Air crew and maintenance personnel assembled in front of four RB-45Cs bearing RAF colors, December 1952. M. Mixson.
Lieutenant Colonel Francis T. Martin Jr.
Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal
But it was not the last overflight of the Soviet Union by the RB-45C. In early May 1954, the 19th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron (Night Photo Jet) from Shaw AFB, South Carolina, flying the former SAC RB-45Cs and led by its commander, Major John B. Anderson, flew its aircraft en masse via Goose Bay, Labrador, and Iceland to RAF Scul-thorpe. The planes arrived at Sculthorpe on May 8. Major Anderson and the 19th TRS air crews were met and greeted by the Sculthorpe base commander, Colonel David M. Jones, and Brigadier General Joseph R. Holzapple, the 47th Bomb Wing commander. The 19th TRS became part of the 47th Bombardment Wing, with its three squadrons of B-45A bombers and one squadron of KB-29 refueling tankers. It was probably the most powerful wing the United States had stationed in Europe at that time. Soon the 19th TRS air crews were involved in extensive photomapping of much of Europe. One of its members was Captain Francis T. Martin Jr. a radar navigator with extensive combat experience in the RB-45C over North Korea and communist China.
RB-45C refueling from a 91st SRW SAC KB-29P tanker over the Baltic Sea near Copenhagen, Denmark, April 17, 1952. M. Mixson.
Frank Martin was a farm boy, born in 1928 in Roslindale, Massachusetts. “While I was still in high school my family moved to the country, to Medway, where my father and I raised chickens for eggs and meat. We had a rabbi kill the chickens, and I had a delivery route in Boston where we sold kosher food. I continued to commute to Boston to finish my schooling. The war got everybody interested in aviation, particularly us youngsters. My father had been a torpedoman in submarines in the First World War, and several of my uncles served in either the army or navy during the war with Spain, in the Philippine Insurrection, and the First World War. I wanted to become a navy flyer, so I joined the navy. Then the war ended, and they just discharged our whole class. At age eighteen I decided I wanted to start a career in photography. I heard that the Army Air Force would give you your base of choice if you enlisted, so I did. In 1946 I was sent to the photo school at Lowry Field in Denver, Colorado. When I graduated, I stayed there as an instructor. I really enjoyed air force life, so I decided to try again and applied for pilot training through the aviation cadet program. It turned out I had insufficient depth perception, disqualifying me, but I was offered a slot in the navigator aviation cadet program, which had just opened at Ellington Field in Texas. I graduated in 1951. I continued with my training, qualifying as bombardier and radar navigator. Since I had expressed an interest in photography, I was assigned to the 322d Reconnaissance Squadron at Barksdale AFB in Louisiana. The squadron flew the new RB-45C photo-reconnaissance jet. Within weeks of my arrival at Barksdale, the squadron transferred to Lockbourne AFB in Ohio.
“At Lockbourne I was quickly checked out in the RB-45. The Korean War was in full swing, and by December 1951 I was flying photo reconnaissance out of Yokota Air Base, Japan, over North Korea. That time I flew twenty-one combat missions. Upon my return to Lockbourne I ended up on Sam Myers’s crew, and I went back to Yokota with him for a second combat tour. Our missions were pretty straightforward, mostly day photo missions over North Korea. There was a small percentage of special missions. On several of those we flew up the Yalu River from Antung [Dandong] until we could see Vladivostok. The pilots could actually see the MiGs taking off at Vladivostok, but the MiGs could never catch us. On the daylight missions up the Yalu we always had navy fighter escorts, F9F Panthers. Then we flew night radar deep-penetration missions into China as far as Mukden [Shenyang]. Other missions, day and night, we flew along the Kurile Island chain and along Sakhalin Island. For the night missions we flew 8-027: the aircraft was painted black. Some of us got jumped by MiGs near the Kurile Islands and Sakhalin. The B-45s made out all right, but some of the others in our squadron—the slower RB-29s—didn’t.
“In January 1953 I transferred to TAC, along with our airplanes. Most of the RB-45 crews of the 19th TRS at Shaw AFB came from Lockbourne. When all of the RB-45s finally arrived from SAC and had their tail guns reinstalled, the squadron went into an accelerated training program. In May 1945 we transferred to RAF Sculthorpe, and I stayed there until 1958. We had less than twenty airplanes in the squadron and had some supply problems with spare parts. Everybody was saying we couldn’t do our mission. So two or three times we got the entire squadron off the ground—every airplane—to show that we could do our mission. In June, only a month after our arrival at Scul-thorpe, one of our aircraft set a record for the most flying time in the B-45 for a thirty-day period, 108 hours.
“We did a lot of mapping in Europe—Norway, for example. That was very difficult because of the steep mountains rising sharply from sea level to thousands of feet. If we had a camera focused for sea level, it wouldn’t be in focus for higher up. When you do mapping work they get very, very stringent. It was a difficult mission for us, but we did it. We did some work in North Africa too, and we even did some archaeology work for some of the colleges in England to help them with their digs. From the air they could see outlines which were not readily discernible on the ground.
“On March 27, 1955, my squadron flew three deep-penetration missions over the Soviet Union. The pilots were Major Anderson, our squadron commander, and Captains Grigsby and Schamber. I was the radar navigator on Anderson’s aircraft. Our copilot was First Lieutenant Flynn, and the gunner was Master Sergeant Bryant. The aircraft with the longest route, which was ours, had to recover in Germany for refueling. We didn’t have enough fuel to make it back to Sculthorpe. Our routes were essentially the same as those flown by the Royal Air Force in 1952 and 1954. Our mission planning was highly classified, very secret. We didn’t know the routes of the other crews. It was all kept very quiet. Somebody else did all the map preparation and planning for us. We just took what Intelligence gave us. We didn’t know until the last minute where we were going.
Routes flown by RAF and U.S. Air Force crews in RB-45C photo-reconnaissance aircraft based at RAF Sculthorpe, England, in 1952, 1954, and 1955. H. Myers.
“The three of us took off reasonably close together. I remember a strange incident just as we were crossing the border into East Germany. We were not yet at our cruising altitude, still climbing to thirty-five thousand feet. The night was pitch-black. We had no lights on anywhere. Major Anderson said to the copilot, ‘Did you see that? The plane going to the west.’ There was a plane heading west as we were going east, pretty close to our altitude. His lights were out just like ours. I flew with my radar on for the entire mission. That was my primary means of navigation. I believe one of the things the Intelligence people were trying to do at the time, other than taking radarscope photography of assigned targets, was to find out what the Russians would do in the way of identifying and stopping us. I think it was important to find out if they would launch night fighters and what radars they would turn on to locate us. It was a coordinated effort to find out everything they had and could do. It was a dark night, and we didn’t see any reaction other than the one airplane that passed us early in the flight. The same was true for the other crews: they encountered no hostile reaction from the Russians. Upon landing we were met at the airplane by Intelligence personnel, who took the radar film and every scrap of paper or map we had in our bags.”
Like the RAF missions in 1952 and 1954, the three RB-45Cs from the 19th TRS did have an aerial refueling just prior to entry into Soviet-controlled airspace. Anderson’s aircraft, flying the longer southern route, had to recover at Fürstenfeldbruck Air Base in Germany and return to Sculthorpe the following day. Anderson’s flight was the last time such mass reconnaissance flights were flown over the western Soviet Union. All twelve crew members of the three RB-45Cs were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight during 1955. Frank Martin’s last flight in the RB-45 was on Ju
ne 28, 1957. “It was a cool airplane. I liked the B-45,” Frank said. Before returning to the United States in May 1958, Frank transitioned into the newer RB-66, which replaced the RB-45 in the TAC inventory. He returned to the Strategic Air Command and flew B-52s early in the Vietnam War before retiring to Maryland’s Delmarva Peninsula, near Salisbury, to raise chickens.
Colonel Hack Mixson continued to serve for many years in the secret world of strategic reconnaissance. In 1955 he transferred to a supersecret reconnaissance program run by the CIA, piloting Kelly Johnson’s high-flying U-2. Hack was involved in nearly every aspect of that program, from getting the aircraft operational, to hiring air crews, to flying them out of various locations in Germany, Japan, Thailand, and Pakistan. After five years of constantly being on the move with the U-2 program, Mixson assumed command of the 55th SRW, in which he had served as a young major in 1948 soon after being recalled to active duty. The wing had been reactivated and still operated out of Forbes AFB in Kansas, flying RB-47H electronic-reconnaissance aircraft. Hack retired from the air force in 1970 as commanding officer of the 100th SRW, a U-2 wing, at Davis-Monthan AFB, near Tucson, Arizona. He settled in Tampa, Florida, not too far from MacDill AFB and the occasional smell of jet fuel. As with so many of his generation’s flyers, it was quite a ride. Hack Mixson went from a little forty-five-horsepower Aeronca via the B-24, RB-45, and RB-47 to the U-2 spy plane. “I loved every minute of it,” Mixson said, “and every airplane I ever flew.”
Chapter 11
Challenging the Russian Bear
President Eisenhower turned his attention to what he would subsequently describe as “the most effective proposal of the [1955 Geneva Summit Conference] . . . mutual overflight by the U.S. and USSR of each other’s country as a technique of inspection, what became known as the “open skies” plan. . . . He observed that in his opinion, since the Russians already knew “the location of most of our installations, mutual agreements for such overflights would undoubtedly benefit us more than the Russians, because we know very little about their installations.”
Peter Lyon, Eisenhower
The fourth MiG . . . 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.
Hal Austin, RB-47E reconnaissance pilot
The Strategic Air Command was the creation of World War II bomber General Curtis E. LeMay. Men such as Harold Austin populated the cockpits of SAC bombers and tankers during the 1950s and ’60s. It was a tightly knit, war-seasoned group of flyers who believed that no other flying command, sister service, or foreign air force could hold a candle to them. They were mostly survivors of epic World War II air battles over Europe, of B-29 raids against Japan, of the assembly-line flying of the Berlin Airlift, and, of course, of Korea. These combat-hardened survivors of adversity constituted the core of SAC air crews.
LeMay’s heritage was German, like that of many other great American soldiers. In late 1942 LeMay, then a thirty-four-year-old colonel, took the 305th Bomb Group to England. Quickly determining that the current formations were suicidal, LeMay recalled how he climbed into the top turret of one of his airplanes, plugged into the radio extension, and personally placed each pilot in that formation (LeMay 234). This was the evolution of the wedge-shaped combat box finally adopted by everyone in the Eighth Air Force. LeMay’s tactics allowed the obsolescent B-17 bombers to strike deep into the heart of Nazi Germany in broad daylight and survive. Although the Eighth Air Force took fearsome losses, the Americans prevailed. By the time the 29th Infantry Division landed on Omaha Beach, there was no Luftwaffe there to greet them, thanks to the Mighty Eighth. In 1944 LeMay transferred to the Pacific and took over B-29 operations against Japan. With single-minded resolve, he developed the tactics for B-29 raids against Japan. It seemed only natural for a man with such tactical genius and strategic vision to be selected to command the newly created Strategic Air Command, a combat command reporting directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
LeMay took over a mixed bag of aircraft and crews in 1948. By the time he relinquished command in 1957, SAC was as deadly as a cat at a mousehole. SAC was an air force within an air force and the envy of those who were not part of it. He built SAC in the image of his Eighth Air Force but many times more lethal. He focused on his people, who had been the key to his success in World War II and who would be the key to building SAC. When LeMay first took over SAC, he ran a maximum simulated bombing effort against Wright-Patterson AFB, near Dayton, Ohio, with the small force then at his disposal. He wanted to see how bad it really was. LeMay wrote later, “Our crews were not accustomed to flying at altitude. Neither were the airplanes, [as] far as that goes. Most of the pressurization wouldn’t work, and the oxygen wouldn’t work. Nobody seemed to know what life was like upstairs [above fifteen thousand 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. “Let any reader think of the many bad messes he must have encountered during World War II, and apply that to SAC in 1948–49, and he’ll know what is meant. The s-on-s was there all right, and it wasn’t even good s-on-s. Steaks obviously came from the nearest shoe repair shop; potatoes had been cooked in the laundry; the spaghetti and macaroni might have interested an entomologist or a herpetologist, but not any hungry customers” (LeMay 433, 437).
If LeMay’s people were not properly trained, he knew it wasn’t their fault. If their equipment was World War II leftovers, that wasn’t their fault either, nor was the fact that they were poorly motivated and fed. He changed that. At its peak in the late 1950s and early 1960s, SAC was a force of nearly two thousand B-47, B-52, and B-58 all-jet bombers, supported by a large fleet of KC-97 and KC-135 tankers. The tankers allowed the bombers to strike anywhere in the world with predictable accuracy. The planes flew ever higher in the ’50s to evade enemy defensive antiaircraft fire, and when the SA-2 SAM made its appearance, the flyers transitioned with equal ease to low-level attack profiles down to two hundred feet above the terrain.
If SAC’s aircraft were the best the United States could build, the crews surely were among the best the United States could train. LeMay established a “lead crew” concept taken right from his Eighth Air Force playbook. A lead crew was designated an S-crew, a select crew. All other crews were designated E-crews, meaning that they were combat ready but were not lead crews. Select crews had to be the best in competition with all other crews in their wing, with a wing usually consisting of three flying squadrons each with fifteen aircraft. The bomb wings were rated on navigation and flying skills, including aerial refueling, time on target, how close their simulated bombs came to the target, and the employment of electronic countermeasures against simulated threat radars. Radar bomb scoring units, known as RBS sites, many located on railroad cars throughout the United States, served as the targets and impartial evaluators. Reconnaissance crews were rated in the same manner as bomber crews. Since these crews did not carry bombs, their crew ratings were determined by the quality of their photography and how accurately they acquired, analyzed, and located radars.
The select crews of each wing were assigned to the standardization and evaluation division (STANDBOARD), which at least once a year flight-checked each air crew and certified it combat ready. In no-notice exercises (cocoa alerts) personally ordered by the commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, a wing’s readiness was put to the test. Failure invariably lead to the wing commander’s dismissal.
Readiness to fight on a moment’s notice and performance by the book was SAC’s credo. It seemed an almost Prussian application of discipline to American flyers in its demand for absolute obedience and following rules. It wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. “SAC took the fun out of flying,” said Colonel Ed Gorski. Many would agree with him. But SAC became incredibly powerful a
nd effective as a peacekeeper in a nuclear world.
Colonel Harold R. Austin
Distinguished Flying Cross (2), Air Medal
Men such as Colonel Hal Austin were trained to fly anywhere, anytime, and prevail, without asking questions. Hal’s turn came on May 8, 1954. By 1949 Hal Austin had become a charter member of the newly formed and rapidly expanding Strategic Air Command flying RB-45C reconnaissance aircraft, first out of Barksdale and later out of Lockbourne AFB. In those early years, he frequently deployed on TDYs to England. “Flying was a thrill in the nearly empty skies of postwar Europe. I never made more than two or three radio calls on an entire mission. In between those two or three calls, I flew at whatever altitude I chose. One of my jobs was to photomap the Rhine River basin and Spain. This was an important prerequisite for the future stationing of ballistic missiles in Europe. What a way to see Europe.”
In 1953, still a member of the 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Wing at Lockbourne AFB, Hal Austin transitioned from the RB-45C to the more advanced RB-47E. “The B-47 was a sleek aircraft with swept wings, a raised cockpit which provided fighterlike visibility, and lots of speed. I loved flying the B-47. It was an aircraft of advanced design which eliminated many of the troublesome shortcomings of the RB-45C.” The B-47 soon became the SAC mainstay. In April 1954 Crew S-51 of the 91st SRW, consisting of Captain Harold Austin, his copilot Captain Carl Holt, and Major Vance Heavilin, the radar navigator, deployed with seven other RB-47E photo-reconnaissance aircraft from Lockbourne to RAF Fairford. Fairford, near the campus of Oxford University, was a Battle of Britain base, many of which were used by SAC aircraft during the Cold War. Hal and his crew spent a couple of weeks familiarizing themselves with the area by flying short training flights and had enough time off to enjoy the nearby historic sights and the many offerings of London. The Columbia Officers’ Club, a large mansion donated during the war by a patriotic and grateful Englishman, fronted Bayswater Road and sat across from Hyde Park. The club was conveniently located near Marble Arch and Speaker’s Corner. There was no better and certainly no cheaper place to stay, and the three men took full advantage of the opportunity.
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 20