“After running a test on a squadron aircraft to prove the N-1 precession theory, Major Gardina hurriedly drew charts and graphs of all equipment affected by the N-1—autopilot, radar, APN-82 Doppler system, and RMI—and briefed Colonel Small. We also drew a prediction of the track from Hahn to Nordholz if the compass failed. At a precession rate of two and a half degrees per minute, the prediction led the aircraft from Hahn into the central Berlin corridor. We had no previous word of where the aircraft crossed the border, only our prediction. Colonel Small in the meantime was under unbelievable pressure to find the cause of what happened. He sent me and a standardization and evaluation pilot to brief the Headquarters USAFE staff on what I had come up with on Wednesday evening, the eleventh of March. USAFE accepted us and my briefing like we were raw meat in a lion’s den. They were totally negative to anything technical and spent their time berating and condemning us and the entire 10th Wing.
“We picked up our briefing charts and tattered remains, and returned to Toul late Wednesday night. I proposed to Colonel Small that we fly a test with the B-phase disconnected and photograph and record the instruments and the ground to establish our actual track, using checkpoints to simulate Hahn and Nordholz. We soon learned that our test had to be approved by Edwards Flight Test Center. We spent hours on the phone with them. Since we were the world’s center of attention at this time, they gave us their approval. The Headquarters USAFE staff was totally negative toward us doing the test, so we bypassed them and went directly to friends in the Pentagon. Major Gardina, flying in the gunner’s seat of an RB-66B photo-reconnaissance aircraft exactly like the one flown by Dave Holland, jury-rigged a cutoff switch on the N-1 compass leads in the C-2 compass transmitter housed in the left wing of the aircraft. That allowed him to interrupt AC current flow, inducing the same error that led 451 into East Germany.” Norm Goldberg flew as navigator. “We headed north out of France toward the UK,” recalled Goldberg. “Verne disconnected the C-2 sensor lead when we got over the English Channel. After about twenty-five minutes of flight, we were heading due east toward the Dutch coast. The picture on my radar scope was photographed with an 0-15 camera, standard equipment to record B-47 and B-66 radar presentations.”
“When we landed,” Major Gardina stated, “the film was immediately processed. The test proved that the entire navigation suite of the aircraft, including the RMI, range measuring equipment, gave false indications. Even an experienced navigator wouldn’t have been able to recognize the misplaced returns encountered by Lieutenant Welch in a heavy industrial environment. We took this information, the photographs, and a better-prepared set of charts and graphs, back to Wiesbaden. Again, we were received like the plague. They condemned our reasoning and discredited our test flight. We returned to Toul in the wee hours of Friday morning, March 13. Reflew the test Friday morning to overcome some of the USAFE objections. Again hurriedly put the data together, and Colonel Small and I returned to Wiesbaden. When we arrived, the situation was worse than before. There was pressure from the very top for an explanation—President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara, the air force chief of staff General Curtis LeMay, and too many others to mention. Scores of general officers were inbound to Wiesbaden to join in the melee. Before the big meeting between Generals LeMay, McConnell, Disosway, and a jillion other nervous generals, I briefed Major General [Henry Garfield] Thorne, the USAFE Director of Operations, and Lieutenant General [James V.] Edmundson, the 17th Air Force commander. Then Colonel Small and I tried to brief Major General [Romulus W.] Puryear, the 3rd Air Force commander, to make certain he was knowledgeable (the 10th Tactical Reconnaissance Wing fell under the 3rd Air Force, headquartered at South Ruislip, a suburb of London).
The route of Captain Holland’s ill-fated flight Into East Germany. The planned route is shown on the left, passing over Dortmund and heading for Nordholz. The actual route shown on the right leads the aircraft Into the central Berlin air corridor and a fateful encounter with two Russian MiG-19s.
“Colonel Small and I were not permitted to be present in the general officer meeting—we were persona non grata, so to speak. I began to brief Puryear. He threw Small, me, and all our charts out of his office and told us he wouldn’t brief that bullshit, and wished he was a thousand miles away. General Edmundson then got us two sharp generals who would be in the briefing, and I brought them up to speed and gave them my charts so that the two could at least make a half-assed presentation. They were very nervous, not technically oriented, and not convinced we knew what we were talking about. While the meeting was going on, Small and I were in a large room outside the briefing room with a score of others. I was a major; everyone else was either a bird-colonel or a general. Every one of them was giving me and Colonel Small hell. Small was getting most of it. About 2100 hours that evening, Small was called to a command post telephone. Major Miller, from the 10th Wing Headquarters detachment at Toul, was on the line. ‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘I have the best news you ever heard.’ Poor Small was under so much pressure that his first thought was, ‘They found out that Holland was a defector.’ Instead, Major Miller informed him that they had located the film from the GCI radar site that had been tracking Holland’s aircraft. It, and Gardina’s plot, was no more than two or three miles off the whole way into East Germany. Small came back and handed me the coordinates he had taken down from Miller. I had gotten up at five o’clock on Wednesday morning, flew two test flights, made numerous ground tests, prepared and made briefings, and made three trips to Wiesbaden. I was exhausted. Flying back, wouldn’t you know it, the weather was bad at Toul, and we had to divert to Laon. I finally got to bed on Saturday morning.”
Colonel Arthur Small was relieved of command effective March 24, 1964, by General Disosway, the USAFE commander—a position held by General Curtis LeMay in 1948. As always, there had to be a scapegoat, and Colonel Small, as the 10th TRW commander, fit the bill. As General LeMay was quoted to have said when responding to the firing of several B-47 bomb wing commanders when they failed to properly execute a “no notice Cocoa” alert, practicing their assigned wartime mission, “I cannot differentiate between the incompetent and the unfortunate.” The border violation was due to a technical malfunction, and Colonel Small was indeed unfortunate, and anything but incompetent. Yet he was the wing commander, the man at the head of a combat wing who usually paid the price for failure, no matter the cause. Major David Holland attributes his exoneration by the Flying Evaluation Board to the extraordinary efforts of Major Verne Gardina. Holland continued to fly and serve his country in Southeast Asia, flying 146 combat missions in EB-66 aircraft. He was awarded five Air Medals and retired in the rank of major—his overflight experience a definite factor in limiting his progression within the air force rank structure. Major Gardina suffered no ill effects from his courageous investigation to save one of his own. In 1976, Gardina retired from the United States Air Force in the rank of colonel. His last duty assignment was as vice commander of Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, the location of the headquarters of the Tactical Air Command.
As a patriotic teenager in 1942, wanting to serve his country, Verne Gardina carried a letter of commendation from his high school principal to the army enlistment center. His principal described Verne as “a young man of good character, manly bearing, and excellent poise. He is sincere and straightforward, and in my judgment he possesses the qualities of leadership necessary in military service.” He served in the Pacific Theater of Operations, was shot down, but survived. Colonel Gardina served in the best traditions of the United States Air Force and certainly was all his high school principal said of him, and more. He passed away on January 24, 1995. Lieutenant Harold Welch, upon his return from Soviet detention, was unable to recall any events after takeoff from Toul-Rosières. Welch did not return to the 19th TRS.
Things didn’t end with that star-studded meeting of March 13, 1964, at Headquarters USAFE in Wiesbaden. American overflights of the Soviet Union, and the occasional shootdowns by Russ
ian fighters or surface-to-air missiles, was an ongoing topic of discussion and formal exchanges between East and West. The March 10 shootdown of the RB-66, soon after the shootdown of an errant T-39 trainer over the GDR, the German Democratic Republic, also referred to as East Germany, was obviously grist for the Soviet propaganda mill. At an April 4, 1964, meeting between Ambassador at Large Llewellyn E. Thompson and the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, Dobrynin handed Ambassador Thompson the Russian-language text of a letter from Chairman Khrushchev to President Johnson. As expected, the letter was long-winded and self-serving, stating: “The fundamental position of the Soviet Union is the improvement of Soviet-American relations and strengthening peace, and we would prefer, of course, not to engage in demonstrations of force, of hard firmness, and in the elimination of the consequences of incidents provoked by the acts of American military forces, but to concentrate, with you, our efforts toward guaranteeing for the people of our two countries a durable peace.” Such verbiage came from a man who only eighteen months earlier tried to put nuclear-tipped missiles on the island of Cuba aimed at the United States.
Chairman Khrushchev continued, referring to the T-39 shootdown, “In spite of the warning and the order to land, the aircraft continued to fly deep into the GDR until it was shot down. The American side stated that this violation was unintentional, that this was not a military plane but a training plane which had lost its bearings. It is difficult to agree that even a training plane could stray off course in such clear weather and over territory which is quite familiar to flying personnel…. But hardly six weeks had gone by and on March 10 there occurred a new violation of the frontier of the GDR. This violation was committed by a military aircraft, a reconnaissance bomber equipped with air cameras as well as radio reconnaissance facilities which were in operation at the time of the flight…. Can we fail to reach the conclusion, Mr. President, that the RB-66 intentionally violated the air space of the GDR and did so in order to engage in air reconnaissance? … I believe that the flight of the RB-66 was arranged without instructions from the President of the United States of America. But I declare to you that I do not accept the idea that this was an accidental border violation.” The letter continued at length in the same spirit, counseling President Johnson that he had a runaway military on his hands.
Khrushchev chose not to take the route of a show trial. On April 17, 1964, President Johnson responded in a direct and brief letter, “I can quite well understand your concern that within a short period of time two American airplanes crossed the demarcation line. There is little I can say about the incident involving a training plane, since the crew were killed and we are unable to ascertain what actually happened. I am disturbed that in both cases, however, there does not appear to have been justification for the rapidity with which there was a resort to force by Soviet planes. The American planes should not have been there, but I believe that this fast and violent reaction is quite unjustified…. I recognize that this is an astonishing series of errors, and upon my instructions the American military authorities have established the most rigorous procedure possible in order to prevent any repetition of such incidents.” Chairman Khrushchev had less than six months left in power when he received President Johnson’s reply.
Don Adee, who in later years taught young aspiring air force officers the intricacies of aerial navigation at Mather Air Force Base, wrote: “I arrived at Toul-Rosières in April 1964 and was assigned to the 42nd TRS. I became a navigator flight examiner at Toul before we moved to Chambley in 1965. After the two shootdowns over East Germany, all of us new guys had briefings running out of our ears before we were allowed close to an airplane.”
General LeMay, who flew into Wiesbaden after Captain Holland’s shootdown on March 10 to whip his generals into line, had less than a year remaining as chief of staff before retiring. With his departure, an era in American military aviation ended. In early August 1964, a fateful meeting between the destroyer USS Maddox and North Vietnamese torpedo boats changed the American political and military landscape. A rallying Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on August 7. The once secret war in Southeast Asia was out in the open. Few understood what the United States was letting itself in for. Fewer still understood how unprepared we were to fight a conventional air war halfway around the world. We had neither the iron bombs on hand to sustain an air campaign nor aircrews trained for anything other than nuclear weapons delivery. Air-to-air combat of the World War II and Korean War variety had been declared obsolete, and our newest fighter, the F-4C Phantom, came armed only with air-to-air missiles. The technologies necessary to further the development of conventional weapons had long ago been put on the back burner by senior air force leaders focused on nuclear war. Although precision-guided munitions achieved a high level of development and success toward the end of World War II—such as the US Navy’s Pelican and Bat bombs, the Army Air Forces’ Axon and Razon glide bombs, and the German Fritz X and Henschel 293—such weapons and their continued development were deemed irrelevant in the nuclear age. In 1964, the air force had little more than old-fashioned general-purpose bombs, and not enough of them, to take out a bridge the way it had been done in World War II. If an aircraft didn’t break the sound barrier or was unable to carry a nuclear device, it apparently wasn’t needed in a world of absolutes defined by megatonnage. A nation and an air force were about to be given a costly lesson by a “Third World country.”48
Major David I. Holland and his navigator, Captain Alex Mazzei, at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam, 1965. Major Holland, a good friend, went West in 2017 to that special place in the sky reserved for military aviators.
THE REASONS WHY (1948–1960)
I was just a dumb 23-year-old fighter jock, which is exactly what the Air Force was looking for back in 1957. All they told me was “How would you like to fly at very high altitude in a pressure suit?” I immediately thought rocket ships! Buck Rogers! Count me in.
—Buddy Brown, U-2 pilot, in Ben Rich and Leo Janos, Skunk Works
In late 1957 a fifty-foot Christmas tree was erected at Offutt Air Force Base, the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command. It was an enlistment gimmick. Commanders could light a bulb on the tree when meeting their enlistment or reenlistment quotas. A status board was erected next to the tree to show the names of the commanders and their units who had met their goals. A painter was to affix a sign to the status board reading: “Maintaining Peace Is Our Profession.” That seemed a bit wordy to the painter—he couldn’t fit all the words on the board—so he removed the word “Maintaining.” “Peace Is Our Profession,” the sign proudly proclaimed for all to see. A visiting officer liked the sign and the message it tried to convey, and once he got back to Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts, he had a similar sign made and displayed at the main gate, adding the SAC shield displaying blue sky, an olive branch, white puffy clouds, and a mailed fist. “Peace Is Our Profession” caught on among others and soon was the slogan that came to define the Strategic Air Command. In 1958, SAC bristled with over 1,700 B-47 and B-52 strategic nuclear-capable bombers and nearly 200 RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft, supported by more than 900 aerial refueling tankers. The powerful offensive capability the United States possessed in 1958, especially its strategic bomber force, held an expansion-minded and predatory Soviet Union in check. Not the case ten years earlier, in 1948, when the United States and its western allies struggled to maintain even a semblance of military force.
The rapid disarmament after World War II left the United States no option other than an airlift when Joseph Stalin made his move on Berlin in 1948. That potential disaster barely avoided, when the Russians in August 1949 exploded an atomic device. The atomic bomb, which had given the United States a unique weapon to checkmate potential Soviet military threats against western Europe, now became part of their arsenal of weapons as well. And they had the bombers, the TU-4, a copy of the American B-29, to deliver them. A quick analysis showed that the most vulnerable
places to the Soviet atomic threat, other than Europe, were Alaska and the west coast of the United States. If Russian military progress was not enough, the Chinese Communists in 1949 declared victory over the Nationalists, completing the occupation of mainland China. Only a small island, Formosa, renamed Taiwan, remained to finish the job, and they intended to do that shortly. The United States had barely time to digest all of this bad news when in June 1950 the North Koreans, with the blessings of the Soviets, invaded South Korea. The United States was at war again, regardless of it being referred to by the United Nations and the Truman administration as only a “police action.” The Eighth Army was saved from disaster by the F-51s and A-26s that decimated the attackers by day and night. A spectacular landing at Inchon drove the North Koreans north into their own mountain country, up against the Chinese border. The North near defeat, General Douglas MacArthur split his forces in pursuit and, smelling victory, declared to the troops that they would be home by Christmas. That neat little plan all changed that November when the Chinese Communists committed nine armies to save their North Korean ally. Now it was the Eighth Army, for the second time during this “police action,” trying to extricate itself in brutal winter conditions from the vulnerable position an overconfident General MacArthur had led it into. The Eighth Army, and elements of the US Marine Corps, managed to do it, under conditions only previously experienced by Germany’s Sixth Army in World War II, and they didn’t survive.
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 30
