Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  “That was my only overflight mission. I stayed on until June 1955, when I was transferred to Moses Lake, Washington, flying SAC RF-84Fs for two years. I kept my eyes open for something better, and two years later, in 1957, I joined the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Laughlin Air Force Base, Del Rio, Texas. I flew U-2s with the 4080th for six years. The base was a good choice for our operation—it had two parallel runways and a minimal amount of nonmilitary air traffic. I checked out in the U-2 in July 1957 and flew it altogether for 1,040 hours. While at Laughlin we got some Cessna 310s, which we used as chase planes when checking out new pilots. We lost a couple of airplanes and pilots because they attempted to make too steep a turn from the base leg to final approach. If you made too steep a turn, because of wet wings, you would get a heavy wing and you just couldn’t lift it up again. So we gave our new pilots a flight in the 310 and showed them the preferred ground track they should follow so they wouldn’t get themselves in a box turning on final. The U-2 wasn’t all that strange an aircraft—it had more lift, more power, less maneuverability, and more endurance than anything I had flown before. It was a good, straightforward airplane with a number of limitations, though, which, if ignored, would kill you. For instance, the older Pratt and Whitney J-57-P-37 engine, which we flew initially, would flame out for no apparent reason other than the engine tolerances were less than that demanded at high altitude. Sometime you would go for several weeks without a flameout, and then have a couple on one flight. The most difficult part of flying the U-2 was to make a good landing. It was a tail-dragger, and in order to make a decent landing I had to come across the threshold at three to five feet and ten knots above the stall speed. The threshold speed varied according to the amount of fuel carried.” Like the B-47, the U-2 had a tandem main gear and outriggers to keep the wings from dragging on takeoff, called Pogos. The outriggers dropped off upon takeoff for the U-2, and retracted for the B-47. Landing on the front main gear, “you get a bounce, from which you may never recover, because you will always be 180 degrees out of synchronization.

  “I flew a couple of reconnaissance missions while I was in SAC. They were called SFERICS, using weather reconnaissance as a cover story. We did air sampling on ‘sniffer’ missions out of a number of places, but the SFERICS missions were focused on picking up Russian radars. We flew about twenty to thirty miles off the coast of Siberia, in a straight line. That’s a very dark place in the middle of the night in the far north in October.”

  Lieutenant Colonel James A. Black retired from the United States Air Force after a challenging reconnaissance career. He flew the RF-80, RF-84, RF-86A, RF-86F, and the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, and was present for the Early Cold War Overflights Symposium held in February 2001 at Headquarters Defense Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC. Colonel Black’s overflight recollections were made in September 1999 with R. Cargill Hall as part of the Oral History Program at the National Reconnaissance Office, Chantilly, Virginia.

  THE LAST HURRAH OF THE “WILD BUNCH” (1954–1955)

  I found that on every dive from 55,000 feet the airplane would pitch up at about Mach 0.95. The heavy buffeting at Mach 0.92 did not surprise me, but with even both hands on the control stick pushing forward I could not get the airplane to stay in a dive. The defector pilot told me that the MiG-15 had a tendency to spin out of accelerated, even one-G stalls, and often it did not recover from the spin. I did the stall tests of both one-G and accelerated stalls. The airplane gave virtually no stall warning and it demonstrated a nasty characteristic of snap-rolling from accelerated stalls.

  —Major General “Tom” Collins, in Kenneth Chilstrom and Penn Leary, Test Flying at Old Wright Field

  “I was assigned as an instructor at the US Military Academy at West Point,” recalled Colonel Robert E. Morrison while participating in the Early Cold War Overflights Symposium in 2001. “When the Korean War broke out, I went to Personnel to request a flying assignment in Korea. They said I was too old for fighters, but would be happy to put me into night fighters or reconnaissance. I wanted no part of night fighters and accepted a reconnaissance assignment. I attended the usual courses—instrument school, reconnaissance school, survival training, and finally transition training into the F-86 at Nellis Air Force Base. After all this was done, in December 1954, off I went to South Korea to take over as commander of the 15th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron. By the time I got there, of course, the war was over for all practical purposes. I arrived at the squadron at Kimpo Air Base, just as it was moving to Komaki, near Nagoya, Japan. I quickly learned that I was to be involved in a secret program. What program? We’ll tell you when the time comes. I quickly realized that I had inherited this Mad Generation of motorcycle-riding aviators who were involved in this secret program that I still didn’t know anything about.

  “My pilots were the Mad Generation, not the X Generation or anything else, but the Mad Generation. Their bible was Mad magazine. ‘What, me worry?’ That was their mantra. They were the absolute wildest bunch of people I’ve ever seen, but they also were excellent pilots—and being their commander was the best job I ever had in my life. I assumed command of the squadron at Komaki Air Base in late March 1954, just as LaVerne Griffin and his associates were tasked to fly a set of three missions over Vladivostok. One of the pilots was Jerry Depew, who later flew a couple of missions with me as my wingman. At the time we were undergoing a modification on our aircraft, changing our radios from VHF—Victor How Fox—to UHF—Uncle How Fox. One day, Jerry got into his speedy little RF-80 Shooting Star and headed for Yokota Air Base. He called in and requested Approach Control. The controller replied, ‘Roger Rat-Race Three Two, do you have Uncle How Fox onboard?’ Without hesitation Jerry replied to the controller, ‘Wait until I check my manifest.’ Everybody on the air who overheard this conversation just broke up.

  “After George Saylor and LaVerne Griffin, our operations officer, were reassigned, I chose Lieutenant Bill McLaren as my squadron operations officer. I liked the way Bill worked with people, and he had a little more flying time than others, but he was just still a first lieutenant. I inherited a recently arrived captain who thought he should be the operations officer. I flew with him once and afterward told him, ‘You are not going to fly again unless you have an instructor pilot with you.’ He was that bad a flyer. The group commander didn’t like my decision, and before you knew it he had me on the phone. ‘I want that captain as your operations officer.’ At that very moment I heard a loud BOOM out on the flight line. I put down the phone and raced out to the flight line. The captain in question, who was preparing for a flight, had just raised the ejection seat handle and blown himself out of the airplane. I returned to the office and picked up the phone. The group commander was still there and I said to him, ‘Sir, if you don’t mind, I am going to keep Bill McLaren as my operations officer. The captain just blew himself out of an airplane and I think he is AOCP—Out of Commission for Parts—for a while.

  “Between March 1954 and February 1955, the 15th TRS flew a total of nine missions over Communist China and the Soviet Union. One disadvantage of running an organization like the 15th TRS was that nobody could talk about the unit or what it was doing. I reported to two different commanders. FEAF gave the overflight orders. I also reported to a group commander and a wing commander who commanded the 67th TRW, which we were a part of. Neither of them knew what we were doing. They were not cleared. Soon after my arrival, I was summoned to Headquarters FEAF by Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis. There, I was briefed by him on the overflight mission in the presence of Lieutenant General Earl E. Partridge, the FEAF commander. They were the people who provided the overflight instructions. Needless to say, I had trouble always meeting orders for airplanes for conventional reconnaissance missions laid on by my wing commander, who was not informed. While receiving letters of commendation from General Partridge, I also garnered three of my worst fitness reports of my entire career as an air force officer from my wing commander—who knew nothing about o
ur secret overflights. Except for the Vladivostok missions, we were always briefed in Tokyo at Headquarters FEAF. Every mission was flown in complete radio silence. Our first two missions were flown over Sakhalin Island. On one of those missions, I recall, we were just nonchalantly flying along, when we encountered some MiG fighters at the same altitude as ours, coming directly at us. We saw each other almost simultaneously, as we flew through each other’s formation. They were just as surprised as we were. After that we overflew Port Arthur. I flew as Bill Bissett’s wingman for that mission, and he flew as my wingman on the next. I am sure we got some good pictures on the first flight, because they sent us back a second time to get even more. Later I participated in an overflight of Shanghai on November 20, 1954. The squadron flew another Shanghai mission in early 1955. For these flights we staged out of Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, overflew Shanghai, and returned to Yokota after first refueling at Kadena.

  Colonel Robert E. Morrison’s overflight route of Khabarovsk in February 1955.

  “One morning at Kadena there was a horrible fog, really very bad. We were checking out our airplanes on the runway when all of a sudden there was this deafening chuk—chuk—chuk noise. We looked up and there was a helicopter right overhead, barely visible in the fog. Bill McLaren, who was with me at the time, looked in the helicopter’s direction and said in a normal voice, pointing in the direction of Base Operations, ‘Base Ops is that way.’ And the helicopter goes chuk—chuk—chuk and flies in that direction to the Base Ops hut. We had quite a laugh.

  “Our last run during my tenure was to Khabarovsk, three and a half hours flying time, round trip, from Chitose Air Base on Hokkaido. My wingman had to abort because he had some mechanical issues to deal with as we were coasting in. I called, as I was supposed to in the event of an abort, and said, ‘Red leader going in.’ At the time I had red hair, thus the nickname ‘Red.’ I didn’t receive a recall message, so I just kept on going. The weather was bad and I was in the clouds. I was over the Amur River with no target in sight. I had, however, a radio compass, Bird Dog, and I homed in on the local radio station, turned right, and headed for Khabarovsk. The standard procedure at the time was to punch off our 200-gallon tanks when we emptied them, and that is what I did. I kept on climbing to my mission altitude to about 48,000 feet. As I approached Khabarovsk, the 120-gallon tanks ran dry and I tried to punch them off. Only one of them dropped. I kept right on doing what I was supposed to—take pictures, roll to the right to take a look, roll to the left, then level out and take pictures. On the second roll, the 120-gallon tank that had hung up dropped right over Khabarovsk. When I got back, General Partridge asked me about the hung tank and dropping it over Khabarovsk. I told him that it probably was a maintenance issue. We didn’t have any hangars for maintenance indoors. My troops lived in tents and had to perform all of their maintenance outdoors. Within two weeks, we had Butler hangars, brought in from Yokota.”

  In 1955, Colonel Morrison was reassigned to the United States and the 15th TRS transferred to Yokota Air Base, the location of the 67th TRW, and flew additional overflights in 1956. “In retrospect,” notes Colonel Morrison, “we were a special group.”

  Major General Roger K. Rhodarmer, when serving as a young captain on the Air Staff in the Pentagon, was right in the middle of the overflight business as a “legman,” the low-ranking guy who passed on messages, relayed orders, and made sure everything was working smoothly. Dropping a wing tank over Khabarovsk guaranteed a diplomatic protest. Recalls Rhodarmer, “Whenever an overflight was going, General [Frank Kendall] Everest [Jr.], US Air Force deputy chief of staff operations, wanted to know about it at the Pentagon, and quickly, because something might happen during the flight. If needed, he could send someone to advise the State Department guys because they were already being stomped on by the Soviet and Communist Chinese governments about overflights. The State Department man would brief Secretary of State [John Foster] Dulles. On one or two occasions we actually went into Dulles’s office. He was very straightforward about the protests and publicly preferred to wash them off as propaganda. But the information we provided made it easy for him to downplay any incident so it would not become a big international flap. Remember, the Soviets never really wanted their people to know that we were flying over their country without getting shot down. So there was a kind of mutual agreement not to publicize the overflights.

  “The most surprising thing about the overflights,” recalled General Rhodarmer at the Early Cold War Overflights Symposium, “was the Soviets’ ability to spot and track our aircraft at altitude. The RF-86s were flying at 50,000 feet. We listened in on the Soviet air defense network, so we had a feel for just how good they were. We sent up a C-47, or another aircraft, to loiter offshore with very sensitive electronic equipment to pick up when our guys’ overflights were first detected and tracked. When did the Soviet air defense system come up? What frequency were they on? On one mission, the aircraft offshore recalled a pilot because MiGs were already airborne and waiting for him.” That latter case involved an RB-45C over China, presented in an earlier section of this book. As for radar tracking? The Russians were very good at it, and their longrange search radars were excellent.

  THE SHORT-LIVED RB-57A “HEART THROB” PROGRAM (1955–1956)

  Captain Gerald E. LaVerne was flying an NRB-57D at 50,000 feet plus, in the winter of 1963 over Wright-Patterson AFB. LaVerne incurred an engine flameout. The resulting abrupt yaw flamed out the other. The wings and engines both parted from the airframe. He rode it down, on aircraft oxygen, until reaching a lower altitude before ejecting.

  —James E. Bauer, in Kenneth Chilstrom and Penn Leary, Test Flying at Old Wright Field

  While the RF-86 aircraft assigned to the 67th TRW were in the process of phasing out, and before the RB-66 replacements arrived at Yokota Air Base, in 1956, the RB-57A-1 made its appearance in 1955, albeit for an extremely short period of time. The program code name was “Heart Throb”—it’s anyone’s guess how someone picked such a warm and endearing name for a mission filled with anything but that. The B-57 aircraft, which was never given an American name, is a derivative of the British Canberra, which, receiving very high praise from air intelligence liaison officers at the American embassy in London, and on their recommendations, was promptly picked up by the Air Staff to satisfy an urgent need for a medium bomber and night-capable reconnaissance aircraft. The Martin Aircraft Company in Baltimore, Maryland, received an order for 404 aircraft of all types. The first flight of a production B-57 took place in 1953, days before the signing of the Korean armistice. The entire program was nearly killed by a string of spectacular accidents. The B-57 was not easy to fly. Prior to modification of its longitudinal control and stabilizer systems, the B-57 was uncontrollable if one of its two engines failed on takeoff or landing. By 1957, the end of the production run for the B/RB-57, 47 of a production total of 403 aircraft had been destroyed in accidents. The program was nearly canceled in 1955 because of engine compressor stalls and structural problems. Cooler heads prevailed, and the needed time and funding was invested in the aircraft to make it work. The RB-57As assigned to the Heart Throb program were aircraft that had most of the kinks worked out of them.33

  Patricia Lynn, an RB-57E aircraft, at Danang Air Base, South Vietnam, January 1964. The E-model was a former B-57B tow-target aircraft converted to the reconnaissance role. Moonglow was their call sign, flying night IR, infrared, reconnaissance missions. The aircraft was lost on October 25, 1968.

  In June 1955, Captain Joseph A. Guthrie Jr. suddenly found himself as the project leader for a group of four modified RB-57A-1 aircraft going to Japan, and Captain William “Bill” Gafford was in charge of six more of these aircraft going to Europe. Heart Throb was the overall cover name for the project—the aircraft bound for Japan would be known as West Wind, while those bound for Europe were assigned the moniker Blue Car. Ten RB-57As had been converted to high-altitude reconnaissance configurations, initially known as Lightweight, then rename
d Heart Throb. Under Heart Throb all equipment not absolutely essential for daylight photography was removed, and the plane’s J65-BW-5 engines were replaced with higher-thrust J65-W-7 engines, and the crew was reduced from two to one. The RB-57A-1 was 5,500 pounds lighter than the original configuration, and all the necessary modifications were completed in August 1955. Six Heart Throb aircraft eventually were assigned to the 7499th Composite Squadron at Wiesbaden Air Base, Germany, and another four went to the 6007th Composite Squadron of the Far East Air Forces at Yokota Air Base, Japan.

  Recalls then Captain Joseph Guthrie at the Early Cold War Overflights Symposium, “In the spring of 1955 I was stationed at Randolph Air Force Base near San Antonio, Texas, as a B-57B flight instructor. On a warm day in May my boss, Lieutenant Colonel Jesse J. ‘Pappy’ Craddock, commander of the 3515th Combat Crew Training Squadron, called me into his office. He advised me that I had been selected for a classified project which would include some travel in the United States and eventual assignment to Japan. I wasn’t too thrilled about this news. I had just returned from a tour of duty in South Korea and been at Randolph for only a year. Pappy assured me that it was a great opportunity for a young captain and I would love the assignment—besides, the decision had already been made. I had been selected and that was that. In early June 1955 I flew to Washington, DC, to learn about my assignment. A Lieutenant Colonel Roger Rhodarmer told me to proceed to the Martin Aircraft Company in Middle River, Maryland, to oversee the modification of four RB-57A aircraft. After the reconnaissance modifications were completed, I was to test fly the aircraft and then ferry them to Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia for inspection and repair as necessary. While that was going on, I was instructed to obtain personal equipment for myself and three other RB-57A pilots, including newly designed partial pressure suits. Finally, I was to get everyone qualified in the new pressure suits at the high-altitude chamber at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. After all that was done, I was to deliver the aircraft, when ready, from Warner Robins Air Force Base to San Diego for transport to Japan on an aircraft carrier.