Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage
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The Truman Doctrine was enunciated as a direct response to Russian pressure on Greece and Turkey. And what eventually became known as the Marshall Plan was set in motion in June 1947, when Secretary of State George Marshall outlined a European recovery plan in a speech at Harvard University. In the meantime, USAFE, in support of the president’s commitment to Greece and Turkey, flew AT-6 and C-47 aircraft to Greece; and President Truman and the Congress authorized $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey. Greece did not turn Communist. However, the Soviet Union kept pushing in other vulnerable places, and in February 1948, in a communist-orchestrated coup, Czechoslovakia was added to the growing list of Soviet satellites. Berlin was to be next, or such was the Russian plan.
On June 1, 1948, Russian troops stopped rail traffic between Berlin and the West for two days. On June 12, they closed a highway bridge “for repairs,” and on June 24 the Soviet Union imposed a full blockade of Berlin. There was no doubt now that this event was the beginning of a long-term and dangerous confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union. The former World War II ally, who unlike the West had largely maintained its troop levels beyond what was reasonable for national defense, was now using its military advantage to exploit Western military weakness. The options for the Western Allies were indeed limited. Recalled then Lieutenant General Curtis E. LeMay, the Commander in Chief, CinC, of the United States Air Forces in Europe, USAFE: “When they clamped down on all surface traffic and transportation, we in the occupation needed suddenly to consider something beyond the demolition and housekeeping duties which had concerned us during previous months. It looked like we might have to fight at any moment, and we weren’t self-assured about what we had to fight with…. At a cursory glance it looked like USAFE would be stupid to get mixed up in anything bigger than a cat-fight at a pet show. We had one fighter group and some transports, and some radar people, and that was about the story.”17
In fact, in June 1948 General LeMay’s fighter group consisted of ninety aging P-47s. The Allied option to go to war over Berlin in reality was not an option at all, although discussed by some. What was agreed to between American and British military officers, and supported by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and President Truman, was to attempt to supply the city of Berlin by air. An audacious undertaking—never successfully done before, and by many detractors deemed a failure in the making. That August, the 36th Fighter Bomber Wing activated at Neubiberg Air Base with a complement of seventy-five F-80 jet fighters, and SAC moved two B-29 groups to bases in England. These aircraft had not had the Silverplate modification and were not nuclear capable, a fact not known to the Russians. The Berlin airlift proved to have been the right choice and was a stunning success. It also served to bring together America and its allies, forming in August 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO. Peace, however, was not in the cards for America without the military strength that a farsighted General George C. Marshall had called for in his 1945 “Victory Report to the Secretary of War”: “Weakness presents too great a temptation to the strong, particularly to the bully who schemes for wealth and power.” Joseph Stalin had just proven this point.
A B-29 of the 28th Bomb Group on final approach to Giebelstadt Air Base in the American Zone of Germany, 1946.
By 1949, America’s senior military and political leaders no longer had any doubt that the Soviet Union represented a major threat to the United States and our allies. To make matters worse, that September a US reconnaissance plane off the Kamchatka Peninsula picked up signs of aerial radioactivity. The Russians had exploded an atomic device, and the United States could reasonably assume to be threatened by atom-bomb-carrying Russian aircraft. In Asia, developments were equally ominous. Chinese Communist forces appeared on the verge of completing their conquest of mainland China. Although the United States responded to these concerns and had created NATO as a defensive alliance to thwart further Russian expansion in Europe, American military strength had not grown commensurate with the threat in either Europe or Asia. Granted, the air force was reorganizing the Strategic Air Command under the driving leadership of General Curtis E. LeMay, but even LeMay had to make do with aging B-29 bombers. The air force of the future was evolving very slowly. At a time of military weakness and political uncertainty, the United States needed accurate and verifiable information about the military and nuclear posture of the Soviet Union and its satellites. While a foreigner could easily travel throughout the United States to view military installations and purchase any number of publications regarding the location, strengths, and weaknesses of the US Army, Navy, and Air Force, no equivalent access was available in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union remained a closed society. The only practical option at the time, other than human intelligence, with its many shortcomings, was aerial reconnaissance.
US Air Force C-54 aircraft at RAF Fassberg, Germany, in 1949, flying coal to the city of Berlin. Nearby Celle Air Base C-54S also flew coal to Berlin; food flights were principally flown out of Rhein-Main and nearby Wiesbaden Air Bases, near Frankfurt.
The Strategic Air Command, created in 1946, wasn’t going anywhere under the leadership of General George C. Kenney, with a rather motley group of dated aircraft assigned. As far as reconnaissance was concerned, the command in 1946 had some F-2s, Beech C-45s assigned (F during this period stood for photo; P stood for pursuit or fighter—all that changed in September 1947 when the United States Air Force became an independent service), and a squadron of F-13s/RB-29s. By 1947, a second reconnaissance group, the 55th, was added, equipped with F-9s/RB-17s and F-2s, all of which were photo reconnaissance aircraft. No significant reconnaissance operations were flown, other than the mapping of Greenland and surveying an Iceland-to-Alaska air route.18 SAC, in general, was a collection of dated aircraft, and its crews were poorly trained. That was to change dramatically with the assignment of Lieutenant General Curtis E. LeMay on October 19, 1948. The Berlin airlift was just beginning when LeMay left USAFE and assumed command of SAC. He took over a mixed bag of crews and aircraft who, in his opinion, were totally incompetent to execute their assigned mission, that is: to conduct long-range offensive operations worldwide, and to conduct maximum-range reconnaissance over land and water.19 Soon after his arrival, he ran a maximum simulated bombing effort against Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, with the small force of B-29 aircraft then at his disposal. He wanted to see how bad it really was. “Our crews were not accustomed to flying at altitude,” he wrote in his biography. “Neither were the airplanes. Most of the pressurization wouldn’t work, and the oxygen wouldn’t work. Nobody seemed to know what life was like upstairs [above 15,000 feet]…. Not one airplane finished that mission as briefed. Not one.” Not only that, but during an inspection of a SAC mess, LeMay found low quality even there.”20 By the time LeMay relinquished command, in 1957, to his personally trained and chosen successor, General Thomas S. Power, SAC was as deadly as a cat at a mousehole, an air force within an air force, an envy of those not part of it, and an intimidating presence to the Soviet Union and its aging leaders.
Photo and electronic reconnaissance, the latter initially at a fairly rudimentary level, received increased interest with the start of the Berlin airlift—and certainly after the Russians became an atomic power in 1949. The playing field had changed, and the Soviet Union was no longer a hermit kingdom but a power that potentially could threaten the very existence of the United States. Both the US Air Force and the US Navy began flying peripheral reconnaissance missions against the Soviet Union and Communist China. For the Strategic Air Command to be effective, it had to know what the opposition’s combat capability was, where it was located, how it trained—anything and everything that defined the potential enemy was of interest. There was very little reliable intelligence on hand, and so began the peripheral reconnaissance effort by the US Air Force and Navy. These border flights, of which I personally flew over one hundred in RB-47H electronic reconnaissance aircraft in later years, were referred to as PAR
PRO missions—Peacetime Aerial Reconnaissance Program. Such missions were flown under serious restrictions prohibiting overflights of Russian territory, although actual navigation errors did occur under difficult meteorological conditions, remembering that navigation aids for this sort of activity were nonexistent. Even the best navigator at times had to fall back on the most rudimentary form of navigation—dead reckoning. In today’s sophisticated electronic environment, with satellites positioned around the globe providing GPS directions to anyone able to buy a simple smartphone, it is difficult to imagine the rudimentary means then available to our aviators. PARPRO missions collected photographic and electronic intelligence to determine the location of Russian and Chinese forces and to assess their equipment’s capabilities to the degree possible. Other missions specialized, as the Cold War progressed, on monitoring communications—verbal and electronic—along with nuclear tests and missile shots. Anything done by our adversary was monitored in one way or another. Ground stations, from Norway down to Turkey, provided a twenty-four-hour means of keeping tabs on our Russian “friends,” but in many ways the reach of such stations was limited by geography. The airplane provided the high ground to look really deep into our adversary’s backyard.
Cargill Hall, former chief historian at the National Reconnaissance Office, described the situation as it existed in the early years in an article for Military History Quarterly: “PARPRO missions collected electronic and photographic intelligence, but their intelligence coverage was limited to peripheral regions. Before long, commanders of the United States Air Force … sought permission to conduct direct Overflights of Soviet territory, especially those regions closest to Alaska. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, JCS, however, after consulting with the director of Central Intelligence, CIA, and the secretaries of defense and state, consistently denied these requests. Indeed, in 1948 … the Department of State restricted PARPRO missions approaching Soviet borders to standoff distances of no closer than forty miles. Overflights remained out of the question. In receipt of one request for such a mission from SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, in October 1950, the USAF director of intelligence, Major General Charles P. Cabell, replied that he would have to recommend against it. But, Cabell added, ‘I am looking forward to a day when it becomes either more essential or less objectionable.’”21 That day was close at hand.
On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the thirty-eighth parallel. In three major columns, with one headed for the South Korean capital, Seoul, they advanced rapidly with the aim of uniting Korea under the Communist banner. “The outbreak of that war came to me as a complete surprise, as it did to all our military men—from Seoul to Washington,” wrote General Matthew B. Ridgeway in his memoir. The first military surprise had come at Pearl Harbor, less than ten years earlier—here we were again, SURPRISED by a military attack. Ridgeway continued: “Under the policy of retrenchment forced upon us by Secretary [of Defense] Louis Johnson, we had reduced the infantry battalions in the regiments from three to two. The firing batteries in the artillery battalions had been reduced from three to two. All of the medium tanks had been taken out of both the infantry regiments and the divisions, and placed in storage—partly because they were not needed in police duty, but mainly because, when we ran them on the roads of Japan, they broke the bridges down. We were, in short, in a state of shameful unreadiness when the Korean War broke out, and there was absolutely no excuse for it…. The state of our Army in Japan at the outbreak of the Korean War was inexcusable.”22
The RAF Special Duty Flight in front of an anglicized RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft at RAF Sculthorpe, England. Colonel Marion “Hack” Mixson, the senior USAF coordinator for the planned overflights project, is standing number six from the right. Squadron Leader Crampton, the RAF senior project officer, is standing to his left.
By December 1950, with the American army now positioned in North Korea, and with the possibility of a Soviet attack in western Europe a distinct possibility, President Truman approved the concept of selected overflights of the Soviet Union. In other words, overflights of “denied” territory in peacetime became national policy, a policy driven by the ongoing war in Korea, which at the time was defined as a “police action,” not really a war. President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954 formalized the effort and its continuation by establishing the super-secret SENSINT (Sensitive Intelligence) program. Every overflight mission required approval at the presidential level.
In December 1950, after the Chinese Communists entered the Korean War, meetings took place between President Truman and senior British political leaders—Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin—and an agreement emerged to plan for and, possibly, jointly execute overflights of the western Soviet Union. In the spring of 1951, the Royal Air Force, RAF, formed a highly secret “Special Duty Flight” of three aircrews to fly American RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft over the western Soviet Union. All flights were to be night missions with the objective of obtaining radar photography of potential targets. Additionally, three RB-45C aircraft were deployed to Yokota Air Base near Tokyo to fly photographic reconnaissance against targets in North Korea, Communist China, and Soviet territory adjacent to the Sea of Japan. And, of course, PARPRO missions were flown in both Europe and the Pacific region using older and more vulnerable RB-29 and RB-50 aircraft assigned to the Strategic Air Command.
The Russians responded quickly to the increased level of American reconnaissance flights, shooting down an older PB4Y-2 US Navy reconnaissance aircraft over the Baltic Sea, flying over international waters near Latvia, with the loss of ten lives. The Cold War between the West and the Soviets had gone beyond rhetoric—and no one knew how it would end.
MORE SECRET THAN THE MANHATTAN PROJECT (1952)
Even though the story leaked out of the woodwork two or three years ago, I still find it strange to talk and write about it. While it was happening it rivaled the Manhattan Project for secrecy. In fact, I think, it outranked the Manhattan Project.
—Squadron Leader John Crampton, Royal Air Force, in a letter to the Museum of the US Air Force
“I flew about thirty-five combat missions. Some missions counted double, giving me a total of fifty. Every week or so we would go up to Ploesti. Ploesti was always bad—they had a lot of flak there. Munich was bad, as was anything around Vienna. The Germans often put up a spotter plane to give their antiaircraft guns our altitude. That was World War II for me. Late in 1946 I returned home to Charleston [South Carolina] and was discharged from the Army Air Forces with the rank of lieutenant colonel. I was twenty-eight. In 1948 I got a message from the air force offering me a regular commission, giving me twenty-four hours to accept or decline. I accepted. I was assigned to the 343rd Squadron of the 55th Reconnaissance Group at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida. They were flying B-17s, C-45s, and C-47s equipped for aerial photography—a mapping outfit. Within weeks we transferred to Topeka, Kansas, and then in October 1949 the 55th Group disbanded. I was transferred to the 91st Reconnaissance Group at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. In December the 91st transitioned to the RB-45C, a four-jet reconnaissance aircraft, and I was given command of the 323rd Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron.” That is how Marion “Hack” Mixson, the former B-24 bomber pilot, got into the reconnaissance business—where he would remain for the rest of his air force career, flying and directing the employment of RB-45, RB-47, and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft.
With the impetus of the Korean War, British prime minister Clement Attlee and US president Harry Truman reached an agreement for a combined reconnaissance program for flights over the western Soviet Union—a former ally with a seemingly voracious appetite for further territorial acquisitions. The only aircraft able to implement such a program was the RB-45C Tornado, the first four-engine jet of the newly created US Air Force. It, later joined by the RB-47 six-engine jet, would replace the much slower and more vulnerable RB-29, RB-50, and RB-36 reconnaissance aircraft. The RB-45C had a gross weight of around 111,000 pou
nds. Unlike the A-model bombers, the C-model was air-refuelable and in addition could carry 1,200-gallon wingtip fuel tanks. The range of the RB-45C was only limited by the endurance of its crew and the availability of aerial refueling tankers. The aircraft was powered by early-model J-47 General Electric engines with around 4,000 pounds of thrust each. By injecting a water/alcohol mixture on takeoff, engine power was increased by close to an additional 1,000 pounds of thrust per engine. The result was a very dirty engine that, after takeoff, left the runway shrouded in a black cloud of exhaust fumes. The J-47 engine, however, was the engine of choice at the time and powered the F-86 fighter as well as the B-47 bomber, still in development and undergoing testing. Colonel Howard S. Myers, who flew the RB-45C out of Yokota Air Base during the Korean War years, described it as “very nimble on the controls, much like a modern two-seat fighter. It had excellent visibility from its large canopy which, incidentally, could not be opened for ground operations. Both pilots had ejection seats; however, the navigator egressed through the left side entrance hatch which had spoiler deflectors just forward of the door.23