In similar situations, nose-down landings by B-47s most often resulted in a funeral pyre. A shredded brake chute or a blown tire could easily spell disaster on landing. As a result of Mattison’s radio calls, there was no lack of radio assistance—but no American fighters had appeared. Interceptors launched from Yokota Air Base were much too far away to provide timely assistance. And once they arrived on the scene, they could only visually confirm the external damage sustained by 4290. Matt turned down a suggestion by the SAC command post at Yokota to land at a base in South Korea; instead, he initiated his descent into Yokota. As they approached Yokota, Colonel Gunn, the 55th SRW detachment commander, came up in a T-39 Sabreliner and looked them over. He couldn’t add any new information to what Matt already knew to assist in the upcoming landing at Yokota. “Rusty” Rust, the pilot who had delivered 4290 only a couple of days earlier, was up in the Yokota control tower making his expertise available if Matt needed advice. Rusty had been stationed at Yokota for four years earlier in his career, and he knew the area’s peculiarities well. “Matt was coming in from the south, heading north to make his first landing attempt. From that direction, visibility was half a mile in haze. I wanted to tell him to come in from the north, heading south. Visibility in that direction was three miles. Although I could see him coming in, I had no way of reaching him. He was talking on the radio, first to the SAC command post, then to the GCA radar operator. All I could do was watch. The B-47 was built like an automobile, with one UHF radio. There were no backups.”
One of the cannon shells entered the main aft fuel tank nearly in the center of the US Air Force star adorning the side of the aircraft. The resulting fire was eventually blown out by the air stream generated by the aircraft.
On approach to Yokota, Raven Red Winters manually lowered the landing gear. “One gear stuck and didn’t want to lock positively,” Hank recalled. “Red Winters was afraid he was going to break off the handle. ‘Do it, Red,’ I told him. We had no other choice. Finally, the recalcitrant gear gave, and we got a positive lock indication.” The Ravens sitting in their web slings in the aisle below the pilots simply waited. Matt and Hank determined that they could use flaps half down, without getting the aircraft in an unrecoverable nose-down position. Matt said a final few words before he initiated his landing attempt. He knew the aircraft was going to porpoise, bouncing back into the air after a hard landing on the forward gear, a situation that frequently led to loss of directional control. “The landing will be rough. We will come down hard on the forward main due to our nose-down attitude. Henry, you deploy the [brake] chute and stand on the brakes after the second bounce. I will keep the wings level and maintain directional control.” Colonel Gunn cleared the runway for them. Everything was as ready down below as it could be—fire trucks, firefighting helicopters, medical teams. The crew did its prelanding check list.
“Crew discipline and training were important in how we handled the situation,” Hank observed. “Crews have scenarios come up in a flying career, and by good fortune the majority make it through. In some cases they don’t. Maybe more discipline and training would have made the difference in those cases. It probably did for us. On our first landing attempt, we tried to follow standard procedures of descending 4,000 feet per minute and keeping the airspeed below 290 knots. As we slowed, the nose of the aircraft began to dip because of our forward CG. We reduced our rate of descent as we approached the runway and continued to experiment with the airspeed and the flaps. We didn’t want the nose to drop on us, because we had no idea if we could get it back up. As we continued to bleed off airspeed, approaching the runway, the aircraft’s nose continued to drop on us. We couldn’t get low enough in time and had to opt for a go-around. Matt put the power to the engines as we crossed the runway threshold, and slowly the nose began to rise again. On our second attempt, we got her down to five hundred feet,” Hank reflected pensively, “then three hundred, then two hundred, and as soon as Matt pulled the power off, the aircraft nose came down and the forward gear slammed into the runway.” Rust, watching through high-powered binoculars from the Yokota control tower, said, “When I saw him after his go-around he had a good landing attitude. Then, suddenly, the nose of the aircraft dropped down and went straight into the runway. He took a tremendous first bounce, nearly up to the level of the rescue chopper, and then he hippity-hopped down the runway until he came to a stop. Recovery from this unusual attitude took great skill and coordination by Matt and Hank.”
George Back sat helplessly in his sling below the pilots. “The landing was as rough as Matt said it was going to be. We porpoised about eight feet into the air, where we nearly hit the fire-suppression helicopter hovering above us. I thought the fuselage was going to break right behind the copilot, but it held together. Matt brought the aircraft to a stop, and we exited, heading for the edge of the runway. I squatted down next to Red Winters, watching the pandemonium around the damaged and smoking aircraft. Red turned to me and said, ‘You know George, we are now living on borrowed time.’ I wondered what Red meant by that. Then I saw Red, our ever-conscientious crew leader, disregard the potential threat of fire, sprint back to the aircraft, climb up the aluminum ladder into the forward crew compartment, and crawl as fast as he could through the narrow tunnel into the Raven crew compartment to retrieve the classified mission logs and other classified material we had left behind.”
After landing at Yokota Air Base, 4290 revealed numerous 23 mm hits inflicted by the cannons of the attacking North Korean MiG-17s. A main aft fuel tank was punctured and shifted the CG forward due to fuel loss; other critical systems such as tires and approach/brake chutes were not damaged. Captain Jim Brookie, a 343rd SRS Raven, points at one of the many shell holes survived by the crew of 4290.
Copilot Dubuy recalled, “During the final landing attempt, I watched the airspeed throughout our descent. We were below 160 knots when we touched down. I pulled the brake chute at the top of the bounce. The chute wasn’t damaged, thank God. It blossomed and slammed us to the ground and kept us there. I stood on the brakes as Matt had ordered me to do. If the chute had failed? I don’t even want to think about that.” Navigator Bob Rogers recalled, “After the brake chute deployed, we hit like a ton of bricks. Everything loose came flying forward, toward my position in the nose of the aircraft. Once the aircraft came to a stop, something else was uppermost in my mind. Get out, of course, but not before I secured the O-15 radar film. I held onto it for dear life because I knew there would be a lot of questions regarding our position.”
When the aircraft was inspected, it was found that a cannon shell had knocked one of the 20mm tail guns off its mount. Still, Hank Dubuy had fired more than three hundred rounds, nearly half the ammunition the plane carried, and his skillful handling of the guns probably ruined the day for one MiG-17 pilot. Shortly after the crew evacuated the wrecked aircraft, they were summed to Colonel Gunn’s office and debriefed. Were they on course? Yes, the O-15 camera film confirmed that. Who shot first? The MiGs did. The usual questions were thrown at the flyers. Then they were off to see the flight surgeon. He wanted to see all of them and examine their fitness to fly. All were fine, were served the customary glass of Old Methuselah combat-ration whiskey, and released. That evening, after long, hot showers, the crew met at the bar of the Yokota Officers’ Mess. They decided that the North Koreans must have sent up two of their worst pilots that day. None of the flyers could understand how the two MiGs failed to down 4290—a sitting duck.
It did not make economic sense to repair 4290. “I remember counting the holes in the airplane. I forgot the exact number, but it was in the hundreds,” Colonel Rust recalled. The aircraft was used for parts, and then cut up. Its loss was not significant, since the advent of a new reconnaissance system was only two years in the future. The new RC-135 aircraft, which would relieve the combat-tested RB-47Hs, did not carry guns. In spite of Vietnam, the Cold War was getting a little less frigid between the two nuclear superpowers. Two days after the North Korea
n attack on 4290, crew E-96 flew again, this time in aircraft 4305, an aircraft in which I had flown earlier missions over the Barents Sea, the Baltic Sea, and other places less visited by most. This time, while taking radar scope photography in the Gulf of Tonkin, the two fighters with them belonged to the US Navy.
Crew E-96 returned to the United States on May 17, 1965. The following month, they reported to SAC headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha. It was standard procedure for reconnaissance crews to receive a debriefing from the intelligence people on the quality of their take. General Richard O. Hunziger met with them. Lieutenant Dubuy recalled General Hunziger looking at several pictures Hank had taken of the attacking MiGs after the guns quit firing. “How did you have time to take these pictures, Lieutenant?” the general inquired. Hank responded, “I had to shoot at them with something, General, and the camera is all I had left.”
Matt Mattison, the competent and courageous pilot with nerves to match his flying skills, died in the early 1990s. George Back was right when he said, “I had the utmost confidence in Matt and somehow knew that God didn’t get us this far just so we would end up splattered all over the runway.” Military flyers may see the hand of God more often than most mortals, but without the consummate flying skills and self-discipline of a Colonel Mattison, the flight would have ended in tragedy. In a twenty-six-year air force career, Matt served in World War II with the 8th Air Force, flew C-54 transports during the Berlin airlift in 1948–1949, tested RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, and then survived a midair collision at Eglin while testing an F-86D fighter. After his retirement, Matt settled in Florida and worked for another twenty years for the FAA. Copilot Hank Dubuy left the air force in 1969 to fly for Continental Airlines. He settled in the greater Los Angeles area. Bob Rogers, the navigator, continued to fly for years with the 55th Wing and after retirement settled in the greater Boston area.
Flight and maintenance crews in front of their RB-47H reconnaissance aircraft at Yokota, Japan, March 1967. Left to right, Simpson, Aiken, Thrasher, Oaks, Samuel, and Lutkenhouse. Captain Lutkenhouse flew as Raven 2 on the ill-fated RB-47H tail number 4290.
In contrast to the often very descriptive award citations issued to World War II and Korean War veterans, Crew E-96’s awards of the Distinguished Flying Cross contain not a word about what specifically the awards were given for. Such factually sparse citations were the norm for awards presented to those of us who flew reconnaissance during the Cold War years. Reads the citation that accompanied the award of the Distinguished Flying Cross to Lieutenant Lutkenhouse: “First Lieutenant Joel J. Lutkenhouse distinguished himself by extraordinary achievement during aerial flight as an Electronic Warfare Officer, from 30 March 1965 to 20 May 1965. During this period he participated in a program of vital international significance and demonstrated outstanding effectiveness and courage in the accomplishment of missions conducted under exceptional flight conditions. The professional competence and aerial skill, and devotion to duty, exhibited by Lieutenant Lutkenhouse reflect credit upon himself and the United States Air Force.”
The Distinguished Flying Cross and/or the Air Medal (as shown in the figure) were the usual awards for reconnaissance aircrews. If shot down, crew deaths did not qualify for the Purple Heart, a medal awarded for injury or death suffered in wartime. The Silver Star was reserved for wartime heroism, ergo reconnaissance crews were not eligible for that award, either. Although an act of Congress resulted in the award of the Silver Star to the two survivors of the RB-47H shot down over the Barents Sea on July 1, 1960, it was a rare exception. General Curtis LeMay, the commander of SAC in 1954, awarded Colonel Austin and his crew two DFCs each for their May 8, 1954, overflight of the USSR. Even LeMay did not have the authority to present anything higher than the DFC to his courageous aircrews. Reconnaissance operations post–World War II up to 1960 actually constituted a secret war between the United States and the Soviet Union, and all the men who died during these operations should in fact be awarded the Purple Heart retroactively—only fair for a nation that sent them into harm’s way. The bullets and shells that terminated their lives in the service of their country were as real as any fired in a formally declared war.
AN UNINTENTIONAL OVERFLIGHT OF EAST GERMANY (1964)
Pilots of course are warned not to enter thunderstorms, but if they do how should they behave? Flight Test at Wright-Patterson went out looking for a thunderstorm in a B-66. Their findings: Maintain an airspeed of 250 knots. The power setting and pitch attitude for this airspeed should be established before entering the thunderstorm. To paraphrase what they are saying: Once you enter a thunderstorm all hell will break loose and you can’t trust your instruments.
—Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, Glory Days
When President Dwight D. Eisenhower ended the U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union in 1960, he in no way limited the Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance Program, known in Pentagon jargon as PARPRO. The RB-47s of the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing continued to fly the borders and coastlines of the Soviet Union and its satellites, monitoring Soviet missile launches and conducting other specialized operations to ferret out the secrets of Soviet combat aircraft as well as missile and radar systems. It was in the peripheral reconnaissance role, while flying over international waters, where Soviet fighters were most prone to lash out at American aircraft. On July 1, 1960, only two months after the shootdown of a Central Intelligence Agency U-2 aircraft near Sverdlovsk, an RB-47H of the 55th SRW was downed over the Barents Sea by MiG-19 interceptors.
As early as April 8, 1950, the Soviets downed an American aircraft over the Baltic Sea off the coast of Latvia, a US Navy PB4Y2 with a crew of ten. Over the years, American reconnaissance aircraft of all types had been downed by Soviet fighters over the Sea of Japan, the Baltic Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, the Bering Strait, and the Black Sea, as well as off the Kamchatka Peninsula. Ben Rich, the director of Lockheed’s legendary Skunk Works, wrote: “Had the American public known about the ongoing secret air war between the two super-powers they would have been even more in despair than many already were about the state of the world.”47 By 1964, little had changed. Soviet military commanders of PVO Strany, their air defense command, remained paranoid about intrusions into Soviet airspace. On January 28, 1964, a T-39 Sabreliner from Wiesbaden Air Base on a routine flight through the southern Berlin air corridor strayed beyond the twenty-mile limit and was shot down by Russian fighters. The crew of three perished.
Captain David I. Holland reported for duty in 1963 with the famed 19th TRS, the squadron that in 1955 had flown three of its RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft from RAF Sculthorpe deep into the Soviet Union, at Toul-Rosières Air Base, France. “After flying a number of training missions, I was declared combat ready. I was assigned a brand new navigator straight out of navigator training, Second Lieutenant Harold Welch. Hal Welch was eager, alert, and a pleasure to work with. After flying a dozen training missions together, I was pleased to have him as my partner. The time for Hal’s combat qualification check arrived—March 10, 1964. Captain Melvin J. Kessler was the instructor-navigator who would monitor and evaluate Lieutenant Welch. A few minutes after noon on March 10, the three of us preflighted our assigned RB-66B photo reconnaissance aircraft, taking off at 1300 hours. We proceeded to fly the mission as briefed—a high-low-high profile to include a low-level photo run of several bridges in northwest Germany near Osnabrück. The flight was scheduled to last about two hours and twenty minutes. It was our practice on a check ride to leave radio navigation aids tuned to Toul-Rosières, because the navigator was being evaluated and he could see the pilot’s instruments from his position. When we were about a hundred or so miles from Toul, the VOR/TACAN was out of range. We leveled off at 33,000 feet. I engaged the autopilot and reported my position to the Frankfurt air traffic controller. We were flying in clear skies above an undercast. Captain Kessler sitting to the right of Lieutenant Welch could read the Doppler latitude and longitude, showing that we were on c
ourse. In reality, we were flying into the central Berlin air corridor, one of three such corridors providing access for Allied flights to and from Berlin. Lieutenant Welch gave me a new heading and time to descend for our low-altitude photo target. I made the turn, began the descent, and extended my speed brakes. We had gone down about 2,000 feet when I felt a slight jolt and heard what sounded like a ‘crump.’ I looked outside and saw at ten o’clock a fighter streaking away and jettisoning his external tanks. At first I thought it was a NATO fighter that had jumped us and come a little too close. When my airspeed began to increase and my hydraulic pressure was going to zero, I realized that the aircraft was seriously damaged and this was no ordinary event.
“I was on a westerly heading, I thought, with a standard penetration angle and speed brakes extended. With the loss of hydraulic pressure the speed brakes retracted, and elevator and aileron response was zero. I attempted to raise the nose of the aircraft and the left wing, applying 100 percent power to the left engine, but if there was a response it was negligible. When I heard Captain Kessler tell me that we were passing through 15,000 feet and I had no control over the aircraft, I ordered the crew to eject. I heard two loud bangs, saw the airspeed indicator passing through 400 knots, and then went through the ejection sequence myself—left preejection lever up, right preejection lever up, squeeze trigger in right preejection lever. I believe I went out at about 10,000 feet as the plane cartwheeled downward in flames. I then blacked out and didn’t wake until I felt a terrible pain in the groin from my parachute straps. I tried to unbuckle my chute, then realized I was still several thousand feet above the ground. One thing I remember clearly, how quiet it was as I was floating to the ground. It turned out to be a very soft landing with the tree branches catching the chute just right to allow me to touch down gently on my feet. My first thought after touching ground was, ‘Oh, shit, what have I done.’”
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 28
