Aviation History September 2021 by HistoryNet

broken arrow: nuke-armed b-52 crashes in california

tough turkey grumman’s tbf avenger was the ultimate torpedo bomber warm-up for world war ii: future foes hone tactics in spanish skies operation highjump: 1947 expedition to SEPTEMBER 2021 explore antarctica from the air

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SEPTEMBER 2021

DEPARTMENTS

5 MAILBAG 6 BRIEFING 10 AVIATORS

Eyer “Slonnie” Sloniger, American Airlines’ “Old Number One,” earned the respect of his fellow airline pilots during a celebrated 38-year flying career. By Robert O. Harder

14 RESTORED Crewmen on USS Philippine Sea ready a Douglas R4D-5 for launch.

More than 50 years in the making, a meticulously reproduced Sopwith Camel is on display at Michigan’s Kalamazoo Air Zoo. By Barry Levine

features 26 Tough Turkey

The finest torpedo bomber to fly in any war, Grumman’s hulky TBF Avenger made a significant contribution to victory in World War II’s Pacific and European theaters. By Stephan Wilkinson

36 The Spanish Air War

In a deadly dress rehearsal for the world war to follow, future Axis and Allied powers battled and honed tactics over Spain in a new generation of aircraft. By Barrett Tillman

44 Broken Arrow in California’s Central valley

A Cold War airborne alert mission ended in nearcatastrophe when a B-52 packing two H-bombs ran out of fuel and crashed on a California farm in 1961. By Timothy Karpin & James Maroncelli

52 Operation Highjump

Airplanes and newly introduced helicopters served as the eyes of a massive U.S. Navy fleet charged with exploring Antarctica’s frozen reaches in 1946-47. By Jim Trautman

16 EXTREMES

By the time the longrange, four-engine Nakajima G8N bomber arrived, Japan had already gone over to the defensive. By Robert Guttman

18 STYLE

Showcasing products of interest to aviation enthusiasts and pilots.

24 LETTER FROM AVIATION HISTORY 66 REVIEWS 70 FLIGHT TEST 72 AERO ARTIFACT

60 No Alternative

Its air assets stretched thin, the Israeli Air Force armed Fouga Magister jet trainers and sent them into combat during the 1967 Six-Day War. By Patrick S. Baker

ON THE COVER: The Planes of Fame Air Museum’s TBM-3E Avenger flies over Lake Mathews in Southern California. General Motors’ Eastern Aircraft division built this particular Avenger in Trenton, N.J., and delivered it to the Navy in July 1945, after which it went into storage until acquired by the museum in 1959. Cover photo: Paul Bowen Photography.

SEPTEMBER 2021

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; JOHN SEWARD/AIR ZOO AEROSPACE & SCIENCE MUSEUM; NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE; BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES

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MICHAEL A. REINSTEIN CHAIRMAN & PUBLISHER DAVID STEINHAFEL PUBLISHER ALEX NEILL EDITOR IN CHIEF

A Boeing B-52G flies a mission.

Aviation History

Online

You’ll find much more from Aviation History on the web’s leading history resource: historynet.com

The Last Flight of Hobo 28

On January 21, 1968, a fire erupted in the cockpit of a Strategic Air Command B-52G heading to Thule Air Force Base in Greenland when the heating system ignited several polyurethane seat cushions. The fire quickly spread out of control, forcing the crew to bail out. But there was a bigger problem: The Stratofortress, now plummeting in flames toward Greenland’s Bylot Sound, was carrying four massive hydrogen bombs.

Five Avengers Lost in the Bermuda Triangle

Three months after the end of World War II, 14 officers and enlisted men in five TBM Avengers took off from Florida’s Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale on a routine training mission. Somewhere over the Atlantic, in the area now known as the Bermuda Triangle, all five planes of Flight 19 vanished. For more than 75 years, military and civilian experts have tried to find an explanation for one of the most baffling mysteries of naval aviation.

AVIATION H

SEPTEMBER 2021 / VOL. 32, NO. 1

CARL VON WODTKE EDITOR LARRY PORGES SENIOR EDITOR JON GUTTMAN RESEARCH DIRECTOR STEPHAN WILKINSON CONTRIBUTING EDITOR ARTHUR H. SANFELICI EDITOR EMERITUS STEPHEN KAMIFUJI CREATIVE DIRECTOR BRIAN WALKER GROUP ART DIRECTOR MELISSA A. WINN DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY PAUL FISHER ART DIRECTOR GUY ACETO PHOTO EDITOR

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Israel’s Other Air Force

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PROUDLY MADE IN THE USA ©BOEING

The founding father of the Israeli Air Force’s Lockheed C-130 squadrons, retired Brig. Gen. Joshua “Shiki” Shani, reveals the secret history of his country’s innovative “other air force.” IAF transport squadrons have made a name for themselves over the years in a series of unconventional and often covert missions, including 1976’s famed Entebbe hostage rescue operation.

SEPTEMBER 2021

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Mailbag

GOOD F-107 PILOT Each month I look forward to the new issue of Aviation History for informative articles and interesting perspectives about historically significant and just plain cool facts from your researchers and contributors. When I began paging through the May issue I stopped cold when I saw the short article about the North American F-107A “Ultra Sabre” [Extremes]. As it turns out, I was fortunate to have rubbed elbows with one of the pilots who actually flew the F-107A. > > After serving with the U.S. Navy flying A-7s and F/A-18s, I went to the airlines and moved to the quiet town of Satellite Beach, Fla., about a mile south of Patrick AFB. Within two weeks I met a neighbor one morning as I walked by his house on my post-run cooldown. I waved “hi” to him and he said, “You’re a pilot, aren’t you?” Quite stunned I said yes and we began to chat and subsequently became good friends. I learned he was U.S. Air Force Colonel Clyde Good, who flew B-26s in the Pacific War, then F-84s in Korea before his days at Edwards AFB as a test pilot. He told me about the various test projects he had participated in, including the F-107A. Colonel Good’s flights in the F-107A involved the no. 2 aircraft, serial no. 55119, which was configured for air-to-ground missions. It was the only one with forward-firing guns installed. When the program concluded, he was tasked to fly the jet back to Wright-Patterson AFB. Unbeknownst to Clyde, engineers had prepped the jet for storage and removed all the cockpit lights since the flight was scheduled to be daylight only. As it turned out, the ferry flight via Tinker AFB was delayed when Clyde could not get the jet started. His F-100 escort

elected to press on and let Clyde follow a few minutes later. Well, it was more than a few minutes and halfway from Tinker the sun set and Clyde was going to have to fly a night instrument approach to a low ceiling… when he discovered there were no lights! He knew the cockpit and controls well so he juggled his only flashlight as he manipulated stick and throttle so that he could see enough of his instruments to approach and land. Once on the ground the tower could not see him since all external lights were also disabled but he told them he knew the place and could find his way to the hangar. Several years ago the Trumpeter model company released a new kit of the F-107A in 1/72nd scale and I could not resist the chance to build an exact replica for the colonel. I talked with him extensively and found all the documentation available, then proceeded to scratchbuild parts and modify the kit as necessary. In the end I was able to present to Clyde a very nice rendition of his test jet from Edwards. He was stunned to see it and immediately began to relate many stories and anecdotes about the project. I’ve attached a picture of Clyde receiving the model from me [above]. It is always a thrill to meet such aviation

heroes from days past and to hear the tales of events they participated in. Thank you for publishing a great magazine and doing the painstaking research needed to provide the details and data for all the interesting articles. Please keep up the stellar work! Lt. Cmdr. Michael R. McLeod U.S. Navy (ret.)

Lajes. No sign of him or his balloon was ever found. Captain William Brost U.S. Air Force (ret.)

HELO FANS

As always your March issue delighted this old aviator! In recent years, I visited Hill

ANOTHER LOST BALLOON

I enjoyed your recent article “Caution to the Wind” about the balloon The Free Life [July]. I was the U.S. Air Force base operations officer at Lajes Field, Azores, Portugal, in 1974 when Thomas Gatch attempted his solo Atlantic crossing in his balloon Light Heart. He was a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and son of a Navy admiral. He departed the Harrisburg, Pa., airport on February 18 and talked to several commercial and military aircraft on his flight. He was last spotted by a freighter about 1,000 miles west of the Canary Islands at 1,000 feet headed toward Africa. The official comment by the military was that there were no military flights searching for him. In fact, the U.S. Navy based at Lajes was actively searching in their Lockheed P-3s. During that time, I received many telephone calls from Portuguese and Spanish newspapers asking if I could arrange for their reporters to ride on the search aircraft. Of course I had to tell them there was no search being launched from

AFB in Ogden, Utah, as part of my aerospace consulting work. An after-hours visit to their small museum was a real joy. The attached photo [above] shows their excellent display of the Kaman HH-43 Huskie [ref: “Leave No Man Behind”]. As a kid growing up in SoCal in the ’50s, this was my favorite “whirlybird” model to build. Lots more at that museum, well worth the trip. It is off but beside the base. Captain Vern Lochausen U.S. Navy (ret.) On the table of contents in the March issue the Kaman H-2 photo is labeled as a UH-2A. The aircraft is in fact an SH-2F. It was originally manufactured as a UH-2B, then later upgraded to SH-2F standards. The bird depicted is a twin-engine aircraft, not a single-engine UH-2A/B. Many of the early A/Bs were upgraded to twin-engine configuration in the 1960s and returned under different designations. Commander Jerry L. Wells U.S. Navy Reserve (ret.)

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Aviation History Editor, HISTORYNET 901 North Glebe Road, 5th Floor, Arlington, VA 22203 OR EMAIL TO aviationhistory@historynet.com (Letters may be edited)

SEPTEMBER 2021

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briefing

Piecing Together a Condor hybrid bird Above: Assembled using parts from four military variants, the Airbus Condor Team Bremen’s Focke-Wulf Fw-200 nears completion in Stuhrbaum prior to being moved to Berlin Tempelhof in June. Inset: A restoration technician works on the fuselage in August 2020.

mashup replication of one of World War II’s more unusual combat aircraft, a Focke-Wulf Fw-200 Condor, is underway in Germany. The completed airframe, engines and partial cockpit are on display in the German Museum of Technology’s Tempelhof Airport hangar in Berlin,

while work is proceeding to re-create an airliner interior. The core of this renewed airplane is a Condor maritime bomber, not an early 26-seat long-range civil transport Condor. The core hulk was raised from the waters off Trondheim, Norway, in 1999, and it literally fell to pieces while being craned onto a barge.

The “restoration” is actually a yard sale of parts from four different military Condors. The outer wings are from an Fw-200C-4, cockpit framing from another C-4, empennage from a C-1 and various parts from a C-3, all attached to a new, purpose-built fuselage. The BMW radials (actually license-built Pratt & Whitney

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OPPOSITE PHOTOS: CONDOR TEAM BREMEN; TOP RIGHT: MEIERMOTORS/COURTESY OF MATTHIAS DORST; BOTTOM RIGHT: UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Hornets) are from four different private donors. The Condor was only briefly successful as a combat airplane. It was never intended to be anything but an airliner, and its structure was weak enough that fuselages of military versions loaded with guns, turrets, cupolas and bombs had a habit of collapsing just aft of the wing trailing edge during hard landings. Brisk evasive maneuvers were verboten, and one Condor famously fell to an angry B-24 crew in what might have been the only one-on-one, eightengine dogfight of the war. Condors sank enough shipping during the early days of the Battle of the Atlantic to elicit Churchillian hyperbole describing them as “the scourge of the Atlantic,” but the arrival of carrierborne Grumman F4F Mart lets and Hawker Hurricanes sacrificially launched from catapult-equipped merchantmen put a quick stop to further scourging. By mid-1941, the heavy and slow Condors were forbidden to attack convoys or seek combat, and they were soon relegated to the Eastern Front as transports. One was modified with two cabins for Adolf Hitler’s personal use. Nonetheless, this new Condor is a remarkable technological accomplishment, funded largely by the Airbus Group and built by company volunteers. It may be a debatable restoration, but it’s almost certainly the only complete Condor the world will ever see again. Stephan Wilkinson

swiss peacekeeper After a five-year restoration that included a fiery red paint job, the EKW C-3604 takes to the air on June 4.

Air Quotes

“FLYING IS HYPNOTIC AND ALL PILOTS ARE WILLING VICTIMS TO THE SPELL.” –ERNEST K. GANN

Alpine Anteater Returned to Flight

witzerland was the Rottweiler of neutral nations during World War II, happily blowing away accidental tourists, whether Allied or Axis, that strayed across its border. To do that job the Swiss relied on a fleet of Messerschmitt Me-109s bought from Germany. The hotpepper-red Swiss airplane shown here, an EKW C-36, had an entirely different job: providing close air support for Swiss infantry had anybody dared to penetrate their mountain fastness by ground, which of course never happened. The C-36 was ultimately built in five versions, C-3601 through C-3605. The first four were piston-powered by various Hispano-Suiza and Hisso-like Saurer V-12s built by a Swiss truck manufacturer. The C-3605 used a Lycoming T53 turboprop at the far end of a hose nose that gave the airplane its nickname, Alpine Anteater. The well-regarded German restoration shop Meier Motors, building on experience gained in restoring the only flyable C-3603 during 2012-14, has now completed the five-year restoration of a C-3604 that first flew this past June. MeierMotors replaced the airplane’s stock 1,500-hp Saurer YS-2/3 with a 1,620-hp Rolls-Royce Merlin 500 “transport engine,” a variant built after WWII with an eye toward increased durability and a longer time before overhaul. MeierMotors also installed a basic set of controls in the rear cockpit (which formerly had a sideways-facing seat for a target-tow operator) and mounted modern avionics throughout. The fiery paint scheme is homage to a famous Swiss air force squadron, Fliegerstaffel 1, which flew C-3604s and featured red as its unit color…though never in such profusion. Stephan Wilkinson

SEPTEMBER 2021

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BRIEFING

One-Eyed Pilot Completes World Flight

ince he was a kindergartener in Hokkaido, Japan, Shinji Maeda dreamed of flying airplanes. Those dreams seemed shattered, however, after an auto accident left the 18-year-old with a fractured skull and a crushed optic nerve. “Doctors gave me a 50/50 chance of survival,” he later said. Maeda did survive, though he was permanently blinded in one eye. Since Japanese regulations prohibit licensing of one-eyed pilots, his father recommended that he try flight training in the United States. After graduating from Nihon University’s College of Science and Technology, he went to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz., and emerged with a master’s degree in safety science and a singleengine pilot’s license in 2005, followed by multiengine and instrument ratings. Maeda went on to be a flight instructor for Snohomish Flying Service at Harvey Field, Wash., as well as the North American aviation engineer for ShinMaywa Industries, Inc., and for Boeing. In 2016 he founded the Aero Zypangu Project, a nonprofit that offers lectures to young people on his general mantra that “nothing is impossible.” On May 1 Maeda put his flight experience to the test when

lucy in the sky Shinji Maeda relaxes on the wing of his 1963 Beechcraft Bonanza (above) and flies a leg of his “Earthrounder Mission” (left).

he took off from Seattle on what he called an “Earthrounder Mission.” His airplane, named Lucy, was a 1963 Beechcraft P35 Bonanza that his former boss at ShinMaywa had sold him and which he spent four years upgrading for the flight. Over the next 42 days he flew 22,000 miles, stopping in 18 countries, to land Lucy at Snohomish on June 12. At age 41, Maeda has logged more than 1,400 flying hours in the process of fulfilling his childhood dream. Jon Guttman

MILESTONES

Off to the Races

he decades between the two world wars are often dubbed the golden age of aviation. It’s no coincidence it was also the premier era for air races— hugely popular competitions sponsored by wealthy patrons that pushed aviation technology to new and greater heights. In 1920 publishing giant Ralph Pulitzer backed one of the era’s first major trophy races. Intended to spur development of faster American airplanes, the Pulitzer was a timed speed challenge that went to the racer who flew four laps around a 32-mile closed course in the fastest time. It was followed in 1929 by the Thompson Trophy, similar to the Pulitzer except that all the competitors flew at the same time—an Indy 500 of the skies. In 1931 inventor and manufacturing magnate Vincent Bendix, founder of the Bendix Aviation Corporation, began sponsoring his namesake trophy race, a cross-country marathon designed to encourage engineers to build faster and more reliable aircraft, as well as to hone pilots’ skills in endurance flights. The first Bendix race—90 years ago this September 4—was won by Major James H. Doolittle, a veteran of the race circuit who had previously also collected the

Thompson and Schneider trophies. Jimmy Doolittle’s Laird Super Solution LC-DW300 biplane won the $7,500 first-place prize, flying the 2,043-mile route from Burbank to Cleveland in nine hours and 10 minutes at an average speed of 223 mph. After a short rest in Cleveland, Doolittle flew on to Newark, N.J., setting a new transcontinental speed record in the process. He would of course go on to lead the April 1942 air raid on Tokyo that still bears his name. celebrated speed demon Jimmy Doolittle poses with the Laird Super Solution in which he won the 1931 Bendix Trophy.

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2020 Collier Trophy awarded

OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: AOPA/DAVID TULIS; COURTESY OF SHINJI MAEDA; PHOTOQUEST/GETTY IMAGES; ABOVE: U.S. AIR FORCE/CHRISTOPHER DYER

f all his achievements in aviation, Jimmy Doolittle regarded as the most significant his blind flight on September 24, 1929, in which he demonstrated the reliability and utility of instruments toward the achievement of safe flight. Garmin Autonomí has now done Doolittle one better, in the process winning 2020’s Robert J. Collier Trophy (above) for “the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America, with respect to improving performance, efficiency and safety of air or space vehicles, the value of which has been thoroughly demonstrated by actual use during the preceding year.” As described by the National Aero nautic Association, which sponsors the Collier Trophy, Garmin’s G3000 Emergency Autoland system is “the world’s first certified autonomous system that activates during an emergency to safely control and land an aircraft without human intervention.” If the situation warrants, the pilot can activate the system by pushing a button, as can a passenger if the pilot is incapacitated. The system can even activate itself if it senses an emergency, determining its course of action to the nearest airport with the most appropriate dimensions, terrain, weather and other safety factors to land itself. Introduced in October 2019, Gar min’s Autoland system was first installed in a Piper M600 and after testing was certified by the Federal Aviation Admin istration on May 15,AVHP-210900-001 2020. Since Mystic then,Stamps.indd the system has also become available in the Daher TBM 940 and the Cirrus Vision Jet, with more aircraft expected to follow.

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AvIATORS

Old Number One DURING A 38-YEAR CAREER ENCOMPASSING NEARLY 25,000 FLYING HOURS, “SLONNIE” SLONIGER GAINED THE RESPECT AND ADMIRATION OF HIS FELLOW AIRLINE PILOTS

“S

loniger of American Airlines” was a genuine legend in his own time, a pilot’s pilot if ever there was one. Author Ernest K. Gann, who began his flying career at American, wrote about him as he did no other pilot. “Sloniger,” Gann said, “had flown the mail mano-a-mano with Lindbergh and on my airline his seniority number was One. [He was] a master airman who had survived almost everything that can happen in the sky without a scratch on his carcass or smear on his natural nobility.” Gann went on to compare him to a riverboat gambler whose eyes absorbed all about him, he with his dark complexion, glossy black hair and deep, well-modulated voice. “I revered [him] as did nearly every other pilot of our line,” wrote Gann. Sloniger never sought publicity, never tried to single himself out, never bragged about his accomplishments. Which is likely why so few pilots remember him today. “Slonnie,” as his friends called him, earned his U.S. Army Air Service wings at Kelly Field, Texas, in 1918 and was sent to France. The former Eagle Scout flew rotary-powered Nieuports along the Western Front in the closing days of World War I. Although he missed out on air combat, his thirst for adventure led him into dodging bandits while delivering

Biplane Beginnings Top: Eyer Sloniger (left) delivered mail and payrolls in Mexico after serving in WWI. Above: In the early 1920s, “Slonnie” flew some of the first regularly scheduled passenger routes in the U.S.

mail and payrolls in Mexico. After returning to the States Sloniger became a barnstormer—for several years a major headliner, air racer, test pilot and ultimately airline pilot. He was among the first pilots to make a scheduled passenger flight in the U.S. in the early 1920s. Eyir Sloniger (later changed to Eyer) was born on July 28, 1896, in Nebraska’s Platte

River Valley. He was raised in a large family with five brothers and three sisters. His was a healthy and well-adjusted upbringing, from a family whose only apparent eccentricity was a penchant for odd given names—his father was Commodore Perry (C.P.) Sloniger, with sisters Inez and Zazel and brother Urmson. His first brush with national fame came following Charles Lindbergh’s May 1927 trans atlantic flight, when the Dole Air Race from Califor nia to Hawaii was held in August. But for a quirk of fate, Slonnie’s career might have ended then and there. He lost a coin flip to Augie Pedlar to be the pilot on Miss

PHOTOS: FROM ONE PILOT’S LOG/JERROLD E. SLONIGER COLLECTION

BY ROBERT O. HARDER

September 2021

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AvIATORS

Slonnie logged 1,800 flying hours in 1931, mostly hauling U.S. Mail. By 1932 AA was serving 60 cities with 100 airplanes. In 1934, however, the roof fell in when President Franklin D. Roosevelt nationalized mail delivery, giving it to the U.S. Army Air Corps. It very quickly became clear that the Army wasn’t up to the job—a dozen of its pilots crashed and many were killed. The scandal resulted in a reorganization of the airline industry. Slonnie’s line was reborn as American Airlines just as such sleek new low-wing monoplane airliners as the Boeing Model 247 and Douglas DC-2 and DC-3 began appearing. The modern passenger airline age had begun. By the middle of 1934, Slonnie’s business card read “Chief Pilot, American Air lines,” his seniority number firmly established as Number One. The company now had 2,000 employees (a figure that would quadruple in another decade) and 423 airliners of all types and sizes. By 1935, Slonnie had about 11,000 flying hours. World War II saw the formation of Air Transport Command, a quasi-military

organization made up of airliners and their civilian crews and headed by newly commissioned Lt. Col. Cyrus R. Smith, American Airlines’ president. ATC provided the backbone of U.S. wartime air transport. Slonnie flew uncomplainingly alongside thousands of other airline pilots, taking his flying assignments in turn without regard to his status, though every crewman from every line knew who he was. In postwar 1946, after AA had returned to commercial domestic flying, Slonnie stunned the flying world by giving up the most coveted seniority number of them all to join a new “can’t miss” international luxury airline called Matson Lines, owned by the famed passenger steamship line. Unfortunately, the line did miss (due in no small part to the political clout of Pan American Airways president Juan Trippe) and Slonnie was out in the airline cold, left with the prospect of either starting over as a lowly copilot on one of the established lines or striking out with the non-skeds as an itinerant captain. He chose the latter. For a number of years he eked out a living, but one

Place in the Sun Top: Sloniger piloted the inaugural Matson Lines flight from San Francisco to Hawaii. Above: He spent most of his flying career as chief pilot for American Airlines.

final, incredibly exhausting marathon trip in 1955 from Puerto Rico to Chicago’s Midway airport ended it all. He walked into the office and declared, “I’ve decided to hang up my wings.” The consensus among his fellow pilots: “Slonnie quit while he was ahead.” Sloniger’s proudest boast, one of his very few, was that “in nearly 25,000 hours and 38 years of flying I never scratched a single passenger.” His son wrote, “He died age seventy-three in 1969—in bed, as he had always intended to do.”

TOP: UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI’I, MANOA; INSET: AMERICAN AIRLINES ARCHIVES

Doran, one of eight aircraft that departed Oakland for Honolulu. Only two airplanes arrived, with 10 lives lost, including all three crew members on Miss Doran. In 1928 the Robertson Aircraft Corporation of St. Louis organized a one-year anniversary mail run between St. Louis and Chicago to commemorate Lindbergh’s Paris flight. Slonnie, Lind bergh and Bud Gurney were among the half dozen pilots who participated. In 1929 the footloose flier found himself in China representing North American Aviation trying to plant its foot in that virgin market. The venture was frustratingly unsuccessful, as were most such efforts in the highly corrupt Chiang Kai-shek Nationalist Kuomintang government. A downcast Slonnie returned to America in 1930, where his professional prospects suddenly brightened. A new airline, American Airways, had been created by a union of scores of tiny air transport companies, anchored around Robertson and Colonial Air Transport. The highly regarded Sloniger was immediately brought on board. September 2021

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RESTORED

Air Zoo Camel

MORE THAN A HALF-CENTURY IN THE MAKING, A METICULOUS REPRODUCTION OF ONE OF WORLD WAR I’S MOST FAMOUS FIGHTERS CAN BE VIEWED AT A MICHIGAN MUSEUM BY BARRY LEVINE

mong the aircraft on display at the Air Zoo Aerospace & Science Museum near Kalamazoo, Mich., is a beautiful hand-built Sopwith F.1 Camel reproduction. An extraordinary chain of events led to this highly accurate replica of one of the most famous fighters of World War I. Long time Michigan resident A. Gordon Beatty, some of his family members and Kalamazoo Air Zoo restoration personnel spent decades on the project. Camels have a remarkable place in aviation history. The aircraft was a state-of-the-art fighter when the British firm established by Sir Thomas Sopwith first rolled it out in December 1916. Camels were credited with shooting down 1,543 enemy aircraft during World War I, more than any other Allied fighter, and 5,695 were built. The airplane’s name was derived from the hump-shaped cover over its Vickers .303-inch synchronized machine guns, which were mounted side by side in front of the cockpit—a first for British fighters and a design feature that became standard on them for nearly 20 years. Despite their success, Camels acquired a reputation for being very difficult to fly; almost as many men lost their lives while learning to pilot them as they did flying them in combat. The difficulties were caused by excessive torque from the rotary engine and a very forward center of gravity—the pilot, engine, armament and controls were in a seven-foot space at the front of the airplane.

William George Barker, Canada’s most highly decorated serviceman, was one of the best-known WWI Camel pilots. His Camel, serial no. B6313, became the single most successful fighter in Royal Air Force history, with Barker destroying 46 enemy aircraft in it before its retirement in early October 1918. Later that month, on October 27, he earned the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest military honor, while flying alone in a Sopwith Snipe when he came under attack by at least 15 German aircraft. Barker managed to shoot down four and drove off the remainder. During the encounter he suffered three wounds before crash-landing behind Allied lines. Indiana native Gordon

camel ace’s colors Top: The Beattys’ Sopwith Camel reproduction is marked as Canadian pilot William G. Barker’s B6313. Above: The family’s garage doubled as a workshop.

Beatty served in World War II as a Consolidated B-24 mechanic at an Eighth Air Force base in England. Upon his return to the States, Beatty got to thinking about honoring WWI veterans by building a reproduction Camel. He had a special tie to the war: His father Homer had earned a Silver Star for his actions in France during the capture and defense of Cantigny on May 28, 1918. Family members are uncertain about the exact origin of the Camel project.

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OPPOSITE TOP & BOTTOM LEFT: JOHN SEWARD/AIR ZOO AEROSPACE & SCIENCE MUSEUM; ALL OTHER PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE BEATTY FAMILY

Son Rob thought the scarcity of Camels in North America was a factor. Daughter Lynn thought it might have been the fighter’s historical significance. Wife Martha believed the challenge of building a reproduction aircraft was irresistible to her husband. In any event, Gordon began working on the airplane in the early 1950s, and Martha’s ongoing support was a key factor in its success. Beatty used blueprints from Clayton & Shuttleworth, a British firm that had manufactured Camels for Sopwith (the family still has an extensive set of the prints). He did most of the work himself and was extremely meticulous in his approach. Rob assisted with the tires while Martha and Lynn sewed the Irish linen—the same type installed by Sopwith on production aircraft—onto the

wooden fuselage frame. The Camel’s seat is authentic, as is its Clerget engine. Beatty drove to Chicago to pick up two functioning machine guns for the reproduction. He owned a wide range of equipment and tools for making parts, including a small foundry. Throughout the project his goal was to build the Camel to factory specs. Beatty spent at least 35 years on the Camel. For many of those years he worked for Bendix performing quality control for various NASA projects, quite a contrast to his nights and weekends spent working on the Camel. The project began in the household basement in Detroit, then moved with the family to California, then back to several different homes in Michigan—housed in either the basement, the garage or

a nearby airport hangar. Sadly, Beatty died in 1994 before he could complete the airplane. In 2000 the Beatty family loaned the unfinished Camel to the Kalamazoo Air Zoo in Portage, Mich. Air Zoo volunteer Boyd Naylor took the lead on the project and worked for 12 years on it. Naylor built many of the wing components, including the aileron pulleys and hinges and fittings for the wing struts. Aviation-grade spruce and some ash was used in the wings, while the fuselage has mahogany around the cockpit. Like Beatty, the Air Zoo insisted on extremely high standards of workmanship. Ryan Knapp (who as a teenager worked in the Air Zoo’s restoration shop and is now a U.S. Air Force helicopter pilot) recalled a team effort to install the wings at “just the

Family affair Clockwise from top left: Gordon Beatty works on the Clerget engine; the Camel emerges from the garage; his wife and daughter attach the fabric covering; it nears completion at the Air Zoo.

right angle” so that the wing struts fit properly. Part of the wings were left uncovered so museum visitors could see Naylor’s handiwork, which is extremely impressive. Although Beatty did not live to see its completion, this Sopwith Camel is his legacy. Thousands of people get to see his and the Air Zoo team’s work every year. Two of Bill Barker’s nephews, Joe and Rick Barker, and their wives visited the Air Zoo in 2003 to see the Camel and met with Beatty family members. It surely must have been an emotional moment for all. September 2021

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EXTREMES

Lost Mountain Range

THE NAKAJIMA G8N FOUR-ENGINE BOMBER ARRIVED TOO LATE IN WORLD WAR II, WHEN JAPAN HAD ALREADY GONE OVER TO THE DEFENSIVE BY ROBERT GUTTMAN

n view of the vast area of the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II, it is somewhat ironic that the four-engine, long-range strategic bomber is conspicuous by its near absence from Japan’s operational inventory. Moreover, while the Japa nese Army Air Force was content with twin-engine medium bombers, it was the navy that was obsessed with the development of long-range multiengine strike aircraft. That was because Japa nese naval strategy was predicated upon the premise that as the larger U.S. Navy made its way across the Pacific, its strength would be systematically whittled down by a series of torpedo attacks by Japanese submarines, destroyers and long-range strike aircraft. The Mitsubishi G3M and G4M proved initially successful in that role, most dramatically when they sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and battlecruiser Repulse off Malaya on December 10, 1941. Nevertheless, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) desired an even larger, better-armed and longer-ranged airplane. Although the Japanese aircraft industry had no experience designing four-engine aircraft, in 1939 it was presented with an opportunity to purchase a state-of-the-art foreign-built

late to the show Above: A Nakajima G8N Renzan being evaluated at Wright-Patterson AFB dwarfs a Beech C-45. Left: Japan’s first attempt at a four-engine bomber was the overweight and underpowered G5N Shinzan, which was based on the Douglas DC-4E.

example for analysis. First flown in 1938 as the prototype of a four-engine, pressurized transcontinental airliner, the Douglas DC-4E was rejected by U.S. carriers because they considered it too heavy, underpowered and expensive. Consequently, Douglas Aircraft welcomed the chance to recoup part

of the DC-4E’s development costs by selling the prototype to the Japanese, ostensibly for commercial use. Once in Japan, however, the aircraft was turned over to engineers at the Nakajima Aircraft Company to study the design and structural details as the basis for a longrange naval attack bomber. The result was the G5N Shinzan (Deep Mountain).

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OPPOSITE TOP: U.S. NAVY; OPPOSITE BOTTOM, TOP LEFT & BOTTOM RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; TOP RIGHT: SAN DIEGO AIR & SPACE MUSEUM

First flown on April 8, 1941, the G5N was 101 feet 9 inches long and had a wingspan of 138 feet 2 inches. It weighed 44,000 pounds empty and had a maximum takeoff weight of 70,500 pounds. Once Allied air intelligence learned of its existence, the airplane was assigned the codename Liz, which seems rather a small name for such a huge aircraft. Although the G5N’s wings and tricycle landing gear resembled those of the DC-4E, its fuselage and tail were entirely different. Along with its wings and landing gear, however, the Shinzan inherited the DC-4E’s undesirable characteristics of being both overweight and underpowered. The bomber’s four 14-cylinder Nakajima Mamori engines, supposedly capable of generating 1,870 hp apiece, ultimately proved inadequate and unreliable. As a result, only six prototype Shinzans were ever built. Like the U.S. Army Air Corps’ mammoth Boeing XB-15 bomber prototype, the G5Ns were relegated to use as longrange transports. Undeterred by the G5N’s failure, the IJN issued a revised specification for a long-range, four-engine strike aircraft in 1943. By that time Japan had gained access to more modern U.S. bomber technology. At least three Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses are known to have been captured in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies in 1942, then repaired and test-flown in Japan. The

Spoils of war A Renzan with propellers removed sits at Nakajima’s Koizumi plant (above) after the war. Americans examine G8Ns on an airfield (above right) and at Koizumi (right).

new specification called for a speed of 370 mph, 8,000pound bombload and 4,600mile range. Nakajima managed to fly its new bomber for the first time on October 23, 1944, after only about 18 months of development. Called the G8N Renzan (Mountain Range), the aircraft was codenamed Rita by the Allies. The G8N was 75 feet 3 inches long and had a wingspan of 106 feet 9 inches—markedly smaller than its predecessor and, at 38,000 pounds empty, 6,000 pounds lighter. Fully loaded, however, the G8N had a maximum takeoff weight of nearly 70,900 pounds, slightly heavier than the fully loaded G5N. The G8N was powered by four turbosupercharged 2,000-hp Nakajima Homare 18-cylinder radials, which delivered about 25 percent more power than the G5N’s Mamoris, enabling it to fly at a much higher speed and service ceiling. The Renzan also boasted a 4,500mile range, almost 2,000 miles more than the G5N. Another area in which the G8N greatly improved upon the earlier G5N was its defensive armament. The Shinzan mounted two 20mm cannons and four 7.7mm machine guns, with only one of the cannons installed in a power-

driven turret. The Renzan, in contrast, had six 20mm cannons in powered dorsal, ventral and tail turrets; two 13mm machine guns in a powered nose turret; and two 13mm guns in flexible waist mounts. It was probably no coincidence that its defensive arrangement was reminiscent of the B-17’s, although the mid-wing G8N was in no way a copy of the low-wing American bomber. When judged against comparable Allied bombers in service at that time, the Renzan was indeed a formidable aircraft. By late 1944, however, the course of the war had radically changed. Japan was on the defensive and the IJN no longer required large long-range maritime strike aircraft or strategic bombers. Moreover, the light alloys required for the manufacture of such aircraft were becoming scarce, and what resources remained were chiefly devoted to the manufacture of defensive

fighters. Production of the G8N was further hampered by bombing raids on Japanese industry carried out by Boeing B-29s from the Mariana Islands. The result of all of those factors was that only four Renzan bombers were completed by the end of the war and none were ever used operationally. One G8N was destroyed on the ground during an Allied air attack, but one of the surviving prototypes was taken to the United States for evaluation after the war. Although the Army Air Forces found fault with a number of details, they were minor matters that might have cropped up on any prototype and could have been ironed out over time. On the whole, the AAF seems to have been impressed with the G8N. Unfortunately for posterity, after the AAF finished testing the G8N, this rara avis among Japanese warplanes was unceremoniously scrapped. September 2021

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SEPTEMBER 2021

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STYLE Museums are reopening,

welcoming visitors to impressive exhibits like the original “Spruce Goose” at Oregon’s Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum

Tall Order Towering 79 feet 4 inches above the museum floor, the H-4 Hercules dwarfs all other aircraft under its wings.

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Spruce Goose The Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum in McMinnville, Ore., is home to Howard Hughes’ behemoth flying boat, the H-4 Hercules. Although the aircraft is made almost entirely of birch wood, critics named it the “Spruce Goose.” On November 2, 1947, the 321-foot-wingspan H-4, powered by eight 3,000-hp Pratt & Whitney R-4360 Wasp Major engines, flew for 26 seconds at an altitude of 70 feet before being retired to a hangar in Long Beach, Calif. The airplane arrived in McMinnville on February 27, 1993, after a 138-day, 1,055-mile trip by barge, train and truck. For museum info, visit evergreenmuseum.org 20

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“Now, I put the sweat of my life into this thing. I have my reputation all rolled up in it and I have stated several times that if it’s a failure, I’ll probably leave this country and never come back. And I mean it.” —Howard Hughes, in 1947, before a Senate committee investigating the use of government funds for the aircraft

ASTON MARTIN VOLANTE VISION PHOTOS COURTESY ASTON MARTIN

MUSEUM

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF EVERGREEN AVIATION & SPACE MUSEUM

6/30/21 10:50 AM

ASTON MARTIN VOLANTE VISION PHOTOS COURTESY ASTON MARTIN

STYLE

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STYLE MUSEUM

Grand Reopening After a lengthy and unfortunate covid-19 holding pattern, the San Diego Air & Space Museum— one of the largest in the nation—has now reopened to visitors. One of only 10 aerospace museums affliated with the Smithsonian Institution, it houses a vast collection of impor tant and rare aircraft. For more info including hours, tickets, directions to the museum and more, visit sandiegoairandspace.org

PBY-5A Catalina The museum’s amphibious PBY-5A was built at the San Diego Consolidated plant and delivered to the U.S. Navy on December 31, 1943. On August 8, 1988, the aircraft was towed to Balboa Park and lifted by crane over the museum building to the Pavilion of Flight.

San Diego Air & Space Museum entrance, with a Convair YF2Y-1 Sea Dart on the left and a Lockheed A-12 Blackbird on the right.

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STYLE

Ford 5-AT-11 Tri-Motor Ford’s major role in the development of transportation in the 20th century extended to the skies with the introduction of the Ford Tri-Motor. This one is exhibited in the Pavilion of Flight.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF SAN DIEGO AIR & SPACE MUSEUM

Spirit of St. Louis Replica Charles A. Lindbergh and his Ryan NYP monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, touched down at Le Bourget Field at 10 p.m. on May 21, 1927, after the first nonstop solo New York-to-Paris flight, completed in 33 hours, 30 minutes. The San Diego Air & Space Museum owns this flying replica of the original. After the museum lost its first replica in a 1978 fire, 34 craftsmen, including three of the builders of the original Spirit, spent 4,800 hours constructing Spirit III, and on April 28, 1979, the airplane flew over San Diego.

SEPTEMBER 2021

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LETTER FROM AvIATION HISTORY

TINFOIL-HAT RUMINATIONS

UFO encounters? Top: Little America IV, the base in Antarctica established during Operation Highjump, was the jumping-off point for exploration of the continent’s interior—and, some believe, searches for a hidden Nazi UFO base. Inset: In 2015 U.S. naval aviators captured this image of an “unidentified aerial phenomenon.”

he U.S. Navy’s 1946-47 sea and air expedition to Antarctica, Operation Highjump (story, P. 52), is today largely forgotten. So it’s understandable if you missed the part about the Navy’s battle with Nazi UFOs. Yes, there are those who believe Nazi Germany established a base on the southern continent from which flying saucers, developed with the help of extraterrestrial technology, attacked the naval flotilla and inflicted serious casualties, sending it packing back to the United States. On the return trip, a Chilean newspaper published an interview with expedition leader Rear Adm. Richard E. Byrd in which he allegedly said it was “a bitter reality that in the case of a new war, the continental United States would be attacked by flying objects which could fly from pole to pole at incredible speeds.” The idea was lent credence as recently as May 2019 in an episode of the History Channel’s curiously long-running “Ancient Aliens” series that asked, “Has Antarctica served as a home base for extraterrestrial visitors to Earth for thousands of years?” Of course the answer is no, but don’t tell that to the UFO true believers. In 2007 a University of Cambridge researcher and his colleague even felt obliged to publish a scientific paper in the Polar Record academic journal titled “Hitler’s Antarctic Base: The Myth and the Reality” that deconstructed the many harebrained theories surrounding the alleged Nazi base. In it they point out that there were 11 journalists aboard the Highjump ships who regularly sent back reports on the expedition, none of which mentioned encounters with UFOs. One of those journalists, distinguished war correspondent Lee Van Atta, was the source of the Chilean newspaper’s Byrd quote, which actually translated as “the cruel reality is that in the case of

a new war, the United States could be attacked by planes flying over one or both poles.” Byrd went on to comment that one of the most important lessons of the expedition was “the fantastic speed with which the world is shrinking.” Thus were two separate quotes conflated to produce “evidence” of alien visitations. A year before the launch of Highjump, five TBM Avengers (story, P. 26) set out from Fort Lauderdale on a training mission and disappeared without a trace in an area later coined the “Bermuda Triangle.” The 1977 Hollywood epic Close Encounters of the Third Kind made hay of the incident by showing the lost Avengers mysteriously reappearing in the Sonoran Desert 30 years later and the aircrews returning in an alien spacecraft. Now the U.S. military is seemingly joining the UFO bandwagon with a report released on June 25 that stated the government was unable to explain more than 140 sightings, many by naval aviators, of what are now termed “unidentified aerial phenomena.” The report noted, “Some UAP appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.” Although it drew no conclusions, the report suggested five categories of potential explanations for the sightings: manmade objects such as stray balloons, atmospheric anomalies, classified U.S. aircraft, aircraft from adversary nations and “other.” The fourth category is a real concern, but that last category is sure to generate interest within the UFO community. At a time when some folks believe space lasers cause wildfires, Italian satellites change vote counts and vaccines contain tracking chips, it’s perhaps not surprising that UFO mythology lives on. Beware of venturing down this rabbit hole—it’s a deep dive.

TOP: ANTARCTIC PHOTO LIBRARY, U.S. ANTARCTIC PROGRAM; INSET: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE VIA AP

BY CARL VON WODTKE

SEPTEMBER 2021

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THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF MILITARY HISTORY

THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

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In World War II the famed “Fighting 79th” slugged its way through Nazi strongholds

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army artillery forced his 1881 surrender in montana territory

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TOUGH TURKEY GRUMMAN’S AVENGER TORPEDO BOMBER—THE BIGGEST SINGLEENGINE AIRPLANE OF WORLD WAR II AND THE LAST OF ITS BREED— MADE A HUGE CONTRIBUTION TO ALLIED VICTORY BY STEPHAN WILKINSON

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twin avengers Two General Motors–built TBM-3Es from the National Museum of World War II Aviation fly near the museum’s base in Colorado Springs, Colo.

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origami wings Above: A plane captain checks the landing gear of a Grumman TBF-1 on board an escort carrier in mid1943. Inset: Leroy Grumman shows how he used an eraser and paper clips to conceive the Avenger’s unusual folding Sto-Wings.

Its fate had been sealed nearly four decades earlier, but the brief 1982 Falklands War showed that ship-killing missiles such as the Exocet could achieve more than an entire air wing of World War II torpedo bombers. And they could accomplish their mission at near-supersonic speeds from stand-off range. Today, nobody needs airplanes launching submersible motorboats while flying at the speed of a fast car. The torpedo bomber’s glory days, when Ger man capital ships and entire Italian fleets were being torpedoed in the European theater while the Japanese lost their precious aircraft carriers in the Pacific, lasted from 1940 to late ’42. Yet the Grumman TBF Avenger, the finest torpedo bomber to fly in any war, lived on far beyond its star

turn. As surface ship targets disappeared, Aven gers began dropping more bombs than torpedoes, and the airplane developed new roles as WWII progressed: anti-submarine hunter-killer, convoy guardian, close air support attack aircraft, radar platform, airborne early-warning sentry, longrange reconnaissance patroller and ultimately that most utilitarian of roles, carrier onboard delivery truck. The big Grumman had the substantial bomb bay, unusually spacious interior, multiple seats and excellent performance to get away with it. Though it may not be obvious, this beast of an airplane was a supersized version of the F4F Wildcat. Both were midwing, barrel-bodied, hell for stout warplanes with surprising performance even though they were often characterized as

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PAUL BOWEN PHOTOGRAPHY; ABOVE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; INSET: CRADLE OF AVIATION MUSEUM

LIKE THE BARRAGE BALLOON AND THE ASSAULT GLIDER, THE TORPEDO BOMBER IS A WEAPON WE WILL NEVER SEE AGAIN.

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ABOVE RIGHT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; BELOW: COLLECTION OF VICE ADMIRAL CALVIN T. DURGIN/NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

Among pilots, the corny joke about the Avenger was that it was so heavy it could fall faster than it could fly. Certainly during takeoffs from escort carriers this often felt true. Bombed-up Avengers had to be catapulted, but an escort carrier’s catapult was only 45 feet long and the best the ship could do into the wind was 19 knots. “We would come off the catapult at 90 knots—barely flying speed,” recalled turret gunner James Gander. “We would dip down when we left the deck until we got our speed up.” The airplane’s ponderous performance in comparison to the Wildcat led escort carrier crews to nickname it the “Turkey.” The Avenger had no underwing ordnance hardpoints, but it did soon get launch rails for HVARs—high-velocity aircraft rockets, four under each wing. They were potent missiles, providing the airplane with the firepower of a destroyer’s broadside. In fact the rockets often had heavy, solid-metal warheads, designed to punch through a submarine’s hull simply with the power

ready for action Above: A TBM-1 prepares for takeoff from the light carrier Monterey in June 1944 to attack targets on Tinian. Below: An Avenger catapults from the escort carrier Makin Island in 1945.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PAUL BOWEN PHOTOGRAPHY; ABOVE: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; INSET: CRADLE OF AVIATION MUSEUM

underpowered. The Avenger introduced carrier aviation to Grumman’s remarkable Sto-Wing system, enabling an airplane to fold its wings alongside its body like a bird. Sto-Wings were quickly fitted on the Wildcat as well, beginning with the F4F-4 version. On the Avenger they narrowed the wingspan from 54 feet 2 inches to just over 18 feet and eliminated the need for extra overhead room on a carrier’s hangar deck. Leroy Grumman came up with the Sto-Wing by fiddling with a draftsman’s eraser to represent a fuselage and paper clips stuck into it as wings. He hit on what’s called a skewed axis—a fixed pivot point on the wing root that allowed the Avenger’s wings to simultaneously rotate and fold. The StoWing remained a feature of many Grumman aircraft right up to the E-2 Hawkeye. Though it’s clear who invented the Sto-Wing, naming the designer of the Avenger is more difficult. Some say it was Roy Grumman, others vote for company cofounder and chief engineer William Schwendler. But the man in the trenches seems to have been engineer Robert Hall, a former air racer and designer of several of the Granville Brothers Gee Bees. An all-rounder, Hall also made the Avenger’s first flight on August 7, 1941. With a maximum takeoff weight of 17,893 pounds, the Avenger was the biggest single-engine airplane produced during WWII by any combatant. It outlifted the heaviest P-47 Thunderbolt by just shy of 400 pounds. The Avenger’s bomb-bay load was a neat ton: a 2,000-pound torpedo or four 500-pound bombs.

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TECH TECH NOTES NOTES

EASTERN AIRCRAFT TBM-1C AVENGER

SPECIFICATIONS CREW

LENGTH

SPEED

ARMAMENT

40 feet 11½ inches

271 mph (maximum)

ENGINE

HEIGHT

145 mph (cruise)

1,700-hp Wright R-2600-8 Twin Cyclone 14-cylinder air-cooled supercharged radial

16 feet 5 inches

SERVICE CEILING

WEIGHT

22,400 feet

10,080 pounds (empty)

RANGE

15,905 pounds (gross)

1,215 miles (combat)

Two wing-mounted .50-caliber machine guns, one .50-caliber machine gun in dorsal turret, one .30-caliber machine gun in ventral position, plus one Mark 13 aerial torpedo or 2,000 pounds of bombs or 350-pound depth charges and eight 5-inch high-velocity aircraft rockets

WINGSPAN 54 feet 2 inches

2,335 miles (maximum ferry)

GUNNER’S ARMORED SEAT

GUNSIGHT AERIAL MAST

ENGINE OIL TANK

PILOT’S ARMORED SEAT

HYDRAULIC FLUID RESERVOIR

CARBURETOR

BOMB BAY DOOR

HAMILTON STANDARD HYDROMATIC CONSTANTSPEED PROPELLER

WRIGHT R-2600-8 TWIN CYCLONE 14-CYLINDER RADIAL ENGINE

EXHAUST STACK SINGLE-STAGE SUPERCHARGER

OIL COOLER

.50-CALIBER MACHINE GUN PORT 500-POUND GENERAL PURPOSE BOMBS

BLISS-LEAVITT MARK 13 TORPEDO

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.50-CALIBER MACHINE GUN RUDDER

ELEVATOR TURRET CONTROL BOX AND GUNSIGHT

CREW ENTRY DOOR

RETRACTABLE TAILHOOK

TAIL WHEEL

.30-CALIBER REARWARD-FIRING MACHINE GUN

BOMBARDIER’S SEAT BOMBSIGHT FLAP

AILERON

RETRACTED MAIN WHEEL

ATC RADIO TRANSMITTER LANDING LIGHT ILLUSTRATION BY GREGORY PROCH

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disastrous debut Above: This TBF-1 was the sole survivor of an attack by six Avengers from torpedo squadron VT-8 on June 4, 1942, during the Battle of Midway. Right: Deck crewmen aboard the carrier Lexington load a Mark 13 torpedo into a TBF-1’s bomb bay. Inset: An Avenger drops a Mark 13 with a plywood tail shroud during a training flight from Naval Air Station Norfolk, Va., in 1942.

of inertia. Despite the rockets being unguided, Avenger pilots quickly became adept at drilling explosive HVARs deep into Japanese caves.

THE AVENGER WAS THE FIRST NEW AMERICAN AIRCRAFT DESIGN TO ENTER THE WAR. 32

he most common myth about the Avenger is that it made its first public appearance on December 7, 1941, and was that day immediately given its retaliatory name. In fact the airplane had been named in early October, two months before anybody planned on avenging Pearl Harbor. The first production Avenger came off the line on January 3, 1942—the first new American aircraft design to enter the war. Its combat debut was a disaster. Six TBF-1s of torpedo squadron VT-8, relayed from the carrier Hornet to Midway Atoll, attacked the Japanese fleet on June 4, 1942. Only one returned, shot to pieces, its turret gunner dead and radioman wounded. The Navy began having second

thoughts about its new torpedo plane. But the big Avenger recovered quickly as its pilots gained experience. Three months later, in the Battles of the Eastern Solomon Islands and Guadalcanal, Avengers sank the light carrier Ryujo and the battleship Hiei. Ultimately, Avengers were involved in the sinking of 12 carriers, six battleships (including the superships Yamato and Musashi), 19 cruisers, 25 destroyers and 30 submarines in the Pacific and Atlantic. Most Avengers were manufactured by General Motors, not Grumman. GM had established a division called Eastern Aircraft using five empty car factories in the Northeast. It took over Avenger production when Grumman found itself overwhelmed by the need to crank out the new F6F Hellcat. Grumman built almost 3,000 TBFs; GM’s 7,500-some were designated TBMs. (Think M for Motors and you’ll never confuse the two.) “What followed was the clash of two worlds,” wrote David Doyle in his book TBF/TBM Avenger. “GM started out with the idea that it would show…Grumman how to mass produce airplanes. Grumman started out with the idea that GM would be lucky if it managed to produce one airplane. GM was more wrong than right. Grumman was more right than wrong.” Automobiles and airplanes are both complex machines, but they have vastly different production requirements. Cars could be churned out by the thousands on ceaseless production lines, while airplanes were produced through a stop-andgo method. Weight didn’t matter much with pre-EPA cars but was crucial for airplanes. Aircraft tolerances were tight, cars could deal with quarter-inch panel gaps. Modifications during production were common with airplanes, rare with cars. Grumman facilitated the process by delivering to East ern the “P-K airplane”—a TBF assembled entirely with sheet-metal screws made by the Parker-Kalon Corpora tion, so the airplane could be disassembled and reassembled until GM’s operators got it right. The Avenger was unique in having an electrically operated gun turret designed by Grumman rather than one bought from Sperry, Bendix, Erco or other specialists. Such turrets were mechanically or hydraulically operated and were less than precise in movement. The Grumman turret was designed by the company’s sole electrical engineer, Oscar Olsen, who came up with the idea of using amplidynes—electromechanical amplifiers

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OPPOSITE PHOTOS: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE LEFT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; W. EUGENE SMITH/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; U.S. NAVY

commonly used to rotate huge naval gun turrets. Miniaturized by GE at Olsen’s request, amplidynes turned out to be excellent at providing rapid and consistent movement for the Avenger’s big “goldfish bowl,” as gunners called it. When Olsen told Bill Schwendler of his idea, Schwendler said he hoped it worked, since they would otherwise have a four-foot hole in the airplane with nothing to fit into it. An Avenger turret gunner didn’t hammer away at the enemy behind a set of spade grips, comicbook style. He sat alongside his .50-caliber machine gun, its breech next to his left ear, controlling the turret’s motion and the gun’s firing with a pistol-grip handle. Actor Paul Newman, who joined the Navy intending to be a pilot but flunked the preflight physical because of color blindness, ended up as a radioman and gunner in Avengers. How Newman later achieved international fame as an automobile racer, in a sport that depends heavily on colored signal lights and flags, is a question that flight surgeons have never answered. Though often described as a turret gunner, Newman controlled the single ventral .30-caliber stinger mount from his station in the rear fuselage. It has been variously written that the stinger gunner fired from a standing position, or while kneeling or laying prone. We asked the curator of Long Island’s Cradle of Aviation Museum, 10 minutes’ drive from the site of the original TBF factory, to climb into the museum’s restored Avenger and see what he thought. “The gunner would have sat with his legs straddling the gun, or possibly kneeling,” replied Joshua Stoff. “He definitely couldn’t have stood, and if lying down, I don’t see how he could have elevated and depressed the gun. Either way, visibility for the gunner was poor—only down and to the rear. But the belly is pretty roomy for one person, even with all the radio equipment installed.” Roomy indeed. Some Avengers were used as squadron hacks, often flown between naval air stations and nearby party towns. A “designated driver” named Wellington Smith holds the record

offensive and defensive punch Above left: Aviation ordnancemen service a TBM-1C’s .50-caliber guns. Above: Smoke rises from Tinian after an Avenger bomb strike on June 30, 1944. Left: Crewmen aboard the carrier Saratoga lift wounded Aviation Ordnanceman Kenneth Bratton out of a TBF’s rear turret after a November 1943 raid on Rabaul. Bratton, who survived, was credited with helping fight off eight attacking Japanese Zeros.

for cramming 17 pilots, plus himself, into a TBM for a flight from Holtville, Calif., back to nearby Naval Air Facility El Centro. Late in the war, as Avengers increasingly attacked ground targets, radiomen/gunners were dropped from flight crews. Trapped in the unarmored belly, they were vulnerable to even rifle fire from the ground, and the death and injury rate for radiomen soared. The turret was entered from below, the gunner climbing up into the fishbowl from the radioman’s compartment while facing forward, then squirming around to face aft in the seat while maneuvering a heavy plate of armor. Bailing out meant reversing the process, the gunner then finding his parachute in the compartment below and clipping it onto his harness, forcing the big entry door open against the slipstream and, along with the radioman, jumping out. Neither crewman had the space to otherwise wear a chute, though the SEPTEMBER 2021

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catching a wire Top: A TBF-1C of VT-6 traps aboard Intrepid during operations in the central Pacific. Above: Lieutenant (j.g.) George H.W. Bush sits in the cockpit of his TBM-1C Barbara III—named after his future wife, Barbara Pierce—on the light carrier San Jacinto.

PILOTS USUALLY SURVIVED A BAILOUT WHILE CREWMEN WENT DOWN WITH THE SHIP. 34

istory’s most famous Avenger pilot was future president George H.W. Bush. Barely 18 and a high school graduate (he would attend Yale only after the war), the 6-foot-2 Bush was one of the tallest pilots in the Navy and for a long time assumed to be its youngest aviator, an honor that actually accrued to one Charles Downey. Bush was by all accounts an excellent pilot. He logged 1,228 hours of Avenger time, flew 58 combat missions and made 126 traps, all of them successful, aboard the short-decked light carrier San Jacinto. WWII carriers all had straight decks, so once an Avenger pilot committed to landing he either caught a wire—there were only three on San Jacinto—or ran into the crash barrier near the bow. Relying on that heavy-duty net often involved crashing into aircraft parked just beyond it. There was no such thing as a bolter, or go-around, as there is aboard a modern, angled-deck carrier. On small carriers, picking up the no. 2 wire— the safest procedure—banged an Avenger down atop the aft elevator, which, according to author Barrett Tillman, “tilted the elevator forward and resulted in a four- or five-inch ‘curb’ for the wheels to hit.” The result often was a blown tire or two. Bush went through three TBMs: Barbara, Barbara II and Barbara III. He safely ditched the first one after losing oil pressure during a catapult launch and being denied permission to re-land by a landing signal officer busy retrieving other Avengers. On September 2, 1944, while bombing a well-defended radio installation on the tiny

TOP: PF-(AIRCRAFT)/ALAMY; BOTTOM: GEORGE H.W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM; OPPOSITE ABOVE: POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

pilot did. Not surprisingly, pilots usually survived a bailout while crewmen went down with the ship. Many Avenger crewmen say they have never heard of a turret gunner successfully bailing out. Early Avengers had a seat between the cockpit and the turret, a few of them fitted with basic flight controls, but it was rarely occupied in combat unless a photographer or observer was along for the ride. The seat was soon gone, the space taken up by bulky 1940s radios and radar electronics, though most restored Avengers have reverted to the third seat for passengers.

island of Chichi Jima, he bailed out after Barbara II’s engine was hit and caught fire. This time he lost his crew, a fact that tortured him the rest of his life. The British enthusiastically adopted the Aven ger for its Fleet Air Arm early in 1943, giving legendary Royal Navy test pilot Eric “Winkle” Brown the opportunity to fly it frequently. Brown found that the Avenger’s one aeronautical failing was that it spun rapidly and dangerously if anti-spin controls weren’t immediately exerted. (The airplane was placarded against intentional spins.) Bombing with an Avenger required a steep glide-bomb approach. Brown noted the pullout was “a two-handed, somewhat frenetic affair, one hand pulling [the stick] with all its strength and the other retrimming frantically.” But the Avenger “stabilized almost immediately, a characteristic that was crucially important if a clean and accurate drop was to be achieved.” Brown also considered carrier landings out of a very stable 78-knot approach, with good visibility over the nose, “extremely easy…about as easy as that difficult art is ever likely to be.” Many Avengers carried Norden bombsights, which were soon found to be useless. The Norden was intended for high-altitude, level bombing and it couldn’t handle the slant ranges it was being asked to compute. Bureaucracy and inertia led the Navy to continue supplying Avengers with deadweight Nordens, and ultimately three-quarters of Norden’s production went to the sea service. The bombsights were linked to an autopilot system called Stabilized Bombing Approach Equipment that Avenger pilots found they could at least use on long flights, bypassing the unpleasantly heavy flight controls. An Avenger’s multitasking radioman/ventral gunner was also intended to be the airplane’s bombardier. At the forward end of his cramped compartment was a small, slanted window that peered into the dark bomb bay. When the bay doors opened, the window provided a view down and ahead, between the racks of bombs. If a torpedo was in place, there was nothing to see but the top of the tin fish. So torpedo drops were controlled by the pilot, eyeballing his heading, airspeed, altitude and distance to the target, aided by a “torpedo director”—a reflector gunsight—atop the instrument panel. Only the pilot could control torpedo release, though the crewman in the belly compartment had inflight access to the bomb bay and could change the torpedo’s depth setting. Either the pilot or the bombardier could open the bomb-bay doors, electrically or manually. The torpedo’s release switch was atop the pilot’s joystick. There was also a manual T-handle emergency release. Bombing, however, was supposed to be in the hands and eyes of the bombardier and his magical Norden, sighting through that aslant window. The

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bombardier was also responsible for arming the bombs before the drop and for setting the intervalometer—a device that controlled the timing of the four bombs’ release. They could all be dropped at once, but releasing them as a spaced-out stick gave better coverage and a greater chance of at least one bomb hitting a small target.

though they undoubtedly ran out of fuel. A 1952 Florida magazine article about the loss of Flight 19 suggested they had fallen prey to a mysterious airplane-eating, ship-sinking stretch of ocean that the author dubbed the Bermuda Triangle. Thus the Avenger came to play its part among the world’s more popular conspiracy theories, alienabduction plots and tinfoil-hat ruminations. The Navy’s last torpedo bomber was the Doug las A-1 Skyraider—the immortal Spad of Vietnam War fame. On May 2, 1951, early in the Korean War, eight Skyraiders made the world’s last-ever surface torpedo attack, against the Hwacheon Dam. Eight Mark 13 torpedoes were dropped, seven hit the dam and six exploded, crippling the structure for the rest of the war. It was truly the end of an era.

island hopping Above: Australian ground crewmen bomb up an Avenger while pilots review their mission plan. Below: A flight of Avengers sets out on a training mission to Espiritu Santo, New Hebrides and Aoba Island in October 1943.

For further reading, contributing editor Stephan Wilkinson recommends: Avenger at War, by Barrett Tillman; TBF/TBM Avenger, by David Doyle; Flight of the Avenger: George Bush at War, by Joe Hyams; and Looking Backward: Don Banks – One TBF Turret Gunner’s Story, by Stephen A. Banks.

TOP: PF-(AIRCRAFT)/ALAMY; BOTTOM: GEORGE H.W. BUSH PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY AND MUSEUM; OPPOSITE ABOVE: POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND

he Avenger’s most media-worthy moment was the epic of Flight 19, five TBMs that departed on a basic bombing and navigation training flight over the Atlantic on December 5, 1945. The exercise couldn’t have been simpler: take off from Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale, fly straight east and drop some practice bombs, turn north and fly awhile, turn due west until you hit the U.S. coast, go south and land back at Fort Lauderdale. Three left turns with all of Florida to hit. The Grummans found themselves over the Bahamas, as they should have been, but for unknown reasons the pilots decided the islands were the Florida Keys. It didn’t help that they were flying a very basic time-speed-distance exercise yet the clocks had been removed from every one of Flight 19’s Avengers—a not uncommon bit of pilferage by people who had access to cockpits, since eight-day aircraft clocks were quickly removable and made nifty souvenirs. Flight 19 ended up flying northwest from what they thought were the Keys. Five airplanes and 14 crewmen soon disappeared forever into the Atlantic, as did the 13-man crew of a Martin PBM-5 Mariner sent out to search for them. A tanker steaming in the area reported a huge explosion in the distance, so it was assumed the gas-heavy PBM had suffered the consequences of a fuel leak. The cause of the Avengers’ disappearance has never been definitively determined,

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monoplanes mano a mano In the summer of 1938, Messerschmitt Bf-109B-2s of the German Condor Legion dogfight Spanish Republican Polikarpov I-16s over Valencia.

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THE SPANISH AIR WAR IN A DRESS REHEARSAL FOR WORLD WAR II, GERMANS AND ITALIANS FOUGHT SOVIETS AND AMERICANS IN THE SKIES OVER SPAIN, EMPLOYING AN IMPRESSIVE VARIETY OF AIRCRAFT BY BARRETT TILLMAN

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fascist friends Top: Italian Fiat CR.32 fighters accompany a Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 as it drops its bombs over Spain. Above: Nationalist General Francisco Franco Bahamonde (center) confers with final Condor Legion commander Wolfram von Richthofen (right).

But that same year involved three other very different clashes. The Spanish Civil War ended in April, while the Nomonhan/Khalkhin Gol conflict between Russia and Japan erupted in May and the Russo-Finish “Winter War” in November. It says something that the Soviet Union was involved in all of them. Lasting nearly three years from July 1936, the bitter Spanish war has been called the “dress rehearsal for World War II.” It’s a reasoned assessment, considering that Germany and Italy on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other were engaged, committing ground, naval and air forces to support the Nationalist and Republican causes, respectively. The air war was especially significant beyond the Nationalists’ controversial bombing of Guer nica, the subject of the well-known Pablo Picasso

painting. More important, the war began with the world’s first military airlift and continued with developments in strategic bombing, refinement of close air support and evolution of fighter tactics. The Spanish Civil War’s origins were lengthy and complex, falling along cultural-political fault lines. After King Alfonso XIII’s exile in 1931, the Second Republic was formed, soon growing into a far-left coalition government. Inevitably it clashed with traditional conservative factions, especially the Catholic Church. A right-wing coup failed, and the situation tumbled into chaos. General Francisco Franco Bahamonde commanded a garrison in the Canary Islands at the start of hostilities, but was flown by chartered aircraft to Morocco. There, commanding the Army of Africa, he emerged as the dominant Nationalist leader and embarked on a career that led to 36

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM TOOBY; OPPOSITE TOP: CPA MEDIA PTE LTD/ALAMY; OPPOSITE BOTTOM & BOTTOM RIGHT: AKG-IMAGES; TOP RIGHT: ©ULLSTEIN BILD/THE GRANGER COLLECTION

ANY WAR IS BRUTAL; CIVIL WARS ARE WORSE. TODAY, 1939 IS MOST REMEMBERED FOR THE START OF WORLD WAR II IN SEPTEMBER.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: ILLUSTRATION BY ADAM TOOBY; OPPOSITE TOP: CPA MEDIA PTE LTD/ALAMY; OPPOSITE BOTTOM & BOTTOM RIGHT: AKG-IMAGES; TOP RIGHT: ©ULLSTEIN BILD/THE GRANGER COLLECTION

years as Spanish dictator. In less than three years the conflict claimed per haps half a million lives. By far the biggest losers were the Spanish people. The scale of destruction was increased by external influence as Germany, Italy and Russia used the opportunity to test a new generation of weapons and tactics. Almost incidentally, the Fascists and Communists sought to bolster their ideological soulmates on the Ibe rian peninsula. Unlike Britain, France, Germany and Italy, Spain lacked an independent air arm. The direc torate general of aeronautics was subordinate to the army chief of staff, and Spain’s tiny naval avia tion branch was likewise constrained. At the start of the war the anti-government Nationalists were strongest in the north, the Republicans stronger in the south and east. The Republican government’s Fuerzas Aéreas de la República Española (Spanish Republican Air Force) retained more than two-thirds of some 400 air craft from the prewar air force. Faced with an international arms embargo, the Nationalists had to look elsewhere for air power. They found it at the opera. Despite the world attention later focused on Guernica, the most important aviation event of the war occurred at the start and mostly went unnoticed. Because the majority of the Spanish navy sided with the government, the Nationalists were largely denied seaborne communications and transport. But the Army of Africa’s 30,000 Moroccan and Spanish Legion troops were badly needed in the homeland. Appeals were made in Berlin and Rome, leading to a hastily organized, remarkably efficient airlift. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler reportedly agreed to the request during an interlude at the annual Wagner festival. Germany provided 20 Junkers Ju-52/3m tri motor transports, twice the number requested, with the first arriving in Spain in late July. They were the bow wave of something without prece dent—a strategic airlift.

The Ju-52s each carried 25 men on the 130-mile flight from Tétouan at the northern tip of Morocco to Seville, some making four trips a day. Assisted by nine Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.81s, over the next two months several hundred sorties delivered 14,000 or more troops. The tactical airlift achieved strategic effects: It ensured that the war would continue beyond 1936. That fall Franco became generalissimo and head of the rebel Nationalist regime.

oth sides scrambled for competent pilots, mechanics and a numbing variety of aircraft. With almost no indigenous avia tion industry, Spain had to rely upon imported products. The number and variety of aircraft used in Spain was enormous: as many as 185 types from Germany, Italy, Russia, France, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. The Republicans and Nationalists each flew more than 60 types, and perhaps 15 more were employed by both

icon of war Top: Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” depicts the bombing of the Basque town but came to embody a universal message about the horrors of war. Above: Junkers Ju-52/3m transports prepare to airlift Army of Africa troops from Morocco to Spain to aid the Nationalists at the start of the war.

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top guns Clockwise from top left: Condor Legion fighter squadron leaders (from left) Wolfgang Schellmann, Adolf Galland, Joachim Schlichting and Eberhardt d’Elsa chat in April 1938; Frank Tinker was the leading American volunteer; German mechanics check a Bf-109B-2; Spanish Nationalist Joaquín García-Morato was the war’s top ace.

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sides. More than 40 others were known to be used, but their dispositions remain uncertain. That group probably went more to the government than the rebels—a smorgasbord of “onesies and twosies” of limited or no combat value such as Stinsons, Spartans and various de Havillands. Ultimately Germany provided more than 700 airplanes. Italy sent 760 but also contributed a significant ground component amounting to a reinforced army corps. Eventually Soviet Russia supplied some 650 planes to the Republican cause. Experienced pilots were rare. Among the most accomplished Spanish aviators was 32-yearold Joaquín García-Morato y Castaño, a former bomber and floatplane pilot and instrument instructor with extensive aerobatic experience. When the war began he had 1,800 hours total time and over the next three years he added 1,012 more, joining the Nationalists and becoming the leading ace of the conflict. Reflecting the eclectic nature of Spanish aviation, his logbook contained 30 or more aircraft types, but his 40 victories were nearly all scored in Fiat CR.32s. Ironically, he was killed in a Fiat during an aerobatic demonstration in April 1939 shortly after the war ended. With an urgent need for aircrews, both sides looked abroad. Hundreds of foreign pilots and mechanics hastened to Spain, many anticipating lucrative contracts for their services. Most were

disappointed. Not all volunteers were as forthright as Frank G. Tinker, a disgraced U.S. naval aviator who joined the Republicans. “I was not quite sure which side was fighting for what,” he later admitted. “I gathered that each was slaughtering the other for being or doing something that the other side did not like.” The Nationalists established the Aviación Nacional, originally with fewer than 150 aircraft. The air force chief was General Alfredo Kindelán y Duany, who returned from exile to support Generalissimo Franco but eventually fell out of his favor. The Nationalist air force grew steadily, and by early 1939 Kindelán counted 160 fighters and 140 bombers plus air support and reconnaissance planes. Nevertheless, the Aviación Nacional depended upon its allies. In July 1938 on the Ebro front, the Nationalists possessed two Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bomb wings, two Fiat fighter groups and four close-support groups with various Heinkels and Italian IMAM Ro.37s. The Italians initially deployed three CR.32 groups, a bomb wing and an attack group. The Germans contributed a variety of mostly modern bombers, fighters, ground attack and reconnaissance aircraft.

ermany quickly organized and deployed the Condor Legion, which besides its famous aviation branch included training, panzer and anti-aircraft units. Major General Hugo Sperrle took the legion to Spain and its final commander was Lt. Col. Wolfram von Richthofen. Both would become prominent

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OPPOSITE: ALL IMAGES FROM HISTORYNET ARCHIVES, EXCEPT INSET: ALBUM/ALAMY; CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: AKG/FAF TOSCANA – FONDAZIONE ALINARI PER LA FOTOGRAFIA; SEUDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG/ALAMY; ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES; HISTORYNET ARCHIVES

Luftwaffe leaders in WWII. The Condor Legion’s air component included bomber, fighter and reconnaissance groups, mainly flying, respectively, Ju-52s and Heinkel He-111s; Heinkel He-51s and Messerschmitt Bf-109s; and Heinkel He-45s and Dornier Do-17s. There was also a small naval contingent with Heinkel floatplanes. From August 1936 through March 1939, the legion lost nearly 300 men, including 120 noncombat deaths. Almost 80 percent of the 178 combat fatalities were aircrew. The fighters of Jagdgruppe 88 claimed 314 victories, while AA gunners logged 58 more. The legion produced 25 aces, including four in He-51s—most notably Johannes Trautloft, who became a wing commander in WWII. By far the best-known pilot was Werner Mölders, the war’s top German shooter with 14 victories in early-model Bf-109s. Some 130 Messerschmitts went to Spain, but Franco’s most numerous fighters were his 380 Fiats. The Condor Legion’s He-51 biplanes achieved moderate success, claiming 40-plus victories, but only one Polikarpov I-16 monoplane. Therefore, from the spring of 1937 onward the legion increasingly relied upon the more advanced Bf-109s for aerial combat. One of the standout Heinkel pilots, future Luft waffe general Adolf Galland, recalled, “The He 51 was clearly inferior both to the ‘Curtiss’ [actually the Polikarpov I-15] and the Rata [I-16] in speed and armament, as well as in maneuverability and rate of climb. That is why we had to avoid air combat with enemy planes as far as possible and to concentrate instead on ground targets.” “On hot days we flew in bathing trunks,” continued Galland, “and on returning from a sortie looked more like coal miners, dripping with sweat, smeared with oil and blackened by gun powder smoke.” After its role in Franco’s airlift, the Italian Regia Aeronautica established the Aviazione Legionaria (Legionary Air Force), committing some 6,000 men to it during the war. The first of four commanders was Lt. Col. Ruggero Bonomi, who had overseen the Italian part of the airlift. In 1937 Italy’s aviation contingent was subordinated to Maj. Gen. Sperrle of the Condor Legion for improved Nationalist coordination. By late 1938 the Italians fielded about 135 aircraft arrayed in two heavy bomber wings with SM.79s and 81s, a Fiat BR.20 medium bomb group, a reinforced attack group mainly equipped with Breda Ba.65s and three CR.32 groups. The

Savoias especially targeted major cities such as Barcelona, Valencia and Madrid. On April 26, 1937, the world learned of Guernica, an obscure city in the Basque country of far northern Spain. The Condor Legion’s chief of staff, Lt. Col. Richthofen, sought to impede a Republican withdrawal through Guernica, hoping that Franco’s forces could overtake them. Presumably with the streets choked by wreckage and the town’s bridge destroyed, the retreating enemy would be trapped. The initial strike force consisted of 21 German and three Italian bombers, while followup attacks were supported by fighters to suppress flak and strafe the rubble. Lacking dive bombers (only seven Junkers Ju-87 Stukas went to Spain), the Germans resorted to carpet bombing. They succeeded in reducing most of the town to ruins but missed the bridge. Nobody agrees on the death toll among the 5,000 residents, with figures running from 200 to more than 1,600, depending on the source. The Republicans made the most of the incident, spurring international condemnation that culminated in Picasso’s dramatic painting. Meanwhile, the war and the bombing continued. Nearly a year later, in four days in March 1938, the Italians bombed Barcelona, killing perhaps 1,000 people, reportedly using poison gas.

advancing the state of the art Clockwise from top left: Ground crewmen haul bombs to a Nationalist SM.79; Heinkel He-111Bs await their next mission at Lerida, Catalonia, in 1939; an aircrew boards their He-111; top Condor Legion ace Werner Mölders was credited with developing the “finger-four” fighter formation over Spain.

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(Italy had used gas against Ethiopians in 1935-36.) However, in fairness to the various air arms, what was frequently derided as terror bombing of cities mainly reflected the scattershot nature of aerial bombardment in the decade before the advent of “precision” bombing.

los rojos Top: Republican pilots enjoy a meal between missions near a Polikarpov I-16 fighter. Above: A recruiting poster urges potential Republican volunteers, “To defeat fascism enlist in aviation.”

he Nationalists faced a consortium of Communist-Socialist forces generically called Los Rojos—the Reds. The Repub lican Ejército del Aire (Spanish Air Force) needed personnel immediately, and three levies of 200 student pilots each went to Russia for flight training. Instruction was necessarily brief, however, and the tyros received almost no instrument time. The last batch was still in training when the war ended. Far more important was Soviet materiel support through most of the war. Moscow delivered more than 400 Polikarpov fighters to Spain, and perhaps 300 more I-15 biplanes were built locally. In addition to aircraft, the Soviets sent about 3,000 men to Spain, ostensibly “volunteers,” plus vehicles, artillery and small arms. The aviation component involved 60 command and staff, 330 fighter pilots, 270 other pilots and aircrew. From October 1936 to January 1939, 158 Russians died in Spain from all causes. They included 59 fighter pilots, 32 other aircrew and 18 killed in accidents. The Soviets entered combat in November 1936 and their I-16 monoplanes immediately outclassed the opposition. I-16s first clashed with enemy aircraft on November 11, losing two “Rata” pilots against claims of four Heinkels. The I-15’s first victory, a Ju-52, fell on November 4. Supremely maneuverable, the “Chato” did well against other biplanes such as the He-51 and CR.32, but could not begin to compete with the Bf-109, which debuted in 1937. Dogfighting pilots savored the I-15’s exceptional maneuverability. The I-15bis was rated at 235 mph, slightly faster than the CR.32, and was more agile. Moreover, the I-16 typically had nearly

one-third less wing loading than a Bf-109B. Both sides recognized the need for improved armament, with fighter weapons increasing from two rifle-caliber machine guns to four and ultimately to two 20mm cannons in the Messerschmitt. “The I-15 easily outperformed the Fiat CR.32, especially in horizontal maneuvers,” Russian volunteer Evengy Stepanov told Aviation History in 1995. “I often came up against the Bf-109 in combat....It performed well but was inferior to the I-16 in vertical maneuverability.” Stepanov claimed 10 aerial victories, including a rare nocturnal taran ramming attack. “On the night of November 27-28, 1937, I shot down two SM.81 bombers in the vicinity of Barcelona,” he said. “During this attack, I had to ram one of the bombers with the left leg of my undercarriage. There was no special technique for ramming, nor could there be since that was a last-ditch method in combat.” Close air support and ground attack received little popular attention, but both missions were proven in Spain. A prime example occurred when the Nationalist advance stalled near Guadalajara in March 1937. As the weather cleared, Republi can aircraft swarmed over the Italian positions, bombing and strafing the Littorio Division nearly to destruction. It was probably the first time that aviation alone had blunted a major ground operation, and it showed the way ahead. The Soviets’ “conveyor belt” technique maintained near-constant pressure on the target area. Air action against enemy shipping likewise received little coverage. In May 1937 three fast new Tupelov SB-2s from Los Alcázares launched against a reported Nationalist naval squadron near the Balearic Islands. The primary target was the 10,600-ton cruiser Canarias, but the Soviets misidentified and attacked the 12,000-ton German heavy cruiser Deutschland. The Germans sustained more than 100 casualties, including 31 killed. By mid-1938 the Soviets had learned as much about their weapons and tactics as they needed. Therefore, dictator Joseph Stalin began withdrawing his aviation component that summer, absorbing the lessons for future use. In any case, late that year the Republican cause looked grim with Nationalist gains in the east. Still, foreign volunteers came forward. French author André Malraux supported a squadron of Republican Potez 54s from bases near Barcelona and Madrid—France’s major contribution to the government war effort. The widely publicized “Yankee Squadron” included some colorful American airmen, none more so than hard-drinking Bert Acosta, who in 1927 had set an endurance record and flown the Atlantic with Richard Byrd. The outfit was led by one of the least-known aces in American history. Frederic I. Lord was a 12-victory Sopwith

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OPPOSITE TOP: ©DAVID SEYMOUR/MAGNUM PHOTOS; OPPOSITE BOTTOM: FOTOTECA GILARDI/GETTY IMAGES; TOP RIGHT: AKG-IMAGES/DE AGOSTINI PICTURE LIBRARY; BOTTOM RIGHT: PHOTO BY HEINRICH HOFFMANN/ULLSTEIN BILD VIA GETTY IMAGES

Dolphin ace in WWI and then in the Russian Civil War, against his future comrades. With a taste for adventure, Lord became an airman of fortune. He briefly flew in the Mexican Revolution, then was recruited by the Republicans in Spain. Flying outmoded equipment (one wing fell off in his first flight), he and his fellow mercenaries were often threatened with execution by their employers. In a matter of weeks most of the not-so-merry band returned home, sulking over fees never paid. Other Americans gained fame, or at least notoriety, as government fighter pilots. The top scorer was Frank Tinker, with eight confirmed victories. Orrin Bell, Stephen Daduk and Harold “Whitey” Dahl all claimed five or more victories, though they were unconfirmed. Albert J. “Ajax” Baumler (4½ victories) narrowly missed ace status in Spain but added 4½ to his tally with the U.S. Fourteenth Air Force in China. Conventional wisdom holds that experience gained in Spain influenced air doctrine and operations in WWII. As a broad statement that is accurate, but far more applicable tactically than strategically. The ground support spadework in Iberian soil benefited the Germans and the Russians, and certainly the Condor Legion’s development of the “finger-four” formation of two pairs of fighters was a revelation. Most historians credit Werner Mölders with that innovation, but contemporary accounts also cite contributions of others, notably Günther Lützow and Harro Harder. However, Adolf Galland noted, “Whatever may have been the importance of the tests of German arms in the Spanish Civil War from tactical, technical and operational points of view, they did not provide the experience that was needed nor lead to the formulation of sound strategic concepts.” Chief among the foregoing was strategic bombing. Neither side possessed the strength to destroy enemy industrial targets—an organizational flaw that went unrecognized in the Luftwaffe. Another lesson often lost in Spanish skies was the need for strong fighter escort for bombers. Some contemporary bombers outpaced fighters,

obscuring the coming requirement for “pursuits” with the range and speed to keep up with them. European fighters would continue to suffer from lack of endurance, a factor that worked to the Royal Air Force’s advantage in 1940 when German fighters were perennially on the verge of fuel exhaustion over England. Though too astute to officially join the Axis, Franco felt a debt to Hitler. Therefore he sent limited resources to support Germany against Russia. An infantry division and five squadron-size rotations of fighter pilots served alongside Wehrmacht units on the Eastern Front from 1941 to 1943. And after the war, Franco allowed many former Nazis to find refuge in Spain.

lessons learned Top: Italian CR.32s peel off after prey over the Ebro region. Above: Luftwaffe leader Hermann Göring (center), Maj. Gen. Hugo Sperrle (left) and General Hellmuth Volkmann (right) review Condor Legion personnel at Döberitz upon their return from Spain.

Frequent contributor Barrett Tillman’s latest project is a book tentatively titled August 1945: The Month That Shaped the World, due from Osprey next year. Additional reading: Aircraft of the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, by Gerald Howson; The Legion Condor, by Karl Ries and Hans Ring; Fiat CR.32 Aces of the Spanish Civil War, by Alfredo Longoluso; and Spanish Republican Aces, by Rafael A. Permuy López. SEPTEMBER 2021

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BROKEN ARROW IN CALIFORNIA’S CENTRAL VALLEY DURING A COLD WAR AIRBORNE ALERT MISSION, A COMBINATION OF MECHANICAL MALFUNCTIONS AND HUMAN ERRORS LED TO THE CRASH OF A B-52 WITH TWO H-BOMBS ONBOARD BY TIMOTHY KARPIN & JAMES MARONCELLI

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well-traveled “buff” Boeing B-52F serial no. 57-0163 was the first Stratofortress assigned to California’s Mather Air Force Base and later flew 30 sorties over Vietnam. Here it sits on the apron at Mather, where on March 13, 1961, another B-52F had set out on a problemplagued nuclear alert mission.

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running start Above: Stratofortress crews scramble during an alert in 1961 at Fairchild AFB, Wash. Opposite: A B-52F takes off on another airborne alert flight.

Nothing happened, no matter how hard he pulled on the release. The maintenance crews, preflight crew and Oarlock himself had failed to check for and remove one of the three turret safety pins. Furious communication among the crew resulted in a second order: Come forward now! Oarlock rotated back his seat, ditched his bulky gear, scrambled through several hatches and began his panicky crawl along the tight starboard bomb bay catwalk. Complying with the two-man rule, the radar navigator, Captain William Hart, stationed himself at the forward hatch to monitor Oarlock’s difficult passage above the cargo: two

thermonuclear bombs. Thus ensued Strategic Air Command’s second “Broken Arrow” incident of 1961, this time over the picturesque Sutter Buttes of California’s Central Valley. As the Cold War warmed in the late 1950s, General Thomas S. Power, commander of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC), implemented an airborne alert program designed to ensure almost immediate U.S. retaliation against its enemies, replacing the prior “launch on warning” policy. SAC began rotating bombers and aerial refueling tankers through continuous flights near the Soviet borders 24 hours per day,

PREVIOUS SPREAD & ABOVE: U.S. AIR FORCE

UPON HEARING THE ORDER TO BAIL OUT, TAIL GUNNER STEPHEN OARLOCK REACHED FORWARD AND FIRMLY PULLED ON THE D-HANDLE LANYARD THAT WOULD EJECT THE ENTIRE TAIL GUN TURRET ASSEMBLY, ALLOWING HIM SIMPLY TO STEP INTO THE SKY FROM THE DOOMED BOEING B-52F STRATOFORTRESS.

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crews cannibalized aircraft for parts and struggled to maintain overworked jet engines and fatigued aircraft electrical systems that experienced excessive power cycling. General Power soon returned to Congress to request more funding.

arch 13, 1961, dawned bright and clear at Mather AFB east of Sacramento as Major Raymond Clay’s refreshed crew prepared to take their B-52F aloft once more to Alaska under the Operation Coverall air borne alert program. Around 9:30 a.m. Major Clay, the command pilot, attended the preflight briefing with his crew. First Lieutenant Robert Bigham was his copilot and Captain Joseph Eth ier, the third pilot, joined them on the flight deck as a student. Electronics weapons officer (EWO) Tech. Sgt. Alexander Baltikauskas sat behind them. On the lower deck—the “Black Hole”— were radar navigator Hart and master navigator

brass tactics Clockwise from above left: SAC commander General Thomas S. Power speaks at a 1962 Senate hearing; the “Christmas tree” alert ramp at Mather; shoulder patch of the 72nd Bomb Squadron.

PREVIOUS SPREAD & ABOVE: U.S. AIR FORCE

seven days a week. Although President Dwight D. Eisenhower did not permit onboard nuclear weapons until October 1959, under the Head Start I and II and Steel Trap I and II testing programs SAC had amassed more than 6,000 B-52 sorties by 1961. To carry out this new mission, SAC had activated 14 dispersed strategic wings by 1958. Almost all of them fielded a squadron of 15 B-52 bombers supported by 10 to 15 KC-135A Stratotankers, with at least half the bombers on a 15-minute alert status. In April 1958 SAC assigned to California’s Mather Air Force Base the 4134th Strategic Wing, composed of the 72nd Bombardment Squadron and the 904th Aerial Refueling Squadron. Gen eral Power briefed Congress on his successful efforts early in 1959, and in January 1961 SAC officially announced that B-52s were conducting these operations, but described them as only airborne training. These early airborne alert missions revealed a multitude of problems. As the sortie rate increased, trained mechanics and vital spare parts for the B-52s and K-135s were in short supply. Ground

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EACH H-BOMB YIELDED 3.8 MEGATONS OF EXPLOSIVE ENERGY, ENOUGH TO OBLITERATE A LARGE CITY AND ITS SUBURBS. 48

Major Morris Levy. Spare radar navigator Cap tain Robert Dobson joined them in a jump seat. Tail gunner Tech. Sgt. Oarlock sat apart from the rest of the crew, facing rearward in the pressurized tail compartment to operate the quad .50-caliber machine guns. Mather Control designated Clay’s bomber “Doe 11” and a sister B-52F flying in their two-plane cell “Doe 13.” Weaponeers from Mather’s Weapons Storage Area carted out two Mark 39 Mod 2 thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs) to the Christmas tree–shaped alert ramp. A thick steel outer casing accounted for much of the mass of the 6,600pound weapons. The ground crew clipped each 11.4-foot-long bomb into a suspension pallet before winching them into the bomb bay. The radar navigator could set the weapon for either a parachute-retarded air burst, ground-contact burst or a parachute-retarded laydown. Each H-bomb yielded 3.8 megatons of explosive energy, enough to obliterate a large city and its suburbs. Unlike earlier models containing cores that ground or flight crews could remove, the nuclear primary stage (the fission core) consisted of a sealed hollow grapefruit-sized plutonium and oralloy (highly enriched uranium, or HEU) composite core, which no ordnance crew could remove without disassembling the weapon. High explosives (HE) surrounded the core and served to compress it to criticality. Each bomb’s secondary (the fusion stage) consisted of a solid lithium-deuteride cylinder surrounding an HEU “spark plug” rod. Doe 11 and Doe 13 took off at 11:25 local time, with plans for extensive over-water travel and two refuelings during their 24-hour mission. Troubles began early. Twenty minutes out, Doe 11’s forward cockpit crew began to experience the first of several maintenance-related problems that plagued

espite these difficulties, a mission-focused Major Clay turned his bomber northwest out of California and over the Pacific Ocean. The crew endured the heat for the next 22 hours, rotating all three pilots and the EWO through cockpit shifts and shuttering the packs to cool down only prior to and during aerial refueling, a maneuver that required all pilots to be in the cockpit fully suited-up and breathing bottled oxygen. Six and a half hours after takeoff, with one refueling complete and 30 minutes into their second loop near the Aleutian Islands, the crew discussed their problems with Mather Control. Clay reported that “the stick is so hot that you can hardly hold your hands on it with gloves on.” Mather Control was firm and maintained one consistent message—to keep Operation Coverall on schedule: “Stay out there as long as you can, fly the route as far as you can. Fly at altitude on oxygen as long as you can, but first let the tankers know tonight what your problem is, and if it continues, then fly as long as you can and then come home.” Additional problems cropped up throughout the night. The copilot’s rate-of-climb indicator malfunctioned and the no. 3 engine lost 30 percent of its power, which required hours of de-icing to improve. Seven hours out, during the second refueling, the forward fuel tank gauge stopped working and Hart experienced severe pain in his left knee from depressurization (i.e., the bends), which diminished once the packs fired up again. Eleven hours into the flight Mather Control made their point again: “Understand you will complete your mission. Is that affirmative?” “We are going to try,” Clay responded. “We are going to try.”

TOP: SAN DIEGO AIR & SPACE MUSEUM; BOTTOM: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE; OPPOSITE ABOVE: DANIEL TEMPLETON/ALAMY; RIGHT: U.S. AIR FORCE

destructive duo Above: Two Mark 15 thermonuclear bombs, identical in appearance to the Mark 39s carried by “Doe 11,” await loading into a B-52. Right: The Mark 39s were armed via this panel at the radar navigator’s station.

the sortie. While they circled over Fortuna, Calif., for almost an hour, Clay reported that they could not control the heat blowing from the vents below the instrument panel. In the B-52F, the final compressor stages of the engines forced 750-degree bleed air into a ram manifold that cooled it to 475 degrees. Four-inch pipes routed this pressurized hot air to air conditioning packs, which were also fed cool ram air from wing ducts. Conditioned air cooled electronics and also served to cool, heat, ventilate and pressurize the crew cabins. Bleed air also powered 10 hydraulic system packs. While the rest of Doe 11’s cabin remained cool, all efforts to block the blistering heat flowing into the cockpit failed due to a malfunctioning relay that locked an air valve in the full hot position. The crew’s options were limited. To cool the cockpit, they had to shut down the packs, bring in ram air and depressurize the cabin, requiring them to don oxygen masks. Shutting down those packs, however, also would cut off cool air to the electronics.

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TOP: SAN DIEGO AIR & SPACE MUSEUM; BOTTOM: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE; OPPOSITE ABOVE: DANIEL TEMPLETON/ALAMY; RIGHT: U.S. AIR FORCE

The mission reached a critical point 14 hours after takeoff, about 30 minutes after the fully refueled Doe 11 and 13 started their third loop, when the outside panel of Clay’s window shattered. Soon the unbearable 125- to 160-degree heat in the cockpit cracked the glass cases on both turnand-slip indicators. Clay depressurized again at 33,500 feet, but not for long as Bigham began to suffer abdominal cramping from trapped gas and Hart re-experienced the bends in his knee. Within 20 minutes, Clay decided to descend to 12,000 feet for the rest of the mission and let Doe 13 proceed ahead of them. About an hour and a half after the window shattered, Bigham, who was monitoring fuel consumption, took a scheduled rest on the upper deck bunk. Oxygen use and extreme heat had dehydrated the crewmen and they depleted their drinking water only 15 hours after takeoff, reporting to Mather, “Sure would like to have a drink if you can send it up.” By 17 hours after takeoff, the crew was spent and alerted Mather that they would soon turn back to California. Their return was fraught with errors and more dysfunctional equipment, with the bomber burning fuel at an accelerated rate due to its lower altitude. A little more than 20 hours after takeoff, the gauge for the no. 1 main fuel tank stuck at 10,200 pounds, a condition Bigham didn’t notice until after he returned to the cockpit an hour and a half later. Also, since Levy had not been resetting their current position with the best known data, the crew miscalculated their fuel burn rate. After 21 hours, Doe 11 advised Mather: “We would like to have a tanker up here and get a little fuel. We now figure we will be over the field at 14,000 pounds. That is a little light.” Mather responded, “We will not launch [a tanker] unless you go below 10,000 pounds.” Not long after Big ham discovered the hung-up gauge he advised Mather: “We have number one main tank now that is stuck at 10,200 pounds, and we are not sure just how much fuel it does have in it now....I think

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it would be a good idea to get that tanker airborne.” Mather radioed: “We have a tanker airborne [but the 904th did not launch tanker Razor 93 for another 20 minutes]....You pick him up on a track between Red Bluff and back in this direction. You might keep in mind, if things get a little close up there, head into Beale [AFB, east of Yuba City].” Clay ultimately never chose that option.

fter making long detours around turbulent weather fronts, which further extended their flight, Doe 11 coasted back over Fortuna a little more than 22 hours after takeoff at 9:35 a.m. local time. At 9:51 Clay and crew passed over Red Bluff, found no tanker and turned south toward Mather at 12,000 feet and 322 mph. When they spotted Razor 93, they asked it to reduce speed so they could catch up. But less than 2½ miles from the tanker, Doe 11 exhausted its fuel. All eight of the B-52’s engines began to flame out at about 10:03 over the eastern flank of Sutter Buttes. Clay immediately rolled into a westerly 30-degree bank to avoid the populated Yuba City area and headed toward open farmland. Upon completing the turn, he ordered the crew to bail out. At an altitude of about 6,500 feet, Levy fired his ejection seat downward first from his navigator position. Dobson and Ethier followed by jumping through the now open hatch below the navigator station. Baltikauskas then fired his ejection seat on

critical factors Above: Due to a stuck air valve, conditioned bleed air emanating from a floor duct (circled on this early B-52) drove cockpit temperatures above 125 degrees. Below: A Boeing KC-135A tanker refuels a B-52. Doe 11’s final tanker, Razor 93, was launched too late to save the thirsty Stratofortress.

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Fortuna

Redding

9:35 a.m., 22 hours into flight

9:51 a.m.

Red Bluff

California ▼

Sutter Buttes

✹

Pacific Ocean

Engines flame out,10:03 a.m.

Yuba City

Crash

10:15 a.m.

Sacramento Mather AFB

running on empty Above: After its return from orbiting near the Aleutians, Doe 11 was on the eastern flank of Sutter Buttes, within 2½ miles of the tanker sent from Mather AFB, when it exhausted its fuel supply. Right: The Department of Energy documented the crash site on the ground and from the air in a film.

the top deck. After his highly motivated crawl from the rear of the bomber, Oarlock finally arrived in the forward crew cabin, donned a parachute and jumped though the open navigator hatch. Bigham then ejected upward, followed by Hart below. Having confirmed that all of the crew had bailed out, Clay attempted to trim his now dead bomber for the best possible glide path and ejected with the ground only 4,000 feet below him. Levy and Bigham suffered leg fractures upon impact with the muddy earth, their parachutes dragging them 30 to 40 feet before they could collapse them. The official SAC accident report later stated that the two men sustained their injuries because they had failed to release their survival kits prior to ground impact. Dobson, Hart and Clay suffered only minor scrapes upon landing and Baltikauskas, Ethier and Oarlock were uninjured. Less than a half-hour after bailing out, Clay reported to the wing commander by telephone from the Sanborn Ranch near Meridian. The now unmanned bomber began a lazy left downward spiral over the farmlands southwest of Yuba City. Doe 11 slowed to 230 mph as it completed a full 360-degree circle in a several mile wide arc. In a shallow 15-degree bank with its nose down five degrees, the bomber impacted the asphalt Moroni Road at a 45-degree angle a little before 10:15. The northern embankment of the road stripped off the 3,000-gallon left wing drop tank as the aircraft began to cartwheel across John Hopkins’ 120-acre ranch. Although never electrically armed by the crew, the two Mark 39s did not fare well, as the impact broke them loose from their pallets and crushed their steel casings, sending fissile, high-explosive and other components down-

range along with scattered aircraft debris. Within 30 minutes of Clay’s bailout order, the local SAC liaison officer notified the Joint Nuclear Accident Coordinating Center, “We had another North Carolina type incident,” i.e., a Broken Arrow like the one on January 24, 1961, near Goldsboro, N.C. Specialists from Mather, Beale, McClellen and Kirtland AFBs; Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory; Sandia Corporation; and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) immediately converged on the crash site. Less than two hours later, the explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) team from Beale confirmed that the two hydrogen bombs were severely damaged but their HE had not detonated and no radioactive materials appeared to have been released. Doe 11 was scattered across 20 acres of Hopkins’

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fallow rice field. The two hydrogen bombs were about 40 yards from each other. One had fragmented into two parts, and its shattered chunks of HE and still intact plutonium and HEU core were scattered within 10 to 20 yards. To minimize transportation risks, the EOD team gathered and burned the HE fragments and detonators in a small pit on the ranch, but trucked the nuclear components to Beale for further scrutiny and eventual return to the AEC. Cleanup crews took several weeks to remove almost 165,000 pounds of aircraft debris.

OPPOSITE IMAGES: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY; MAP: PAUL FISHER; ABOVE: U.S. AIR FORCE; INSET: SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER

AC’s accident report identified the primary cause of the incident as supervisory errors at Mather Control and its failure to launch a fuel tanker in time to save Doe 11. Clay had expected to rendezvous with the tanker in the Red Bluff area, which would have allowed him to take on more fuel before his engines flamed out. However, there was no doubt that onboard attempts to monitor fuel consumption were inadequate in light of failing and stuck gauges and the increased rate of fuel consumption after the bomber descended to 12,000 feet. The accident report clearly documented repeated encouragement by Mather Control to continue the Coverall flight in spite of these significant equipment malfunctions and the crew’s inability even to keep the cockpit fully manned during most of the mission. Historical SAC documents suggest that stimulants were available to flight crews, and wing commanders may have encouraged their use for these 24-hour airborne alert missions. In his book Jet Age Man, retired USAF Lt. Col. Earl J. McGill gained some notoriety by stating incorrectly that the accident board found the primary cause of the incident was pilot error induced by dextroamphetamine (he called them “Go Pills”) that impaired Clay’s judgment. McGill further asserted that due to the Doe 11 crash SAC made the use of amphetamines a court-martial offense. The accident report made no mention of the

stimulant, however, and McGill seemed to confuse the details of the Doe 11 accident with the earlier Goldsboro Broken Arrow. He further reminisced that before he and his B-52 crew headed out to the flight line, they dipped into a jar full of Go Pills for their flights where “those little guys made us the sharpest pilots in the universe.” In the end, there is little evidence to suggest that stimulants were a factor in this accident. What was obvious to the Air Force investigators was that, beyond fatigue from sleep deprivation, the crew was under extreme physical stress from high heat, dehydration and hypoxia, all contributing factors to the accident. Nevertheless, General Power’s strong desire to deploy the early airborne alert program had driven the SAC chain of command hard, to the point where wing commanders faced intense pressure to roll the dice and fly missions even with multiple hardware failures. As the aircraft commander, it was Major Clay’s prerogative to declare an emergency and abort the mission. But he too likely surmised from his own leadership chain that failure was not an acceptable option. Even after Clay described several serious problems during the flight, Mather Control’s clear direction was to “fly as long as you can” and “complete your mission.”

ever vigilant Top: A SAC B-52 and ground crew stand ready for their next mission. Above: Aside from this newspaper account, the crash received very little media coverage, as the Air Force sought to place blame on the aircrew and sweep the incident under a rug.

Timothy Karpin and James Maroncelli are the authors of The Traveler’s Guide to Nuclear Weapons: A Journey Through America’s Cold War Battlefields. They last wrote for Aviation History in the July 2019 issue about a Broken Arrow incident in 1958 near Savannah, Ga. (see “Amazing Story of the Lost H-Bomb” at historynet.com). Further reading: Broken Arrow: The Declassified History of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Accidents, by Michael H. Maggelet and James C. Oskins. September 2021

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eyes of the fleet A U.S. Coast Guard Sikorsky HNS-1 helicopter attached to Operation Highjump, the Navy’s 1946-47 Antarctic expedition, returns from a survey of South Pole waters. The Navy used helicopters to reconnoiter routes through the sea ice during the challenging three-month expedition to map the frigid continent.

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OPERATION HIGHJUMP IN A COMBINED EFFORT NOT LONG AFTER WORLD WAR II, THE U.S. NAVY EMPLOYED SHIPS, AIRPLANES AND HELICOPTERS TO EXPLORE AND MAP ANTARCTICA’S FROZEN REACHES BY JIM TRAUTMAN

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THE CELEBRATIONS SURROUNDING THE END OF WORLD WAR II HAD BARELY ENDED WHEN THE COLD WAR COMMENCED BETWEEN THE WESTERN ALLIES AND THEIR SOVIET FORMER PARTNER. Pole jumping Top: Highjump team members plot their route before leaving for Antarctica in December 1946. Above: Expedition commanders Rear Admirals Richard H. Cruzen (left) and Richard E. Byrd board a Douglas R4D-5 during the operation.

The war’s end also signaled the onset of the atomic age and a corresponding desire among the victorious nations to secure supplies of uranium and other natural resources. With its vast mineral deposits amid largely unexplored territory, Antarctica was considered a promising potential repository of those vital resources. As such, the United States sought to establish a presence in Antarctica and explore the frigid continent using naval and air assets. On August 26, 1946, chief of U.S. naval operations Admiral Chester Nimitz announced that a massive combined military expedition dubbed

Operation Highjump would be launched into Antarctica in December during summer in the Southern Hemisphere. The operation involved 13 ships, more than 4,700 personnel and a variety of aircraft, including newly purchased helicopters. The naval contingent, known as Task Force 68, was commanded by Rear Adm. Richard H. Cruzen and Rear Adm. Richard E. Byrd commanded the scientific and research elements, with six Douglas R4D-5L aircraft (Navy C-47As) at his disposal. After Admiral Byrd and his team established the Little America IV base near where three previous bases had been situated, aircraft would

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PREVIOUS SPREAD & OPPOSITE INSET: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; OPPOSITE TOP: U.S. MARINE CORPS; TOP LEFT & BOTTOM RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NAVAL AVIATION; TOP RIGHT: JEFFREY ETHELL COLLECTION

photograph as much of Antarctica’s land surface as possible during the three-month operation. Six Martin PBM-5 Mariner flying boats were to operate from the seaplane tenders Pine Island and Currituck, photographing the east and west coasts, while the R4Ds surveyed the interior. On November 12 Admiral Byrd stated at a press conference that Operation Highjump “was primarily a military mission to train naval personnel, test ships, planes and the new helicopters under frigid zone conditions. Develop techniques for establishing and maintaining air bases in Antarctic. A secondary objective was to increase knowledge of hydrographic, geographic, meteorological, geological and electromagnetic conditions of the area. The PBMs and R4Ds would play a major role in the objectives.” A second, unstated objective was to prove Navy capabilities to President Harry Truman, who sought reductions in America’s postwar military budget. The Soviets eyed the Operation Highjump announcement warily. One of their naval journals stated, “U.S. measures in Antarctica testify that American military circles are seeking to subject the polar regions to their control and create military bases.” The operation involved significant planning and equipment, from gloves, coats and provisions to tiny snow boots to protect sled dogs’ paws, and even a Christmas tree and Santa Claus suit since the ships would be at sea on December 25. Thousands of pieces of bamboo were carved and had orange flags attached to be used as route and landing zone markers.

ask Force 68 consisted of three separate naval groups, each with a specific mission. Captain George J. Dufek commanded the Eastern Group, with Pine Island carrying three PBM Mariners. The Western Group, commanded by Captain Charles A. Bond, included Currituck with the other three Mariners. Admiral Cruzen’s Central Group and the aircraft carrier Philippine Sea, with Byrd as officer in charge, filled out the task force. The PBM flight crews were all inexperienced volunteers, having only had a month to train for the mission. One crew member characterized the flying as “no weather stations, inhuman landscape, traditional navigation aids useless, maps limited, knowing that the flying would not be safe. You were trapped in an aircraft for five hours, in zones where the weather changed minute by minute.”

The operation also involved several Sikorsky HO3S-1 helicopters, capable of a carrying a pilot, three passengers and cargo, with a 360-mile range. The smaller Sikorsky HNS-1 accommodated a pilot and one passenger and had a range of 130 miles. One key aspect of the preparations was the construction of special platforms on the ships for the helicopters and hours upon hours spent practicing takeoffs and landings. Flying out ahead of the icebreakers to search for clear passages through the ice, the helicopters served as the eyes of the fleet. One helicopter was allotted to each of the icebreakers and one to the carrier Philippine Sea. Besides conducting reconnaissance, each was large enough to undertake rescue operations. Two helicopters would be lost during Operation Highjump. The Central Group was the command center for the operation. Its ships broke through the ice with the help of the Coast Guard cutter Northwind and the new Navy cutter Burton Island, which joined the operation later. Northwind was critical to the mission since the thick ice could crack open a thin-skinned ship like a can opener. Norwegian

air assets Clockwise from top left: Coast Guard Grumman J2F-6 Ducks served recon, supply and rescue roles; the seaplane tender Pine Island carried three Martin PBM-5 Mariners for use by the task force’s Eastern Group; an R4D-5 is readied for takeoff from the aircraft carrier Philippine Sea, the Central Group’s capital ship, on January 30, 1947.

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heading south Clockwise from top left: With R4Ds lining its deck, Philippine Sea negotiates the Panama Canal’s locks en route to Antarctica in early January 1947; a snowcovered Mariner waits aboard Pine Island; an R4D carrying Admiral Byrd and his men makes a jetassisted takeoff from Philippine Sea and heads to Antarctica on January 29.

trawlers in the area reported the ice to be the heavi est in more than 40 years. Upon reaching the Ross Ice Shelf, the Central Group ships would disgorge the small aircraft, ice vehicles, supplies, tents and sled dogs. Then the men would move inland to establish Little Amer ica IV, headquarters for Byrd and his six R4Ds. Getting the big Douglas birds to Antarctica presented a formidable challenge as, lacking the range to fly from a land base, they had to be launched from Philippine Sea. Each was outfitted with aluminum skis attached to the landing gear struts, with the tires providing a two-inch clearance between the skis and the carrier deck. In order to get airborne, each R4D was outfitted with four JATO (jet-assisted takeoff) bottles. It was a oneway trip to Little America IV since they could not land on the carrier and would be left behind when the operation was completed. The tail, wings and midsection of each aircraft were painted with bright orange stripes for enhanced visibility in case they went down on the ice.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: U.S. NAVY; NAVAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE COMMAND; POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE TOP LEFT & TOP RIGHT: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NAVAL AVIATION; OPPOSITE BOTTOM LEFT: POPPERFOTO VIA GETTY IMAGES; RIGHT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES

he Eastern, Western and Central group ships departed at different intervals and ports on both coasts. Northwind left Norfolk, Va., on December 2, headed to Antarctica via the Panama Canal. The ships stationed in the Pacific left San Diego, Calif., the same day. The Central Group and Philippine Sea did not depart Norfolk until January 2, 1947. The carrier was the last to arrive due to the construc tion of the base and airfield. Grumman J2F-6 Duck amphibians with the group performed reconnaissance, supply and, if needed, rescue and medical missions. Once the expedition ships reached heavy ice, the HNS-1 helicopter was employed to fly at 600 feet and act as a scout to radio where clear openings were. Safe passage involved ships operating at low speed, wending their way through the ice. The low temperatures made the air denser and increased the helicopters’ efficiency. Even so, 60 minutes of prep time was required to heat the fuel, oil, engine and remove any ice from the rotor blades prior to a mission. Operating from Pine Island, an HO3S-1 carrying Captain Dufek flew to Scott Island on a reconnaissance mission. During its return flight the rotor blades became so coated with ice that the helicopter crashed several feet short of the ship’s landing pad. The HO3S-1 was lost but Dufek and the pilot were saved before freezing to death in the frigid water. The first Central Group ships arrived at the Ross Ice Shelf on January 17. The next two days were spent searching for a site for Little America IV. Then the tractors, jeeps, M29 Weasels, bulldoz ers and other snow-track vehicles were unloaded. The base comprised large tents, weather equip

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ment, Quonset huts, three packed-snow runways and one short runway made of steel matting. Lieutenant Jim Cornish had the honor of flying the first helicopter in and out of Little America IV. By the time Operation Highjump was completed on March 1, a dozen helo flights had been made to the base. On January 22, Philippine Sea lost an HO3S-1 helicopter when it was caught in strong winds on

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takeoff and crashed into the sea. The pilot was rescued but the accident was indicative of the hard lessons learned by pilots and crew in the early days of helicopters. The carrier was within 600 miles of Little Amer ica IV on January 29, close enough for the six R4Ds to prepare for takeoff. The flight deck was only 300 feet long, but with the JATO assist the first aircraft, with Byrd aboard, was airborne in 100 feet. A second aircraft took off and both made it to Little America IV safely. As the weather closed in the next day, the remaining four R4Ds followed and reached the base with only an hour to spare before conditions deteriorated. Upon landing it was judged advisable to remove the aircraft tires and only employ the skis. During Highjump the six R4Ds completed 28 photographic flights and captured more than 21,000 images. The helicopters and PBMs also flew photo missions along the coasts. At the completion of the operation, more than 70,000 photos had been taken and over 1.5 million square miles of territory had been surveyed. “Our hope is that now we have the entire material to make a detailed map of all of Antarctica,” said Byrd. Flying in subzero conditions meant that the oil in each aircraft had to be heated, special fuel was used and the engines were warmed up for a long

settling in Clockwise from top left: The task force carried in special heating equipment to warm aircraft engines; Navy personnel use a bulldozer to clear paths from the supply ships Yancey (right) and Merrick; the Coast Guard cutter Northwind performed yeoman’s work clearing sea lanes for the task force; Byrd addresses his men at a flag-raising ceremony on February 17 at the Little America IV base.

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unforgiving land Clockwise from top left: A Navy Sikorsky HO3S-1 helicopter surveys Antarctica’s inhospitable terrain; two weeks after the crash of PBM-5 George I, rescuers spotted the airplane’s wreckage and a message from the survivors that three crewmen had died; R4Ds line up on the ice at Little America IV.

time prior to takeoff. Ensuring that all the ice was removed from the propellers, wings and tail surfaces was also critical. Besides photo equipment, each aircraft carried various instruments to search for mineral deposits and other geological features. On one of Byrd’s flights magnetic instrument pods detected a massive coal deposit. When a lake was discovered in a large ice-free patch of land, a PBM landed to scoop up water samples.

he experiences of the PBM-5 Mariner George 1 were indicative of the difficulties airmen faced during Operation High jump. The aircraft’s launch had been delayed for days by fog, snow squalls and heavy seas. Finally, on December 26, the weather cleared and allowed for aerial mapping of the east coast. George 1 was lowered over the side of Pine Island and almost immediately one of the launch boats

crashed into a wing and damaged a pontoon. The Mariner had to be lifted back onto the ship for repairs. When the weather cleared again on December 29, George 1 was once more lowered over the side and took off with a crew of nine, including Pine Island’s skipper Captain Henry H. Caldwell, who was along as an observer. The other two Mariners were launched shortly afterward. Each PBM carried survival equipment consisting of 100 days’ worth of rations, skis, sleds, medicine, warm clothes and sleeping bags. After they had been flying for three hours, the weather took a turn for the worse. George 1 climbed to 1,000 feet to get above the snow and ice. Instead it became involved in what is known as an “ice blink,” with streams of snow reflecting the sunshine and making it difficult to see—similar to the reflections experienced while driving a car at night through a snowstorm. Unable to see the ground, pilot Ralph LeBlanc struck an object and tried to pull up, but the fuel tank ripped open and the aircraft crashed in a fireball. Two crewmen were killed instantly when they were thrown through the propeller blades. For 13 days weather conditions prevented any attempt to search for the downed PBM. Finally a search plane spotted burned wreckage and men on the ground. Their signal, painted on the wrecked Mariner’s wing, indicated that three of the crewmen were dead. Since it was impossible to land in the area, messages were dropped directing the survivors to make their way to the open water about 10 miles to the north. An aircraft marked the route with orange flags and then proceeded to parachute drop food, medicine and other supplies. The men successfully made the trek—a feat in itself—and were brought back to Pine Island by the rescue aircraft. George 1’s radioman Wendell Henderson, flight engineer Frederick Williams

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OPPOSITE PHOTOS: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NAVAL AVIATION; CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHIVES; U.S. NAVY; MGM/UA

and navigator Maxwell Lopez had been killed. Pilot LeBlanc would lose both of his badly burned and frozen legs. In another dramatic incident, during a fourplane flight to map as far as the South Pole an R4D carrying Admiral Byrd almost met a similar fate. After dropping a United Nations flag over the South Pole, Byrd’s crew continued their photo mission. Suddenly one of the engines seized and they began to lose altitude. Facing the prospect of an emergency landing and difficult rescue, Byrd ordered any item that was not bolted down thrown out of the aircraft, save for the photographic material. The R4D slowly began to gain altitude and in the tradition of the tough Douglas aircraft arrived back at Little America IV and made a safe landing. As winter approached the weather deteriorated—only five days were favorable for flying in February. Soon the process began to shut down the operation and leave before the full force of winter set in. The R4Ds’ fuel, oil and other fluids were drained. Tail sections were dismantled and stored in the hope that a future expedition could reassemble the transports and use them again. Sadly, this was not to be. By 1958 the ice shelf on which Little America IV was sited had broken away and drifted into open water. The six aircraft disappeared. Among other losses, a PBM had been blown overboard off Currituck in a massive ocean storm prior to reaching the objective and disappeared in the high waves. A second Mariner suffered damage to its nose. The stars of Operation Highjump appeared to be the helicopters employed by the fleet. In his report, Northwind’s commander, Captain Charles W. Thomas, emphasized, “Helicopter best piece of equipment ever carried on ice vessels.” He further noted that “In a well organized ice convoy, the commander needs to know what his ships will encounter within the next day....Hence helicopter reconnaissance within a radius of twenty five miles

was essential....Battering a track through 650 miles of ice in eighteen days would not have been possible without helicopter reconnaissance. Had the Task Group penetrated the pack without ‘eyes’ it would have arrived too late in the season to establish a base; then conduct an aerophotographic exploration of a hidden continent. In other words, the Central Group would have been obliged to turn about and get out of the pack before being able to erect Little America No. 4.” Operation Highjump was chronicled in a film shot by military photographers and narrated by Hollywood actors Robert Taylor, Robert Montgomery and Van Hef lin, all of whom had served in the Navy during WWII. Released in movie theaters as The Secret Land, it won the 1948 Academy Award for Best Documen tary Feature. Other operations would follow, including the U.S. Navy’s Operation Windmill in 1947-48, and eventually treaties were signed by all involved nations to ensure that Antarctica remained a nonmilitary zone. Jim Trautman is the author of Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats and is currently working on a book about airship history, due next year from Firefly Books. Additional reading: Report of Operation Highjump: U.S. Navy Antarctic Development Program 1947, produced by the U.S. Navy; and Operation Highjump: Diary of a Young Sailor, by Richard J. Miller.

secrets revealed Clockwise from top left: Byrd holds an instrument during a flight in an R4D to the South Pole; a period illustration details the operation’s three main angles of attack; MGM’s documentary chronicling the epic operation won an Academy Award.

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multitask trainer In 1967 the Israeli Air Force used modified Fouga CM-170 Magister training jets on the front lines in the Six-Day War. The IAF aerobatic team later flew the Magisters.

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NO ALTERNATIVE WITH LIMITED AIR ASSETS, THE ISRAELI AIR FORCE ARMED A SQUADRON OF TRAINERS AND PRESSED THEM INTO COMBAT IN THE GROUNDATTACK ROLE DURING THE SIX-DAY WAR BY PATRICK S. BAKER

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original role One of Israel’s first license-built Magisters, painted in the highvisibility markings of 147 Squadron, makes a training flight.

One by one, the lumbering jet trainers modified into light attack planes volleyed rockets from 200 yards away, knocking out the targets. On the ground, Egyptian anti-aircraft artillery fired enthusiastically, if not very effectively. Although each plane was hit, none were seriously damaged. The Magisters turned east after their strike. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) planners had the strike aircraft leave the attack area exactly the way they had entered—over the Jiradi Pass. More enemy AA fire rose to meet the escaping planes. Captain Arnon Livnat, deputy commander of the squadron, was hit and slumped in the cockpit, his head lolling to one side. Livnat’s wingman, Zvi Kanor, just 19 years old and only six weeks out of flight school, watched as his flight leader’s plane yawed and dove, uncontrolled, into the desert floor. It

was just the first mission of the war and already 147 Squadron had lost a Magister, several others were damaged and one of its best and most experienced pilots had been killed. On June 5, 1967, the IAF unleashed Operation Focus, the boldest and most successful preemptive air assault in military history. In just a few hours on that summer morning the Israelis decimated the Egyptian air force. Before noon, Jordan and Syria, fooled by Egyptian announcements of victory, declared war on Israel. The IAF then turned and attacked those two nations, destroying their air forces on the ground as well. By about 1 p.m. on the first day of the Six-Day War, Israel had achieved air superiority throughout the battle space. During Operation Focus, Israel used nearly all of its jet fighter force of 65 Dassault Mirage IIIs,

THE ISRAELI FOUGA CM-170 MAGISTERS OF 147 SQUADRON CAME IN LOW TOWARD THE EGYPTIAN RADAR STATIONS AND COMMANDAND-CONTROL CENTER NEAR EL ARISH ON THE SINAI PENINSULA’S MEDITERRANEAN COAST.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES; AP PHOTO; PHOTO12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES

available, allowing each Magister to carry a dozen 80mm rockets. IAF pilots advocated for the inclusion of an ejec tion seat, but the idea was considered too expen sive and too technically difficult to implement. A jury-rigged weapon-control panel was added in the cockpits to fire the rockets. The Magister’s top speed was supposed to be 444 mph, but fully loaded and at low altitude it could not even reach 300 mph.

he Fougas were assigned to the Israeli Flight Academy as training jets. In Nov ember 1961, 147 Squadron was formed as the IAF’s only reserve unit, with the mission to fly the Fougas in combat. In late May 1967, the squadron was reactivated at Hatzerim, near Beersheba, in the Negev Desert. Major Arieh Ben-Or was the squadron commander, with Captain Arnon Livnat as his deputy and one other regular IAF officer on his staff. A mixed bag of 39 other pilots were assigned to the unit. Some were reservists, many of whom flew for the national air line, El Al, and had fought in the 1956 Sinai cam paign. Others were even older—retirees recalled

Six-Day Warriors Clockwise from top left: Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin (left) congratulates 147 Squadron commander Major Arieh Ben-Or on June 8, 1967, after Jerusalem’s Old City was captured during the war; an Egyptian MiG-17 lies destroyed following an attack by IAF warplanes; Israeli tanks speed through the desert toward Egyptian positions in the Sinai Peninsula.

51 Dassault Ouragans, 35 Dassault Super Mys tères, 19 Sud-Ouest Aviation Vautour IIAs and 44 Magisters to attack enemy air bases and support facilities. The IAF held back just 12 Mirage III fighters to defend all of Israel. In 1960 Israel Aerospace Industries (then known as the Bedek Aviation Company) started to man ufacture a version of the CM-170 Magister jet trainer under license from the French Fouga air craft company. The Israeli-built version was nick named the Snunit, or “Swallow,” but the name never really caught on and the planes were still generally referred to as Fougas or Magisters. Israeli military doctrine at the time required all IAF aircraft to be capable of some combat role, so the Magisters were equipped with two 7.62mm machine guns in the nose and the wings were modified with two hardpoints each to hold underwing stores. The weapon loads were predict ably light. In general, the planes could be armed with two Matra-181 rocket pods holding 18 37mm rockets, or 62mm or 82mm rail-fired anti-armor rockets. Also, two AS-11 anti-armor missiles or two 110-pound bombs could be carried. A locally manufactured “over-under” rocket launcher was

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combat ready Top: An IAF Magister undergoes testing. Middle and bottom: Modified to carry ordnance, Fougas supported Israeli ground forces in 1967. Inset: A veteran Fouga at Hatzerim’s Israeli Air Force Museum sports camouflage and marks for targets destroyed.

to active duty—while nine of the newly assigned pilots had just graduated from flight school and were not qualified to fly any other jet. Forty-four Fougas were transferred to the squadron and quickly armed. Throughout the war the squadron’s weapon of choice was the Israeli-made over-under pylon launcher armed with Oerlikon 80mm rockets or the French C-10 rocket. Later in the war the Israelis used captured enemy weapons to resupply all the IAF’s planes. During preparations for Focus, IAF planners considered the Magisters’ light armament, low speed and limited combat range, and assigned the

squadron to deception, interdiction and close air support missions, as well as the attack on the El Arish radars. In any other nation’s air force the Fougas would have been spared a combat mission, but for the IAF there was no alternative—ein brera, as the Israelis say—but to use the planes. Ben-Or assigned 16 Magisters to the deception plan. Twenty-six others with the 26 best pilots were charged with direct combat missions on the first day. That left Ben-Or with two planes in ready reserve or for spare parts if required. In the run-up to the war, Ben-Or and his two regulars drilled the reservists and the new guys hard on flying very low, staying in formation and proper attack procedures. The Magisters did not even have a basic targeting system, so the pilots had to eyeball their dive angle, estimate the range to the target and “play the wind,” like a soccer player taking a shot at goal. Since the Magisters had no night flying capability, when the sun went down the pilots were free. The three regulars stayed on base and planned the next day’s activities, while the others, in the tradition of combat pilots everywhere, drank and chased women in Beersheba. At 7:10 on the morning of June 5, 16 Fougas took off from Hatzerim and started to fly routine patrol patterns over Israel. The pilots were using radio frequencies usually employed by the IAF’s Mirage and Mystère fighters in an effort to lull the

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Arabs into thinking it was just another routine day. Meanwhile the remaining IAF jets took off and streaked at low altitude to attack the Egyptians in Focus’ first phase. While the rest of the IAF was destroying three Arab air forces, 147 Squadron was the sole supplier of close air support and air interdiction for the advancing Israeli army. At Rafah, northeast of El Arish, the Egyptian defenses stiffened and the Israeli ground commander called for airstrikes on enemy artillery positions. The Magisters came in low and struck the Egyptian guns. The squadron returned to the Rafah area twice more that day, attacking enemy mortar and artillery positions in support of Israeli paratroopers fighting against Egyptian armor. The lightly armed Fougas did little physical damage to the entrenched enemy, but the airstrikes demoralized and sowed confusion among the Arabs, who retreated by the end of the day.

OPPOSITE: (TOP) ISRAELI AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES, (MIDDLE & BOTTOM) FROM THE ISRAELI AIR FORCE: CAMOUFLAGE & MARKINGS, PART 1, 1948 TO 1967, (INSET) OREN ROZEN; TOP RIGHT: VITTORIANO RASTELLI/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES; BOTTOM RIGHT: EXPRESS/GETTY IMAGES

eanwhile in the central Sinai Peninsula, the Fougas attacked enemy artillery at Um Katef. After seeing a Magister shot down and the pilot killed while conducting strikes near Abu Ageila, Brig. Gen. Ariel Sharon ordered his commanders to stop requesting airstrikes for fear of demoralizing his men by seeing the planes destroyed. Late on the first day, after Jordan opened a second front on the west bank of the Jordan River, the Fougas and other IAF planes struck Jordanian artillery that had been shelling Israeli air bases. Then, as the sun was setting, Ben-Or’s fliers attacked and destroyed dozens of M47 and M48 Patton tanks of the advancing Jordanian 40th Armored Brigade and a convoy of at least 26 trucks carrying ammunition. When hitting enemy columns, the 147 Squad ron pilots flew in groups of four, with two planes attacking the front of the column while the other two attacked the rear. The pilots flew so low that one claimed to have scraped a wing on the ground. At 200 yards they fired a salvo of rockets at their first target; at that range it was nearly impossible to miss. Then, while his wingman was attacking, the lead pilot would circle around and attack a different vehicle the same way. A four-plane formation could account for eight enemy vehicles at the front and rear of the column, which blocked the survivors from easy escape. On June 6, 147 Squadron went into battle again on the West Bank. The Fougas attacked and destroyed more tanks, armored vehicles and artillery guns. That afternoon, with the rest of the IAF now available for close air support and interdiction missions, the squadron stood down and the pilots were informed they were being removed from combat operations. The Israelis finally moved on the Golan Heights

death from above Above: An Israeli military convoy passes destroyed enemy vehicles. Left: A burnt-out Syrian T-34/85 tank lies along the road from the Golan Heights.

on June 9, prompting the IAF to reconsider its decision and move 147 Squadron north to Ramat David air base. From this new base, the squadron’s Magisters struck Syrian artillery positions and supply convoys. During the first attack that day, however, Major Ben-Or was killed by Syrian anti-aircraft fire, making him the sixth and last 147 Squadron casualty of the war. After Ben-Or was killed, the squadron was taken off the front lines for good. During combat operations, 147 Squadron had engaged the enemy on all three fronts and managed between six and 10 sorties a day per plane, with the pilots flying as many as five missions a day. The lack of an ejection seat was deeply felt, as it is thought that at least three of the six pilots killed could have survived if they had been able to eject. The squadron flew a total of 419 sorties and expended 4,384 rockets. The pilots of 147 claimed to have destroyed 128 tanks, 43 other armored vehicles, 47 artillery pieces, four anti-aircraft guns, 292 trucks and two trains, although the number of tanks destroyed is disputed by non-Israeli sources. One historian said of 147 Squadron and its slow, unarmored planes, “Their overall contribution to a speedy victory is incalculable.” U.S. Army veteran Patrick S. Baker has a master’s degree in European history and regularly contributes to history magazines in the U.S. and overseas. Further reading: The Six Day War 1967: Sinai, by Simon Dunstan; Six Days in June: How Israel Won the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, by Eric Hammel; On the Edge: Aircraft of the Israel Air Force Since 1948, by Bill Norton; and The Lion’s Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War, by Steven Pressfield.

147 SQUADRON WAS THE SOLE SUPPLIER OF CLOSE AIR SUPPORT AND AIR INTERDICTION FOR THE ADVANCING ISRAELI ARMY. September 2021

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6/29/21 4:58 PM

REvIEWS

TEST GODS

Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle, Henry Holt and Co., 2021, $29.99.

> As a result, he brings to

the book an understanding of what it’s like to wonder whether Dad is coming home that night. Every test pilot knew and admired Robert “Rooster” Schmidle, so his son was given unprecedented access to Burt Rutan’s and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism project, at least until Rutan kicked him out. Test Gods is built around the

author’s relationship with civilian test pilot Mark Stucky and Stucky’s uncomfortable squeeze between an engineer and a huckster. “Rutan and Branson were bound to be an odd couple—one committed to function, the other to flair,” writes Schmidle. Leaving aside conjecture about whether there is a business model for a company that intends to send space tourists just far enough aloft

to experience six minutes of weightlessness in a very expensive parabolic vomit comet, in SpaceShipTwo Stucky was flying an analog rocketplane, “cables and rods, no autopilot, no automation. The fate of the ship was in Stucky’s hands.” One enthusiastic friend referred to Stucky as “the Chuck Yeager of the twentyfirst century!” Other test pilots might have thought

pushing the envelope VSS Unity, Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo craft, glides back to base after its second supersonic flight.

that hyperbole, but they all knew “the truth—how not all flight-test minutes were created equal, how one minute at the controls of an analog rocket ship could say more about a pilot than thousands of hours in another vehicle, how the margin of error on Space ShipTwo was nearly invisible, and just how extraordinary Stucky’s experience and successes had been on that ship, and others.” Stephan Wilkinson

This book is the best thing written about extreme flying since The Right Stuff, and in some ways it’s even better than that Tom Wolfe classic. Nick Schmidle, a New Yorker magazine writer, grew up an aviation nerd, in large part because his father was a notorious Marine F-4 Phantom pilot, call sign Rooster. >

SEPTEMBER 2021

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6/29/21 9:06 AM

LEGION CONDOR 1936–39

The Luftwaffe Develops Blitzkrieg in the Spanish Civil War by James S. Corum, Osprey Publishing, 2020, $24. In a coolly detached tactical analysis of German participation in the Spanish Civil War, retired U.S. Air Force Reserve Lt. Col. James S. Corum reveals that the Luftwaffe, which did not officially exist until 1935, made its operational debut by conducting what amounted to an air campaign that presaged the total war Blitzkrieg to come, unmatched by its Italian allies or the Spanish Nationalist air arm itself. Indeed, had it not been for 10 Lufthansasupplied Junkers Ju-52/3ms rushing Moroccans to mainland Spain in history’s

TIGER IN THE SEA

first military troop airlift, General Francisco Franco Bahamonde’s revolt against the Spanish Republic might literally have never gotten off the ground. From there Legion Condor 1936–39 describes how the German airmen became the backbone of the Nationalist air effort, even while gaining invaluable experience and devising doctrine as they went along. Regarding the war’s most famous incident, the author asserts the notorious bombings of Guernica in April 1937 were against a legitimate military target and fell far short of the mass

The Ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival by Eric Lindner, Lyons Press, 2021, $26.95. Captain Chesley Sullenberger’s successful ditching of a stricken airliner into the Hudson River in 2009 was a remarkable feat, but it pales in comparison to the largely forgotten ditching of a Flying Tiger Line flight in 1962. Flight 923 did not ditch in the calm waters of a river in broad daylight but in the Atlantic Ocean at night amid a storm with 20-foot seas. Under the circumstances, the fact that 48 of the aircraft’s 76 occupants survived the ordeal seems even more of a miracle than Sullenberger’s more famous Flight 1549. The Flying Tiger Line was principally a cargo carrier, but it also flew passengers on Military Air Transport Service charters. Flight 923, a Lockheed Super Constellation bound from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey to Frankfurt, Germany, was one such charter flight. On board were eight crewmen and 68 passengers, all either military personnel or dependents. Tiger in the Sea recounts the harrowing events of the night of September 23, 1962, when three of Flight 923’s four engines failed, leaving Captain John D. Murray no choice but to ditch in the ocean more than 500 miles from land. All the airliner’s occupants apparently survived the initial crash, though 28 subsequently lost their lives before the first rescue ship arrived. Author Eric Lindner tells this gripping story through interviews with the survivors and family members, in addition to referencing the official accident investigations. Robert Guttman

atrocity described by the Republicans. Ironically, the exaggerated impression that the enemy’s propaganda gave of the Condor Legion’s ability to raze cities to the ground played into the Germans’ hands when it influenced Neville Chamberlain and Édouard Daladier to bar-

gain away Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in 1938. Although far from capable of strategic bombing, the Luftwaffe developed its close support tactics in Spain, as well as radically revising fighter tactics to radio-equipped 300 mph aircraft by replacing the close massed V formation with the spread-out, more flexible “finger four.” Along with that tactical learning process, Spain provided a testing ground for aircraft that swiftly evolved from biplanes to monoplanes. All in all, Legion Condor offers interesting insights into the German air arm’s importance to the outcome of the Spanish Civil War and that conflict’s contribution to accelerating the Luftwaffe’s evolution. Jon Guttman

THE BOMBER MAFIA

by Malcolm Gladwell; Little, Brown and Company; 2021, $27. I didn’t know what to expect from the noted gadfly/author of The Tipping Point and Outliers writing anew about the precision- versus area-bombing controversy, but what I got was a mashup of old stories retold, “today I learned” trivia, pretentious theo rizing and a few errors ludicrous enough to be entertaining. Malcolm Gladwell, as the saying goes, knows just enough to be dangerous. He does superficial research, learns a few things new to him and decides that he has uncovered a remarkable story that only he understands. In this case, it’s the well-known firebombing of Tokyo by B-29 Superfortresses. Gladwell loves every obscure fact he uncovers, even if it’s irrelevant. The B-29s, he writes, initially took off from “Kol kata (formerly known as Calcutta).” No, they took off from Calcutta, which someday far in the future would be renamed Kolkata. He describes the company Hamilton Standard as the maker of a small spring crucial to the manufacture of variable-pitch propellers, apparently unaware that Hamilton Standard, the largest propeller manufacturer in the world, made not only the spring but the entire prop. For a writer who fancies himself to be something of a scientist, Gladswell’s most embarrassing howler is his description of a unit of B-29s waiting to take off from Tinian. Apparently unaware of how an airfoil works, he describes at length how the overloaded Superforts needed “a ferocious tailwind to lift them off the runway.” Blown away, one supposes. The Bomber Mafia is revisionist history at its worst. Stephan Wilkinson SEPTEMBER 2021

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6/29/21 8:37 AM

REvIEWS FLIGHTS FROM FASSBERG

How a German Town Built for War Became a Beacon of Peace by Wolfgang W.E. Samuel, University Press of Mississippi, 2021, $29.95. Born in Germany in 1935, the same year Nazi Germany officially announced the birth of the Luftwaffe, Wolfgang W.E. Samuel spent his teenage years witnessing the Berlin Airlift, the first Cold War confrontation between the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—won by the latter without a shot being fired. In 1951 he emigrated to the United States, where he rose to the rank of colonel in the U.S. Air Force. Samuel has written eight books, mostly dealing with his fly-

CLASSICS CARRYING THE FIRE An Astronaut’s Journeys by Michael Collins Astronaut autobiographies are, to be fair, a mixed lot. Some are obviously ghostwritten exercises in self-aggrandizement, some are used to settle old scores and many cover well-trodden ground without offering much new information. A few of these works stand out for the quality of their writing, their candor and the insight the authors provide regarding what it really felt like to be in the hot seat at the dawn of the space age. Astronaut Michael Collins’ 1974 autobiography, Carrying the Fire, is perhaps the very best of them all. Collins, who died on April 28, 2021, will be missed, but his impactful book is worth revisiting. By the time his autobiography was published, Collins, along with his Apollo 11 crewmates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, had completed their globe-circling publicity tour and retired from NASA. The former command module pilot was settling into his new job as the first director of the National Air and Space Museum. As such, Collins had time to reflect on his days as a test pilot and astronaut and mentally digest all that he had experienced. The resulting work is thoughtful, personal and introspective. Collins attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point but entered the Air Force upon graduation. Initially detailing his time as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Collins is blunt about the risks he and his colleagues faced and avoids any silk-scarf notions concerning the work they did. He makes it clear that the old guard at Edwards looked down their noses at NASA and manned spaceflight. He described the head-shaking attitude of Air Force officers as “Why all the fuss? Not one quarter of the skill, finesse, or flying technique of an X-l5 flight was required here, yet the public went wild.” Still, Collins could see where the wind was blowing, and he found his way into NASA with the third group of astronauts in 1963. His descriptions of his fellow astronauts come off as both complimentary and funny while not feeling sugar-coated—the men are portrayed as three-dimensional people dealing with the complex and competitive environment of NASA, space-

ing experiences. His latest, Flights from Fassberg, is primarily the story of how his hometown came into existence as a new Luftwaffe air base, survived the post–World War II years as a major component of the 1948-49 Berlin Airlift and continues to operate as both a town and NATO base. It is a very personal chronology in which the author’s son later participated, flying an A-10 Warthog in NATO exercises during the late 1980s. Full of photos from various stages in the air base’s evolution—and including a chapter devoted to what the author considers the most significant aircraft from his formative years, the Douglas C-54 Skymaster—Samuel’s book should interest Cold Warriors in general and specifically service personnel who did tours at Fassberg. Jon Guttman flight training and the inevitable jockeying for flight assignments. Collins thought his West Point classmate Ed White would be first to set foot on the moon: “He had projected exactly the right image as the nation’s first space walker, and why not do the same as the first moon walker?” Sadly, White perished in 1967 in the Apollo 1 fire along with astronauts Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee. While Collins is obviously most famous for his role in Apollo 11, the first manned moon landing, much of the book details his oft-forgotten Gemini 10 flight alongside future moonwalker John Young. His description of their Gemini launch captures the tone of the whole book: “Right now we are velocity zero, distance traveled zero, prospects unknown. Days have turned to hours, and hours to minutes. No simulation this, no ride back down on the elevator, no debriefing over coffee. Our primary instrument becomes the clock, and finally the excited voice on the radio, trying to sound bored, reaches the end of its message: 10—9—8…grab the ejection D-ring between your legs with both hands; one jerk and our seats will explode free of this monster…7—6—5…it’s really going to happen…4—3—2—1…engines should be starting— IGNITION—pay attention to those gauges—LIFT-OFF!” Regarding Apollo 11, Collins is sanguine about his role as the non-moonwalker of the historic mission. Tapped before the launch to command a later Apollo mission and walk on the moon himself, Collins declined—he had had enough. During training, Collins also managed to sidestep the deep and lasting tensions between Armstrong and Aldrin about who would be the first on the moon. “Once [Aldrin] tentatively approached me about the injustice of the situation, but I quickly turned him off. I had enough problems without getting into the middle of that one.” During the mission itself, Collins was in some ways more affected by his views of the Earth than the moon. Reflecting afterwards, he wrote, “If I could use only one word to describe the earth as seen from the moon, I would ignore both its size and color and search for a more elemental quality, that of fragility.” Douglas G. Adler

SEPTEMBER 2021

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6/30/21 2:44 PM

THE FIESELER FI 156 STORCH

Wings Over Iraq - A new historical novel by Eric B. Forsyth

The First STOL Aircraft

A gripping story of RAF bombers in Iraq during the period leading up to WWII. The country is wracked by rebellious Arab tribes, prompted by German intelligence posing as an arche archeological expedition. Newly qualified RAF pilot Allan Chadwick is posted to a squadron trying to maintain the flow of vital oil using obsolete Vickers Vimys. Set against the rise of fascism in Europe, Chadwick is soon exposed to the harsh realities of an undeclared war, as well as the pleasures awaiting a young man coming of age in a turbulent country.

BUNDESARCHIV BILD 101I-567-1503C-04

by Jan Forsgren, Fonthill Media, 2021, $35.

When World War II ended in Europe, the victorious Allies evaluated every German airplane they could get their hands on for every useful innovation they could adapt to their own purposes. When they were done, they earmarked a few for museums and scrapped the rest. There was one exception, however. A gawky-looking observation and liaison plane with slotted camber-changing flaps on the trailing edges of its wings and Handley Page/Lachmann slats on the leading edges, the Fieseler Fi-156 Storch (Stork) found operational use in air arms all around the world. In fact, it saw more widespread military service postwar than it did during WWII. For anyone interested in one of Nazi Germany’s most overlooked success stories, this book provides a truly comprehensive treatment. The firm that built the Fi-156, founded by World War I ace Gerhard Fieseler, laid the foundation for the development and technology behind the airplane. Famous vignettes (such as the rescue of Benito Mussolini from a prison on the Gran Sasso—photo above) and forgotten episodes (such as the extensive use of a French-built version in the Indochina and Algeria wars) fill out the narrative. The Storch’s importance as a pioneering short takeoff and landing aircraft is lent perspective by chapters devoted to the AVHP-210900-002 Yacht Fiona Books .indd products of other nations, ranging from license-built versions to outright copies and an impressive array of original designs inspired by the Fi-156’s configuration. In addition, a remarkable number of countries kept on using original Fieselers into the early 1960s, and more than a few survive in civilian hands. All in all, The Fieseler Fi 156 Storch amounts to a fascinating study of a fascinating airplane. Jon Guttman

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The author was an RAF pilot and is an award-winning sailor and retired engineer. His previous book, “An Inexplicable Attraction: My Fifty Years of Ocean Sailing,” was among Kirkus’s 100 Best Memoirs of 2018.

Available worldwide wherever books are sold online, including www.YachtFiona.com Published by Yacht Fiona Books ISBN Paperback: 978-0-578-65299-3 ISBN eBook: 978-0-578-68800-8

THE LAST JAPANESE HOW MANY TIMES SOLDIER HAS THEFROM DESIGN WORLD OF THE WAR U.S.IIFLAG SURRENDERED CHANGED? IN THIS YEAR 27, 31, 36 or 40?

- 1945 - 1947 1 - 1950 - 1974 For more,search visitDAILY QUIZ For more, WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ at HistoryNet.com. MAGAZINES/QUIZ HistoryNet.com

ANSWER: 1974. PRIVATE TERUO NAKAMURA, A TAIWANESE NATIONAL,27. ENLISTED IN THE JAPANESE ARMY IN 1943. ANSWER: THE CURRENT DESIGN HAS BEEN IN HE HELD OUT ON 1960 MORTAI IN INDONESIA HE WAS CAPTURED PLACE SINCE WHEN THE FLAGUNTIL WAS MODIFIED IN DECEMBER 1974. EARLIER THAT YEAR, HIRO ONODA, WHO TO INCLUDE HAWAII, THE 50th STATE. HELD OUT IN THE PHILLIPINES, FINALLY SURRENDERED.

6/29/21 8:38 AM

FLIGHT TEST

FOURENGINE ALSO-RANS

1. Which four-engine bomber project was canceled after the death of Luftwaffe chief of staff General Walther Wever in 1936? A. Dornier Do-19 B. Junkers Ju-89 C. Messerschmitt Me-264 D. A and B

MYSTERY SHIP

Can you identify this forward-sweptwing X-plane? See the answer below.

2. Which bomber was commonly depicted or referred to in Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s? A. Boeing B-15 B. Douglas B-19 C. Consolidated B-24 D. Boeing B-17 3. Which four-engine aircraft raided Pearl Harbor in March 1942? A. Kawanishi H6K4 B. Nakajima G5N1 C. Nakajima G8N2 D. Kawanishi H8K2

Match the Sopwith design with its description. A. Scout B. Snipe C. Bulldog D. Snapper E. Dolphin F. Salamander G. Snail H. Swallow I. Snark J. Hippo

Sopwith 7.F1 Snipe 1. Biplane with monocoque fuselage, ABC radial engine 2. Single-seater with back-staggered wings 3. Two-seater with back-staggered wings 4. First fighter built to a Royal Air Force specification 5. Single-seater unofficially (and more widely) called the Pup 6. Single-seat parasol monoplane 7. Conventional single-seat biplane with ABC radial engine 8. Triplane with monocoque fuselage and ABC radial engine 9. Armored single-seat ground attack plane 10. Two-seater with forward stagger

4. Which four-engine bomber made 15 bombing raids on Gibraltar in 1942? A. Junkers Ju-89 B. Focke-Wulf Fw-200C C. Piaggio P.108B D. Heinkel He-177 5. Which four-engine naval bomber ended up redesigned for the transport role? A. Nakajima G5N2-L B. Focke-Wulf Fw-200 C. Dornier Do-19 D. All of the above

ANSWERS: MYSTERY SHIP: Grumman X-29. Learn more about it at historynet.com/aviation-history. A SOPWITH MENAGERIE: A.5, B.4, C.10, D.7, E.2, F.9, G.1, H.6, I.8, J.3. FOUR-ENGINE ALSO-RANS: 1.D, 2.B, 3.D, 4.C. 5.A. 70

TOP: NASA; BOTTOM: IWM Q67483

A SOPWITH MENAGERIE

SEPTEMBER 2021

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TODAY IN HISTORY FEBRUARY 28, 1995

DENVER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT OPENS. FEATURING AN EXTERIOR DESIGN WHICH BEARS RESEMBLANCE TO BOTH THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS AND TEPEES OF NATIVE AMERICANS, THE AIRPORT SPRAWLS OVER 52.4 SQUARE MILES OF LAND, 1.5 TIMES THE SIZE OF MANHATTAN. COST OVERRUNS AND CONTROVERSIAL PLANNING DECISIONS HAVE LED TO CONSPIRACY THEORIES RELATED TO THE ILLUMINATI AND THE PRESENCE OF DOOMSDAY BUNKERS. For more, visit WWW.HISTORYNET.COM/ TODAY-IN-HISTORY

TODAY-DEN.indd 22

5/24/21 11:16 AM

AERO ARTIFACT

close call

Whenever two opposing nations stockpile tens of thousands of immensely destructive nuclear weapons, as the Soviets and Ameri cans did during the Cold War, there is always the possibility of something going very, very wrong. While the most well-known terrorinducing moments involved showdowns or miscommunications with the Soviets, several U.S. Broken Arrow incidents—the military code name designating a lost nuclear weapon—made the prospect of acci dental nuclear explosions in the United States a real possibility. In 1961 the U.S. dodged nuclear bullets twice in the space of seven weeks. On March 14 a distressed B-52 carrying two hydrogen bombs crashed in California’s Central Valley (story, P. 44). Both bombs—3.8Lost and found megaton Mark 39 thermonuclear devices like the one pictured below—were badly damaged in Only one of two H-bombs the crash, but thankfully were not armed. None of the Mark 39’s primary stage conventional exaccidentally dropped over plosives detonated and no radioactive material was lost. Goldsboro, N.C., on Earlier that year, however, an incident near Goldsboro, N.C., brought the U.S. closer to catas January 24, 1961, was trophe. On January 24 an H-bomb-toting B-52 on a 24-hour airborne alert mission over the Atever fully recovered. lantic Ocean developed a serious fuel leak in its right wing. The damaged bomber limped toward Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina to attempt an emergency landing, but the pilot soon lost control of the Stratofortress and it started breaking up. As the crew was ejecting and bailing out, the bomber exploded, killing two of the eight crewmen. A third died from the jump. The B-52’s two Mark 39s fell from the bomb bay toward the community of Goldsboro, N.C. One floated down on a para chute, landed mostly undamaged (see inset photo) and was quickly whisked away by the military. The other plowed itself deep beneath North Carolina farmland. Most of the buried Mark 39 was recovered during eight days of searching, though the sec ondary—the fusion part of the bomb that does the most damage—was never found. Opinions vary on how close the hydrogen bomb came to detonating; documents declassified in 2013 indicate it was a very close call, but others maintain that adequate fail-safes were in place. Had the worst occurred, the nuclear explosion would have vaporized everything and everyone within 5.5 square miles of the blast and caused extensive damage and fatalities over swaths of eastern North Carolina. Meanwhile, the deadly radiation fallout would likely have extended northeast, easily reaching Norfolk, Va.—home of the U.S. Navy’s Fleet Forces Command.

mark 39 thermonuclear bomb casing

SEPTEMBER 2021

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AVHP-210900-005 GovMint Roll 50 1943 Steel Cents.indd 1

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