Roaring Thunder: A Novel of the Jet Age

by Boyne, Walter J.

  The B-29s bore the brunt of the long-range bombing, with Douglas B-26 Invaders handling the night interdiction. But the November 1950 introduction of the MiG-15 fighter spelled the end of American air dominance. The guns of the B-29 were not capable of tracking the swift 600 mph MiGs, and casualties were growing. Neither the F-80 nor the F-84 was useful as an escort fighter, and only one tactic would serve, bottling up the MiGs with enough F-86s to keep them in place. The problem was that the B-29s had to keep bombing even though there were still not enough F-86s on hand to do the job.

  Shannon did not like being a copilot, not after years in the left seat of a B-17, but his pilot, Carl Chance, was capable and friendly. The rest of the crew accepted Harry, because of his experience with B-17s. For the first time in months, his conscience was letting up on him. He was in combat where he was needed, and he was being depended upon not only to do the copilot’s duties but also to make a perceptive analysis of an unacceptable situation: American air inferiority.

  Today’s mission was eleven hours round-trip to strike the Namsi Airfield, where a buildup of both jet fighters and piston engine attack aircraft had been seen. Eight B-29s were tasked with the mission, flying in two flights—Able and Baker—of four. Shannon was in the lead ship of Able Flight. On paper their escort looked formidable, with thirty-four F-86s ranging out in front and fifty-five F-84 fighter-bombers joining in the mission.

  Based on his World War II experience, Shannon approved of the tactics, developed by the ace Hub Zemke in World War II. Using what was called the Zemke Fan, the F-86s would stay out in front of the B-29s so that they could disrupt any MiG attack on the B-29s before it began.

  Even though the B-29 was pressurized and possessed what was laughingly called a heating system, the cold was piercing at 25,000 feet, and Shannon pounded his hands together to try to keep feeling in them. Chance waved to get his attention and pointed up to the two o’clock position. A positive wall of MiG-15s, at least one hundred, maybe more, was falling out of the sky, between the F-86s and the B-29s, cutting the Sabres off and isolating the bombers and the F-84s.

  Chance’s distinctive southern voice came through the intercom: “OK, we’re at the Initial Point. We’ll be straight and level until bombs away, so you-all keep a sharp lookout; this looks like a setup.”

  There had been the brief flurry of intercom clicks to tell him he’d been heard when Shannon saw the trap sprung. Forty eight MiG-15s, in twelve flights of four, were cascading out of the sun straight for their formation—six MiGs for every B-29.

  Shannon expected a head-on attack. Instead the MiGs formed a ring around the slow-moving formation of B-29s, F-80s, and F-84s, reminding him of the old Western films where the Indians circled the wagons. They made only one circuit before boring in, their 37mm cannon stuttering in the odd, almost comical way they had, the shells visible as a phosphorous blob arcing in, the 23mm cannon rattling faster.

  The MiG attack came just at bombs away; to his right, Harry saw a B-29 drop its bombs, start a slow turn, and blow up. Now the MiGs began a seesaw attack climbing to altitude, diving through the formation, and climbing back for another attack. The F-84s responded vigorously but lacked the speed to engage the MiGs, which brushed them aside almost contemptuously as they fired into the turning formation of bombers.

  The B-29 gunners threw out an enormous amount of lead. He heard one claim a victory, but if it was true, it was an accident; the MiG had simply flown into the barrage of .50-caliber shells. As they neared the coast, a Baker Flight B-29 nosed out of the formation, heading for the sea, two engines burning, two engines turning. Shannon said a hurried prayer for them, his Catholic instructions suddenly welling up.

  Then suddenly it was over; the MiGs departed and the skies were clear of enemy aircraft.

  Harry had plenty of time to think on the long flight back to Okinawa and through the endless debriefing. The B-29 gunners claimed three MiGs and an F-84 pilot claimed another one, but Shannon doubted all of the claims. The B-29 gunners had put more slugs in the B-29s accompanying them than in enemy fighters, and the F-84s were simply outclassed.

  He realized that it would have taken at least 150, perhaps 200 F-86s to fight off that many MiGs and there still would have been losses. The B-29s were clearly obsolete and would have to be relegated tonight bombing to survive.

  The irony was severe. The poorest major power in the world, China, had put as many as a thousand MiG-15 jet fighters, one of the best in the world, into the theater, with half that many ready for combat on any given day. The richest country in the world, the United States, had fewer than seventy-five F86s in the theater, and of these, only about half were ever operational at one time. Shannon guessed that Headquarters, USAF, thought that the threat of Russian bombers was greater than the threat from the MiGs. They might have been right, but that was no answer. The richest country in the world should be able to afford enough jet fighters for both jobs.

  May 20, 1951, Suwon Air Base, Korea

  Tom Shannon believed that patience pays. He had flown fifty missions in F-80s, and while he never grew to love the aircraft the way he felt about the F-86, he respected it for the job it did. Now he was collecting his reward, back flying Sabres with the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing out of Suwon.

  It’s not that the missions were easy. The F-86s always had to fly up the length of the Korean peninsula to where the MiG-15s wanted to play. MiG Alley was a parallelogram of some sixty-five hundred square miles that stretched from the Korea Bay in the west to Huichon and from the Yalu River in the north to Sinanju. Up to five hundred MiGs operated out of several bases, with the principal complex of airfields centered around Antung, in Red China. The geography and the rules of engagement gave the MiGs a tremendous advantage, for they could take off and climb to altitude in Red China, where they were immune to attack. Then, at a time and place of their choosing, they could make a diving attack on a formation of F-86s and slice back across the Yalu to their sanctuary again.

  Today the 4th was flying a standard fighter sweep over Sinuiju. Tom was at 27,000 feet, leading the second of four six-ship flights, a maximum effort for the F-86s. He hoped that the MiGs would attack; often they did not, making just a feint attack to force the F-86s to drop their auxiliary tanks.

  Shannon felt an incredible sense of well-being. Unlike flying the F-80, where his mission was to take munitions to where they were most needed by the ground forces, here the mission was to kill MiGs, nothing more, nothing less. There was an adrenaline rush from knowing that he was flying the best fighter in the world, that he had six .50-caliber machine guns at his command, and that there was no enemy pilot who would survive an engagement with him. In short, he was feeling like a fighter pilot should feel.

  As they started their second pattern of turns, Lieutenant Colonel Ben Emmett, leading the first flight, commanded, “Drop Tanks.”

  Elated at the coming combat, Tom hit the jettison switch, but only the left tank came off, spiraling away, while the right one stayed tight on his wing. He hit the switch again, but nothing happened.

  The standing procedure was to depart combat, with your wingman, immediately, if a tank failed to jettison. The aircraft was suddenly far less maneuverable and the asymmetric weight and drag condition could cause real problems as you pulled high g-forces. Tom muttered, “Screw it,” and continued turning, straight into the oncoming MiGs, firing as soon as they were in range. Miraculously, the two formations passed through each other without a mid-air collision, and Tom’s wingman called, “Break, MiG at your six o’clock.” Tom pulled the F-86 into as tight a turn as he could, given the tank he still retained, slid behind a MiG-15, and hosed it with all six of his guns. Parts flew off the MiG, the canopy departed, and the aircraft half-rolled into a dive straight toward the ground. He repressed a momentary urge to follow the plane down and make sure of it, but when he looked up he saw the remaining twenty-two Sabres mixing it up with at least fifty MiGs.

  Leading his wingman to the extreme edge of
the battle, Tom found six MiGs forming up for a dive on the encircled Sabres below. He burst right through their flight, turned, caught the lead MiG in his sights, and once again fired a five-second burst, sending about thirty-nine pounds of lead smashing into the enemy. The MiG blew up, and Tom moved to the next aircraft. They were lower and slower now, and as he began to fire, the MiG pilot ejected in panic.

  Suddenly Tom was alone in the sky. His wingman had disappeared, so had the MiGs, and what Tom hoped was the rest of his unit was streaking away south. One look at his fuel gauges and he knew why. He started a climb to his optimum altitude, probably about thirty-two thousand feet, knowing he had just enough to get back to the base at Suwon if he flew conservatively, if the winds were favorable, and if no one had crashed on the runway. God, it felt good! Three MiGs down. That gave him twelve victories, counting the nine from World War II. He was no Rickenbacker or Jabara, but he was getting there. He had passed through 9,000 feet when he saw the MiG-15 letting down, heading for the Yalu River. Tom watched the “Ivan” gliding away, wings straight and level, probably thinking about his “stogramoy,” the one hundred grams of vodka he would knock back when he landed at Antung.

  Tom glanced at the fuel gauge, winced, and glanced at the MiG again. This was how he liked it, no maneuvering, just slip in behind the airplane and kill it. Advancing power, he dove under the unsuspecting MiG and maneuvered behind him. He fired his remaining .50-caliber rounds into the MiG, in one ferocious sixty pounds of lead lump that tore the plane apart in a violent red and black explosion. Ivan probably never knew what hit him.

  Another glance at the fuel gauge and it showed him down to five hundred pounds—roughly eighty gallons. Tom started a nervous climb, and when he got to 16,000 feet, he called in to the K-13 weather officer. He knew a knot of pilots would be gathered there, hanging around to listen to the fights, trying to visualize events from the rapid-fire radio calls that streamed in, determining from the pitch of the friends’ voices how scared or how elated they were.

  Somewhat to his surprise, Gordon Maxson, a friend from his days at Nellis came on saying, “Don’t shoot them all down, Tom; leave some for us.”

  “Gordon, I’m low on fuel, and I need to know what the winds are. If there’s much of a headwind, I can’t make it back.”

  “Stand by one.”

  There was a minute’s wait; Tom could imagine Maxson riffling through the weather data, checking for any pilot reports. He came back on, “Doesn’t look good, Tom; you’ve got about a fifty-five-knot wind, quartering from the east. No help, a lotta hurt.”

  “Roger, thank you, Gordon. I’m not going to make it back to Kimpo, so I’ll turn west, and try to land on the beach at Pen Yang Do.”

  Pen Yang Do was an island twenty-five miles out in the Sea of Japan. The “Dumbo” rescue aircraft, a Grumman SA-16 Albatross, usually orbited there.

  Maxson came back, “Roger, Pen Yang Do.”

  Tom looked at his fuel gauge again, bumping toward empty. “That may be too far for me. Ask them to come in closer to the shoreline; I think I’ll have to leave this bird pretty soon.”

  “OK. Stay on this frequency and let us know how things are going.”

  A few minutes later, at 11,000 feet, the engine flamed out. He kept the airspeed at 220 knots and flew as precisely as possible, trying to stretch the glide as far as possible. At 3,000 feet he called Maxson again.

  “Gordon, I’ve cleared the coast; I’m about three thousand feet and I’ve got the Albatross in sight. I’m going to eject pretty soon.”

  “One second, Tom; there’s a few guys here with something to say to you.”

  Ed Chalkley came on the horn and said, “Tom, you cheap bastard, you’re just trying to get out of paying me the five bucks you owe me. You get your ass safe back home here!”

  Another three or four guys came on with similar rough sentiments and Tom felt pretty good.

  “Adios, you guys, I’m leaving now.”

  He reached down, unfastened his safety belt so that the windblast would rip the seat away, and pulled the ejection seat handle. The next instant was filled with pain and confusion as the canopy blew off and the ejection seat fired, compressing him down as he shot out of the aircraft, no longer a pilot but a projectile. Numb from the shock of the ejection, hoping he hadn’t collapsed his spine, he kicked clear of the seat, deployed his parachute, and hit the water within a minute.

  The icy water sent chills down him, but he got rid of his parachute canopy, inflated his dinghy, and crawled in.

  The Dumbo had followed him down and was already taxing over to him. A rope line was fired from a big hatch in the rear fuselage, and Tom grabbed it, pulling himself close enough to the plane for two crewmen to help him up into the opening. As soon as he was aboard, the SA-16 started moving forward. His mind went back to the Catalina that had rescued him off Guadalcanal, and the image was heightened as a North Korean shore battery began lobbing shells out toward the Grumman. He turned to the grinning airman and said, “Two wars, two bailouts, two rescues. Not a bad average.”

  The whole 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing had been monitoring his radio calls and there was a huge celebration going on when the Albatross put down its wheels and landed at Suwon.

  Tom’s heart sank when he saw the wing commander, Colonel John Meyer, waiting for him. Meyer was tough; he had twenty-four victories in World War II against the Germans and had shot down two MiG-15s in Korea. He was a disciplinarian who demanded that rules be followed, and he obviously had heard from others about Shannon engaging in combat when his tip tank wouldn’t jettison.

  “Captain Shannon, you know what the rules are about a hung tank, don’t you?”

  Tom mumbled, “Yes, sir,” and Meyer was into a five-minute tirade about discipline, rules, safety, and ego. His face grew red and his neck veins bulged as he leaned into Tom, his finger jabbing him in the chest. Then, abruptly, he finished with, “But seeing that you got four confirmed kills, I’m not going to court-martial you; I’m putting you in for a Distinguished Flying Cross. You are dismissed.”

  Tom saluted and turned to head for the bar, thinking, That makes thirteen. Boy, this is really going to burn Harry up. He got about twenty feet before the medics reached him to take him off for X-rays, standard procedure after an ejection.

  April 15, 1952, Boeing Field, Seattle

  Construction of the XB-52 and YB-52 had taken place in a restricted area of the Boeing plant, where the workers were all veterans with top security clearances. The two planes were virtually identical, the difference in their designation coming only as a funding ploy that allowed $10 million in production funds to be spent on the prototypes.

  Superficially similar in appearance to the B-47, the prototype B-52s were much larger, with a 185-foot wingspan, eight Pratt & Whitney YJ57-P-3s, placed in four nacelles of two engines each, and a strange-looking undercarriage, four trucks of two wheels each. The wings had a thickened wing root that both decreased weight and increased fuel capacity. The cockpit used tandem seating, as in the B-47, but General LeMay had insisted that a conventional side-by-side cockpit be used and the production aircraft were already redesigned to accommodate his wishes.

  The airplane would have flown in 1951, but in November of that year the XB-52’s pneumatic system had suffered a massive failure, blowing out the entire rear section of the wing. The incident had forced Boeing to put in a hurry-up call to Vance Shannon to come in and advise on the redesign that was incorporated in the YB-52 and subsequent aircraft.

  The super-secret security surrounding the airplane disappeared the week prior to April 15, as Boeing public relations gave newspapers advance notice of the first flight. The hillside east of Boeing Field and all the perimeter streets were jammed with spectators, anxious to see what the future held for Boeing and Seattle. To them the aircraft represented jobs, careers, new cars, and house payments—and also the defense of the United States.

  Shannon was in the privileged group watching the first-flight cr
ew, Tex Johnston and Lieutenant Colonel Guy Townsend, go through their methodical preparations. Johnston’s career had followed Shannon’s by about ten years but had closely paralleled it in many ways. The amiable but sometimes tempestuous Johnston had made many first flights and also flown racers at Cleveland, winning the Thompson Trophy race in 1946. Townsend had been vital in the B-47 program and was credited with selling the airplane to the top brass of the Air Force.

  Everyone who had participated in the famous 1948 Dayton “weekend at the Van Cleve” when the proposal for the B-52 had been created was on hand. Vance’s job was done, and he asked Vaughn Blumenthal, the aerodynamicist, how he thought things would go.

  “Vance, there’s only one thing I’m worried about, and I think we took care of it. The ailerons are so big, I was afraid that they might overbalance and perhaps flutter at higher airspeeds. So we’ve rigged the control forces to be very high, and set the pickup point for the spoilers at about forty-five degrees of control movement.”

  “That should avoid the problem, all right, but won’t it make it tough to handle?”

  “That’s what Johnston gets paid for, handling. I get paid for making sure it doesn’t come apart in flight.”

  All the conversation dwindled as the YB-52 moved down toward the end of the runway, moving its nose from left to right, as if it were a ludicrously huge hound dog sniffing the wind, as Johnston checked the crosswind landing gear. After the check, he caused a collective gasp from the spectators by allowing the aircraft to move sideways down the taxiway, compensating for the slight crosswind. Lightly loaded at 225,000 pounds, the wingtip outriggers were well above the ground. Shannon had seen fully loaded taxi tests when the wings drooped so that the wheels rolled along the ground, keeping them from touching it.

  The takeoff began with a ground-shaking run up to 100 percent power on all eight of the 9,000-pounds-of-thrust engines, with black smoke pouring out behind in a torrent. Then Johnston released the brakes, and the YB-52 jumped forward, accelerated rapidly, lifting off at 11:08 AM to begin its climb for the flight to Larson Air Force Base at Moses Lake, Washington, where additional testing would be done.