Carl Holt also remembered that moment well. He looked back from his position behind the pilot, and what he saw did not make his heart jump for joy. “We started to generate contrails like six white arrows pointing to our airplane. As we passed over our first target, I could see the fighters down below circling up to meet us, and I knew it would only be a matter of time before they reached our altitude.”
“About the time we finished photographing the second airfield near Murmansk,” Austin continued, “we were joined by a flight of three Russian MiG-15s. I don’t know whether or not they were armed. I don’t believe they were. They kept their distance and stayed about half a mile off our wing. About twenty-five minutes later, another flight of six MiGs showed up. Those, too, were MiG 15s, appeared to be unarmed, and kept their distance. I guess they confirmed that we were the bad guys. A few minutes after their arrival, another two flights of three each arrived behind us with obvious intent to try to shoot us down. By this time we had photographed five of our assigned target airfields and were turning over Kandalaksa east toward Archangel’sk and our last four targets. We had been over Soviet territory for an hour. We had been briefed that the MiG-15 would not be able to do any damage to us at 40,000 feet with our airspeed at 440 knots. Well, you can imagine what we called those Intelligence weenies when the first MiG-17, not a MiG-15, made a firing pass at us from the left rear and we saw cannon tracer shells going above and below our aircraft. And the MiG was still moving out rather smartly as he passed under us in front. ‘Enough of this 40,000 feet stuff,’ I thought. I pushed the RB-47 over, descending a couple thousand feet and picking up about 20 knots indicated airspeed in the process.”
MiG-17 in North Vietnamese colors displayed in front of the 8th Air Force Museum in Pooler, Georgia. The MiG had a combat ceiling of 54,000 feet and carried one 37 mm and two 23 mm cannons.
Carl Holt recalled, “When I saw the flashes of fire from the nose of the fighter, I knew it would not be a milk run. I had trouble to get the tail guns to fire, and since I was in a reverse seat position, I could not eject if we were hit. Also, the radar firing screen would not work, because the MiGs stayed out of the RB-47’s radar envelope, so I felt a little like Wyatt Earp, looking out the back end of the canopy and firing at will. I did not hit any of their fighters, but kept them away from a direct rear firing pass. They could only make passes from either side at a greater than 45-degree angle to stay outside the area covered by our guns.”
“The second MiG-17,” Hal Austin recalled, “made his firing pass, and I don’t care who knows, it was scary to see tracers go over and under our aircraft. This guy had almost come up our tailpipes. Carl Holt turned around to operate our tail guns after the first MiG fired at us. It was typical for the two remote-controlled 20mm cannons not to fire. I told Holt he’d better kick them or something, because if our guns didn’t fire, the next SOB would come directly up our tailpipes. Fortunately, when the third MiG started its pass, our guns burped for a couple of seconds. General LeMay didn’t believe in tracers for our guns, but the Russian pilots must have seen something, because the third guy broke off his attack, and the next flight of six MiG-17s which joined us later stayed about 30 to 40 degrees to the side, outside the effective envelope of our guns. Of course the MiGs didn’t know that our guns wouldn’t fire again.
“The fourth MiG of the second group finally made a lucky hit as I was in a turn, through the top of our left wing, about eight feet from the fuselage, through the retracted wing flap. The shell exploded into the fuselage in the area of the forward main fuel tank, right behind our crew compartment, knocking out our intercom. We felt a good ‘whap’ as the shell exploded, and of course all three of us were a bit anxious—scared is a better word—but we continued on our mission as briefed. Basically, because of habit. I firmly believe that’s what good, tough, LeMay-type SAC training did for his combat crews. Later, we also discovered the shell had hit our UHF radio. It would no longer channelize, meaning it was stuck on channel 13, our command post frequency, which we had on the set at the time.”
“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 closeup 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 Archangel’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. But our excitement for this mission wasn’t 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 him, 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.
“As we coasted out of Norway, it was obvious to me that we had fallen behind the fuel curve. I climbed to 43,000 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 court-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 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.” As for the B-47’s glide ratio? It wasn’t a glider. When the power was pulled back or the engines quit because of a lack of
fuel, the aircraft would drop out of the sky like a rock. “In the meantime, Rigley had his crew looking upward, searching for a glimpse of us. They caught a glint which they thought was our airplane rapidly descending toward them. Rigley leveled off at 3,000 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 12,000 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 500 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 US 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 Curtis E. LeMay, attended our mission debriefing. We met in a room in the old Douglas aircraft plant because the new SAC headquarters building 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. 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 tail pipes. General LeMay responded, ‘There are probably several openings today in command positions there, since you were not shot down.’” Carl Holt also reflected on the 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.’” All the Cold War shootdowns had been kept secret. “During our debriefing I said to General LeMay 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.”
Colonel Hal Austin in 1999, when I interviewed him, holding the entry point section, cut out from his damaged aircraft by Maintenance, of a 23 mm cannon shell fired by a Russian MiG-17. Austin is the Face of Courage.
Three months after the debriefing of Crew S-51 at Offutt Air Force Base, 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 Captains Austin and 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 damned many people who don’t need to know.” Hal asked if they could see their photography. The answer was “No.” But to the question, “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 aircraft would soon follow. An alternative solution 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 SA-2 surface-to-air missiles demonstrated that they could reach its 70,000-foot-plus operating altitude. Earth-orbiting satellites, as well as the remarkable SR-71, eventually provided the necessary solutions. But in 1954 it took the courage of men like Hal Austin, Carl Holt, and Vance Heavilin to fly over the Soviet Union to provide the United States with the critical information it needed to defend itself.
Colonel Harold R. Austin went West in February 2018 to join his fellow flyers at a place where he’d see all the fellows who’d flown West before, and they call out his name, as he comes through the door. For this is the place where true flyers come, when their journey is over, and the war has been won. Farewell to an American hero, and a friend.
SLICK CHICK RF-100As (1955–1956)
The F-100 is remembered with respect and some affection by a generation of aviators. Its good features were viceless handling, a robust airframe and reliable systems. Between 1956 and 1970 more than 500 F-100Ds were lost in accidents, out of a total build of 2,294 Super Sabres.
—Jim Winchester, American Military Aircraft
Major General Roger K. Rhodarmer recalled at the 2001 Early Cold War Overflights Symposium how he got into the reconnaissance business. “In the summer of 1941, I got my private pilot’s license, and then came Pearl Harbor. Shortly afterward I received a letter from my local draft board. Within three weeks I was in the army at Camp Croft, South Carolina, eventually ending up in San Antonio, Texas, as an aviation cadet. I trained in twin-engine aircraft and after commissioning as a second lieutenant entered advanced training in Martin B-26 medium bombers. In May 1943, I am in North Africa looking at the Germans. I said to myself, ‘I’m not old enough yet, I’m only twenty-one years old. I’m not ready for this.’ I was assigned to the 319th Bomb Group and stayed with them for the rest of the war. We flew bombing missions in North Africa, southern France, Austria, and all through the Alps. Then in 1945 they packed us up and brought us back to the United States, reequipped us with A-26s, and sent the 319th to the Pacific Theater of Operations. We took one hundred brand-new Douglas A-26s and flew them from Savannah, Georgia, to Okinawa. I only flew five or six low-level bombing and strafing missions before the Japanese surrendered in September 1945. I then ended up at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio.
“At Wright Field, I learned they were looking for experienced A-26 people to participate in a ‘special project.’ I checked into it and learned that it was something in Europe. I didn’t know what the project was but I wanted to go back to Europe, so I volunteered. In April 1946, I was assigned to the 10th Reconnaissance Group at Fürth Airfield. Of course I wondered what the hell I am doing in a recon outfit. I’m supposed to be an A-26 pilot, and there weren’t any A-26s anywhere on that base. The group commander told me that some A-26s were on the way, and in a hangar across the field an A-26 was being modified with a camera installed in its nose. A very skillful guy cut a hole in the nose of the A-26 that you could barely see, and that became the eye for a forward-looking camera. That’s how the project got its name—Birdseye. And because all of our operations involved flying and taking pictures at very low levels, it was called ‘dicing.’ The reason for equ
ipping A-26s with cameras was to avoid violating the Four Power Agreement, which prohibited reconnaissance aircraft from flying in the Berlin air corridors connecting Berlin with the British and American Zones of Occupation. I flew eighty to ninety hours a month and covered targets in western Europe—industrial sites, bridges, tunnels, that sort of thing. We flew as low as we could go. I actually got pictures of railroad tunnels where you could see both ends of the tunnel. I don’t know who was in charge of the operation, but whoever it was had plenty of clout. I once took low-level photos of the Vatican, which upset a US representative assigned to the Vatican. I was ordered to report to a general about this. He called the State Department. After the call, he told me, ‘OK, go back and do your business.’ Birdseye ended in late 1946, and I returned to the United States.
Silent Warriors, Incredible Courage Page 19