“As we passed near Vladivostok,” Joel Lutkenhouse remembered, “I picked up Soviet shipborne gun and missile radars. Our pilots looked for them but couldn’t see the ships because of a low cloud layer. Bob, our navigator, saw the ships on his radar. They were tracking us with their antiaircraft and SAM radars, but the ships were in international waters and no obvious threat to us.”
“We were six hours into our mission,” Bob Rogers recalled. “Only another ninety minutes and we would be back at Yokota enjoying a hot shower and a good meal. We turned to a south-southeasterly heading abeam of Wonsan Harbor on the east coast of North Korea. Then we tracked down the Korean peninsula and initiated a 180-degree turn at 37 degrees north latitude, heading north-northwest back toward Wonsan, back the way we had come.” At that time, copilot Hank Dubuy recalled, “we were routinely monitoring our instruments. Everything looked normal. The autopilot was tracking, temperatures, fuel flow, everything was within tolerance. Matt and I scanned the horizon out of habit. Nothing but clouds above and below us. We had an unobstructed view from wingtip to wingtip but not to the low rear quadrant, which was obstructed by the aircraft fuselage and wings. There was a layer of stratocumulus clouds below us, preventing us from seeing the water below or the coastline of North Korea. Another layer of gray stratus clouds was above our cruising altitude of thirty-six thousand feet.”
“We rolled out of our turn and headed north again,” Bob remembered, “and stabilized the aircraft on its new heading, when suddenly a loud single-sideband warning came blasting into our headsets over HF radio. It was a message broadcast in the blind from a secret American monitoring station somewhere in South Korea or Japan, warning aircraft of bogeys in the area around Wonsan. It was a strange warning to a reconnaissance aircraft in international waters off the coast of one of the more hard-line and belligerent communist countries. I had never received such a warning on any other mission. Briefly, I wondered if the monitoring station had heard a radio call of intent to shoot us down. But I was busy navigating my aircraft, and as quickly as the cautionary thought entered my mind, I pushed it aside.” Raven George Back put it this way: “No matter how much preparation I had, how much intelligence on the bad guys I knew, I never thought that some North Korean would try to kill me on my first operational TDY. But the North Koreans were deemed unpredictable and their actions frequently irrational. After that mission, I knew this for a fact.”
The two pilots continued to scan the horizon, seeing nothing but empty sky. Copilot Hank Dubuy swiveled his seat around. “I raised my camera and took a couple shots off the wings. I had switched the A-5 fire control system to warm up soon after our departure from Yokota. In the off and warm-up positions, the guns remained stowed, pointing upward. Over open water I had switched the system to standby, the two guns pointed straight back. Then I switched to operation, firing a couple of short bursts to ensure the guns were working properly. Everything looked good to me, and I put the system back into standby.” The ammunition load for each 20mm gun was 350 rounds. Normally, in an aircraft’s standard combat load, every fifth round was a tracer, to give the gunner a visual indication of where he was firing. But Hank didn’t carry tracers in his ammunition load.
The gun radar system was designed to automatically track rear hemisphere attackers approaching within forty-five degrees of azimuth to either side of the aircraft and thirty-seven degrees of elevation up or down. Targets outside this automatic tracking window had to be fired on by going to emergency manual operation, using the antenna control handle, manually positioning the antenna on the target azimuth and then spotlighting the target in elevation. The antenna control handle was spring-loaded to position the guns at zero elevation and azimuth, which gave the gunner the ability to quickly baseline his guns and know where they were pointing at that time. As the warning message still echoed in the crew members’ ears, Raven 1 Red Winters picked up the distinctive scan of an airborne intercept radar on his APR-17 receiver. The signal was weak and faded quickly, but Red had heard it and seen it long enough on his receiver trace to identify it as an airborne threat signal emanating from their rear hemisphere. It sounded to Red like the scan of a MiG-17 radar in the search mode.
Red notified the crew and simultaneously started his recorder in case the signal reappeared, but it did not. George Back, the Raven 2, was working a Korean GCI radar. “I was unaware of what was happening. I had turned my intercom switch to the ‘private’ position to eliminate crew communications and was in the process of annotating the signal I was recording to aid in subsequent analysis and evaluation.” Raven 3 Joel Lutkenhouse was similarly engaged, “although I was aware that there were probably MiGs prowling in our piece of sky. I did check that I was properly strapped into my seat. The first I knew we were under attack was when I felt the aircraft shudder.” Joel felt the impact of 23mm cannon shells exploding into the aft main fuel tank, into the chaff chutes, and probably into the gun compartment.
George related, “I felt the aircraft shudder, pitch nose down, and begin losing altitude. My first thought was that the autopilot or trim had failed, but a split second later, as I went back to the normal interphone position, I found out that a couple of MiG-17s were serious about shooting us down. I noted that the altimeter, which was reading about twenty-seven thousand feet when I glanced at it, was rapidly unwinding. In an instant, my mind seemed to go in a thousand different directions at a thousand different speeds. It was the first time in my life I thought I was really going to die. The irony of it was that I had no control over what was happening. Panic and fear paralyzed my thought processes, and I think I sat dumbfounded for what seemed an eternity, trying to figure out what the hell was going on and what to do. When Matt remarked that we were hit and going down, I thought it was the end. I started the ejection sequence. My mind was still racing and everything I had ever done or witnessed seemed to go whirling by in a kaleidoscope of my life. At the same time, a different part of my brain seemed to be saying, ‘Don’t panic. You have been trained for situations like this. Do your job and follow the checklist.’ I deliberately collected my thoughts and realized that the aircraft was still well above fourteen thousand feet and that my likely time of survival in the fifty-degree water was less than thirty minutes. I didn’t pull the D-ring between my legs. As fast as the panic came, it went, and I felt an uneasy calm. I was still scared but starting to think rationally. ‘Get your oxygen mask on. Check the flow. Tighten your parachute harness. Remember, you’re sitting on an armed seat. Watch out for the D-ring.’ During the subsequent MiG firing passes, I could feel the cannon fire impacting the aircraft. I remember thinking that at any time there would be a tremendous explosion, a rush of cold air, and that would be the last I would remember.”
Pilot Mattison exclaimed, “They are shooting at us. We are hit. I’m going down!” Raven George Back, who had just come back on intercom, overheard part of the conversation between the two pilots, “We are hit . . . going down,” Back heard Mattison say. “I thought the pilot meant we were really going down.” Instead, Mattison was telling his copilot that he was going down to a lower altitude and taking evasive action. George Back misunderstood and automatically depressurized the Raven compartment when he raised his leg braces, dropping the back-end crew rapidly from fourteen thousand–feet pressure altitude to the actual altitude in the mid–twenty thousands. Joel saw George pull up the leg braces on his ejection seat, felt the rapid decompression, and immediately pulled down the visor of his helmet in preparation for ejection. He assumed the practiced ejection position—back straight up against the seat, head against the back headrest, feet in the seat stirrups—but he didn’t do anything further. He waited for instructions from the pilot.
George and Joel sat side by side in their ejection seats facing aft, their inner turmoil not apparent to each other. Joel listened on the intercom to the front-end crew’s conversation as they tried to cope with the situation. He glanced over at George, sitting there ready to eject, looking calm. “Thought
s raced through my mind. How could this be happening to me? My heart was pounding in my mouth. I thought I could feel my blood coursing through my body, my nerves tingling. Suddenly, I was intensely afraid of losing my life. I could feel tears running down my cheeks. I decided to say a prayer, the Act of Contrition. As suddenly as the fear surged through my body, just as suddenly it subsided. I felt calmer and listened to the ongoing battle over the intercom, feeling shells from the attacking MiGs slamming into our aircraft.”
The two North Korean MiG-17s, approaching through multiple cloud layers and probably guided by the GCI radar George Back was recording and analyzing, had reached the RB-47H unseen from behind and below, the plane’s blind spot. The MiGs kept their radars off, or they would have been detected by the B-47’s APS-54 airborne warning receiver and by the Raven 1. When the MiGs commenced their attack, they were still low, directly behind the B-47, firing upward, trying to stay out of the cone of fire of the B-47’s 20mm guns. Copilot Hank Dubuy watched the MiGs as they positioned themselves behind his aircraft and took a couple of pictures. The lead MiG suddenly initiated the attack by firing its cannons. It was war. Hank dropped his camera. As the shells slammed into the aircraft, he requested permission from his pilot to fire. “Shoot the bastard down,” exclaimed Mattison while calling ‘Mayday,’ the internationally recognized call for a ship or aircraft in distress, on his single-sideband radio. As he proceeded to drop the aircraft toward the lower cloud layer, Mattison called for the navigator to give him a heading, “to get the hell out of here.” The aircraft was plummeting downward to escape the MiGs, seeking shelter in the lower layer of cloud and turning toward open water.
Captain Bob Rogers, the navigator, hunched over his radarscope in the nose of the aircraft, was busy ensuring that the plane remained on its planned track when the attack occurred. “At first I thought Mattison was joking when he said we were under attack. I thought he was joking until I heard and felt the hits.” Bob’s calm response to Mattison’s request for a heading was, “Take a ninety-degree turn to the right, and I’ll refine it in a second.” Then Bob put his radar crosshairs on the coast of Japan and asked Matt for second station. In second station, the pilot puts the aircraft on autopilot, and the navigator manually controls the aircraft in azimuth. It was a system designed to provide the best possible bombing results for B-47 bombers. Mattison couldn’t surrender control of the stricken aircraft to his navigator at such a time, but Bob’s request demonstrated the crew’s mettle and professional competence. Matt had no idea which systems were still operational. He needed to hand fly, he knew that. “After Matt called out ‘Mayday,’ everyone in the air was told to clear our frequency, because everyone in the air, including some KC-135 tankers, was offering help,” added Bob Rogers.
Unknown to the aircraft’s crew, a captain on an airborne Looking Glass C-135 SAC command-post aircraft circling near SAC headquarters at Omaha, Nebraska, picked up their HF radio transmissions of distress. The captain immediately notified the brigadier general on-board his aircraft, which was designed to exercise control over nuclear forces should SAC headquarters be destroyed by a surprise attack. While the general and his staff listened to one of their aircraft under North Korean fighter attack thousands of miles away, they downlinked the radio intercept to the SAC command post at Offutt. The Looking Glass aircraft crew and the command-post staff listened to the unfolding drama over the Sea of Japan but could do nothing to help.
In the meantime, Hank Dubuy was trying to defend the damaged plane against two persistent MiGs. “When I tried to return fire, I couldn’t get the attackers on my radar. They were too close and outside the elevation and azimuth limits for the guns to lock on in automatic mode. I immediately went to manual mode and began to engage the MiGs. I had no tracer ammunition, and to increase my probability of hitting the MiGs, I continually reset the guns to zero azimuth, zero elevation—I knew then where the guns were pointing—and I was able to aim the guns at an attacking MiG. I punched the firing button and repeated the process of aligning the guns and firing. The first MiG approached from behind and below, assumed a nose-up position, and fired. Then the MiG fell off on one wing and dove to regain airspeed and altitude for a second pass. While the first MiG recovered, the second tried to down us using the same awkward tactic. The Raven 1 released a steady stream of chaff packages [aluminum strips designed to break lock of enemy fighter radars] into the face of the enemy aircraft, which was trying to get into firing position behind and below us. At one time, the second attacker was totally obscured in a cloud of chaff and broke off his attack.”
The two MiGs made three passes each. Although their flying was clumsy and their gunnery abysmal, their shells brought the B-47 close to disaster. In George Back’s words, “the hydraulic system failed, boost-pump lights illuminated, and the aft main fuel tank was hit and burning. During subsequent attacks, the number three engine was hit. Shrapnel from broken turbine blades in number three damaged the number two engine. Both engines continued to operate at reduced power; number three engine vibrated like an old car with no universal joints. Engines number four and five continued to run, although number five threw a number of turbine blades into the body of the aircraft. Out of six engines, only the two outboard engines remained undamaged—numbers one and six—continuing to perform at full power. The remaining four engines provided varying amounts of thrust.”
“Both hydraulic systems were damaged,” copilot Hank Dubuy remembered. “The pumps operated, but there was no fluid. The aircraft was sluggish in its response when I pulled on the yoke, rather like a truck that lost its power steering. In addition, we had to deal with an ever-deteriorating center of gravity. As the main rear fuel tank continued to lose fuel, which was on fire as the fuel spray exited the aircraft through the shell holes, the diminished weight in the rear of the aircraft due to the loss of fuel slowly shifted the aircraft’s CG forward. The nose came down. It wasn’t that much of a problem flying at 425 knots, but we were concerned that on landing the forward shift in the center of gravity would lead to a severe nose-down attitude, which we couldn’t overcome with trim and flap adjustments. The forward shift in the aircraft’s CG also precluded us from using full landing flaps because their use would force the nose of the aircraft down even more as our airspeed diminished. Matt knew the landing would be difficult, if we made it that far. I continued to engage the MiGs while Matt did evasive maneuvers and assessed the damage we sustained. Throughout the engagement, Bob, our navigator, continued to provide headings to lead Matt out of the area to Yokota.
“On their third and final firing pass, I thought I scored a hit on the lead MiG. It nosed up abruptly, then pitched over and descended straight down in what appeared to be an unrecoverable position. Matt observed the MiG disappearing through a cloud deck at twelve thousand feet, heading for the water. Then my guns ceased firing—jammed or damaged, I didn’t know. I picked up my camera and took a couple of quick shots before the remaining MiG broke off the attack and turned back toward Wonsan. After the last MiG departed, Matt yelled over the intercom, ‘Hank, get the Dash-1 out and go to the red-bordered pages, emergency procedures.’
“ ‘Which page?’ I asked. ‘Any page will do,’ was Matt’s laconic answer.”
The RB-47 had taken a lot of punishment. The aircraft was vibrating badly, but Matt felt it was responding to his control. He could fly it. Hank could see that the aft main fuel tank was still emitting smoke, but the fire seemed to have diminished in intensity, and the color of the smoke had changed from black to white. A lack of fuel and wind blast had probably put out the fire. But the CG problem was irrevocably with them and would have to be dealt with once they got ready to land. The pilots had no idea if their tires were shot up, if the approach and landing chutes were in shreds, or if there was other damage that might doom their landing attempt. But the aircraft was flying, and they had ample fuel to get back to the base.
Hobart Mattison was an experienced World War II Eighth Air Force combat veteran who in
1944 had bailed out of a stricken B-17 bomber over Hungary, made his way across southern Germany to France, and then escaped to England with the help of the French underground. For him, abandoning a still-flying aircraft, no matter how badly damaged, was not an alternative. After leveling off at ten thousand feet and bringing the three Ravens forward, Matt asked his crew what they thought about punching out over Tokyo Bay or over the runway at Yokota. According to George Back, “When Matt inquired if anyone wanted to bail out, there was a unanimous ‘No, Sir.’ All fear had left me, and I had the utmost confidence in Matt and somehow knew that God didn’t get us that far just so we would end up splattered all over the runway.”
In similar situations, such nose-down landings by B-47 bombers most often resulted in funeral pyres. A shredded brake chute or a flat tire could easily spell disaster on landing. As a result of Mattison’s Mayday calls, there was no lack of radio assistance, but no American fighters had appeared. Interceptors launched from Yokota were much too far away to provide assistance in a timely manner, and once they arrived on the scene, they could only visually confirm the external damage 3-4290 sustained. Matt turned down a suggestion from the SAC command post at Yokota to recover at a base in South Korea. Instead, he began his en route descent to Yokota. Colonel Mattison was the aircraft commander and, as such, had the ultimate decision-making authority when it came to the safety of his crew. As they approached Yokota, Colonel Gunn, the 55th Detachment commander, came up in a T-39 Sabreliner and looked them over. He couldn’t add any new information that would help Matt in the tricky landing ahead.
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 25