I Always Wanted to Fly

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  “After we were hit in the left wing and fuselage,” recalled Carl Holt, “one MiG tried to ram us by sideslipping his fighter into our aircraft. On one ramming pass, he stalled out right under our aircraft, and our vertical camera took one of the first close-up pictures of the new MiG-17.”

  “By then we had covered our last photo target,” Austin continued, “and turned due west toward Finland to get the hell out of there. The six MiGs which dogged us since Arkhangel’sk must have run short of fuel. They left. Six others appeared to take their place, two of whom initiated firing passes but didn’t hit anything. After those two made their unsuccessful passes, the third came up on our right side, close enough to shake hands, and sat there for two or three minutes. As we departed the area south of Helsinki, Finland, he gave us a salute and then turned back toward the Soviet Union.”

  “We proceeded to cross neutral Sweden, then Norway. Over the North Sea, we headed south-southwest, looking for our tanker,” Hal Austin recalled, but “our excitement for this mission was not over by any means. An airborne standby KC-97 tanker was holding for us about fifty miles from Stavanger, Norway. We really weren’t sure how the damage to our left wing and fuselage would affect fuel consumption. Initially, it didn’t look bad. As we came into UHF radio range of the tanker, I heard him calling in the blind on command-post common, the only frequency we had available on our radio. He came in garbled. His transmission was breaking up. We were running about thirty minutes behind schedule, and I heard the tanker pilot say that he was leaving his orbit at the scheduled time. I tried frantically to acknowledge his call, but when I later spoke to the tanker pilot he said he never heard me. Of course they had not been briefed about our mission, but they were aware that six RB-47s went through refueling areas that morning and that only five had returned. Usually they were smart enough to figure out the situation.

  Route of Austin’s May 8, 1954, overflight of the Soviet Union. The various points at which MiGs attempted to shoot him down are shown. The last attempt was over Finland. H. Austin.

  “As we coasted out of Norway, it was obvious we had fallen behind the fuel curve. I climbed to forty-three thousand feet and throttled back to maximum-range cruise. I thought we could get back to a base in England, not necessarily Fairford. We knew there was a tanker on strip alert at RAF Mildenhall awaiting our call. Carl Holt had spent much of the time since the last MiGs departed sitting in the aisle below me, acting as the intercom between me and the navigator. You don’t realize how handy the intercom is until you don’t have one. Holt was monitoring our fuel consumption and beginning to panic as we reached a point about 150 miles from the Wash. Carl wasn’t afraid for himself. He was worried about losing our film. He said to me, ‘All this effort was for nothing if we have to bail out of the airplane and have no film for Intelligence to process.’ He was right. At one hundred miles off the Wash, I started calling for the strip tanker from Mildenhall to launch. Jim Rigley, the tanker pilot, later said to me, ‘I heard a word or two of your transmission, enough to recognize your voice.’ He was one of our tanker guys from Lockbourne. We all knew each other. He attempted to get permission to launch. The tower wouldn’t give permission because the RAF had an emergency of some sort working at nearby RAF Brize Norton. Rigley announced that he was launching, and he did. When he returned to base, the local American commander, a colonel, threatened him with a courts-martial and British air-traffic control gave him a violation. Both situations were later fixed by General LeMay.

  “In all my nine years of flying up to that time, I was never more thrilled to see another airplane in the air than I was to see that beautiful KC-97 tanker. As soon as I saw Rigley’s airplane, I headed straight for him. We as a crew already decided to try to land at Brize Norton and were in the process of letting down when I spotted Rigley. At the same time, Holt looked at our gas gauges from the aisle below me and yelled, ‘We’re going to run out of gas.’ The gauges were analog gauges and usually moved a little if there was still fuel remaining in a tank. None of the gauges moved, and Holt was sure we were about to flame out. In the meantime, Rigley had his crew looking upward, searching for a glimpse of us. They caught a glint of what they thought was our airplane rapidly descending toward them. Rigley leveled off at three thousand feet, heading south, toward land. He was positioned perfectly to allow me to use an old RB-45 refueling maneuver. Since we had no way to slow that aircraft down other than pulling back on the throttles, we came up from behind the tanker, flew below him, and then got on his tail in a climbing turn. This bled off the airspeed in the RB-45. The old maneuver worked perfectly. When I pulled up behind the lumbering KC-97, its engines were giving all they could to keep us from stalling. The boomer skillfully flew his boom into our refueling receptacle.

  “ ‘Contact,’ Holt called out to me. ‘We are taking on fuel. All gauges show empty.’

  “Tell me when we have twelve thousand pounds, Carl.” “

  ‘Now,’ Holt called out at the top of his lungs, still sitting below me in the aisle.

  “I punched the boom loose, gave the boom operator a salute, and headed for Fairford. I got down to five hundred feet and buzzed the control tower. They gave us a green light to land. When we reached the ramp and brought the aircraft to a stop, the crew chief was the first up the ladder. He saw the damage we sustained. ‘What kind of seagull did you hit, Sir?’ he shouted at me. I smiled back at him. I couldn’t give him a straight answer. Colonel Preston met us at the aircraft. We jumped into his staff car, and he took us to our quarters, where we took a quick shower and changed into Class-A blues. Then he drove us to London and we met with the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain at his home. The ambassador greeted us cordially and offered us a drink. Then he whispered, ‘Let’s go outside. I think my house is bugged.’ The next morning my crew flew back to Lockbourne. I took another guy’s RB-47E to get back since mine obviously needed repairs. We arrived at Lockbourne in the afternoon, and the following morning we took a B-25 base flight aircraft and flew to Offutt—headquarters SAC at Omaha, Nebraska. The commander in chief himself, General LeMay, wanted to attend our mission debriefing. We met in a room in the old Douglas aircraft plant because the new SAC headquarters was still under construction. It was a three-hour meeting. The first question the general asked was, ‘How come they didn’t shoot you down?’

  “ ‘I guess they didn’t have the guts,’ was my answer to him. There was no doubt in my mind that the MiG-17 pilots could have shot us down if they had been willing to come right up our tailpipes. General LeMay responded, ‘There are probably several openings today in command positions there, since you were not shot down.’”

  Carl Holt also reflected on that occasion. “Having flown combat in World War II and later been recalled during the Korean War, I thought we were in a Cold War with Russia, not a hot one, since all the reconnaissance plane shootdowns had been kept secret. During our debriefing with General LeMay, I said to him innocently, ‘Sir, they were trying to shoot us down!’ Smoking his usual long cigar, the general paused, leaned back in his chair, and said, ‘What did you think they would do? Give you an ice cream cone?’ His aides smiled. I was serious. I didn’t smile.”

  Three months after the debriefing of crew S-51 at Offutt, General LeMay visited Lockbourne, where he was met by the wing commander. After the usual saluting back and forth, the general came right to the point of his visit. He wanted to meet with Captain Austin, Captain Holt, and Major Heavilin. When they arrived, he asked the wing commander to leave. General LeMay decorated each member of crew S-51 with two Distinguished Flying Crosses, in lieu of the Silver Star, for their reconnaissance flight over the Soviet Union. According to Austin, the general apologized, saying, “The award of the Silver Star had to be approved in Washington, which could cause two problems: first, they’d get the thing screwed up, and, second, I’d have to explain this mission to too damn many people who don’t need to know.” Hal asked if they could see their photography. The answer was “no.” But to the questio
n, “How did we do?” the general answered, “You got all targets.”

  Colonel Austin’s epic May 8, 1954, overflight of the Kola Peninsula accomplished at least two things. First and foremost, it assured the American military and political leadership that the Soviet Union had not massed its new jet bombers at potential staging bases on the Kola Peninsula. The second, although unintended, result was to again point out reconnaissance aircraft’s vulnerability to shootdown. The RB-47 could not fly high enough to escape the MiG-17’s cannon fire, and even more capable Soviet aircraft would soon follow. Alternative solutions had to be found. The higher-flying U-2 reconnaissance plane was an interim solution itself, and by 1960, technology caught up with it, too, when SAMs demonstrated that they could reach its sixty thousand–foot operating altitude. Earth-orbiting satellites, as well as the remarkable high-altitude Mach 3 SR-71, eventually provided the necessary solutions. But in 1954 it took the courage of men such as Hal Austin, Carl Holt, and Vance Heavilin to fly over the Soviet Union to provide the United States the critical information needed to defend itself.

  Hal Austin at his home in Riverside, California, holding the framed cutout from his RB-47E where the MiG-17 cannon shell impacted, December 1998. W. Samuel.

  Chapter 12

  Flying the Top of the World

  To this day, the SAC Thule missions remain one of the most incredible demonstrations of professional aviation skill ever seen in any military organization at any time.

  R. Cargill Hall, “The Truth about Overflights”

  We launched up to five tankers an hour before we took off, to be able to take the fuel off of at least three of them. One tanker usually developed engine problems and had to turn around before he got to the refueling area. . . . At the final refueling point, high over the polar ice cap, they could only give us ten thousand pounds each if they wanted to make it back to Thule themselves. . . . We loved our tanker buddies, who were always there when we needed them. They could only surmise what we were doing or where we were going, but they knew after flying ten hours or more we had covered five thousand nautical miles.

  Joe Gyulavics, RB-47H reconnaissance pilot

  The Cold War had some truly cold aspects to it, speaking from a climatological perspective. Waged from air bases near or above the Arctic Circle, the U.S. long-range reconnaissance war against the Soviet Union was essential to ensure national security. The two principal air bases from which the polar-region reconnaissance missions were flown were Eielson AFB near Fairbanks, Alaska, just below the Arctic Circle, and Thule Air Base, on Danish Greenland, at approximately seventy-eight degrees north latitude, on Baffin Bay. Both man and machine were put to severe tests in winter. Flyers and maintenance men who served in these inhospitable climes never forgot the conditions under which they had to get aircraft ready to fly, especially at Thule. Cold froze the inside of the nose when anyone stepped out of a vehicle or a building. Vehicle tires shattered like glass. Static electricity dogged nearly every move made in the dry Arctic air.

  In temperatures below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, the simplest function became difficult to execute. Closing a valve or opening a hatch, operations that under normal conditions required little thought, became difficult to perform and were carefully planned. Aircraft landing at Thule could close the airfield with ice fog for hours or even days at a time. To maintain aircraft in such a hostile environment and to fly them routinely were challenges that required skill, perseverance, and a little bit of luck. Cabin fever, combined with deep boredom, became another enemy. Given enough time and the right circumstances, such conditions could drive a man to the edge of his sanity.

  At Thule the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing maintained Operating Location 5 (OL-5) in support of its RB-47H electronic-reconnaissance flights. On occasion, RB-47E photo-reconnaissance aircraft from Lockbourne also operated from Thule. A comparable setup existed at Eielson AFB in Alaska, where the 55th SRW maintained OL-3. From these two locations, the 55th SRW launched year-round electronic-reconnaissance flights. Life in the remote and hostile Arctic world was controlled by the environment. Each building at Thule was built like a cold-storage vault, with large icehouse-type doors and triple foot-thick walls perched on three-foot-high pillars. Many buildings had their own water supply, delivered by truck and pumped into freshwater tanks. Water used for washing was drained into an intermediate tank and then reused to flush toilets. The final waste was eventually pumped into a truck and shipped out. In the spring, snow and ice melted, including mounds of frozen human waste from truck spills and water that had accumulated as a result of the constant drip, drip, drip from access pipes. The ensuing putrid smell often pervaded the entire air base. Colonel Joe Gyulavics, an RB-47H pilot who flew out of Thule on several occasions, put it this way: “It was pretty gruesome living.”

  Water was a precious commodity and was used sparingly when the winds were blowing. It wasn’t that water was scarce; to the contrary, there was plenty available from a nearby freshwater lake. The problem was delivery. Water was delivered by truck. When the winds were blowing or when the base was closed by ice fog, the trucks could not operate, and each building had to make do with what water was available in its tanks. Showers were short. None of the luxuries of the lower forty-eight states applied at Thule. Going to the toilet was frequently a dreaded undertaking. Manual flap-valve pumps were used to pump waste water into the toilet. The user then had to manually pump the waste into a tank. This required frequent opening and closing of valves, and the pumps frequently backfired and splattered waste onto the individual. The only flush urinal on Thule was in the Officers’ Club, which didn’t open until three o’clock in the afternoon. Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Bailey, a 55th Wing Raven who flew out of Thule, recalled, “We sat around with our legs crossed, miserable, in pain, and unable to stand straight when the time came, waiting for the club to open.”

  Another Thule phenomenon was the suddenly arising winds, referred to as “phases.” The intensity of the Arctic winds was defined in terms of their velocity—phase I, II, III, and IV. Phase IV winds were the most dangerous, threatening human life and requiring outdoor activity to come to an immediate halt. Phase II and III winds closed down flying operations, and Phase I winds resulted in a warning to air crews attempting to land at Thule. In actuality, any phase usually resulted in the closing of the base and outdoor activity coming to a halt. It wasn’t just the winds that closed the base but also the accompanying loss of visibility due to blowing snow and the danger of freezing to death. The transition from lower to higher, more dangerous wind velocities could occur quickly. An effective warning system was devised by using the base radio station, KOLD, which operated twenty-four hours a day. Everyone working outdoors carried a small portable radio to receive warnings. Phase wind warnings and freeze notices were announced on KOLD. Warnings such as “Flesh will begin to freeze in forty-five seconds,” were common. Warnings considered not only the outside air temperature but also the windchill factor. In anticipation of the sudden occurrence of a phase, every building was stocked with water and emergency food. Once a phase hit, it was nearly impossible to go anywhere.

  The final hazard at northern locations was psychological. The dark season played with a man’s mind. At seventy-seven degrees north latitude, darkness was a significant factor. “Some people,” noted Colonel Charles Phillips, “suffered severe psychological problems during the November-February period. On the shortest day of the year, December 21–22, if the weather was clear, I could see a glimmer of light to the south for a few minutes at noon. Otherwise it was dark around the clock.” Colonel Gyulavics recalled, “We had slot machines in the Officers’ Club which could keep people busy for hours. And there were free movies every night. But it got to where we didn’t even bother to go to see a movie anymore. We adapted as best we could. A few came close to the edge, but I am not aware of anyone actually breaking under the stress of living at Thule.”

  Thule-based reconnaissance flights over the Soviet Union were lo
ng and required tanker support. “At times, we took off from Thule and recovered at Eielson. A few days later we would fly a mission in reverse and recover at Thule,” Joe Gyulavics recalled. “Long means that the flights were over nine hours in duration. Over nine hours meant that the air crew had to sit in their ejection seats for that entire period of time. Into the early ’60s tanker support was provided to the RB-47s by KC-97 aircraft. For a reconnaissance mission flying over the polar ice cap to reach its targets in the Laptev and Kara Seas usually required the support of several KC-97s. Refueling was critical. We launched up to five tankers an hour before we took off, to be able to take the fuel off of at least three of them. One tanker usually developed engine problems and had to turn around before he got to the refueling area. Sometimes two wouldn’t make it. I worked out light signals with the tanker crews, since we never used our radios on these flights, so if I met one or two of them heading back prematurely, I would get behind them and take whatever fuel they could off-load. At the final refueling point, high over the polar ice cap, they could only give us ten thousand pounds each if they wanted to make it back to Thule themselves. On the return leg, we didn’t refuel, so we had to have enough fuel to make it back on our own. To rely on a refueling was too risky because of possible high winds or unexpected ice fogs. We loved our tanker buddies, who were always there when we needed them. They could only surmise what we were doing or where we were going, but they knew that after flying ten hours or more we had covered five thousand nautical miles.”

  In 1956 Project Homerun was flown out of Thule between March 21 and May 10. The operation was top secret, and not even the participating air crews were fully aware of its scope. During that period, sixteen RB-47E photo-reconnaissance aircraft from the 10th SRW at Lockbourne teamed with four RB-47H electronic-reconnaissance aircraft from the 55th SRW at Forbes to photograph and electronically record the entire north polar region well into the Siberian interior. The region from the Kola Peninsula across the Kara and Laptev Seas to the Bering Strait was the target area. Two squadrons of KC-97 tankers provided the necessary air-refueling support. The air crews lived under Arctic conditions aggravated by the number of men stationed there. They flew from a snow- and ice-covered ten thousand–foot runway barely discernible from the surrounding fields of ice and snow. All missions were flown in absolute radio silence.