RB-66B photo reconnaissance aircraft of the 10th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing, 19th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron, landing at Toul-Rosières Air Base, France, after returning from a training mission. The shooting star on the tail of the aircraft was the 10th Wing emblem. An aircraft just like this one was flown by Captain David Holland and shot down by Russian MiG-19 fighters.
On March 10, 1964, Russian senior pilot Captain Vitaliy Ivannikov, at Wittstock Airfield, was on alert duty at readiness level two. “At 1646 Moscow time I was given orders by my fighter division command post to assume readiness level one. I started my engines, took the runway, and took off at 1649, assuming a heading of 330 degrees. As I was climbing to 15,000 feet, the controller informed me that my target was on a heading of 090 degrees at 30,000 feet. Four minutes later, to the left and about 6,000 feet above me, at an approximate range of about six miles, I spotted the intruder, pulling contrails for about 1,500 to 2,000 feet behind him. I also saw the aircraft of Captain Zinoviev. Without losing sight of either aircraft, I completed a hard left turn into the target. I saw there were no guns in the back of the B-66—otherwise we would have been immediately destroyed. Captain Zinoviev fired, the target turned left to a heading of 270 degrees, and while he was turning Captain Zinoviev fired again, but I couldn’t tell if he hit anything. Halfway through the turn, I assumed an attack position behind the violator at a distance of about 1,000 feet, he extended his speed brakes, and my distance decreased to 600 feet. At 1657, after Captain Zinoviev finished his attack, he turned left and away from the target. I received a command from the controller to fire my C-5 rockets from a distance of less than 500 feet. The rockets were programmed to fire singly. I saw the rocket leave my plane, hit the target; its left engine began to smoke. I fired no more rockets, because I was too close, and the rocket’s proximity fuse would not have armed in time, so I used my 23mm cannons from a distance of about 300 feet. I observed hits in the vertical stabilizer and lower part of the fuselage and speed brakes. I reported the results to the command post of my fighter division. I broke off my attack and climbed away to the right. I inadvertently flew past the aircraft into the debris zone, and as a result punctured one of my wing fuel tanks, something I didn’t know until after landing. The target rolled to the left, entered a steep spiral, and I saw three red-and-white parachutes, which I reported to the command post. I was then ordered to land at Altes Lager Airfield, because Wittstock was below minimums. The entire flight from beginning to end lasted about twenty-five minutes.”
Captain David Holland in the cockpit of an RB-66B while assigned to the 10th Reconnaissance Wing at Toul-Rosières, France, in 1965. Note the white helmet—painted camouflage during the Vietnam war years. Holland was an excellent pilot and found himself in a situation created by an errant N-1 compass, which led his aircraft into East Germany. In subsequent years during the Vietnam War, Holland flew 146 combat missions in EB-66 aircraft.
“It seemed only minutes after I had disconnected from my chute and taken off my helmet,” Captain Holland recalled, “that a jeep-like vehicle appeared with three people in it. Two in uniform, one in civilian clothes. They indicated through gestures that I should get in and accompany them. I didn’t think I had a choice. Where I came down was near the small town of Gardelegen in East Germany. I later learned that there were six thousand Soviet troops in the area on maneuvers. I inquired about my crew, but no one talked to me—this being the way things remained for the next seventeen days. We arrived at a hospital, where I was made to disrobe, put in a bed, and examined by medical personnel. I indicated to them that I had pain in my left arm, and they X-rayed it. I was frightened. I remembered the U-2 shootdown in 1960 of Gary Powers. I also thought about the three USAF officers on the T-39 from Wiesbaden who had been shot down and died on January 28, just a little over a month ago. One of the nurses whispered to me, ‘I so wish you were not here,’ adding to the drama. Sometime during the middle of the night I was put into an ambulance and taken for a bumpy ride to a Russian hospital in Magdeburg. My private room was small, a guard was at the door, and the food was far from gourmet. I enjoyed pickled herring, but what I thought was a piece of delicatessen fish turned out to be just raw fish. The borscht wasn’t too bad.
“The following day, interrogation began. The Russians clearly believed we were on a spy mission and tried hard to have me admit it. I was worried about Hal and Mel, but the Russian interrogators wouldn’t give me any information about them. I had no idea whether the air force really knew what happened, whether my family knew about my plight. I was kept in total ignorance. Although I knew nothing about what was going on in the outside world, my relatives were notified of our missing status, and the incident became a media event in Time, Newsweek, and all the dailies. Headlines continued until the Alaska earthquake overshadowed our predicament. There was of course no way for me to know that [people in] my government—President Lyndon B. Johnson, former ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk—were making every effort to secure our release.
“During the seventeen days of detention and isolation there were five interrogations, some threats of a trial in Moscow, and questions about ‘Madrid Control.’ The Russians had salvaged the wire recorder from the crashed RB-66, which evidently still contained recordings of a pilot talking to Madrid air traffic control when proceeding to or from our fair-weather base near Tripoli, Libya. Standard procedure became to be awakened at three or four in the morning, to sign a paper, which of course I refused to do. The days passed slowly. No radio. No newspaper. No one to talk to. I had attended survival training at Stead Air Force Base near Reno, Nevada, prior to reporting to Shaw. The training I received was effective in preparing me mentally for this period of detention. I have the greatest admiration for those who survived long periods of imprisonment as prisoners of war. The one thing that sustained me during that relatively short period of detainment was my faith in my government making every attempt to obtain my release.
“After the sixteenth day, I was led to a bathroom and allowed to take a shower. The next morning, to my great surprise, I received a breakfast of scrambled eggs with bacon. Something was up, but I didn’t know what. After breakfast, a Russian officer entered my room with what he called a ‘clothing list’ and asked me to sign it. It was in Russian and I refused to do so. He argued but finally left. Another person arrived later with my flight suit, underwear, socks, and boots. I began to get my hopes up not to be going to Moscow. What happened next was puzzling. A Russian major escorted me to a room on the first floor. There, we sat and waited. Then he escorted me to a waiting car with a driver. When I asked where we were going, he put his index finger to his lips. I got the message. We drove into Magdeburg; it was about noon. I was struck by the lack of traffic and people in the streets. The Russian said something to the driver, who pulled over to the side of the street and parked. It seemed that whatever we were involved in had something to do with timing. Apparently we were ahead of schedule. Then the major turned to me and asked me if I believed in God. I said, ‘Yes.’ Answering his own question he said, ‘Nyet.’ We arrived at the Helmstedt crossing the same time another car, with Captain Kessler, arrived. Prior to getting out of the car, the Russian major told me not to shake his hand when he turned me over to a US Army officer.
“Kessler and I boarded an army staff car, which took us to Hannover. The media was relentless, attempting to get newsreels and photographs of two US Air Force officers being released from Soviet captivity. In Hannover, Kessler and I boarded a C-54. A flight surgeon gave us a cursory physical examination, then we flew to Wiesbaden Air Base. We were driven to the large air force hospital in Wiesbaden. When I entered my room, I was met by General Gabriel Disosway, the commander of the United States Air Forces in Europe, USAFE. ‘I’m glad you are back,’ he said, shaking my hand. He cautioned me not to talk to anyone about my experience except the OSI—Office of Special Investigations—officer assigned to me. And he added that this was
ordered by President Johnson. I was also ordered by General Disosway not to speak with Lieutenant Welch, who had the room next to mine, or to Captain Kessler. While the general was giving me instructions, an airman ripped the telephone out of the wall.
“I was allowed to say hello to my crew mates, learning for the first time of the extensive injuries suffered by Lieutenant Welch during his ejection. His left leg was broken in two places, and his right arm was broken as well. He had a neck fracture, which was not discovered until he was X-rayed at the Wiesbaden hospital. While in the East German hospital, Hal Welch had been allowed a visit by an air force flight surgeon, who, after examining him, asked for his immediate release so he could get proper care. Lieutenant Welch was released after ten days of captivity. The next five days I spent almost entirely with the OSI—daily interrogations; a polygraph test; a visit to a psychiatrist, who questioned me and then administered a Rorschach test. Finally, it was over, and I boarded a T-29 for Toul-Rosières to meet the inevitable flying evaluation board.”
The shootdown by a Russian Mig-19 fighter on March 10, 1964, of the straying RB-66B, 53-451, piloted by Captain David Holland, reverberated through the 19th Squadron, the 10th Wing, Headquarters USAFE in Wiesbaden, the State Department, right up to the White House. Lieutenant Welch’s navigation combat qualification test was a disaster. It was one of the notable Cold War incidents ranking right up there with the shootdown of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 on May 1, 1960, and the subsequent downing of the RB-47H electronic reconnaissance aircraft over the Barents Sea that same year. Within four days of the shootdown of the RB-66, Headquarters USAFE established an Air Defense Identification Zone, ADIZ, and Brass Monkey procedures for flights along the inner East German and Czechoslovak borders were implemented to preclude any further such incidents from happening. Any aircraft entering the ADIZ without authorization was contacted on Guard channel, a radio channel monitored by all aircraft at all times, and directed to immediately reverse course. These procedures, although implemented after a shootdown that could have been prevented, solved the problem, and there were no further intrusions into East Germany after Brass Monkey procedures were implemented. While flying EB-66 aircraft in the early 1970s with the 39th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron over West Germany, more than once I heard a Brass Monkey call on Guard channel, a procedure that should have been implemented years earlier.
The three air corridors leading into Berlin: the central corridor was used for flights heading west, while the two others were entry corridors to the Berlin airfields of Tegel, Gatow, and Tempelhof.
The Stars and Stripes military newspaper, Newsweek, and Time, among many other publications, carried lengthy articles about the loss of the RB-66. “One of the trickiest games of the Cold War is a sort of airborne electronic ‘chicken,’” speculated Time, “in which a high-speed aircraft without warning dashes headlong for the enemy’s border, turning away just in time. The game is played by both East and West, and not just for fun. From such phony forays has come a wealth of crucial information about one another’s defense capabilities….. In the past two years, according to one official source, Soviet jets have poked their noses into Western airspace 95 times—mostly on just such sniffing missions. But when a Western plane goes into Communist territory, innocently or not, the Russians do not hesitate to shoot. Since 1950, 108 U.S. airmen have died or disappeared within Communist airspace, the last three only seven weeks ago when an unarmed—and demonstrably innocent—T-39 jet trainer was blasted from the leaden skies over Vogelsberg,” Time magazine wrote. “Last week,” the weekly magazine continued its story, “a U.S. Air Force RB-66B reconnaissance bomber bellowed off the runway at Toul-Rosières Air Base in France, then sloped east by northeast on a routine, 2½ hour ‘navigational training mission.’ The flight plan called for the 700 m.p.h., twin-jet bomber to swing over Germany’s beautiful Mosel Valley to Hahn Air Base, then bank north to Bremerhaven before returning with zigzags and altitude changes to Hahn and home…. The big swept wing Douglas jet crossed into Communist East Germany in the vicinity of the central Berlin air corridor. Moments later, two swift blips rose on the radar screens—Soviet MiGs in deadly pursuit. The slower moving blip that marked the RB-66 leaped suddenly into wrenching, zigzag evasive maneuvers, [and] four minutes later disappeared from the screen well within East German territory. On the ground a German school boy watched the last moments of the flight: ‘The fighter closed on the bomber from behind and fired on it. The American plane burst into flames. I saw a fireball on one wing. The crew of three came out by parachute. The first two came out together. The third one came a bit later.’ … Whatever the nature of the RB-66’s mission, the Russians had all the ingredients for a fat, propaganda-loaded ‘show trial’ like that of U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers.” Although East and West played games aplenty, as the Time magazine article chose to speculate, the RB-66 was clearly a victim of circumstance of an overly aggressive Soviet regime.
Kermit Helmke, one of the more experienced navigators at Toul-Rosières, remembers the day well: “I was about to start a top secret briefing concerning a change to our war plans. It was about one o’clock or so on the tenth of March. The command post called the briefing room and asked for Lieutenant Colonel McCormack, my boss and the chief of plans. We waited for about ten minutes. Then I got a call to scrub the briefing and come down to the CP. When I got there, I learned a border violation had occurred and that a 19th Squadron airplane was suspected. We called Bill Schrimsher, who was flying one of the Brown Cradles in the same area where Dave Holland was supposed to be, to see if he had heard from Dave. Nothing. In the next hour or so we learned that Holland had been shot down. Then things got quiet for a while. Colonel McCormack obtained a radar plot of the track of Holland’s aircraft and asked me what I made of it. It’s a compass malfunction, I told him.
“‘How do you know that?’ The track is a very smooth curve leading me to believe that a gyro was steering the aircraft. An open rotor or stator lead in the system would cause a precession of this nature. My answer was based on experience with selsyns as a remote-control turret mechanic on the B-29. Verne Gardina was listening to our conversation. Vern was the 19th Squadron senior navigator.”
Early that evening, the wing commander, Colonel Arthur Small, arrived from Alconbury and had dinner with Major Gardina. “We discussed the possible causes,” wrote Major Gardina. “I told him that something happened to me seven years earlier that may have happened also to Dave Holland. In 1957, Captain Henley and I flew from Shaw to the Douglas plant in Long Beach, California, test-hopped an RB-66, then flew it back to Shaw. We were on autopilot. Halfway to Shaw I gave Henley the heading and ETA—estimated time of arrival—to the next checkpoint, then slid my seat back and went to sleep. It had been a long day. I woke up about thirty minutes later and looked at the radar scope and couldn’t believe what I saw. I checked the N-1 compass immediately, and it was reading as it should, 90 degrees, but there was the Mississippi River running east and west, directly under the radar heading marker, which was on 90 degrees. We flew into Shaw using the standby whiskey compass. I described the symptoms to maintenance. The next day, they told me that one leg of a delta-wound coil had failed and caused the compass to precess at a rate of two to three degrees per minute to maintain the 90-degree heading.
“Colonel Small then instructed me to select the people I needed to pursue this possibility. By daybreak I was in the compass mockup area in the armaments and electronics shop. I told the maintenance men that I wanted to fail each leg of the delta-wound coil of the N-1 compass alternately. There were three 120-degree legs in the coil located in the left wing of the aircraft. I wanted to check the precession rate and duration especially on headings between 000 degrees and 010 degrees, the heading from Hahn Air Base to Nordholz. We found the compass mockup too crude for a convincing test. So I had an RB-66 ground test run with maintenance failing one, then another of the coil legs with all equipment operating. We timed the precession and effects on all associa
ted equipment that directly used the N-1 inputs. This test showed that the B-phase of the coil failed when the aircraft was trying to maintain a northerly heading; it would cause the aircraft to turn toward 090 degrees in order to maintain a 360-degree heading on the compass.”
The N-1 gyro-stabilized magnetic compass system in the B-66 aircraft was its primary directional reference. The navigator and pilot alike relied on it. The N-1 had a high level of reliability, so much so that few ever questioned the system. The whiskey compass in the pilot station, installed as an emergency backup, was notoriously unreliable as a meaningful cross-check reference. Not only because of the distorted magnetic field in the cockpit but also because of a serious problem with a magnetized nose wheel in many of the B-66 aircraft. The N-1 was the only directional input to the Doppler-driven ground position indicator, GPI, system. The GPI provided continuously updated latitude and longitude to the navigator station, and stabilized the navigation radar display to true north. Colonel Don Adee taught the N-1 compass system to basic navigator-bombardier students at Mather Air Force Base, California. Adee remembers teaching his students that the power failure warning light on the N-1 would illuminate whenever alternate current was lost on the system. Only after David Holland’s shootdown was it discovered that the warning light measured only one phase of the three-phase AC power. The phase lost on aircraft number 53-451 flown by Holland was not the one being monitored, so Lieutenant Welch, Holland’s navigator, had no warning of the N-1 compass failure. “In tactical radar navigation, the navigator was required to obtain periodic radar fixes. The beginning of the fix process was to obtain an initial position, in this case Hahn Air Base, which would routinely have been obtained from the GPI counters or by manually taking time, speed, and direction from a last-known position. Next, the navigator would have looked at his navigation map using the initial position he established as his starting point, then tried to determine the radar return pattern for his next fix. In the German environment, where there are so many cultural radar returns, it is quite easy to find a similar pattern of returns that matches those expected from your next position, then checking an incorrectly oriented radar display, the consequences were predictable. The crew flying over a total undercast, however, thought everything was alright.
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 29
