what was happening. I had turned my intercom switch to the ‘private’ position to eliminate crew communications and was in the process of annotating the signal I was working to aid in subsequent analysis and evaluation.” Raven 3, Joel Lutkenhouse, was similarly engaged: “Although I was aware that there were probably MiGs prowling around in our piece of sky. I did check that I was properly strapped into my ejection seat. The first I knew that we were under attack was when I felt the aircraft shudder.” What Joel felt was the impact of 23mm cannon shells exploding into the aft main fuel tank, right behind their capsule, and into the chaff chutes.
“I felt the aircraft shudder, pitch nose down, and begin losing altitude,” George Back recalled. “My first thought was that the autopilot or trim had failed, but a split second later, as I went back to the normal intercom position, I learned that a couple of MiG-17s were serious about shooting us down. I noted that the altimeter, reading about 27,000 feet when I glanced at it, was rapidly unwinding. In an instant, my mind seemed to go into a thousand different directions. It was the first time in my life I
thought I was really going to die. The irony was that I had no control over what was happening. Panic and fear paralyzed my thought processes, and I think I sat dumbfounded for what seemed an eternity, trying to figure out what the hell was going on and what to do. When Colonel Mattison said over the intercom, ‘We are hit, and going down,’ I thought it was the end. I started the ejection sequence. My mind was still racing, and everything I had ever done seemed to go whirling by in a kaleidoscope of my life. At the same time, a different part of my brain seemed to be saying, ‘Don’t panic. You have been trained for situations like this. Do your job, and follow the checklist.’ I calmed down and realized that the aircraft was still well above 14,000 feet and that my likely time of survival in the 50-degree water of the Sea of Japan was less than thirty minutes. So I didn’t pull the D-ring between my legs. I was still scared but starting to think rationally. ‘Get your oxygen mask on. Check the flow. Tighten your parachute harness. Remember, you are sitting on an armed seat. Watch out for the D-ring.’ During the subsequent MiG firing passes, I could feel the cannon shells impacting the aircraft. I remember thinking that at any time there would be a tremendous explosion, a rush of cold air, and that would be the last I would remember.”
Mattison, the aircraft commander and pilot, exclaimed, “They are shooting at us. We are hit. I’m going down.” George Back, who had just come back on intercom, overheard only part of Mattison’s comment, “We are hit … going down.” Mattison was telling his copilot, Captain Hank Dubuy, that he was going down to a lower altitude and taking evasive action—a comment that George Back misinterpreted because he had not been on intercom full time—and by arming his ejection seat, automatically depressurized the Raven compartment, rapidly dropping the back-end crew from 14,000 feet pressure altitude to the actual altitude of the aircraft, somewhere around 25,000 feet. Joel, the Raven 2, saw George pull up his leg braces, felt the rapid decompression, and immediately lowered the visor of his helmet in preparation for ejection. He assumed the practiced ejection position—back straight against the seat, head against the back headrest, feet in the seat stirrups—but he didn’t do anything further. He waited for instructions from the pilot.
George and Joel sat side by side in their ejection seats, facing aft, their inner turmoil not apparent to each other. Joel listened on the intercom to the frontend crew’s conversation as they tried to cope with the situation. He glanced over at George, sitting there ready to eject, looking calm. “Thoughts raced through my mind. How could this be happening to me? My heart was pounding in my mouth. I thought I could feel my blood coursing through my body, my nerves tingling. Suddenly, I was intensely afraid of losing my life. I could feel tears running down my cheeks. I decided to say a prayer, the Act of Contrition. As suddenly as the fear had surged through my body, just as suddenly it subsided. I felt calmer, and listened to the ongoing battle over the intercom, feeling shells from the attacking MiGs slamming into our aircraft.”
The two North Korean MiG-17s, approaching through multiple cloud layers and probably guided by the GCI radar George Back was recording and analyzing, had reached the RB-47 unseen from behind and below, the plane’s blind spot. The MiGs kept their radars off, or they would have been picked up by the RB-47’s APS-54 airborne warning receiver and by the Raven 1. When they commenced their attack they were still low, directly behind the B-47, firing upward, trying to stay out of the cone of fire of the B-47’s 20mm tail guns. Copilot Hank Dubuy watched the MiGs as they positioned themselves behind his aircraft, taking a couple of pictures of them. The rules of engagement for the RB-47 were to continue to fly the assigned route and to abort the mission only if the intercepting aircraft showed clear hostile intent, such as turning their gun-laying radars from search to track mode or firing their guns. The lead MiG suddenly initiated the attack by firing its cannons. It was war. Hank dropped his camera. As the shells slammed into his aircraft, he requested permission from his pilot to fire. “Shoot the bastard down,” exclaimed Mattison while calling “Mayday,” the internationally recognized call of distress, on his single-sideband radio. As he proceeded to drop the aircraft toward the lower cloud layer, Mattison called for the navigator to give him a heading “to get the hell out of here.”
Captain Bob Rogers, the navigator, sat hunched over his radar scope in the nose of the aircraft, busy ensuring that the plane remained on its planned track when the attack occurred. “At first I thought Mattison was joking when he said we were under attack. I thought he was joking until I heard and felt the hits.” Bob’s calm response to Mattison’s request for a heading, “Take a 90-degree turn to the right, and I’ll refine it in seconds.” Then Bob put his radar cross hair on the coast of Japan and asked Matt for second station. In second station, the pilot puts the aircraft on autopilot, and the navigator manually controls the aircraft in azimuth—it was a system devised to provide for the best possible bombing results for B-47 bombers. Mattison couldn’t release control of his stricken aircraft to his navigator at such a time, but Bob’s request demonstrated the crew’s mettle and competence. Matt had no idea which aircraft systems were still operational. He needed to hand-fly. “After Matt called out ‘Mayday,’ everyone in the air was told to clear our frequency, because everyone, including some KC-135 tankers, was offering to help,” Bob Rogers recalled.
Unknown to Mattison and his crew, a captain on an airborne Looking Glass C-135 SAC airborne command post aircraft circling near SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, picked up their HF radio transmissions of distress. The captain immediately notified the brigadier general on the aircraft, an aircraft designed to take over control over nuclear forces should SAC headquarters be destroyed by a surprise attack. While the general and his crew listened to one of their aircraft under attack by North Korean fighters thousands of miles away, they downlinked the radio intercept to the SAC command post at Offutt Air Force Base. The Looking Glass crew and the command post staff listened to the unfolding drama over the Sea of Japan but could do nothing to help.
In the meantime, Hank Dubuy was trying to defend his damaged plane against two persistent MiGs. “When I tried to return fire, I couldn’t get the MiGs on my radar. They were too close and outside the elevation and azimuth limits for the guns to lock on in automatic mode. I immediately went to manual mode to engage the MiGs. We carried no tracer ammunition for me to see where I was firing, and to increase my probability of hitting the MiGs, I continually reset the guns to zero azimuth, zero elevation—I knew then where the guns were pointing—and I was able to aim the guns at an attacking MiG fighter. I punched the firing button and repeated the process of aligning the guns and firing. The first MiG approached from behind and below, assumed a nose-up position, and fired. Then the MiG-17 fell off on one wing and dove to regain airspeed and altitude for a second pass. While the first MiG recovered, the second tried to down us using the same awkward tactic. The Raven 1 released a steady stream of chaff [aluminum strips designed to break the lock of enemy fighter radars] into the face of the MiG trying to get into firing position behind and below us. At one time, the attacker was totally obscured in a cloud of aluminum chaff and broke off his attack.”
The two MiGs made three passes each. Although their flying was clumsy and their gunnery abysmal, their 23mm cannon shells brought the B-47 close to disaster. In George Back’s words, “The hydraulic system failed, boost pump lights illuminated, and the aft fuel tank was hit and burning. During subsequent attacks, the number three [left inboard engine] was hit as well. Shrapnel from broken turbine blades damaged the number two engine, but both engines continued to operate, although at reduced power. The number three engine vibrated like an old car with no universal joints. Out of six engines, only the two outboard engines [numbers one and six] remained undamaged and performed at full power.”
“Both hydraulic systems were damaged,” recalled copilot Hank Dubuy. “The pumps operated but there was no fluid. The aircraft was sluggish in its response when I pulled on the yoke, like a truck that lost its power s
teering. In addition, we had to deal with an ever-deteriorating center of gravity [CG]. As the main rear fuel tank continued to lose fuel, on fire when the fuel spray exited the aircraft through the shell holes, the diminished weight in the rear of the aircraft due to the loss of fuel slowly shifted the aircraft’s CG forward. The nose came down. It wasn’t that much of a problem flying at 425 knots, but we were concerned about our possible landing back at Yokota—having to deal with a nose-down attitude, which we couldn’t overcome with trim and flap adjustments. Landing on the nose gear of the aircraft was a sure recipe for disaster. Matt knew the landing would be difficult—if we made it that far. I continued to engage the MiGs, while Matt did evasive maneuvers and assessed the damage we sustained. Throughout the engagement, Bob, our navigator, continued to provide headings to lead Matt out of the area to Yokota. On their third and final firing pass, I thought I scored a hit on the lead MiG. It nosed up abruptly, then pitched over and descended straight down in what appeared to me as an unrecoverable position. Matt observed the MiG disappearing through a cloud deck at 12,000 feet, heading for the water. Then my guns ceased firing—jammed or damaged, I didn’t know. I picked up my camera and took a couple of quick shots before the remaining MiG broke off his attack and turned back toward Wonsan. After the last MiG disappeared, Matt yelled over the intercom, ‘Hank, get the Dash-1 out and go to the emergency procedure pages.’
“‘Which page?’ I asked. ‘Any page will do,’ was Matt’s laconic answer.”
The RB-47 had taken a lot of punishment. The aircraft was vibrating badly, but Matt felt that it was responding to his control. He could still fly it. Hank could see that the aft fuel tank was still emitting smoke, but the fire seemed to have diminished in intensity, and the color of the smoke had changed from black to white. A lack of fuel and wind blast had probably put out the fire. But the CG problem was irrevocably with them and would have to be dealt with once they got ready to land. The pilots had no idea if their tires were shot up, if the approach and landing chutes were in shreds, or if there was other damage that might doom their landing attempt. But the aircraft was flying, and they had ample fuel to get back to their base. Hobart Mattison was an experienced 8th Air Force combat veteran who in 1944 had bailed out of a stricken B-17 bomber over Hungary, made his way through southern Germany to France, and then escaped to England with the help of the French underground. For him, to abandon a still-flying aircraft was not an alternative. After leveling off at 10,000 feet and bringing the three Ravens forward, Matt asked his crew what they thought about punching out over Tokyo Bay or over the runway at Yokota. According to George Back, “When Matt inquired if anyone wanted to bail out, there was a unanimous ‘No, Sir.’ All fear had left me, and I had the utmost confidence in Matt’s flying ability—and somehow knew that God didn’t get us this far just to see us splattered all over the Yokota runway.”
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 27
