How to Win While Losing – Post World War II
One of my concerns during those immediate post-war years was whether I would be able to hang-onto my rank as Colonel. The military forces were shrinking, and they had more ‘bird’ Colonels than they could use. They, therefore, initiated a program of taking a hundred or so Colonels off the bottom of the Seniority List every so often and reduce them in rank to Lt. Colonel. I don’t know how close they came to me, but I knew they were breathing down the back of my neck. When the Korean War came along in 1950, the Air Force started expanding again and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief, and put my silver oak leaves back in the footlocker where they belonged.
The three years spent with 22nd Bomb Group were busy. The old B-29s had most of the bugs out of them by that time and were pretty effective and reliable pieces of machinery. Between 1949 and 1952, we pulled about a 5-month tour out in the Pacific, and in the Korean War we served two rotational tours, of 3-months each, in England. Strategic Air Command policy kept two to three Groups of bombers in England at all times, on a rotational basis, in case the Russians began to cause too much trouble.
In the summer of 1952 we were finishing up a three month tour, with our three squadrons at three separate bases in East Anglia. We were anxious to come home and see our families, and our route was to be from our British bases to Lajes, in the Azores, to Bermuda, to MacDill Field, Florida, to our home base in California.
The trip began smoothly. I launched that morning in the Lead Airplane, and was followed, in 15 minute intervals, by a bomber stream of B-29s. All went well until I reached Lajes, about 8:00 o’clock that night. I contacted the Base by radio and was told there was a ‘pretty good rainstorm’ in progress, but they should be able to get us in with a GCA (Ground Controlled Approach) Approach without any trouble. Captain John Donnahue, a fine Irishman, was commander of the crew I was with, and he squared-away on a GCA approach. We were punching-through a pretty good little storm. It was raining quite hard, was very bumpy, and there was a lot of lightening crackling around us. We continued our GCA and were only a few hundred feet above the ocean, when GCA went off the air, and we were left there alone, in the bumpy, wet darkness. I called the Tower and got no answer. I made the decision to continue with the heading and rate of descent GCA had put us on, and felt we would be able to land okay when we reached the island.
Unknown to us, a vicious tropical storm had centered over Lajes. It had torn the antenna off the GCA Trailer, forcing it off the air, had blown-in a glass window in the Control Tower, knocked-out all of their radios, and forced the Operators to abandon the Tower. It was quite a mess on the ground as we were, blissfully, feeling our way through the weather.
We finally made-out a couple of runway lights but weren’t perfectly lined-up with the runway, so did some low-level sashaying to get lined-up. Our left wing-tip knocked out a runway light, but we hit the runway okay and rolled to the end in howling wind and blinding rain. An automobile with a flashing red-light pulled up to the nose of our plane, and the Base Commander, wringing-wet came scrambling-up through the nosewheel-well. He tapped me on the shoulder, said, “Go ahead and shut her down. The visibility is too lousy to taxi-in and nobody is going to be landing on this runway until the storm is over. We can tow her in to the ramp when it clears up a little. Let’s go up to the Club and have a drink. I think we both could use one.”
I thanked him very much, but explained that I had a string of B-29s behind me at 15 minute intervals, stretching all the way back to England, and had to figure out some way to get them all on the ground, somewhere. I got in his car with him and we felt our way through the storm to the Ground Radio Station. I was able to contact the next guy in-line behind me, who was circling above the storm, and wondering why no one on the ground would answer him. The storm was violent but quite local and we sent him and the next two airplanes into the field on Santa Maria, the southernmost island in the Azores, where the weather was beautiful. My instructions were passed back down the bomber stream. Most of the planes were diverted into Spain, and the last few were told to turn around and return to their bases in England.
Once the flight was all taken care of, the Base Commander said, “Now, let’s go to the Club for that drink.” As we squared-away at his bar with a couple of cold ones, the Base Commander said, “You know, that was the second hairiest landing that I’ve ever seen made with a B-29 in my life.” He went on to tell me that during the war, he’d been stationed at Karachi, and he’d had Tower Officer duty one night while a nasty sandstorm had been taking place when some knuckle-head took off, lost an engine, and ------“. At that point, I stopped him and told him, “You don’t need to go into the details…that was me too!” He gulped, looked at me, blinked, and changed the subject. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but he was kind of quiet for the rest of the evening.
My friend, John Donohue was at the bar, too, and that night he taught me his Irish Prayer, which is still one of my favorites. Here it is:
May those who love us, love us.
And those who don’t love us, may the Lord turn their hearts.
And if He can’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles
So we may know them by their limping.
The rest of the trip home was about as uneventful as such things usually are. Soon after takeoff from MacDill, we lost an engine and went in to the Air Depot at Mobile, Alabama, and lost a day while they were hanging a new one on our plane. Coming in to California, we found March Air Force Base was fogged-in and landed at Palm Springs. They sent a staff car over for me, and when I got home around 2:00 AM, I told Lee, “Honey, we’d better start packing our bags. I have a feeling we are either going to be promoted or canned, and in either case, we won’t be around here very much longer.”
Sure enough, shortly thereafter we received orders to Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, Washington, to assume command of the 92nd Bombardment Wing (Groups had recently been upgraded to Wings) which was equipped with B-36s. I commanded the 92nd for a while, and in 1953, received my first star and took over the Air Division at Fairchild a short time later.
I flew the B-36 three years, and they were the biggest monsters of their day, with six pusher, conventional engines and the propellers mounted along the trailing edges of the wings and four jet engines, in pods, mounted near the wingtips. When you passed on your status report during a B-36 mission, and all was going well, the standard report was, “Six churning, and four burning.” The B-36 was really not a lot of fun to fly. It was more like sitting on your porch and flying your house around, but we had a busy three years in the B-36s and I was proud of our B-36 crews. At that time, the technique of air-to-air refueling that is so common today, had not been perfected and the B-36s were the only airplanes with long enough legs to reach the tough targets deep inside Russia. We covered deep, critical targets during those years, until KC-97s with their refueling booms came along to give additional range to the fleet of B-47s and B-52s. Later, the jet tanker the KC-135, which was much the same airplane as the Boeing 707, came into the SAC inventory to boost the range of the jet bombers even further, and the B-36s were able to relax their war plan responsibilities a little.
In 1955, I was re-assigned to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, near Tucson, Arizona, to command a two-wing Air Division equipped with B-47s. This was a welcome assignment. We moved out of the snow, into the sunshine, and we moved out of the B-36s with their 14 man crews into little six-jet bombers with three-man crews that flew like fighters. They were a delight to fly and, as long as there were tankers available to keep you pumped-up when you ran dry, you could fly forever. I flew one 23 hour, non-stop mission from Guam in the Western Pacific to Sidi Slamaine, in Morocco, hitting tankers over Japan, Alaska, and Labrador, but that’s another story. The B-47s were a dream to fly and I acquired over 1,000 hours in them during my three years at Tucson.
I was on a Survey Flight to the Western Pacific to check on the conditions of our War Plan Recovery bases and to attend a conference in Japan. When it was time to return to Tucson, we decided to come home, non-stop. We took off out of Yokota Air Base in Japan shortly after midnight, hit a couple of tankers over Alaska about sunup and setting up a cruise/climb to stay as high as we could to save fuel, headed for Arizona.
We were cruising along at 42,000 feet over Nevada, fat, dumb, and happy and not too far away from home, when there was a sudden, loud bang, the cockpit filled with vapor and it felt as if I had been hit in the stomach with a feather pillow. I knew we’d had an explosive decompression, because I’d experienced one before, when I’d had a blister shot out in my B-29. I knew we were in trouble because things were getting fuzzy, even though I had my oxygen mask on. I set up the auto-pilot for a decent descent, pulled back the power on the six engines, and passed-out.
I came-to when we were passing through 12,000 feet, and checked with the other two crew members on Intercom. They were both beginning to come around, also, and the airplane was running fine, but we were now going to have to fly at low level, where our remaining fuel wouldn’t last long. We were not far from Nellis Air Force Base, outside Las Vegas. I called them on the radio, was told they had some kind of operation in-progress, and we would not be permitted to land there. I declared an emergency, and they didn’t like it, but they had to let us land. We taxied-in, followed by the Fire Trucks and Meat Wagons required to respond to an Emergency situation. When I climbed down out of the airplane, the Base Commander was there to give me the dickens for lousing-up his exercise. When he saw that I was a Brigadier General, he calmed down, and I explained that we wanted to look the airplane over, to see what had caused the explosive-decompression. Even if it couldn’t be fixed, we would continue with the short hop to Tucson at low-level, and un-pressurized.
The Base Commander said that was alright with him, but he wanted us all to check at the hospital, to see if the period without oxygen had done us any harm. The Flight Surgeon shook his head and said he could see no reason not to clear us for flying, and we went back down to the airplane. They had located our problem. Early in the flight, the Navigator had dropped a pencil. He looked around for it, couldn’t find it, got another from his Navigation Kit and went back to his navigation. The lost pencil continued to rattle around until it wound-up next to the Cabin Pressure Relieve Valve, where it jammed the valve open and caused the decompression. The Navigator sheepishly picked-up his pencil, examined it, put it in his pocket, and we climbed aboard, took off, and headed for Tucson.
Knowing my career-pattern, I’m sure you recognize by now that my days at Tucson were numbered. I had been selected to report to Strategic Air Command Headquarters, at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska, as Deputy Director of Operations and soon, Director of Operations. I’m sure you don’t need to be told that the job had a second star that went with it. It didn’t really make much sense to me, but I was in no position to complain.
After three interesting and busy years at SAC Headquarters, where I was never permitted to be out of radio contact with the Command Post, or more than three rings away from a telephone, I had a short and productive tour at the Pentagon. They gave me a chance to get around the country, to fly fighters again, and to attend the Army’s Parachute School at Ft. Benning, Georgia. In 1961, I received orders sending me to Europe to command the 17th Air Force, which contained all of the American fighter units committed to NATO.
It was the finest job I ever had. My headquarters was in Ramstein, Germany and in the 17th Air Force were 10 wings of fighters, fighter-bombers, and reconnaissance airplanes, as well as a wing of intermediate-range air-breathing Mace Missiles. My wings were based in England, France, Italy and Germany. My base structure stretched from Oslo, Norway to Izmir and Adana, Turkey. Our gunnery and bombing range was called El Uotia, out on the Libyan Desert and our base there was Wheelis Air Base, near Tripoli. These were the days when Khadaffi was an obscure Captain, somewhere in the Libyan Army, and King Idris ran the country.
I hit the ground running in Europe. I went to Wiesbaden and checked-in with my boss, was thoroughly briefed by my staff, and visited all of my units and bases. Then, I set-up a program to get myself checked-out in all of the airplanes with which my units were equipped. This included the F-100, F-101, RF-101, F-102, F-105, RB-66 and the HH-43 helicopter. I stayed current in all these birds and, during my entire tour, never had so much fun.
The last plane in which I checked-out was the F-84F. One of my Wings down in France was equipped with this little airplane and I knew their feelings would be hurt if the Old Man didn’t come down and fly their little birds with them. At that time, the F-84 was an antique, as far as fighters go. It was the second jet fighter to become operational in the Air Force. It was a tough little bird built by Republic Aviation, and familiarly known as the ‘Lead Sled, because it had no afterburner on takeoff, rolled down the runway ‘forever’ before it could build up enough speed to lift-off. The F-84F was a newer version of the F-84, and instead of having a straight pair of wings, its wings were swept-back 30 degrees.
I memorized the F-84F Dash-1 Technical Order and took-off for France, where I completed the Ground School and flew the prescribed series of supervised check-out flights, including Emergency Procedures, aerobatics, and Flame-out Landings. The last flight to complete the check-out was a flight which would take us through the Speed of Sound. The F-84 jocks were very proud that their vintage machines could go supersonic. Of course, they couldn’t go through Mach 1 in level flight like the Huns, One-O-Wonders, Deuces, Thuds and as all of the Century series did simply by popping-in the afterburner. The little Sled didn’t have an afterburner, and breaking Mach in an F-84F was quite a procedure. They would load you up with all the fuel you could carry, including two huge wing tanks. Then you would claw your way as high as you could get, then had just enough fuel to get home, you’d roll the little rascal on its back, and dive straight-down with full throttle. The little brick would build-up speed and, usually going through about 10 to 12,000 feet, you’d feel a shudder, the Airspeed Indicator would twitch, and you would know you had passed through the sonic barrier. Then you’d have to chop the power, bleed-off the airspeed, and head for home before running out of fuel.
It seemed like a futile waste of time to me, but the guys were proud of being “Mach Busters”, and assured me that without this final flight, my check-out would be incomplete. They left me no loopholes, so I got ready for my supersonic dive. A nice, young Lieutenant took off in-formation with me, to fly chase-plane with me during my supersonic dive and keep an eye on me. All seemed to go as advertised. We worked our way up to about 22,000 feet, the big balloon tanks under my wings were empty, I gave my wingman a nod, rolled her over, pointed straight-down, full-throttle The airspeed seemed real slow building-up, and finally, around 10,000 feet I got my shudder, to indicate we’d gone through Mach 1. At about the same time there was a rather loud explosion. I didn’t know what had happened, the airplane felt okay, but I lost no time leveling-off and slowing down. As I looked the airplane over, the big empty tank under the left wing looked like a piece of crumpled tinfoil.
What had happened, we found out later, was that the Vent Line to relieve pressure in the empty tank had become clogged. As we rapidly descended from the thin air above 20,000 feet to the heavier air at lower altitudes, the pressure could not adjust--between the thin air inside the tank and the heavier outside air. The pressure built up during the dive (outside the tank) until the tank literally imploded into a piece of crumpled duraluminum. The airplane was not hurt at all.
In the meantime, however, my chase plane pilot had seen my plane throw off a cloud of vapor, and when he showed-up and leveled-off, he lost sight of me. Next thing I knew, he was putting-out a frantic MAY DAY call to the effect that the General’s plane had blown-up and disappeared, so they had to scramble the Air-Sea Rescue guys at-once, if not sooner. He was so excited and talked so constantly I had a hard time breaking-in on him to tell him I was fine and would see him back at the base in a few minutes. And, for heaven’s sake, to cancel his MAY DAY call! Once all the fuss was turned-on, it was almost impossible to get it turned-off. Wild radio calls were on the air all-over Europe about “some crazy general having blown-up his fighter plane.” Sure enough, when I taxied-in and shut-down, a guy came running-up to the plane to tell me my four-star boss in Wiesbaden was on the phone, wanted to talk to me at once, and was very angry.
I dashed into Base Operations, grabbed the phone, and my boss wanted to know what I was doing down in France, breaking airplanes. I explained that the Radio Call had been an error, that the airplane was fine, that there had been no accident, but an Incident Report would be filed immediately, that I had been down in France, flying with my troops like any commander should be, and that I’d be back at my base in Germany in a couple of hours. The matter was never mentioned again between us.
No doubt, you’ve guessed it! A few days later, I was relieved of command of 17th Air Force, the Secretary of Defense had established a new job in the Department of Defense, and in some mysterious way, I had been recommended for the job. Our two kids were in college in the States, so Lee and I and our cat were on our way back for another go in the Pentagon. The new job, of course, was being set-up as a 3-star billet.
The job was odd. Of course, each of the services had a strong and effective Inspector General System, but Mr. McNamara had set-up a worldwide system of Joint Commands, as well as an assortment of Defense Agencies, and all of those activities were out from under the individual service inspection systems. Mr. McNamara wanted an inspection system of his own at the Department of Defense level. My new title was Chief of the Department of Defense Inspection and Investigation System.
During the three years I ran this operation, we inspected every Defense Agency and every Joint Command, including the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Besides, there were a lot of other little things that kept popping-up, and I needed to be very mobile. I found the T-33, commonly known as the “T-Bird”, was just the transportation I needed. It was a training plane that had developed by taking the F-80 Shooting Star, the first operational jet fighter in the Air Force, and making a tandem, two-seater out of it. It was just what I needed because it was small, I could get around quickly in it, there was a fleet of them at Andrew Air Force Base, and one was available for me whenever needed.
With the T-Bird, I could take off early in the morning and, gaining three hours, could be on the West Coast for an afternoon conference. When the conference was over, I could strap into my T-Bird and head east--with the help of the ever-present jet stream—get back to Andrews from Los Angeles with one refueling-stop, and be at my desk when the bell rang the next morning. I covered the States in a T-Bird pretty well in those three years, and the Andrews Flight Line had a big metal piece with 3-stars they could fasten to each side of the vertical fin of the T-Bird assigned to me. There were no other 3-star characters dashing around the country in T-Birds, so when I’d pop out of the sky at some Base, they would see the stars on the tail and know it was me. They also knew I was an Inspector, and this would cause no end of initial concern. Even many of my old and good friends would meet me at the Flying Line with worried look on their faces. Once they found-out that all I wanted was a sandwich and load of fuel, everything was okay.
In the Spring of 1966, I was off on a business trip in my little T-Bird. We left Andrews early in the morning and for a conference at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. About noon, we took off for Carswell Air Force Base in Ft. Worth, Texas. We were at about 30,000 feet, enjoying the beautiful weather and about 20 miles west of Little Rock, Arkansas DME (Distance Measuring Equipment) station when there was a loud explosion in the rear of the airplane, and the engine began vibrating violently. I stop-cocked the throttle at once and the silence was deafening. I talked to my rear-seater and we agreed it felt as though the turbine had cast-off a couple of buckets and was badly out of balance. I tried a re-start, just to see what would happen, and when the vibration was still there, shut it down again.
Fortunately, we had lots of altitude and CAVU (Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited) weather, but we had to find a place in a hurry to put-down We called Little Rock Air Force Base, which was only about 25 miles away and declared an emergency. They cleared the field for us to make a dead-stick landing. With the engine out, our T-Bird lost all power including the Aileron Boost System, so suddenly the flight controls were very stiff and made the little T-Bird fly like a battleship, but my adrenaline was pumping and I hardly noticed.
I played with the descent, had time to set up perfectly for a Flame Out pattern that brought us down the proposed landing runway at 10,000 feet above the ground. When we were over the center of the runway, I cranked into a left-hand pattern and actuated the Manual Gear Extension System. There was a slight thump as the doors popped open, but the indicators showed that the nose wheel and right main gear were down and locked, but the left main gear was in an “Unsafe Condition”. I cranked-away at the Manual Extension System to no avail. We called Little Rock Tower and confirmed that our left main gear was “hanging half-way down”. We continued in the pattern and I tried slipping, skidding, and wing-rocking to try to get the Left Main Gear down, but no luck!
By now, we had a problem. There seemed to be no way to get all the gear down for a normal landing, and no way to get the gear back up so we could slide-in on our belly. By then we were pretty low and close to the field, over a well-developed residential area, so “punching-out” was out of the question. I told them that I was going to continue with my flame-out and try to hold the left wing up as long as I could.
We touched-down on the end of the runway, in good shape, but as we rolled-out, began to lose speed, the left wing began to droop, and I couldn’t hold it up. As the wingtip began scraping down the runway, the airplane ground-looped to the left, went off the runway and into a fairly good-sized drainage ditch. As it came to a stop, we popped-open the canopy and climbed out in a hurry. There was no fire and the little bird seemed to be in good shape, but looked awfully sad, cocked on two wheels, at the bottom of a 10-foot drainage ditch. It actually sat there for most of the day, because they didn’t want to move it until the Accident Investigation Team arrived. They wouldn’t even take the 3-star insignia off the tail! Everybody had to know just what knuckle-head general put it where it was.
It didn’t take the experts long to figure-out just what had happened. Back at Andrews, the maintenance people had pulled a cracked turbine wheel off a T-33 to send back to the Depot. Somehow the wires got crossed, and the defective turbine had been re-installed on the T-Bird they issued to me that morning. As for the Emergency Manual Gear Extension System, some components had been installed backwards and we could have cranked all day without getting that left gear down.
I kind of wondered what was coming next. My three years were up in the Inspection job and a move of some kind was due. There were rumors that a 4-star job was in the offing, but it didn’t develop. I’m sure the powers that be came to a couple of decisions. First, I wasn’t smart enough for any of the up-coming 4-star jobs. And second, they didn’t’ want to break any more expensive airplanes.
At any rate, I finished my career in two interesting, demanding, and fulfilling
Three-star jobs. The first was as Vice Commander-in-Chief of Pacific Air Force, which gave me a chance to prowl through the far reaches of the Pacific, from Indonesia to South Korea, and get-in another 42 combat missions in every kind of airplane that saw combat in the Vietnam affair. The second job was as Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Strike Command, a Joint Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Strike Command had jurisdiction over an area known as MEAFSA, and acronym standing for the Middle East, Africa South of the Sahara, and Southern Asia. This gave me the chance to renew my familiarity with places like India, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It also gave me a chance to fly into most of the nations of Black Africa, where I had seldom been before. It couldn’t have been any better.
As I said in the beginning, this is certainly no book. Nor is it a war story. It skips through a 36-year career, hitting mostly on the low spots, but also making clear that if you approach your chosen line of work with a real effort to make enough mistakes and make them fast enough, you’re bound to succeed.
I guess it also goes to demonstrate why the Air Force has chosen to invest billions to equip itself with several families of precision munitions, known as “Smart Bombs”. While the Air Force may have a few smart pilots, the vast majority are just about as dumb as I, and need all the help they can get.
How to Win While Losing – Post World War II
One of my concerns during those immediate post-war years was whether I would be able to hang-onto my rank as Colonel. The military forces were shrinking, and they had more ‘bird’ Colonels than they could use. They, therefore, initiated a program of taking a hundred or so Colonels off the bottom of the Seniority List every so often and reduce them in rank to Lt. Colonel. I don’t know how close they came to me, but I knew they were breathing down the back of my neck. When the Korean War came along in 1950, the Air Force started expanding again and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief, and put my silver oak leaves back in the footlocker where they belonged.
The three years spent with 22nd Bomb Group were busy. The old B-29s had most of the bugs out of them by that time and were pretty effective and reliable pieces of machinery. Between 1949 and 1952, we pulled about a 5-month tour out in the Pacific, and in the Korean War we served two rotational tours, of 3-months each, in England. Strategic Air Command policy kept two to three Groups of bombers in England at all times, on a rotational basis, in case the Russians began to cause too much trouble.
In the summer of 1952 we were finishing up a three month tour, with our three squadrons at three separate bases in East Anglia. We were anxious to come home and see our families, and our route was to be from our British bases to Lajes, in the Azores, to Bermuda, to MacDill Field, Florida, to our home base in California.
The trip began smoothly. I launched that morning in the Lead Airplane, and was followed, in 15 minute intervals, by a bomber stream of B-29s. All went well until I reached Lajes, about 8:00 o’clock that night. I contacted the Base by radio and was told there was a ‘pretty good rainstorm’ in progress, but they should be able to get us in with a GCA (Ground Controlled Approach) Approach without any trouble. Captain John Donnahue, a fine Irishman, was commander of the crew I was with, and he squared-away on a GCA approach. We were punching-through a pretty good little storm. It was raining quite hard, was very bumpy, and there was a lot of lightening crackling around us. We continued our GCA and were only a few hundred feet above the ocean, when GCA went off the air, and we were left there alone, in the bumpy, wet darkness. I called the Tower and got no answer. I made the decision to continue with the heading and rate of descent GCA had put us on, and felt we would be able to land okay when we reached the island.
Unknown to us, a vicious tropical storm had centered over Lajes. It had torn the antenna off the GCA Trailer, forcing it off the air, had blown-in a glass window in the Control Tower, knocked-out all of their radios, and forced the Operators to abandon the Tower. It was quite a mess on the ground as we were, blissfully, feeling our way through the weather.
We finally made-out a couple of runway lights but weren’t perfectly lined-up with the runway, so did some low-level sashaying to get lined-up. Our left wing-tip knocked out a runway light, but we hit the runway okay and rolled to the end in howling wind and blinding rain. An automobile with a flashing red-light pulled up to the nose of our plane, and the Base Commander, wringing-wet came scrambling-up through the nosewheel-well. He tapped me on the shoulder, said, “Go ahead and shut her down. The visibility is too lousy to taxi-in and nobody is going to be landing on this runway until the storm is over. We can tow her in to the ramp when it clears up a little. Let’s go up to the Club and have a drink. I think we both could use one.”
I thanked him very much, but explained that I had a string of B-29s behind me at 15 minute intervals, stretching all the way back to England, and had to figure out some way to get them all on the ground, somewhere. I got in his car with him and we felt our way through the storm to the Ground Radio Station. I was able to contact the next guy in-line behind me, who was circling above the storm, and wondering why no one on the ground would answer him. The storm was violent but quite local and we sent him and the next two airplanes into the field on Santa Maria, the southernmost island in the Azores, where the weather was beautiful. My instructions were passed back down the bomber stream. Most of the planes were diverted into Spain, and the last few were told to turn around and return to their bases in England.
Once the flight was all taken care of, the Base Commander said, “Now, let’s go to the Club for that drink.” As we squared-away at his bar with a couple of cold ones, the Base Commander said, “You know, that was the second hairiest landing that I’ve ever seen made with a B-29 in my life.” He went on to tell me that during the war, he’d been stationed at Karachi, and he’d had Tower Officer duty one night while a nasty sandstorm had been taking place when some knuckle-head took off, lost an engine, and ------“. At that point, I stopped him and told him, “You don’t need to go into the details…that was me too!” He gulped, looked at me, blinked, and changed the subject. I don’t know whether he believed me or not, but he was kind of quiet for the rest of the evening.
My friend, John Donohue was at the bar, too, and that night he taught me his Irish Prayer, which is still one of my favorites. Here it is:
May those who love us, love us.
And those who don’t love us, may the Lord turn their hearts.
And if He can’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles
So we may know them by their limping.
The rest of the trip home was about as uneventful as such things usually are. Soon after takeoff from MacDill, we lost an engine and went in to the Air Depot at Mobile, Alabama, and lost a day while they were hanging a new one on our plane. Coming in to California, we found March Air Force Base was fogged-in and landed at Palm Springs. They sent a staff car over for me, and when I got home around 2:00 AM, I told Lee, “Honey, we’d better start packing our bags. I have a feeling we are either going to be promoted or canned, and in either case, we won’t be around here very much longer.”
Sure enough, shortly thereafter we received orders to Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, Washington, to assume command of the 92nd Bombardment Wing (Groups had recently been upgraded to Wings) which was equipped with B-36s. I commanded the 92nd for a while, and in 1953, received my first star and took over the Air Division at Fairchild a short time later.
I flew the B-36 three years, and they were the biggest monsters of their day, with six pusher, conventional engines and the propellers mounted along the trailing edges of the wings and four jet engines, in pods, mounted near the wingtips. When you passed on your status report during a B-36 mission, and all was going well, the standard report was, “Six churning, and four burning.” The B-36 was really not a lot of fun to fly. It was more like sitting on your porch and flying your house around, but we had a busy three years in the B-36s and I was proud of our B-36 crews. At that time, the technique of air-to-air refueling that is so common today, had not been perfected and the B-36s were the only airplanes with long enough legs to reach the tough targets deep inside Russia. We covered deep, critical targets during those years, until KC-97s with their refueling booms came along to give additional range to the fleet of B-47s and B-52s. Later, the jet tanker the KC-135, which was much the same airplane as the Boeing 707, came into the SAC inventory to boost the range of the jet bombers even further, and the B-36s were able to relax their war plan responsibilities a little.
In 1955, I was re-assigned to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, near Tucson, Arizona, to command a two-wing Air Division equipped with B-47s. This was a welcome assignment. We moved out of the snow, into the sunshine, and we moved out of the B-36s with their 14 man crews into little six-jet bombers with three-man crews that flew like fighters. They were a delight to fly and, as long as there were tankers available to keep you pumped-up when you ran dry, you could fly forever. I flew one 23 hour, non-stop mission from Guam in the Western Pacific to Sidi Slamaine, in Morocco, hitting tankers over Japan, Alaska, and Labrador, but that’s another story. The B-47s were a dream to fly and I acquired over 1,000 hours in them during my three years at Tucson.
I was on a Survey Flight to the Western Pacific to check on the conditions of our War Plan Recovery bases and to attend a conference in Japan. When it was time to return to Tucson, we decided to come home, non-stop. We took off out of Yokota Air Base in Japan shortly after midnight, hit a couple of tankers over Alaska about sunup and setting up a cruise/climb to stay as high as we could to save fuel, headed for Arizona.
We were cruising along at 42,000 feet over Nevada, fat, dumb, and happy and not too far away from home, when there was a sudden, loud bang, the cockpit filled with vapor and it felt as if I had been hit in the stomach with a feather pillow. I knew we’d had an explosive decompression, because I’d experienced one before, when I’d had a blister shot out in my B-29. I knew we were in trouble because things were getting fuzzy, even though I had my oxygen mask on. I set up the auto-pilot for a decent descent, pulled back the power on the six engines, and passed-out.
I came-to when we were passing through 12,000 feet, and checked with the other two crew members on Intercom. They were both beginning to come around, also, and the airplane was running fine, but we were now going to have to fly at low level, where our remaining fuel wouldn’t last long. We were not far from Nellis Air Force Base, outside Las Vegas. I called them on the radio, was told they had some kind of operation in-progress, and we would not be permitted to land there. I declared an emergency, and they didn’t like it, but they had to let us land. We taxied-in, followed by the Fire Trucks and Meat Wagons required to respond to an Emergency situation. When I climbed down out of the airplane, the Base Commander was there to give me the dickens for lousing-up his exercise. When he saw that I was a Brigadier General, he calmed down, and I explained that we wanted to look the airplane over, to see what had caused the explosive-decompression. Even if it couldn’t be fixed, we would continue with the short hop to Tucson at low-level, and un-pressurized.
The Base Commander said that was alright with him, but he wanted us all to check at the hospital, to see if the period without oxygen had done us any harm. The Flight Surgeon shook his head and said he could see no reason not to clear us for flying, and we went back down to the airplane. They had located our problem. Early in the flight, the Navigator had dropped a pencil. He looked around for it, couldn’t find it, got another from his Navigation Kit and went back to his navigation. The lost pencil continued to rattle around until it wound-up next to the Cabin Pressure Relieve Valve, where it jammed the valve open and caused the decompression. The Navigator sheepishly picked-up his pencil, examined it, put it in his pocket, and we climbed aboard, took off, and headed for Tucson.
Knowing my career-pattern, I’m sure you recognize by now that my days at Tucson were numbered. I had been selected to report to Strategic Air Command Headquarters, at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska, as Deputy Director of Operations and soon, Director of Operations. I’m sure you don’t need to be told that the job had a second star that went with it. It didn’t really make much sense to me, but I was in no position to complain.
After three interesting and busy years at SAC Headquarters, where I was never permitted to be out of radio contact with the Command Post, or more than three rings away from a telephone, I had a short and productive tour at the Pentagon. They gave me a chance to get around the country, to fly fighters again, and to attend the Army’s Parachute School at Ft. Benning, Georgia. In 1961, I received orders sending me to Europe to command the 17th Air Force, which contained all of the American fighter units committed to NATO.
It was the finest job I ever had. My headquarters was in Ramstein, Germany and in the 17th Air Force were 10 wings of fighters, fighter-bombers, and reconnaissance airplanes, as well as a wing of intermediate-range air-breathing Mace Missiles. My wings were based in England, France, Italy and Germany. My base structure stretched from Oslo, Norway to Izmir and Adana, Turkey. Our gunnery and bombing range was called El Uotia, out on the Libyan Desert and our base there was Wheelis Air Base, near Tripoli. These were the days when Khadaffi was an obscure Captain, somewhere in the Libyan Army, and King Idris ran the country.
I hit the ground running in Europe. I went to Wiesbaden and checked-in with my boss, was thoroughly briefed by my staff, and visited all of my units and bases. Then, I set-up a program to get myself checked-out in all of the airplanes with which my units were equipped. This included the F-100, F-101, RF-101, F-102, F-105, RB-66 and the HH-43 helicopter. I stayed current in all these birds and, during my entire tour, never had so much fun.
The last plane in which I checked-out was the F-84F. One of my Wings down in France was equipped with this little airplane and I knew their feelings would be hurt if the Old Man didn’t come down and fly their little birds with them. At that time, the F-84 was an antique, as far as fighters go. It was the second jet fighter to become operational in the Air Force. It was a tough little bird built by Republic Aviation, and familiarly known as the ‘Lead Sled, because it had no afterburner on takeoff, rolled down the runway ‘forever’ before it could build up enough speed to lift-off. The F-84F was a newer version of the F-84, and instead of having a straight pair of wings, its wings were swept-back 30 degrees.
I memorized the F-84F Dash-1 Technical Order and took-off for France, where I completed the Ground School and flew the prescribed series of supervised check-out flights, including Emergency Procedures, aerobatics, and Flame-out Landings. The last flight to complete the check-out was a flight which would take us through the Speed of Sound. The F-84 jocks were very proud that their vintage machines could go supersonic. Of course, they couldn’t go through Mach 1 in level flight like the Huns, One-O-Wonders, Deuces, Thuds and as all of the Century series did simply by popping-in the afterburner. The little Sled didn’t have an afterburner, and breaking Mach in an F-84F was quite a procedure. They would load you up with all the fuel you could carry, including two huge wing tanks. Then you would claw your way as high as you could get, then had just enough fuel to get home, you’d roll the little rascal on its back, and dive straight-down with full throttle. The little brick would build-up speed and, usually going through about 10 to 12,000 feet, you’d feel a shudder, the Airspeed Indicator would twitch, and you would know you had passed through the sonic barrier. Then you’d have to chop the power, bleed-off the airspeed, and head for home before running out of fuel.
It seemed like a futile waste of time to me, but the guys were proud of being “Mach Busters”, and assured me that without this final flight, my check-out would be incomplete. They left me no loopholes, so I got ready for my supersonic dive. A nice, young Lieutenant took off in-formation with me, to fly chase-plane with me during my supersonic dive and keep an eye on me. All seemed to go as advertised. We worked our way up to about 22,000 feet, the big balloon tanks under my wings were empty, I gave my wingman a nod, rolled her over, pointed straight-down, full-throttle The airspeed seemed real slow building-up, and finally, around 10,000 feet I got my shudder, to indicate we’d gone through Mach 1. At about the same time there was a rather loud explosion. I didn’t know what had happened, the airplane felt okay, but I lost no time leveling-off and slowing down. As I looked the airplane over, the big empty tank under the left wing looked like a piece of crumpled tinfoil.
What had happened, we found out later, was that the Vent Line to relieve pressure in the empty tank had become clogged. As we rapidly descended from the thin air above 20,000 feet to the heavier air at lower altitudes, the pressure could not adjust--between the thin air inside the tank and the heavier outside air. The pressure built up during the dive (outside the tank) until the tank literally imploded into a piece of crumpled duraluminum. The airplane was not hurt at all.
In the meantime, however, my chase plane pilot had seen my plane throw off a cloud of vapor, and when he showed-up and leveled-off, he lost sight of me. Next thing I knew, he was putting-out a frantic MAY DAY call to the effect that the General’s plane had blown-up and disappeared, so they had to scramble the Air-Sea Rescue guys at-once, if not sooner. He was so excited and talked so constantly I had a hard time breaking-in on him to tell him I was fine and would see him back at the base in a few minutes. And, for heaven’s sake, to cancel his MAY DAY call! Once all the fuss was turned-on, it was almost impossible to get it turned-off. Wild radio calls were on the air all-over Europe about “some crazy general having blown-up his fighter plane.” Sure enough, when I taxied-in and shut-down, a guy came running-up to the plane to tell me my four-star boss in Wiesbaden was on the phone, wanted to talk to me at once, and was very angry.
I dashed into Base Operations, grabbed the phone, and my boss wanted to know what I was doing down in France, breaking airplanes. I explained that the Radio Call had been an error, that the airplane was fine, that there had been no accident, but an Incident Report would be filed immediately, that I had been down in France, flying with my troops like any commander should be, and that I’d be back at my base in Germany in a couple of hours. The matter was never mentioned again between us.
No doubt, you’ve guessed it! A few days later, I was relieved of command of 17th Air Force, the Secretary of Defense had established a new job in the Department of Defense, and in some mysterious way, I had been recommended for the job. Our two kids were in college in the States, so Lee and I and our cat were on our way back for another go in the Pentagon. The new job, of course, was being set-up as a 3-star billet.
The job was odd. Of course, each of the services had a strong and effective Inspector General System, but Mr. McNamara had set-up a worldwide system of Joint Commands, as well as an assortment of Defense Agencies, and all of those activities were out from under the individual service inspection systems. Mr. McNamara wanted an inspection system of his own at the Department of Defense level. My new title was Chief of the Department of Defense Inspection and Investigation System.
During the three years I ran this operation, we inspected every Defense Agency and every Joint Command, including the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Besides, there were a lot of other little things that kept popping-up, and I needed to be very mobile. I found the T-33, commonly known as the “T-Bird”, was just the transportation I needed. It was a training plane that had developed by taking the F-80 Shooting Star, the first operational jet fighter in the Air Force, and making a tandem, two-seater out of it. It was just what I needed because it was small, I could get around quickly in it, there was a fleet of them at Andrew Air Force Base, and one was available for me whenever needed.
With the T-Bird, I could take off early in the morning and, gaining three hours, could be on the West Coast for an afternoon conference. When the conference was over, I could strap into my T-Bird and head east--with the help of the ever-present jet stream—get back to Andrews from Los Angeles with one refueling-stop, and be at my desk when the bell rang the next morning. I covered the States in a T-Bird pretty well in those three years, and the Andrews Flight Line had a big metal piece with 3-stars they could fasten to each side of the vertical fin of the T-Bird assigned to me. There were no other 3-star characters dashing around the country in T-Birds, so when I’d pop out of the sky at some Base, they would see the stars on the tail and know it was me. They also knew I was an Inspector, and this would cause no end of initial concern. Even many of my old and good friends would meet me at the Flying Line with worried look on their faces. Once they found-out that all I wanted was a sandwich and load of fuel, everything was okay.
In the Spring of 1966, I was off on a business trip in my little T-Bird. We left Andrews early in the morning and for a conference at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. About noon, we took off for Carswell Air Force Base in Ft. Worth, Texas. We were at about 30,000 feet, enjoying the beautiful weather and about 20 miles west of Little Rock, Arkansas DME (Distance Measuring Equipment) station when there was a loud explosion in the rear of the airplane, and the engine began vibrating violently. I stop-cocked the throttle at once and the silence was deafening. I talked to my rear-seater and we agreed it felt as though the turbine had cast-off a couple of buckets and was badly out of balance. I tried a re-start, just to see what would happen, and when the vibration was still there, shut it down again.
Fortunately, we had lots of altitude and CAVU (Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited) weather, but we had to find a place in a hurry to put-down We called Little Rock Air Force Base, which was only about 25 miles away and declared an emergency. They cleared the field for us to make a dead-stick landing. With the engine out, our T-Bird lost all power including the Aileron Boost System, so suddenly the flight controls were very stiff and made the little T-Bird fly like a battleship, but my adrenaline was pumping and I hardly noticed.
I played with the descent, had time to set up perfectly for a Flame Out pattern that brought us down the proposed landing runway at 10,000 feet above the ground. When we were over the center of the runway, I cranked into a left-hand pattern and actuated the Manual Gear Extension System. There was a slight thump as the doors popped open, but the indicators showed that the nose wheel and right main gear were down and locked, but the left main gear was in an “Unsafe Condition”. I cranked-away at the Manual Extension System to no avail. We called Little Rock Tower and confirmed that our left main gear was “hanging half-way down”. We continued in the pattern and I tried slipping, skidding, and wing-rocking to try to get the Left Main Gear down, but no luck!
By now, we had a problem. There seemed to be no way to get all the gear down for a normal landing, and no way to get the gear back up so we could slide-in on our belly. By then we were pretty low and close to the field, over a well-developed residential area, so “punching-out” was out of the question. I told them that I was going to continue with my flame-out and try to hold the left wing up as long as I could.
We touched-down on the end of the runway, in good shape, but as we rolled-out, began to lose speed, the left wing began to droop, and I couldn’t hold it up. As the wingtip began scraping down the runway, the airplane ground-looped to the left, went off the runway and into a fairly good-sized drainage ditch. As it came to a stop, we popped-open the canopy and climbed out in a hurry. There was no fire and the little bird seemed to be in good shape, but looked awfully sad, cocked on two wheels, at the bottom of a 10-foot drainage ditch. It actually sat there for most of the day, because they didn’t want to move it until the Accident Investigation Team arrived. They wouldn’t even take the 3-star insignia off the tail! Everybody had to know just what knuckle-head general put it where it was.
It didn’t take the experts long to figure-out just what had happened. Back at Andrews, the maintenance people had pulled a cracked turbine wheel off a T-33 to send back to the Depot. Somehow the wires got crossed, and the defective turbine had been re-installed on the T-Bird they issued to me that morning. As for the Emergency Manual Gear Extension System, some components had been installed backwards and we could have cranked all day without getting that left gear down.
I kind of wondered what was coming next. My three years were up in the Inspection job and a move of some kind was due. There were rumors that a 4-star job was in the offing, but it didn’t develop. I’m sure the powers that be came to a couple of decisions. First, I wasn’t smart enough for any of the up-coming 4-star jobs. And second, they didn’t’ want to break any more expensive airplanes.
At any rate, I finished my career in two interesting, demanding, and fulfilling
Three-star jobs. The first was as Vice Commander-in-Chief of Pacific Air Force, which gave me a chance to prowl through the far reaches of the Pacific, from Indonesia to South Korea, and get-in another 42 combat missions in every kind of airplane that saw combat in the Vietnam affair. The second job was as Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Strike Command, a Joint Command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Strike Command had jurisdiction over an area known as MEAFSA, and acronym standing for the Middle East, Africa South of the Sahara, and Southern Asia. This gave me the chance to renew my familiarity with places like India, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. It also gave me a chance to fly into most of the nations of Black Africa, where I had seldom been before. It couldn’t have been any better.
As I said in the beginning, this is certainly no book. Nor is it a war story. It skips through a 36-year career, hitting mostly on the low spots, but also making clear that if you approach your chosen line of work with a real effort to make enough mistakes and make them fast enough, you’re bound to succeed.
I guess it also goes to demonstrate why the Air Force has chosen to invest billions to equip itself with several families of precision munitions, known as “Smart Bombs”. While the Air Force may have a few smart pilots, the vast majority are just about as dumb as I, and need all the help they can get.