Cold War keepsake

Mid-air refueling required intense concentration.

 I mentioned in an earlier post that my east coast grandfather flew B-47s during the Cold War.  Here's a photo during aerial refueling with a KC-97.  It looks scary to me.  No flexible hose and a basket to catch your probe, but a big steel pipe that has to go directly into a small hole in your airplane.  Talk about piloting skills.  I've read that, in order to execute the refueling, the KC-97 had to fly at top speed while the B-47 flew just above stall speed.  But I'm not sure that's true.  The

Whew! Glad that's over!

stall speed of the B-47E, the most produced model, was 177 mph while the cruising speed of the KC-97 was 230 mph and throttling up to military power would see it moving considerably faster.  But weights, atmospheric conditions and altitudes would modify these numbers, so I suppose under certain conditions that might have been true.  

Now to relax with some milk.

 I read that one time a B-47 flew non-stop from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam to Sidi Slimane Air Force Base in Morocco, a distance of over 11,000 miles, being refueled in mid-air four times.  The flight took about 22 hours.  Imagine how tired the men who manned that plane were.  The Air Force liberally supplied its  air crew with amphetamines back then, from what I understand (I don't know about today), so they were probably both exhausted and wired at the same time.

B-47 at Brize Norton.  Such a beautiful airplane.

When there was a crisis during the Cold War, as there often was, my grandfather's squadron would forward deploy from Pease AFB in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to England, basing at RAF Brize Norton, some miles northwest of London.  It's a  very Englishy town even today with all the changes in the world; imagine how English it must have been back in the 1950s before...you know....  When sent there, he brought back all sorts of English souvenirs for his family, including Raleigh bicycles for his kids, an MG sports car (carried home in the bomb bay -- no, really; I have heard that story so many times!) for his wife and Forgan golf clubs for himself among doubtless all kinds of other things:  Barbour jackets, Tunnock's tea cakes, Mcvities digestive biscuits and so forth. 

The B-47E parked at Brize in the photo to the left above was delivered to the USAF in 1953, converted to an EB-47E, an electronic intelligence gatherer, flying many a daring mission probing Soviet air defenses.  It was declared excess and withdrawn from service in 1965 and sent to Davis-Monthan, where it was scrapped in 1969.

USAF museum photo of  a B-47 cockpit.

The photo on the left, from the Air Force museum, shows the cockpit of their B-47.  Note the logo disc on the steering yoke hub.  My grandfather pried that off one of the B-47s he flew and it ended up in a stash of his stuff that we have stored away.  I found it the other day and took a photo of it that I included in an earlier post in which I talked about his life.  Here's the photo again, below. I'm sure the Air Force frowned on souvenir vandalism, but I'm glad that he pried it off and pocketed it.  He probably took it to give to his son.   

Pried from steering yoke hub.

Why we have it I don't know. People store things at the ranch rather than rent storage lockers when they move and sometimes they reclaim all their belongings and sometimes they don't.  

Anyway, I'm glad I found this memento of the past.  I've held it in my hand, a physical reminder of a world that was, that actually existed and is not merely words in a book or on-line.  B-47s were real. Curtis LeMay was real.  The Soviet Union was real.  Do you understand what I'm trying to say?  I'm not sure I do, but I'm attempting to express all that I feel when I hold this little piece of plastic in my hand and brush my fingers across its surface and think about all that it means.  The jet bomber it was part of routinely carried multi-megaton hydrogen bombs and was primed on 15-minute alert to launch on warning and destroy the Russians before they destroyed us.  It may once have been assigned to intrude into Soviet airspace, the crew tasked with deliberately provoking Soviet radars to light it up, interceptors to scramble to shoot it down.  Once it had stirred up this hornet's nest, it had to get out of Dodge, pronto.  If it could.  An RB-47B flying a ferret mission didn't make good it's escape and was shot down over the Arctic Ocean on July 1, 1960.  Only the co-pilot and navigator of the six-man crew survived.  Captured by the Soviets, they were imprisoned for seven months before being released.  Their ordeal was overshadowed by the shooting down of a U-2 exactly two months before on May 1, 1960, and is forgotten, as is the B-47 and the Strategic Air Command, its bases abandoned or repurposed as civilian airports, all part of a vanished world of high drama, courage and daring that hardly anyone today even knows existed, let alone remembers.

What they tuned in to listen to on the AM band in 1959 on those long, tense waits in the alert shacks and on those hours-long flights patroling the Soviet arctic: