THE PRICE WE PAID (1945–1993)
On July 27, 1953, Ralph Parr, flying an F-86F Sabre, shoots down a Russian IL-12 Coach transport, with 21 passengers and crew aboard, just hours before the Korean Armistice is signed. Two days later, on July 29, 1953, an RB-50G of the 343rd SRS is shot down in retaliation over the Sea of Japan, near Vladivostok. Captain John Roche, the copilot, was rescued. The bodies of two crew members were recovered. Most of the crew were rescued by the Russians…. They had immediately been whisked away to the KGB.
—Laurence Jolidon, Last Seen Alive
It sounds like an oxymoron that peripheral reconnaissance flights along the borders of the Soviet Union, North Korea, the People’s Republic of China, and other Cold War allies of the Soviet Union should have been more dangerous than overflying Mother Russia. But such was the case. The 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, for which I flew during the volatile 1960s, at the time was equipped with RB-47H aircraft configured for electronic reconnaissance. Some of our aircraft monitored Soviet missile shots as well, and others yet were configured to address new and unique issues. We flew our missions from five principal locations: Yokota Air Base, Japan; Incirlik Air Base, Turkey; Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska; Thule Air Base, Greenland; and several Royal Air Force bases in the United Kingdom. However, it wasn’t unusual to fly from other locations, all depending on what the situation called for. Other SAC reconnaissance units flew out of Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, and from the windswept island of Shemya at the extreme western end of the Aleutian chain of islands monitoring communications and missile-related events.
The 55th Wing came into existence in February 1947 at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, equipped with dated World War II–type aircraft to perform photo mapping. It was soon disbanded and in 1949 came to life again flying RB-29, and later, RB-50 aircraft. All slow and low flyers, easy prey for aggressive attackers. But of course they would be flying PARPRO missions over international waters, outside the twelve-mile limits of whatever nation they were flying against. It turned out that aircraft flying over the Barents Sea, the eastern Baltic, the Black Sea, the Sea of Japan, and the Sea of Okhotsk would find themselves frequently under attack. The fact that they were flying over international waters seemed to have no relevance. The rationale for that sort of aggressive action is hard to understand. Possibly it reflected a sense of Russian impotence in the face of the frequent overflights by American aircraft of the Russian motherland, flights that they were never able to shoot at because they were either flying too high for their fighters or they were detected too late, or both. But much more likely is that commanders of PVO Strany, their equivalent of our Air Defense Command at that time, had a great amount of latitude in how they dealt with perceived intruders—even if the “intruder” was in fact not flying over Soviet territory nor heading in that direction. When intercepted by Russian fighters, which was a frequent occurrence for us, we continued to fly our missions as briefed. If we aborted every time the Russians sent up a fighter or two, we would have never been able to accomplish our tasks. Our rules of engagement in the 1960s, and they hadn’t changed over the years prior to or after the 1960s, were to take evasive action if the hostile aircraft fired on us or went from a radar search mode to lock on—meaning that the hostile fighter was getting ready to fire its guns, cannons, or missiles. We only fired our own guns in self-defense and never initiated such action, but only responded to the aggressor.
One other very volatile area was access to and from Berlin, flying through the three Berlin air corridors. As early as 1946, we configured A-26 aircraft to fly photo reconnaissance in the Berlin corridors and many other places in Europe. In subsequent years, we used reconnaissance-configured B-17, C-54, C-97, and C-130 aircraft to fly electronic and photo reconnaissance missions in the Berlin corridors. Under the Four Power Agreement, such missions were not authorized, but they were flown anyway, cameras and antennas for receivers carefully hidden or disguised. However, aircraft straying outside the twenty-mile-wide air corridors to and from Berlin were risking a shootdown by Russian fighters. On occasion, they would attack or harass aircraft even while flying within the confines of the corridors. There is an interesting story that occurred during the Berlin airlift of 1948–1949. Colonel Harold “Hal” Austin, then a young lieutenant, was piloting a C-54 from Rhein-Main Air Base to Berlin. “It was night, and we were on our second run to Berlin, me and my copilot, Darrel Lamb. Both of us were sleepy. We didn’t call in over the Berlin beacon. When I awoke, I saw Darrel was sound asleep. The bird dog, our radio compass, was pointing toward the tail. There were not many lights on the ground below. Everything was pitch black. I really got scared. I woke Darrel. He cranked in Berlin radio. It was weak. We had no idea how long we had been asleep, but we promptly did a 180. It took us thirty minutes to get back to Berlin, about ninety or so miles. We were probably over Stettin, or somewhere over the Baltic Sea, when we made our turn. The corridor wasn’t always full of aircraft, so we waited until someone called in over the Berlin beacon. We waited three minutes, then called in our own number and rejoined the stream of aircraft flying into Berlin. We sweated blood for a couple of days, expecting the hammer to come down at any time. Nothing ever happened.” Austin, in May 1954, would fly his RB-47E photo reconnaissance aircraft over the Kola Peninsula and come home nearly unscathed. The luck of the Irish, or something like that. I never asked Hal if he had Irish blood in his veins—probably did.
The table in this chapter is a listing of not only reconnaissance and observation aircraft shot down in the course of their missions but also airliners misidentified by Russian pilots and ground controllers and shot down with heavy loss of life. The 1978 and 1983 attacks on South Korean airliners revealed the continuing disarray of the Soviet air defense system. The 55th SRW by that time had converted to RC-135 aircraft, a derivative of the KC-135 tanker and the 707 airliner. The Russians apparently believed that it was one of those reconnaissance aircraft that had flown off course, and they were shooting down. Although it is difficult to mistake a 747 airliner with flashing red and green lights for an aircraft that looks very much like a Boeing 707 flying with no lights on. Russian radar controllers generally determined a fighter’s action, even the weapons he was to use, as in the case of the RB-66B shootdown. The pilot of the Russian jet just executed the orders given.
Not shown in the table are the many unsuccessful attacks by Russian fighters on American reconnaissance planes, and there were plenty of those. Attacks against American aircraft began in late 1945 and picked up as the years went by. For the Russians, the confrontation with the West clearly began as soon as World War II ended; for the West, it took a while to have that fact sink in, but by 1948 the Cold War was in full bloom and recognized as such by everyone.
Looking at the loss statistics in the table, the high number of U-2 aircraft lost by the Chinese Nationalists is a standout. There may have been more losses than those shown in the table, plus a number of accidents that added to the total. How did that happen? The PRC, the Chinese Communists, had obtained SA-2 surface-to-air missiles from the Soviet Union, the same missiles that downed Francis Gary Powers’s aircraft on May 1, 1960. The Taiwanese U-2s that overflew China were principally employed to photograph China’s secret nuclear test and development facilities at Lop Nor, two thousand miles inland, “and a very tough round trip for even the most experienced U-2 pilot.” The loss of several of the U-2s flying over China made Kelly Johnson suspicious. “Kelly long suspected that the electronic counter-measures black box we installed on the tail section of Powers’s U-2 may have acted in an opposite way from the one we intended,” wrote Ben Rich, the former director of Kelly’s Skunk Works. “It was possible that the Russians had changed these frequencies by the time we incorporated them into our missile spoofer, so that the incoming missile’s seeker head was on the same frequency as the beams transmitted off our tail and acted as a homing device. A few years later a similar black box was installed in the tails of CIA U-2s piloted by Taiwanese fl
ying highly dangerous missions over the Chinese mainland. One day three of four U-2s were shot down, and the sole survivor told CIA debriefers that he was amazed to be alive because he forgot to turn on his black box. To Kelly, that clinched the case. But we’ll never really know.”54
Aircraft Shot Down by Russian Fighters, 1950–1983
The majority of shootdowns occurred in the 1950s, many over the Sea of Japan and adjacent areas such as the Sea of Okhotsk, all areas I flew many times in the 1960s in RB-47H jet aircraft. Losses over the Sea of Japan were inflicted not only by overly aggressive Russian fighters but by the North Koreans as well; North Korea was well known for its unpredictability. The most egregious act committed by the North Koreans being the capture of the USS Pueblo, an electronic reconnaissance ship posing as a research vessel, on January 23, 1968, off the east coast of North Korea. Both the United States and the Soviet Union used vessels of that nature to monitor each other’s military exercises and communications, a practice tolerated by both sides. However, this was not the Soviet Union the Pueblo was facing, but a North Korea that had frequently attacked and shot down unarmed American observation aircraft over or near the Demilitarized Zone, and three years earlier, in 1965, nearly shot down an RB-47H flying over international waters off Wonsan. Neither the RB-47H electronic reconnaissance aircraft, attacked by MiG 17s, nor the USS Pueblo in 1968, attacked by MiG-21s and North Korean armed speedboats, received American fighter support. Nor did the slow-moving and low-flying RB-29/50 aircraft, or similar US Navy aircraft, during the 1950s. All too many of which perished. To me, it is totally inexplicable that we did not have properly armed fighter aircraft sitting alert on our air bases in northern Japan to provide appropriate protection for our vulnerable reconnaissance aircraft, and of course fighter escort could have been provided over areas deemed especially vulnerable. Once the Pueblo was captured, we moved large numbers of combat aircraft from Southeast Asia into Japan facing Korea. But for some reason our senior military leadership couldn’t figure out beforehand that our continued reconnaissance operations over the Sea of Japan might elicit another violent response from a volatile North Korea, even though it had happened with the Russians many times before. In retrospect, what is difficult for me to understand is our senior military leadership’s apparent obliviousness to a situation calling for action. They sent us on these dangerous flights for good reason, yet fighter support apparently was never a consideration, regardless of place or situation. We also had KB-29/50 air refueling tankers based in Japan, and later KC-97 and KC-135 tankers became available, which easily could have supported fighter aircraft over the Sea of Japan when reconnaissance aircraft, or a ship such as the USS Pueblo, approached vulnerable areas. There were many options available—none were exercised, which, as a senior air force officer, I find not only inexplicable but frankly irresponsible.
The eighty-two survivors of a crew of eighty-three of the USS Pueblo, led into captivity by its skipper, Lieutenant Commander Lloyd Bucher. After an apology by the US government on December 22, 1968, insisted on by the North Koreans even though the ship was in international waters, the crew was released.
As if the attack on an RB-47 in 1965, and the subsequent attack on the USS Pueblo in 1968, didn’t provide sufficient warning for our senior commanders to adjust the way we conducted reconnaissance off North Korea, or in the Sea of Japan area as a whole, a bitter lesson was yet to come. Just a little over a year after the Pueblo capture, on April 15, 1969, a US Navy EC-121 electronic reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by North Korean fighters over the Sea of Japan. All thirty of the crew perished. That should never have happened after what had come before.
As for the Russians, shootdowns diminished drastically after the downing of Powers’s U-2 on May 1, 1960, and the Khrushchev/Eisenhower confrontation at the Paris summit, which terminated the U-2 overflights of the Soviet Union. Khrushchev had played a masterful hand at the Paris summit, greatly embarrassing the president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Recalled General Andrew J. Goodpaster at the Early Cold War Overflights Symposium in 2001, “I have to tell you that the handling of that critical international situation—and it was critical—was about as clumsy in my opinion as anything our government has ever done. I can say that because I had a hand in that clumsiness. We had absolutely failed to consider the many ‘what-ifs’ of the U-2 overflights in a thorough, realistic, and searching manner. The shootdown was a lesson that was burned into us by the way we mishandled it. In any case, the shootdown ended all aerial overflights of the Soviet Union…. It just so happened, however, our ‘blindness’ was temporary. Four months later, in August, the Corona project, the nation’s first photo reconnaissance satellite authorized by the president back in 1958, became operational. Corona satellites overflew and returned imagery of the Soviet Union in incredible volume, far more than was ever possible with the U-2. And that was accomplished in outer space without risking the lives of any pilots or aircrews.”
After embarrassing Eisenhower at the Paris conference, Khrushchev was going to play an even bigger hand, a heady gamble one might say, two years later confronting the United States with nuclear-armed IRBMs based in Cuba, less than a hundred miles offshore from the United States. In spite of the Corona satellite circling the earth, it took an RB-47H reconnaissance aircraft to find the missile-carrying ship in open ocean. This time, the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak, and to avoid a nuclear showdown Khrushchev ordered the ship to turn around. The Cuban Missile Crisis resolved itself not in Khrushchev’s favor, and he soon was put out to pasture.
An RC-135E, Lisa Anne, of the 4157th Reconnaissance Wing, flown by Brigadier General Regis Urschler. General Urschler spent his entire career flying, commanding, and directing reconnaissance units and operations. He flew every model of the RB-47 and RC-135, starting as a lieutenant in the 1950s, and years later ended up as commander of the 55th Reconnaissance Wing.
Left to right, Brigadier General Regis Urschler; Colonel Thomas Shepherd, RB-47 navigator; Colonel Wolfgang Samuel; and Hank Dubuy, copilot of RB-47 #4290, at the funeral of Colonel Bruce Olmstead at Arlington Cemetery in 2017, whose aircraft was shot down over the Barents Sea on July 1, 1960.
RF-100A serial number 31554, one of six Slick Chick aircraft produced.
Early Cold War U-2 recovering at Incirlik Air Base, Turkey.
Aggressive shootdowns continued over East Germany, taking down aircraft straying from the approved air corridors or experiencing navigational issues. None of which had anything to do with reconnaissance, nor did the shootdown of the South Korean airliner in 1983. That was to be the last, and the Soviet Union ceased to exist as an entity ten years later. Aerial reconnaissance was not an option for the United States in the early Cold War years, if it wanted to survive in a nuclear-armed world. It was a matter of life or death. Yet the implementation of our reconnaissance program, and the protection of the vulnerable aircraft, left much to be desired. For those who lost their lives serving our country, we, in the reconnaissance community, remember them as Silent Warriors as well as their Incredible Courage. Men and women of the fabled 55th Reconnaissance Wing, still based at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, continue to serve our nation in the many ongoing conflicts in our current world. The fabled U-2 reconnaissance plane, renamed TR-1, then back to its original name, still flies dangerous skies to help record and decipher the intentions of the newest crop of world tyrants. I cannot imagine their services not being needed in future years.
NOTES
1. Matthew B. Ridgeway, Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgeway (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 141–46.
2. R. Cargill Hall, ed., Early Cold War Overflights Symposium Proceedings, vol. 1, Memoirs (Washington, DC: Office of the Historian, National Reconnaissance Office, 2003), 45–46.
3. George C. Marshall, “General Marshall’s Victory Report: Biennial Report of the Chief of Staff of the United States of Army, 1943 to 1945, to the Secretary of War,” War Department of the United St
ates of America, Washington, DC, September 1, 1945, 6.
4. Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, Glory Days: The Untold Story of the Men Who Flew the B-66 Destroyer into the Face of Fear (Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2008), 15.
5. Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, I Always Wanted to Fly: America’s Gold War Airmen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 181–82.
6. Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffe’s Secrets (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 429.
7. Martin E. James, Historical Highlights: United States Air Forces in Europe, 1945–1979 (New York: Headquarters USAFE, Office of History, 1980), 3–7.
8. Theodore von Karman, “Toward New Horizons: Science, the Key to Air Supremacy; A Report to General of the Army H. H. Arnold” (Washington, DC: Headquarters Army Air Force, 1945), iii–vii.
9. Vannevar Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949), 85.
10. Kenneth Chilstrom and Penn Leary, eds. Test Flying at Old Wright Field (Omaha, NE: Westchester House, 1993), 82.
11. Chilstrom and Leary, Test Flying, 92–93.
12. Samuel, American Raiders, 257.
13. Samuel, American Raiders, 147.
14. Samuel, American Raiders, 152.
15. Samuel, American Raiders, 154.
16. James, Historical Highlights, 11.
17. Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 411.
18. John T. Bohn, The Development of Strategic Air Command, 1946–1976 (Omaha, NE: Office of the Historian, Headquarters Strategic Air Command, 1976), 9.
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