Mig-19C Farmer, reproduced by the PRC under license from the USSR, flown from the PRC by a defector to the ROCAF, Taiwan. Picture taken by Dr. Richard Hallion in 2010 while lecturing at the ROCAF Academy.
A P2V-7 NEPTUNE SURVIVING THE CZECHOSLOVAK BORDER (1956)
During flight training, two-plus years in VP-23, and almost two years on the staff of Fleet Air Wing Three, I flew first a PB4Y-2, then P2V-2, -3, -5, -5F, -6, and–7. They were a dream to fly after the -5 became a -5F and then a -7, both with jets, in addition to the Wright R-3350, a terrible engine.
—Lieutenant Commander Joe Grace
“I was born in 1928, and I always wanted to fly,” recalls Joseph “Joe” Grace. “I built lots of model planes as a kid, flew them and hung them from the ceiling in my room. I grew up in Tonowanda, New York. Just south of town there was a mile-square airfield of grass. One hangar, several Piper and Taylor Cubs. An operator offered ‘See Niagara Falls for $1.50.’ Two friends and I saved our dimes until we each had fifty cents, then rode our bikes out to the field. We didn’t have to climb very high before we could see the falls, about ten miles down the river. We weren’t so much impressed by the falls, but were thrilled to fly. In 1947 I received an appointment to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Once I reported to the academy we received indoctrination flights in N3Ns—a beautiful biplane on floats.
“On graduation from the Naval Academy in 1951 I was assigned as a ship’s company officer on the training carrier USS Monterey (CV-26) at Pensacola, Florida. After one year, in 1952, I was finally entered into flight training. I managed to hold my own and not wash out, although many did. About a year after I started flight training it was time for our basic carrier qualification on the Monterey. We flew out to the carrier in a flight of six. I flew a beautiful ROGER pass on my first approach—only to have the LSO wave me off, instead of giving me a ‘cut.’ My second approach was the same—another ‘foul deck wave-off.’ The deck was not fouled. After the third wave-off in a row, I was getting mad. Finally, on my fourth approach, I got a ‘cut’ from the LSO permitting me to land. As the deck crew was freeing my tailhook from the arresting gear wire, the ship’s air boss announced on the radio and on the ship’s intercom: ‘This ship’s 57,000th landing has just been made by Lieutenant JG Joe Grace, former ship’s officer.’ They set me up. There was cake that night in the wardroom. We flew SNJs in training; the air force called them AT-6s.
P2V-7 Neptune antisubmarine aircraft assigned to Patrol Squadron 23, VP-23, at Brunswick, Maine, while deployed to Keflavik, Iceland. Patrol plane commander, LTJG Joe Grace.
“After completion of flight training in 1953, I requested an assignment to Patrol Squadron 23 at Brunswick, Maine. I was serving as navigator on a crew of eight by 1954. We had a squadron officers party one Friday night, had a good time and went to bed early. At 0200 hours Sunday, our duty officer received a call, not from our boss, not from his boss, Fleet Air Wing Atlantic, or our operational boss, Commander Eastern Sea Frontier in New York, but from the duty navy captain at the Pentagon—‘Get your squadron in the air tomorrow morning. Fly to the municipal airport at San Juan, Puerto Rico, and find us a Russian ship running guns into Guatemala to start a revolution.’ We had two planes down for major checks planned for Monday morning. The night check crew came in and had them ready to go by 0700. The recall worked like a charm. Each of us got his call, and called three others, packed a bag, and were out at the air station by 0700. Soon thereafter we had twelve planes in the air, in formation and flew VFR, visual flight rules, just offshore to San Juan.
“Our crew, Lieutenant JG Bourke, pilot, Ed Cumie, copilot, and I as the ship’s navigator, were flying just offshore of the Dominican Republic, then very unfriendly to the United States under the dictatorship of General [Rafael] Trujillo. We had been briefed to stay outside their three-mile limit. The capital city, Ciudad Trujillo, could be seen just a few miles up the river from the coast. There, we spotted our quarry tied up to a pier in the city. We sent a FLASH contact report to Commander Caribbean Sea Frontier. There was no revolution in Guatemala that year.
Joe Grace’s crew in front of their P2V-7 Neptune antisubmarine aircraft at Keflavik, Iceland, 1956. Standing, left to right: Aviation Radioman 2nd Class Brand; AD1 Joe Amaviska, plane captain; LTJG Art Detonnancourt, copilot; LTJG Joe Grace, patrol plane commander; AT3 Harry Harrison, radar operator; AT3 Nash, ECM operator; and Ensign Paul Sorenson, navigator. Kneeling, left to right: AO3 Meinoc, aviation ordnanceman; and AM3 Haulk, 2nd mechanic. The photo was taken by AO1 Wiebe, gunner, member of the crew.
“A couple of years later in 1956 I had made PPC, patrol plane commander, and had my own crew. While deployed to Keflavik, Iceland, we had a week-long deployment flying reconnaissance around northern Europe with a brand-new P2V-7 Neptune, with jets nonetheless. Wow. I remember flying into Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base near Munich. I shot three GCA approaches, but was still in the soup each time. I didn’t dare break minimums as a LTJG, lieutenant junior grade—first lieutenant in the army and air force—because our skipper, Commander Harvey Hop, had broken minimums to land just the week before and had been put on report by the air force. So we headed for our alternate, Frankfurt Air Base, adjacent to the Frankfurt civil airport.
“The airway out of Munich ran right alongside the Czechoslovak/East German border. We hadn’t been briefed to expect any trouble from the Russians, but they must have overheard our radio transmissions and knew we were not in familiar surroundings. I had put the navigator, Paul Sorenson, in the left seat and gone back to the aft station to have a cup of coffee with our gunner. When I came forward, Art [Detonnancourt], my copilot, was flying the plane heading for a radio beacon on the airway. I don’t have any idea why I looked at the bird-dog needle, but thank God I did. It kept trying to swing off to starboard, and Art was chasing it. I told him to ignore it and just fly the heading. In less than five minutes, the needle was sticking straight out to starboard, to the right, into Czechoslovakia. I am sure they were waiting for us there, less than five miles away. We had all heard of the VP-5 PB4Y-2 that had been shot down over the Baltic Sea in April 1950, but nothing since. So we came close to being just another incident in the Cold War. The next day we flew from Frankfurt back down to Fürstenfeldbruck; the weather was much better this time around. Took a train to the Third Army rest camp in Garmisch for a wonderful, but shorter-than-planned stay.”
It was a routine practice for the Russians and their satellites during the Cold War years to interfere with aerial navigation aids, such as radio beacons, to lure American aircraft, passing near their borders, over their territory—then shoot them down. It happened to a luckless American F-84 fighter as early as 1953, being shot down by a Czech MiG-15. Meaconing, as the practice of bending radio beams was referred to, was a frequent experience for MATS/MAC transport aircrews who flew to diverse places around the world. It was also the practice for American aircrews to be briefed on Soviet meaconing activities and to be cautioned, if at all possible, to avoid using radio aids that could be easily compromised. As in the case of the P2V Neptune commanded by LTJG Grace, such interference often was rather obvious, but it could also be subtle, drawing an aircraft off course through the use of a number of small, incremental changes to a radio navigational aid. The losses of a C-118 transport over Armenia in June 1958, and an RC-130 reconnaissance aircraft that same September, showed how vulnerable aircraft could be if relying on radio aids for navigation near Soviet-controlled territory. In the case of the RC-130, which was on a border surveillance flight, its shootdown by waiting MiG-17 fighters resulted in the loss of its entire crew of seventeen. For aircraft assigned to the Strategic Air Command, the RC-130 downed by the Russians was assigned to the National Security Agency, NSA, tactical radio navigation aids were never used for navigation purposes. Tactical navigation aids such as radio beacons or Loran were deemed unreliable and would not be available in wartime anyway, so it made no sense for SAC crews to use them during peacetime. All SAC navigators u
sed either radar, celestial, the stars and the sun, or grid navigation in the Arctic regions, and if none of that was available, they flew time and distance—dead reckoning. On reconnaissance missions over the Arctic, radar returns often were distorted because of ice formation along shorelines, while the sun and stars were not always available due to cloud cover, so dead reckoning was used as a fallback position more often as not. It is indeed a credit to SAC reconnaissance navigators that they consistently kept their aircraft on track regardless of time of day or adverse weather conditions.
FRANZ JOSEF LAND (1952)
There had been dozens of American attempts during the early 1950s to gather important Russian radar and electronic communications by flying provocatively up against the Soviet coastline. Several of these reconnaissance aircraft were shot down either by Soviet jets or ground fire. Most of the crews disappeared off the scope and were presumed to have been sent to Siberia or killed.
—Ben Rich and Leo Janos, Skunk Works
The Franz Josef Archipelago is a group of nearly two hundred islands adjacent to the Barents Sea, above 80 degrees north latitude, northeast of Spitzbergen, Norway. A cold, rocky place if there ever was one. In the early 1960s, I recall flying by that desolate place in an RB-47H electronic reconnaissance aircraft on our way to the Kola Peninsula and Novaya Zemlya. All the action we encountered was always on the Kola Peninsula—very little on Novaya Zemlya, which was called Banana Island by us because of its shape. I recall intercepting a lone early-generation Knife Rest early warning radar coming up when we flew by Franz Josef. It must have been the high point for the Russian crew for the week to have seen any activity at all. But in September 1952 there was not even that lone Knife Rest radar site active in Franz Josef Land. There was nothing there but lots of ice and rocks. However, planners with a vivid imagination at Headquarters Strategic Air Command in Omaha, Nebraska, just wanted to make sure the Russians hadn’t somehow sneaked up to Franz Josef Land, hacked an air base in secret out of ice and stone, and based some of their TU-4 bombers, copies of our World War II–vintage B-29s, on this godforsaken place—so they scheduled a reconnaissance mission. There were no RB-47s available in 1952; RF-86s didn’t have the legs and were busy anyway fighting the war in Korea. The RB-45C, however, was a SAC-owned asset and could have been used—but wasn’t. For one reason or another, the selection fell on a piston-powered and propeller-driven RB-50E aircraft, which was not really known for its reliability. The aircraft and crew was assigned to the 38th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron of the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing—at this period of time based at Ramey Air Force Base, Puerto Rico. The normal crew complement for the RB-50E was ten, but for this unique mission an additional navigator and photographer were added. Major Roy E. Kaden was the aircraft commander, and he would need all the good judgment he could muster to ensure the safe return of his aircraft and crew. Very early in the mission briefings, he was given to understand that in case of aircraft malfunction, there was no rescue capability available. In other words, Major Kaden and his crew were on their own.
R. Cargill Hall, an air force historian and former chief historian at the National Reconnaissance Office, writes in the Early Cold War Overflights Symposium Proceedings, “In July 1952 a request was submitted to high-level government and military officials for approval of a photographic and electronic reconnaissance overflight of Franz Joseph Land. The purpose of the mission was to determine whether the Soviets were building airfields on Franz Joseph Land [to accommodate TU-4 bombers] and if they had installed any supporting radar facilities. At what level this request was initiated is unknown, but owing to its high degree of political sensitivity and proximate timing with Presidential approved eastern Siberian Overflights, we believe only the President could have approved it. I presume that this information was deemed critical not only for U.S. defense planning, but also for war planning that included plotting the course of American bomber streams over the high Arctic into central and European Russia. The Franz Joseph Land islands were astride the flight path that some of our bomber streams would take.”
Of all the Cold War overflight missions that I have reviewed, plus my own experience flying over a hundred PARPRO peripheral reconnaissance missions, this one I find truly strange and unusual—and I find it difficult to believe that the president of the United States would have felt compelled to approve it. In fact, President Truman had serious reservations approving limited Siberian overflights across from Alaska by brand-new B-47s. It is much more likely that approval was derived from other overflight requests granted about this time, such as the authorization for three RB-45Cs flying deep into Russia under the British flag. It gets even stranger in my estimation that the aircrew was not briefed or debriefed after mission completion at SAC headquarters in Omaha, which was the practice, but at a subordinate major air command, and was scheduled to fly the mission out of Thule Air Base, a very inhospitable environment, instead of flying out of the United Kingdom, a much safer approach all around. One should keep in mind also, for the Soviets to establish a functional air base in an inhospitable environment such as that found in Franz Josef Land without arousing the suspicions of their Norwegian and Swedish neighbors would have been nearly impossible. This is one overflight mission that should never have been flown, and certainly not using an RB-50 aircraft with a crew of twelve, with no rescue support at any point of its flight. No matter the what and the how, these were American airmen who followed orders and did what they were told to do to the best of their ability.
Recalls then Major Roy E. Kaden, the aircraft commander, “In April through early August of 1952, the 38th Reconnaissance Squadron, the squadron I flew with, was on a routine deployment in the United Kingdom flying out of RAF Sculthorpe and RAF Upper Heyford. We flew electronic and photographic PARPRO missions over the Baltic Sea, no closer than forty miles to the Soviet border. Such missions lasted from twelve to fifteen hours. We also flew the Berlin air corridors and along other areas of interest near the periphery of East Bloc states. In July 1952, intelligence personnel assigned to United States Air Forces headquarters in London requested the 38th SRS provide a navigator and flight engineer to determine the feasibility of flying a reconnaissance mission out of England over Franz Josef Land. After evaluation of all requirements, the conclusion was reached by all involved in the study that the requirement could not be met with confidence using an RB-50 aircraft flying out of England because of the distance involved. The 38th SRS thus returned to Ramey Air Force Base, Puerto Rico, its home base—soon to move to Forbes Air Force Base in Topeka, Kansas. On August 13, 1952, the 55th SRW directed the 38th SRS to provide one aircraft and crew to fly a special Top Secret photographic and electronic reconnaissance mission out of Thule Air Base, Greenland. My squadron commander asked me if my crew would volunteer for this assignment. Of course I said ‘Yes.’ We had flown together for some time and flew the same aircraft for the past three years, an RB-50E, tail number 47-130, which we had named High and Lonesome. Additionally, we had one of the few aircraft that had a K-30 100-inch focal length oblique camera installed, used for high-definition photography of targets from a considerable distance. On August 28, 1952, we were confident that our aircraft was ready, and two days later we received our temporary duty orders—which did not specify a destination or purpose.
“I received verbal instructions to report with my crew to Headquarters 2nd Air Force at Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana. In accordance with instructions, our crew chief and squadron intelligence officer were to accompany us on our aircraft to Barksdale. Our maintenance support team was to fly on a C-97 aircraft provided by the Military Air Transport Service, MATS, directly to Thule Air Base. We made a night flight to Barksdale and on September 2 were ready for our briefing. The SAC briefing team presented the photographic and electronic intercept objectives to be accomplished on an overflight of the Franz Josef Land archipelago. We were briefed to obtain photography at a flight altitude of 20,000 feet. To the flight crew, the briefed mission re
quirements were nothing more than a routine reconnaissance sortie. What made the requirements exceptional were the hazards of the high Arctic operational environment, and that we would be almost 1,500 miles from Thule with no place to land in the event of an emergency. It became apparent that briefing personnel could tell us very little about what to expect. They had no information relative to the environmental hazards of the islands because their charts were based on nineteenth-century information. There was not even positive assurance that the location of the archipelago itself was accurately depicted on the charts. Knowing that we would be violating Soviet territory, we were interested in the possibility of encountering Soviet fighters. The Soviets had shot down an RB-29 a few months before, we were well aware of the risks involved.35 We asked about the possibility of a rescue operation. The SAC officers replied honestly—rescue would be impossible. I then asked about a navy submarine contact, surveillance, or pickup. They said, ‘Forget it.’ Ditching in Arctic waters was not an option in my book. Following the briefing, there was no question in my mind that if we had a problem, we were on our own.
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 15