by Robert Coram
One possible reason for the poor ER is that Day was surrounded by men who could do nothing but fly. Perhaps Day’s SAC superiors were a bit intimidated by a lawyer-pilot with a college degree. When assigned as defense counsel to miscreants, he was a vigorous advocate who almost always saw his clients exonerated. He was far from the typical SAC pilot, and he never fit in at Bergstrom.
A year after returning to Bergstrom, Day again was deployed to Japan. Doris remained at Bergstrom this time. She was an Air Force wife, and it was her job to stay home and mind the house. To keep her company while he was gone, Bud bought her a dog: a Weimaraner named Copper. Unfortunately, while Day was gone, Copper jumped for a clothespin hanging on a line, got entangled, and hung himself. When Day returned, he wanted to buy Doris another dog. Money was so tight that he stopped smoking and used the cash he would have spent on cigarettes to buy another Weimaraner, this one named Smoky.
Day was still deployed to Japan when the Korean armistice was signed in 1953. He came home, and the Days, who were unsuccessful at efforts to have children, began discussing adoption. Both agreed that they wanted several children.
By 1955 Day decided to resign his commission and return to Sioux City. One of his fundamental beliefs was that hard work and diligence paid off with promotion. But that clearly was not true in SAC, or at least it would not be possible until a lot of senior people died. Day believed the best he would ever get in SAC was maybe to become a flight commander — a captain’s billet — leading six pilots. That was not enough. He wanted to lead a fighter squadron in combat.
So many fighter pilots wanted out of SAC that headquarters was inundated with transfer requests. But SAC did not release its pilots, and if a pilot somehow wrangled a back-channel transfer, headquarters blocked it.
So Day was astonished when he put in for a transfer to England and it was approved. He received orders transferring him to the 55th Squadron of the 20th Fighter Bomber Wing at Wethersfield. This exceptional move may have indicated just how much his superiors at Bergstrom disliked him.
SHORTLY after Day received his orders, Doris was invited to attend a meeting of the Officers’ Wives Club. She did not even know there was such a club. Once there, Doris found a very formal group with ritualized rules. At teas, the wives wore white gloves, and inside their homes, near the front door, was a guest book along with a silver tray, upon which people left their calling cards. The wives thought Doris had just arrived at Bergstrom. “I’ve been here more than two years,” she confessed. “We are leaving. We have orders sending us to England.”
She made a vow that she would join the Officers’ Wives Club as soon as she got to England. And she would become part of the welcoming committee and would seek out and greet newcomers as soon as they arrived.
Every career military officer, when he retires and looks back over his years of service, has a favorite duty station. For Bud and Doris, that would be England. It also would be the place where Day’s name became known throughout the Air Force for an incident that a half century later would still cause people’s jaws to drop when they heard of it.
5
Sporty Flying
WETHERSFIELD was a former RAF base, one of the old bomber-recovery bases from World War II, located on the North Sea about forty-five miles northeast of London. The job of the 55th was to deliver nuclear bombs to Eastern Europe in the event the Soviet Union attacked through the Fulda Gap. Doing so would blow a hole through Communist defenses and allow SAC bombers an open door for their thrust to the heart of Russia.
Day arrived in England at a propitious time. Several senior officers were scheduled to return to the States, and the wing was in the process of converting from the straight-wing F-84G to the swept-wing F-84F, an aircraft in which he was already checked out.
Day’s almost obsessive desire for increasing his skills in every area began to show results immediately. He was hardly on the ground before he began training to be a bomb commander, a job which calls for navigation and bombing skills far above those of other fighter pilots. It also meant that Day would be qualified to conduct a single-airplane flight carrying a nuclear weapon on a suicide mission to Eastern Europe should war break out.
Usually junior officers spend most of their spare time studying highly classified reports on the weapons and tactics of the enemy. But Day was given the job of “trial observer” — sitting in on British courts in matters involving Air Force personnel — on top of his other duties. The added load made no difference: Day was free from the politics and insecurities of Bergstrom, and his strengths not only shone through but became part of the official record. His first ER in England covered the period from June 1, 1955, to January 31, 1956, and said that his ability as a pilot “is well above average,” that his appearance and military bearing “reflect great credit upon the Air Force,” and that his “coolness and clear, precise decisions under favorable and unfavorable conditions are not usually found in a pilot or officer of his experience.” The ER also stated that Day never complained about being a trial observer, even when that extra job kept him from flying. It ended by saying that Day had “unlimited growth potential” and should be promoted to captain. He was.
ELEVATED in rank, Day became the assistant standards and evaluation officer for the wing. A “stan-eval” pilot checked out other pilots and made sure they maintained their combat-ready flying proficiency. A few months after Day arrived, his boss rotated back to the States, and Day became the ranking stan-eval officer for the wing, a job usually held by a senior captain or a major. For a very junior captain, it was a splendid job. Subsequently, he was given the additional job of wing gunnery officer, which meant he wrote the procedures and was in charge of training other pilots on how to deliver nuclear weapons.
Life was very good for him and Doris. They lived in a centuries-old house in the village of Finchingfield. Day played golf frequently. Doris began to blossom as a military wife, demonstrating leadership qualities equal to those of her husband. She joined the Officers’ Wives Club and ran for president against a colonel’s wife. In the military, the status of a wife is determined by the rank of her husband, and it was almost heretical for the wife of a captain to run against the wife of a colonel. Doris, oblivious of tradition, won the race. She then set up procedures whereby members welcomed new wives and brought them into club activities as soon as they arrived. Soon she had members doing volunteer work at the base hospital. These changes were, within the ossified culture of the base, revolutionary.
As Doris and Bud were coming into their own, her dad’s health began failing, so Sonwald turned his business over to Stanley, one of his sons, who lacked his father’s acumen. The business foundered. As a result, in addition to supporting his own parents, Day began sending money to Doris’s father every month.
Doris decided to press ahead with the decision made back at Bergstrom to adopt. She and Bud wanted a child around four years old, the age their child would have been if Doris had become pregnant a year or so after they were married. The age was their only requirement; the Days did not stipulate boy or girl or even race. Because they were not specific, their request was put at the top of the list. In the summer of 1957, they were told that an orphanage in Germany had a young boy eligible for adoption.
Klaus was a blue-eyed boy who was two years and three months old. The age wasn’t quite right, but everything else that mattered was. One of the first things Day did was to change the child’s name to Steven Michael Day. The “Steven” was for a friend from Bud’s Marine Corps days, and “Michael” was in honor of Day’s squadron commander.
The Days were ecstatic. At last they were beginning to expand their family.
IT was a slow process for the still relatively new Air Force to drop one by one the practices inherited from the Army Air Forces and to create new procedures. Therefore, it was not until the mid-1950s — almost ten years after the Air Force was created — that pilot survival training became a serious issue. Day was sent to a training program in Germa
ny where pilots were blindfolded, trussed tightly, tossed into the back of a truck, and hauled into the Alps. There they were untied and told to find their way back. The route led through territory occupied by military units whose sole job was to capture the “escapees.” The training was rigged so that every pilot was captured and interrogated. Shortly after Day was pushed into his cell, he overpowered the guard, took his weapon, and escaped. When he was recaptured, his arms were taped together. He broke his bonds and had his cell mate fake an epileptic seizure. When the guard came in to investigate, Day and his cell mate overpowered him, ripped out the floor of the building, and escaped — the only members of their class and among the very few in the hundreds of students who had been through the school ever to do so. Survival-school officials chewed Day out for tearing up the floor — destruction of U.S. government property, they called it. Day said that he was told the training was to be as realistic as possible and that he had only used the ingenuity and initiative expected of an Air Force officer.
A little more than a decade later, Day would have the opportunity to put his survival training into practice. And it would not be a training exercise.
FLYING duties at Wethersfield were among the most hazardous in the Air Force. Commencing a typical flight, Day would load his F-84F with two 450-gallon drop tanks, charge his .50-caliber guns, and check the “bluke” bolted to the belly of the aircraft. (The “bluke” was a blue concrete bomb the size and weight of the nuclear weapon he would carry in wartime.)
He was so heavily loaded that for takeoff he had to use Jet Assisted Take Off (JATO) bottles, attached to the fuselage, that would be jettisoned over the English Channel. He flew a “high-low profile” — that is, after takeoff he climbed to high altitude, where jets are more fuel efficient. By the time he reached the French coast, he was climbing through 34,000 feet.
As he approached Germany, he would let down until he was on the deck — around 100 feet — and make a simulated bomb run on a target. He would be at treetop level and 450 knots, executing turns at precise spots and on a split-second schedule, oftentimes in the full instrument conditions common in Europe. Arriving over the target at a precise time, he would execute a simulated “over-the-shoulder” delivery of a nuclear bomb. Then Day would make a high-speed low-altitude exit before climbing back to altitude. He did not practice air-to-air refueling on the return flight because, in wartime, his target would be behind the Iron Curtain and he would have run out of fuel about the time he reached Holland. He also flew missions in England, where wood and coal fires filled the air with soot and smoke, a combination that, when combined with cool moist air off the North Sea, often resulted in low clouds and fog.
To get down at very low altitude and go ripping across England and much of Europe was a fighter pilot’s dream. And the Air Force had permission for low-level flights in the United Kingdom, Holland, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and part of Morocco. When a pilot flew at 450 knots and less than 100 feet of altitude, a microsecond of inattention would turn him into a fireball. A fighter pilot had more chances to get killed in the space of two or three minutes than most people experience in a lifetime. The flying was fun and it was dangerous, a combination beloved by fighter pilots — “sporty flying,” they called it. But jet aircraft were primitive by today’s standards. The pilots often returned from missions in a critical fuel state or with flight-threatening mechanical problems. Ambulances (“meat wagons”) and fire trucks screaming across the tarmac were a common sight at Wethersfield.
Day seemed to have more than his share of sporty flying. One night he took off for Étain, northeast of Paris, to pick up a small aircraft part. Captain Billy Moore, a wing staff officer who needed the night flying time, came along for the ride. Day was flying in the front seat of a T-33. Moore was in the rear. The weather was solid instrument conditions: low ceiling, limited visibility, and very cold, though the forecast called for improvement.
Day had a gnawing feeling about this flight; an inner voice was telling him not to take off. He went to base operations and asked what the weather was like along the route. He was told it was marginal.
The plan was for Moore to make the takeoff and landing. Day would fly the return flight.
As they crossed the English Channel, Moore asked for the current weather at Étain. The voice on the radio said that weather had deteriorated rapidly and that all of Europe was socked in: every runway within range was well below minimums.
Wethersfield, their home base, was zero-zero — no ceiling and no visibility.
“Billy, we’re in deep shit,” Day told Moore.
Moore wanted to fly on to Wiesbaden, easy to find because it was located on a big curve in the Rhine River. Day disagreed. “If we’re going to bust our ass,” he said, “let’s go back to a place we know. Our friends can plow through the wreckage.” Day told Moore to reverse course and fly the ground-controlled approach (GCA) while he watched from the front seat. When Day saw the runway lights, he would say, “I got it,” take control, and land. It was a risky strategy. The shift from instrument flying to visual flying takes several seconds, and in zero-zero conditions, pilots rarely have more than a brief moment to make the transition.
Moore slowed the airplane, nailed down the airspeed, and locked onto a three-degree glide slope. At three hundred altitude feet, they saw nothing. At two hundred feet, nothing. One hundred feet came and went, and still Day could see nothing. They continued to descend. About ten feet from the ground, Day suddenly saw the runway lights. But the aircraft was slightly off course and too low to make a correction without digging a wingtip into the ground. “Take it around,” Day said.
In these weather conditions and under these circumstances, the Air Force considered a bailout the proper procedure. If Day attempted another landing and banged up the airplane, he would face a board of inquiry.
He decided to make one more attempt. If they could not land, they would fly east of Wethersfield, bail out over open meadows, and hope he and Moore did not land in water, electrical lines, or trees.
“Faint heart never fucked a pig,” he mumbled as the aircraft rolled in on final.
The approach was perfect, corrections no more than one degree and airspeed nailed. The rate of descent was also textbook perfect. Moore reached a hundred feet — maximum pucker point. Day was holding the canopy rails so tightly that his hands hurt. The aircraft descended through fifty feet and there was nothing. At thirty feet they were still on solid instruments.
“I got it,” Day said. He pulled back slightly on the stick and felt the thunk of his tires on the runway. Unable to see the runway, he kept his eye on the compass and maintained his heading. He rolled to a stop, kept the aircraft lights on, and called for a tug to tow the aircraft off the runway.
A high degree of proficiency, combined with an equal amount of luck, had just enabled Day to do what was considered impossible. “I think we may be the only two guys to ever make a zero-zero landing in a jet aircraft,” Day told Moore. He probably was correct. Once again, Day survived an experience that had killed numerous other pilots.
DAY’S second ER in England, covering 1956, was extraordinary. The squadron commander said Day had an “unusual aptitude for command” and an “extremely high standard of character and leadership.” The wing commander added that Day was “one of the most outstanding leaders in this wing” and among “the upper 5 percent of all officers of like rank known to me.” The ER said that Day “has proved himself to be not only the most popular among those he works with, but those he works for.” Apparently word had gotten out about the fighter pilot who was also an aggressive lawyer, because a number of enlisted men had gone to Day for help rather than going to JAG lawyers. The ER noted that each time Day was sought out, he performed “in an out-standing manner.” Day was also praised for calculating the first accurate figures on fuel consumption and range for the new F-84Fs, an accomplishment the reviewing officer said made the difference in aircraft returning from missions safely or run
ning out of fuel.
The ER also said that pilots under Day’s command “are far better supervised than any others in the squadron” and are so proficient that “they are always the first ones chosen for a particularly hard or difficult mission.” Day himself was picked to be the first to check out in the F-100, which was replacing the F-84.
WHEN a wing converts to a new aircraft, the accident rate almost always goes up. This is particularly true in temperamental high-performance jets such as the F-100. Outfits transferring to the F-100 often tripled their accident rate, and one-quarter of the F-100s manufactured were lost in training accidents. But when the 20th Wing, under Day’s supervision, converted to F-100s, there was a decline in the accident rate. Day revised the pilot handbook for the F-100, and the 20th Wing was commended and recognized as having the best standardization program of any Air Force unit in Europe.
IN 1953, some 3,600 American POWs came home from Korea, and America learned that a number of them had collaborated with the enemy. The collaboration had come after physical and psychological torture, and a new term, “brainwashed,” was added to the lexicon. The novel and later the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate were inspired by stories of North Korean mind-control efforts. The military was extremely alarmed about the poor showing its members made as POWs and set about codifying a few guiding principles for the future. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower signed an executive order approving this new Code of Conduct. Members of the military assumed that since the code came from the president, it had the force of law.