The Cold War was at its coldest in the 1960s, with the United States and the Soviet Union each engaged in massive military buildups to prepare for possible war with the other. Both superpowers wanted to develop production aircraft that had the potential to deliver advanced weapons systems to the enemy. Among many projects, the Soviets wanted to build a new strategic intercontinental bomber capable of supersonic speeds. This interest was, at least in part, due to the awareness that the United States was developing a successor to the Boeing B-52 bomber—the Rockwell B-1 Lancer—that would eventually fill this same role. The Soviets were also alarmed by the United States’ development of the hypersonic North American XB-70 Valkyrie prototype bomber, which first flew in 1964.

Multiple design bureaus submitted proposals for the new Soviet bomber. Some of them looked very similar to the XB-70. Ultimately, the Tupolev design bureau received the assignment to create the new aircraft, which would become Tu-160, known in the West as the Blackjack. Early in the development process, Tupolev realized that wings with variable geometry (swing-wings) would be ideal, and that those wings should be blended into the airframe at their roots. The swing-wings would allow the Tu-160 to maximize its lift/drag ratio during all aspects of its mission, from takeoff, to climb and attack and back to landing. The design of the tail posed significant technical challenges given how thin it needed to be for such a high-speed aircraft. Ultimately Tupolev decided on a cruciform tail with a divided rudder. The aircraft was powered by four Kuznetsov NK-32 turbofan jet engines, each of which could produce 55,000 pounds of thrust in afterburner mode.

In its final form, the Tu-160 looked strikingly similar to the B-1, but the two aircraft have significant differences. Although both have a crew of four, the Tu-160 is much larger, with more than double the wing area and almost twice the thrust of its American counterpart. The Tu-160 has a top speed of just over Mach 2 (similar to that of the original B-1A) while current B-1B models top out at Mach 1.25. The Tu-160 also has a higher rate of climb than the B-1. Critically, the Tu-160’s armament was limited to either twelve Raduga KH-15 or six KH-55 nuclear-capable cruise missiles in each of two internal bays, both on rotating launchers. The B-1, in contrast, has three internal bomb bays and six hardpoints on the wings to allow it to carry a wide array of conventional and nuclear armaments as well as air-launched missiles.

Neither aircraft have stealth capabilities, technology that didn’t exist at the time of their design. Although both aircraft started out with analog instruments, the B-1 has since been updated to a glass cockpit. While many B-1s and almost all Tu-160s were originally painted white (to protect against the flash of a nuclear blast), modern B-1s have a dark blue or dark gray color scheme. It should be noted that the current B-1B functions as a low-level penetrator, which is a different role than that for which the Tu-160 was designed. Overall, the Tu-160 is a faster aircraft with an extended range, but the B-1 is more maneuverable and harder to spot on radar. 

Of note, the Soviets did significant work to make the Tu-160 capable as a platform for air-launching space vehicles to put satellites into orbit, via a system known as Burlak. The idea was that the airplane could be flown to an air base in a country that had requested the service, and there a satellite of up to 850 kilograms could be fitted to a three-stage, liquid propellant launch vehicle. The mating of the rocket to the airplane would be done within the host nation’s borders to avoid the prying eyes of foreign governments. The Tu-160 could then air-launch the combined payload/rocket from altitude into any orbit desired. Despite some interest, the Burlak system appears to have been abandoned before it was ever used. Plans to use the Tu-160 as a launch platform for an aerial drone known as Voron also fell flat.

The Tu-160 formally entered active service in 1987. Before the initial round of production stopped in the 1990s, a total of 37 Tu-160s had been completed, with nine of them serving as test models and the rest as operational aircraft. Critically, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, 19 Tu-160s (and their nuclear armament) became the property of the newly independent nation of Ukraine. While some of the aircraft were repainted in Ukrainian livery, their new owners had little use for them. The Tu-160s were extremely expensive to operate and maintain and the planes sat largely unused at Ukrainian military airfields.

Russia soon found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to buy back its Tu-160s from Ukraine. Extensive negotiations ensued, mostly focusing on price, and by 1999 Ukraine finally agreed to sell back eight Tu-160s to Russia (along with their attendant nuclear-tipped cruise missiles) in exchange for debt relief. The Russians selected the eight aircraft they felt were in the best condition to return to their fleet. Of the remaining eleven Tu-160s in Ukraine, ten were scrapped (including at least one in a public demonstration) as part of the START II disarmament treaty. One Tu-160 was kept as a museum piece.

Interestingly, during the time when the Russians were negotiating to buy back their Tu-160s, there was a brief period where it appeared that three of the aircraft would be sold to an American company, Platforms International Corp., which wanted to use them for a private air-launched satellite venture. The Russians were outraged (and terrified) at the possibility of the planes being transferred to the West and pointed out that such a purchase would itself be a violation of START II. The deal subsequently collapsed. 

The Tu-160 has only seen relatively limited operational use over its lifetime. Mostly used for patrols and as part of military exercises, several aircraft were briefly deployed to Venezuela in 2008 and again in 2013 as part of a show of force, and the planes first saw true combat in 2015 during the Syrian civil war. The aircraft have only been used in a very limited manner in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Recently, some Tu-160s have undergone extensive upgrades and modernization, and a small number of new, upgraded aircraft (so-called Tu-160M models) are being produced again after many years. A living relic of the Cold War, the Tu-160 remains one of the most striking and remarkable bombers ever to roll off an assembly line. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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When Military History sought an interview with Buzz Aldrin, he initially demurred. The second human being ever to walk on the surface of the Moon—on July 21, 1969, as a crew member of Apollo 11—he finds that journalists seldom want to discuss anything else. But Aldrin’s career spans much further. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he was commissioned into the Air Force at the outset of the Korean War. Flying the North American F-86 Sabre for the 16th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, Aldrin completed 66 combat missions and downed two MiG-15 jets. After the war he earned a doctorate in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aldrin walked in space as a Gemini astronaut before flying to the Moon with Apollo. Today, the 93-year-old Air Force brigadier general remains a strong advocate of the space program, particularly of planned missions to Mars.    

What made you select the Air Force after graduation from West Point?  

I wanted to fly and had always wanted to fly. I took my first flight at age 2 with my father and never looked back. Flying was exhilarating. We [graduates] knew the nation would need pilots, so we signed up.  

What was it like flying the cutting-edge F-86 Sabre?  

Fast in a dogfight—and I was in a couple of those—and gratifying, because the plane handled well, although my gun got jammed in one encounter, and on another occasion I had a frozen fuel line. But the plane was a jet, and we liked the idea of flying jets. They got you higher and faster, and we all liked that.  

How did the MiG-15 match up in your two recorded Korean War shootdowns?  

The MiG-15 was a fast plane, and they had good pilots. The pilot ejected in the first one, which was filmed by the nose camera [of my Sabre].  

Your second kill entailed a difficult dogfight. Tell us about that.  

Not a lot to tell, but you can see photos of it. My gun jammed on my first lock, so I had to be steady, stay with him, get the lock again and then fire. He, too, ejected, which was good for him. Dogfights are all-consuming—they happen fast. Nothing about a shootdown is easy, but when you return alive you feel glad you returned, glad you could do what you were supposed to.  

What was it like flying the F-100 Super Sabre equipped with nuclear weapons?  

I will just say, those times—perhaps a bit like these times—were about being prepared. There was tension, but we were always well trained, ready for what might come. We signed up to protect the United States, and so we did. It was as simple as that. We all thought freedom mattered, and we flew to protect it.  

A fighter jock with a doctoral degree?  

Yes, before selection to NASA’s third group of astronauts, I earned my doctorate from MIT. I wrote a thesis called “Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous.” An understanding of that topic and orbital mechanics proved fortuitous when Jim Lovell and I flew Gemini 12, the last Gemini mission, which required proving the efficacy of orbital rendezvous. As fate would have it, we actually needed to manage part of that process manually, due to computer problems, so the thesis came in handy after all.  

How excited were you to join the space program?  

Very. And looking back, I was just fortunate to be selected for Gemini 12 and Apollo 11. I was also blessed to have great crewmates—Lovell in Gemini 12, and Neil Armstrong and Mike Collins in Apollo 11. What can you say? We were all blessed.  

Describe the sensation of your free-flight space walk for Gemini.  

My longest EVA [extravehicular activity], or space walk, of Gemini 12 was surprising for the beauty and sense of accomplishment that came with it—and because my heart rate apparently stayed low. Someone asked me why, and I really could not say, except that I was honestly having fun.  

We must ask, what was it like to walk on the Moon?  

In many other venues I have discussed the answer to that question, but suffice to say we had a job to do, and we worked very hard to do it. We did not want to let others down, since so many had worked to make Apollo 11, mankind’s first Moon landing, a success.   I called it “magnificent desolation” at the time, and that remains a good description. It was also an honor, and while we trained hard for it, the actual event was exhilarating in small and unexpected ways. We saw our shadow landing, which never happened in simulation. We had to test one-sixth gravity, since that could not be simulated. We had to get experiments out, and one required waiting for a small BB to settle in a cone, which took a while with one-sixth gravity. Neil and I worked together to get the American flag in, which was harder than you might think with only about an inch of Moon dust to plant it in.  

On May 5, 2023, you were promoted to brigadier general. What did that mean to you?  

Well, it was humbling, gratifying, and I was really honored. I stepped out of the normal advancement sequence flying for NASA. Afterward, I continued to serve, fly and believe in the U.S. Air Force. To be recognized for that—for what I did during and after that special time—was gratifying. I thank all those involved. It meant a lot, and I am happy still when I think about that day.  

You continue to advocate for a manned mission to Mars. Why?  

Simple, really: The United States is the leader in human space exploration, and we need to keep reaching outward, expanding and enriching the human experience. That means not resting on our laurels, but going out to Mars, exploring and swiftly creating permanence there—not a touch-and-go, but staying on Mars.  

How do you reflect on your achievements in the military and as an astronaut?  

We all have our stories and our journey, and mine has been exciting. It was an honor to serve in Korea, with NASA and thereafter with the Air Force. This nation is one of a kind—both a great and good country. Those opportunities came from tens of thousands of other dedicated Americans, and I feel forever grateful for what they did to make my journey possible. So, how do you reflect on all that? You just remind yourself each dawn is precious, and you stay grateful. You keep trying to do whatever you can to keep the greatness and goodness going.

This interview appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Military History magazine.

As Soviet ICBM tests and the launch of Sputnik in the 1950s added intensity to the Cold War, the United States turned its attention to the ice sheets of Greenland for an edge.

Meant to be a “city under the ice,” Camp Century was designed to be a series of “twenty-one horizontal tunnels spidering through the snow,” according to the University of Vermont. Designers boasted that, once complete, it would be three times the size of Denmark — replete with a movie theater, hot showers, a chapel, a library, chemistry labs, and, most importantly, a portable nuclear reactor.

Destined to house nearly 200 residents, the top-secret missile base in northwestern Greenland, far north of the Arctic Circle, was publicly touted as a “remote research community” under the auspices of the Army Polar Research and Development Center.

In reality, it was “a top-secret plan to convert part of the Arctic into a launchpad for nuclear missiles,” according to the Washington Post.

Dubbed “Project Iceworm,” the city nestled under layer after layer of ice was to be positioned less than 3,000 miles from Moscow. During the Cold War, the frigid location offered the U.S. Army a more covert and convenient cover for its medium-range ballistic missiles, or MRBMs.

The project was to take advantage of the strategic location of Greenland — midway between the two superpowers — so as to avoid using long-range Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs, located stateside, professor Nikolaj Petersen of Denmark’s Aarhus University wrote in a 2007 article for the Scandinavian Journal of History.

In 1958, the U.S. received tacit approval from Denmark — which has maintained control of the world’s largest island since the 1814 Treaty of Kiel — after being approached with the plans for Iceworm by U.S. ambassador Val Petersen.
According to Petersen’s account, Danish Prime Minister H. C. Hansen replied, “You did not submit any concrete plan as to such possible storing, nor did you ask questions as to the attitude of the Danish Government to this item. I do no[t] think that your remarks give rise to any comments from my side.”

The U.S. deemed this a green light, with construction slated to begin in June 1959. Despite temperatures as low as -70°F, winds as high as 125 miles per hour and an annual snowfall of more than four feet, the audacious project was completed the following October, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

“The missile force is hidden and elusive,” a 1960 planning document noted. “It is deployed into an extensive cut‐and‐cover tunnel network in which men and missiles are protected from weather and, to a degree, from enemy attack. The deployment is invulnerable to all but massive attacks and even then most of the force can be launched. Concealment and variability of the deployment pattern are exploited to prevent the enemy from targeting the critical elements of the force.”

The audacious $2.71 billion plan didn’t account for one thing, however: Mother Nature.

It became increasingly clear, in short order, that building an atomic city under shifting ice sheets was tenuous at best. The project was scrapped entirely by 1967, and the massive underground structure collapsed shortly after.

Despite this rather large military gaffe, the project wasn’t entirely a waste. During the building of Camp Century, U.S. glacier scientist Chester Langway drilled “a 4,560-foot-deep vertical core down through the ice,” according to an account in the University of Vermont Today. “Each section of ice that came up was packaged and stored, frozen. When the drill finally hit dirt, the scientists worked it down for twelve more feet through mud and rock. Then they stopped.”

For decades, this layer of ice and rock from Greenland’s core remained untouched, stored in cookie jars at the bottom of a freezer in Denmark.Then in 2017, it was rediscovered by Jørgen Peder Steffensen, a professor and curator of the ice core repository at the University of Copenhagen, and glaciologist Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, who were going through the university’s extensive collections of ice cores in preparation for a move to a new freezer.
“Some were oddly labeled ‘Camp Century sub-ice,’” Steffensen told UVM Today. “I never thought about what was in those two boxes.

“Well, when you see a lot of cookie jars, you think: who the hell put this in here?” he continued. “No, I didn’t know what to make of it. But once we got it out, we picked it up to see these dirty lumps, and I said: what is this now? And all of a sudden it dawned on us: Oh s–t, this is the sediment underneath it. The ‘sub-ice’ is because it’s below the ice. Whoa.”

In October 2019 the overlooked bits of dirt finally had their time in the sun as more than 30 scientists from around the world gathered in Vermont to study what the silty ice and frozen sediment might tell us.

The convention discovered that the sediment contained “fossilized leaf and twig fragments, proving that plants had once grown under one of the coldest regions on earth,” according to the Washington Post story.

While the U.S. didn’t get to act out its Bond villain lair fantasies, it did, at the very least, further scientific understandings of the world around us — and below us.

Henry Kissinger, U.S. national security adviser and later secretary of state at the height of the Vietnam War, died on Nov. 29 at the age of 100. His polarizing career saw him serve every president from John F. Kennedy to Joe Biden, with achievements that included masterminding a new relationship with communist China, softening the Cold War friction with the Soviet Union through a diplomatic policy called détente, and eventually negotiating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Southeast Asia and ending the Vietnam War, for which he was co-awarded (with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho, who declined his) the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.

Born in Germany in 1923, young Kissinger and his Orthodox Jewish family emigrated to the United States in 1938 as the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies ramped up. He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, where he served as an interpreter in his native Germany as World War II was coming to an end—and where he saw firsthand the threats from the communist East that he feared were intent on upending democracy.

The intellectual Kissinger enrolled in Harvard in 1950, and soon began developing diplomatic theories of “realpolitik,” advocating for calculated foreign policies that delivered practical results, sometimes at the cost of a perceived larger morality. He was known and respected for his ability to broker high-level negotiations between nations with diametrically opposed ideological viewpoints. The BBC notes that Kissinger was the only American to have personally interacted “with every Chinese leader from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping.” In a testament to his ability to interface between nations with opposing worldviews, Kissinger’s passing was mourned in China as well as by leadership of the European Union.

Nonetheless, Kissinger’s approach to politics and diplomacy, which decidedly influenced U.S. foreign policy over the course of many decades, was controversial during his lifetime and remains so after his death. Kissinger was straightforward about his belief in separating morality from political affairs. Former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes argues in The New York Times that Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik “mistakes cynicism — or realism — with wisdom.” A tribute featured in The Independent however praises Kissinger’s approach as “his finest of attributes”.

Rising quickly through the U.S. government’s ranks, it was during his tenure as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon in 1969 that Kissinger’s sense of realpolitik played out most controversially. Kissinger instituted a strategy of heavily-bombing Cambodia, a theoretically neutral country but long a sanctuary for North Vietnamese forces and resupply in the Vietnam War, to disrupt the flow of enemy troops and equipment.

While the policy may have had military merits, the bombing was too little, too late to have a strategic impact on the war’s outcome, and the deaths of tens of thousands of Cambodian civilians in the bombings remains a cloud on his record. The bombing, contends Rhodes, “did nothing to improve the terms on which the Vietnam War ended; if anything, it just indicated the lengths to which the United States would go to express its displeasure at losing.”

All the same, Kissinger negotiated the end of the war after years of talks with North Vietnam, resulting in the Paris Peace Accords of 1973 and the withdrawal of American troops. South Vietnam fell two years later when Hanoi broke the accords, invaded South Vietnam and overran the country within weeks.

Kissinger stayed on as secretary of state under Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, until 1977. He continued advising future presidents on a myriad of topics. He counseled U.S. President George W. Bush and controversially supported the Iraq War. He lectured and published books and policy papers for many years, and remained actively engaged in foreign policy discussions until his death.

Debates about Kissinger’s legacy will continue. An article published in The Rolling Stones blasted him as “a war criminal” immediately following his death. Marking his passing, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken hailed him as someone who “really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job.”

As for Kissinger himself? He was well-aware of the criticisms he faced but appeared to have been unfazed by them. “I’ve been thinking about these problems all my life…the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable,” he later said. With regard to the Vietnam War, Kissinger was typically matter of fact: “We did the best we could.”

Lt. Gen. Robert F. Foley has led a distinguished career in the U.S. Army. Graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he served as a company commander in Vietnam with the 27th Infantry Regiment, famed as the “Wolfhounds,” and received the Medal of Honor for his actions during Operation Attleboro in November 1966. Foley subsequently rose to become a battalion and brigade commander with the 3rd Infantry Division in Germany, served as West Point commandant of cadets, and was commanding general of the Fifth U.S. Army.

In his autobiographical book Standing Tall: Leadership Lessons in the Life of a Soldier, Foley offers us an in-depth view of his life and military career. The book contains a detailed account of Foley’s life, including his family background, career milestones, interactions with comrades, his marriage, faith, and experiences with mentors. It is a very personal book and there is a lot of material to sink into. Readers of Vietnam magazine will likely be most interested in Foley’s overall observations about the Vietnam War and the details of his experiences as an infantryman “in country,” especially during Operation Attleboro.

Views on Vietnam

Foley is a battle-tested Wolfhound and it is with justifiable pride that he frequently alludes to the prowess of his regiment, organized in 1901 and fighting under the motto, Nec aspera terrent, meaning “No fear on earth.” Fearless in combat, Foley also shows himself to be fearless in sharing his overall views about the Vietnam War itself. Some soldiers are leery of wading into politics, but Foley makes some controversial observations which merit further reflection.

Foley’s criticism of the war is not reactionary; he is well-read on the Vietnam War in addition to having experienced it himself, and he cites a variety of firsthand sources as a foundation for his criticisms. Foley alludes with regret to a failed opportunity for the United States to form a working alliance with North Vietnamese leaders, describing how Ho Chi Minh’s life was saved by U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers in August 1945. “After the OSS dissolution on October 1, 1945, its solidarity with the Viet Minh vanished in the wake of the American and Allies’ pursuit of a new world order,” Foley writes. He also cites the words of Col. Harry Summers, founding editor of Vietnam magazine, from the latter’s work On Strategy: “Every military operation should be directed towards a clearly defined, decisive and attainable objective.”

Foley is plainly skeptical of the Eisenhower administration’s policies based on an abstract “domino theory.” He argues that the Vietnam War “had no clearly defined objective” and that “conditions for declaring war against North Vietnam did not meet the criteria for a national security interest.”

The Wolfhounds

On Aug. 5, 1966, Foley became the commanding officer of Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 27th Infantry (Wolfhounds) while serving in Vietnam. His descriptions of the actions he took in the war zone demonstrate his competent leadership. For example, his “cure” for VD among his troops was depriving the stricken misbehavers of bed rest and ordering them instead to participate in all regular combat duties, regardless of their physical discomfort springing off helicopters and shuffling through leech-filled rice paddies. The rate of infections quickly dropped to zero.

“We lived with our soldiers 24 hours a day—we knew them and they knew us,” writes Foley. He allowed his subordinates leeway to devise deceptive methods to counteract communist forces attempting to infiltrate their base camp in night attacks. Foley also shares humorous anecdotes about his encounter with a bamboo viper and an occasion when he toppled into a well, only to be serenaded by his grinning men later with a new take on an old nursery rhyme: “Ding Dong Dell, there’s a captain in the well!”

“Angry As Hell”

Foley describes Nov. 5, 1966, as “the most difficult and devastating day” for his company in Vietnam. During Operation Attleboro, Foley was ordered to break into an enemy bunker system to create a corridor through which trapped comrades could escape back to friendly lines. He and his men were facing NVA regulars, and because the surrounded Americans were so close to enemy bunkers, his options were limited. “I couldn’t employ artillery, close air support or gunships,” according to Foley. As his group got stalled in dense underbrush and his men fell down shot all around him, Foley got “angry as hell” and took matters into his own hands. Accompanied by Pvt. First Class Charles Dean, who carried ammunition belts for him plus a grenade launcher, Foley swooped up an M-60 machine gun and led a charge against the NVA.

The NVA fled the battlefield taking heavy losses and Foley succeeded in rescuing the hemmed-in U.S. troops. He was wounded by shrapnel from a grenade. Foley was awarded the Silver Star and later received the Medal of Honor for his actions, but above all credits his fellow Wolfhounds who followed him into the fray, saying that their “indomitable spirit…made all the difference.”

Courage to Say No

True to its title, the book chronicles the evolution of a young soldier into an effective and capable military leader. Foley shares wise observations about leadership of soldiers that have withstood the test of time throughout military history, such as: “Good leaders make it a habit to get out of the command bunker, walk around the unit area, and be accessible—in the chow line, on the rifle range, in the mess hall, or in the barracks.”

Anyone familiar with the history of war will know that military science is not the science of agreement or passivity; the edifice of war history is etched with instances in which commanders have not agreed with each other—this friction is beneficial. Foley shares insights about military leadership in difficult moments.

“Leaders must also have the courage to say no when the mission has unacceptable risk, when essential resources are not provided, or when following orders is simply not an option,” writes Foley. “A solid background in moral-ethical reasoning is essential for leaders to feel confident in asserting their beliefs.… They can’t walk by the red flags of ethical turmoil and then maintain, during damage recovery, that there were no indicators.”

Standing Tall

Leadership Lessons in the Life of a Soldier
by Robert F. Foley, Casemate Publishers, 2022

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On Feb. 15, when Senior Airman Jordan Smith was helping her colleagues clean out storage areas in the 673rd Air Base Wing public affairs office at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, she wasn’t sure what she would find.

Before long, she happened upon a piece of Army history, tucked into dilapidated binders — 1,444 silver gelatin large-format black-and-white prints, virtually all complete with typed captions, documenting three major Army training exercises that occurred between 1959 and 1963. The photos were taken by uniformed Army Signal Corps photographers.

And thanks to her and the other airmen and civilians of the wing public affairs office, all of them, less a few duplicates, were digitized and published online three months later. The project provided a unique visual window into the Army’s Arctic lifestyle more than 60 years ago; most such photographs are held at the National Archives and are not easily accessible online.

Army Times spoke with the two Air Force civilians — McCann, the base’s webmaster and public affairs editor, and Justin Connaher, the base’s lead photographer and visual studio manager — who led the digitization effort. Both are Army veterans.

The top Army officer in Alaska, Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler, praised their work in a statement emailed to Army Times. The 11th Airborne Division commander said, “It’s hard to overestimate the value of this historic find and the preservation work by the 673d team.”

Eifler and his deputies have emphasized heritage as part of their efforts to instill a sense of camaraderie among troops there.

“As we move forward on our mission to regain Arctic dominance, the ability to look back at these types of extreme cold weather training events from 60-plus years ago will give us a better historic perspective and a connection to the roots of our Arctic Ethos,” Eifler added. “We have come full circle to today with our Arctic exercises as a part of Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center.”

‘A labor of love’

After discovering the photos, McCann and Connaher quickly realized the enormity of the task at hand. Their supervisor, Air Force Maj. Clay Lancaster, realized they were obligated to preserve the records, but wanted them to be made as accessible as possible.

“The binders were not in great shape,” McCann, who deployed to Iraq twice as an enlisted public affairs soldier, recalled. “Some of the photos were falling off; some of the cutlines were falling off.”

So McCann and Connaher researched what archival techniques and equipment they would need to produce original-quality resolution scans of the photos. Connaher, luckily, had worked in archives during a college internship, so he knew where to find techniques and instructions.

Ultimately, their team set up a copy stand where Connaher and others — civilian Joey Miller, Airman 1st Class Julia Lebens and Senior Airman Patrick Sullivan — took photos of the vintage prints. The ad hoc setup included what McCann described as their “happy lights” — the military-issued sun lamps that help Arctic-based personnel ward off Vitamin D deficiency during the long nights of the winter months. They then used photo editing software to enhance the reproductions.

Simultaneously, McCann retyped the captions that were glued into the binders and inserted them into the files’ metadata, to help researchers and history buffs understand what they were seeing in the images.

The process took roughly three months and more than 400 hours of collective work, the pair said, despite other public affairs work frequently interrupting their progress.

Those interruptions also included research sidetracks, McCann confessed.

“These people are doing incredible things,” Connaher remembered thinking. He said McCann would run into his work area and gush about the people in the photos, which included ski jumper Spc. Jon St. Andre, who competed at the 1960 Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley, California.

“Here’s this fresh-faced kid, jumping off of a mountain in this photograph that was taken with a four by five-speed graphic, which is unfathomable that the photographer could even do that,” Connaher added. “That kind of gummed up the process for us because we kept stopping periodically to search these people. It was a labor of love for us.”

What the photos depict

McCann acknowledged that in some ways, the photos reflect a bygone era of Cold War service. But they also capture some timeless elements of the Army in the Arctic. Take the ballad of Spc. Jerry Dickens, a Signal Corps photographer whose shots were numerous in the files.

Connaher laughed in agreement as McCann continued. “He got names, duty titles, ranks, hometown…200 some photos with all these great cutlines.”

But one day in February 1962, something changed. The pair have a theory.

“We got to a certain day where he just mailed it in for like four cutlines. I mean, no detail. A couple of minor spelling errors,” McCann recalled. “Just made me wonder what happened on this day. Jerry, what happened to you? This is out of character.”

Connaher praised Dickens’ printing abilities, and theorized that his bad day must’ve occurred when “he probably got snapped up by some first sergeant for some sort of minor infraction or something…you could almost put yourself in that time in 1962 and feel his pain as an enlisted soldier.”

Sadly, Dickens has passed away, so the world will never know why he had one bad day in early 1962. “He took great pride you can tell in the entire process. The guy was really impressive,” Connaher said. “We truly appreciate this level of professionalism as a Signal Corps photographer.”

Connaher argued the photos offer lessons about Arctic warfare and the Army today, too.

“A lot of people will say like, ‘The old Army…is tough and the new Army isn’t,’ in some ways, right?” he said. “You look at these photographs, and you see [Alaska] is just as unforgiving today as it was then.”

The photographer, who served in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantryman in the mid-1990s, said that speaks to the quality of the troops there.

“Alaska is every bit as tough and unforgiving as it ever has been,” Connaher said. “And soldiers who serve in Alaska have to be every bit as tough in 2023 as they had to be in 1963.”

Editor’s note: Interested readers can review the historical photos on the wing’s Flickr page, which has dedicated albums for Exercise Little Bear (1959-60), Exercise Great Bear (1961-62), and Exercise Timberline (1963).

On Friday the 13th of August 1948 U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Sterling P. Bettinger tried to land his Douglas C-54 Skymaster transport at Berlin’s Tempelhof Field. Aboard was a VIP passenger—Maj. Gen. William H. Tunner, the new director of operations for the seven-week-old Berlin Airlift. Unfortunately, recalled Tunner in his memoir Over the Hump, “at that moment everything was going completely to hell in Berlin. The ceiling had suddenly fallen in on Tempelhof. The clouds dropped to the tops of the apartment buildings surrounding the field, and then they suddenly gave way in a cloudburst that obscured the runway from the tower. The radar could not penetrate the sheets of rain.” One aircraft crashed; another blew out its tires braking to avoid the crash.

Bettinger joined a cluster of pilots circling over Tempelhof, waiting as ground controllers tried to sort out the mess. “The pilots filled the air with chatter, calling in constantly in near panic to find out what was going on,” Tunner recalled. “On the ground a traffic jam was building up as planes came off the unloading line…but were refused permission to take off for fear of collision with the planes milling around overhead. ‘This is a hell of a way to run a railroad,’ I snarled.”

Two months earlier the Cold War had heated up dramatically. Unhappy with plans by the Western Allies (France, Britain and the United States) to create a federal government uniting the portions of Germany they occupied, the Soviet Union in retaliation blockaded the American, British and French occupation sectors in isolated West Berlin. On June 19 the Russians blocked automotive and rail passenger service between western Germany and Berlin. On the 24th they halted all barge and rail freight shipments, cutting the primary supply and commerce links for more than 2 million Berliners. The only means left to the Western Allies to sustain the city was by air transport. “Members of the Soviet military administration in Germany celebrated when the blockade began,” wrote U.S. Air Force historian Roger Miller. “None had doubts that the blockade would succeed.” Major General Lucius Clay, military governor of the American occupied zone of Germany, recalled the Russians were “confident that it would be physically impossible for the Western Allies to maintain their position in Berlin.” The chaos Tunner and Bettinger encountered at Tempelhof seemed to validate Soviet confidence the airlift would fail.

A year later, though, it was the Western Allies who were celebrating. Between June 26, 1948, and Sept. 30, 1949, Allied transport planes completed 277,569 cargo flights, carrying 2,325,509 tons of supplies, into West Berlin. West Berliners had suffered a great deal, but they had endured, and the Western Allies’ position in the divided city had remained strong. On May 12, 1949, the Russians threw in the towel and reopened land and water access to the western sectors—without receiving any concessions regarding the formation of a West German government. (The airlift continued through September to build up emergency supply stocks in Berlin.) The airlift achieved what many thought was impossible: fulfilling the critical needs of a modern city’s population solely through air transport. Allied determination and organization had won the West’s first major victory in the Cold War.

On June 28, four days after the blockade began, the U.S. Departments of State and Defense briefed President Harry S. Truman on the situation. Miller, in his book To Save a City, notes the president quickly quashed any idea of withdrawal. “Abandoning Berlin, [Truman] affirmed, was beyond discussion,” Miller wrote. “The United States was in Berlin by agreement, and the Soviets had no right to push its forces out.”

British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin agreed. A former truck driver and union official, Bevin was the opposite of the stereotypical sophisticated English diplomat. Bevin had displayed his less-than-genteel manner at the July 1946 Paris Peace Conference. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had hurled insults at the British during the meetings and continued the badgering at dinner one night. “Bevin exploded in rage,” wrote Giles Milton in his book Checkmate in Berlin. State Department official Charles Bohlen recalled Bevin “rose to his feet, his hands knotted into fists, and started toward Molotov, saying, ‘I’ve had enough of this, I ’ave.’ For one glorious moment it looked as if the foreign minister of Great Britain and the foreign minister of the Soviet Union were about to come to blows.” (Security intervened, defused the situation and spoiled the moment.) When the Soviets blockaded Berlin, Bevin demanded the Western Allies stand firm. Milton quotes him as saying he “did not want withdrawal to be contemplated in any quarter.” Ordered to stay in Berlin, the American and British military had to figure out how to maintain their position there.

Hardly any Western officials thought an airlift could satisfy Berlin’s needs for an extended period. “Rather it was a stopgap measure,” Miller wrote, “an expedient that enabled Western leaders to buy the time…to negotiate without either the need to give in at some point to Soviet pressure or to escalate the situation beyond control.”

A 1945 agreement between the wartime Allies established six corridors for aircraft travel to and from Berlin—three from the Soviet occupation zone, two from the British and one from the American. The Russians, loath to provoke armed conflict, didn’t contest the three western corridors. Anyway, they thought the airlift would fail. Before the blockade Berlin imported approximately 12,000 tons of supplies a day. American, British and French occupation officials calculated that West Berlin’s population, Western Allied personnel and their families would require a minimum of 4,500 tons daily to survive, while at most Royal Air Force and U.S. Air Force transport aircraft in Europe could carry 1,000 tons a day. West Berlin was not wholly sealed off from the outside world. It still received supplies from the Soviet zone, but not nearly enough to survive.

Clay added his voice to Truman’s and Bevin’s, arguing forcefully for the West to do whatever necessary to stay in Berlin. On June 25 Clay warned Army leadership that the West’s credibility in Germany could be mortally wounded if they abandoned the western sectors. “Thousands of Germans have courageously expressed their opposition to Communism,” he told them. “We must not destroy their confidence by any indication of departure from Berlin.”

During World War II Clay had established a reputation in the Pentagon as a logistical and managerial wizard. When supplies for Allied forces in Europe had backed up in the freshly liberated port at Cherbourg, Clay unsnarled the mess. That gravitas helped Clay convince others the Western Allies could supply all of Berlin’s needs by air. In late July he advised Washington that if it sent larger cargo aircraft, and many more of them, the U.S. and British aircrews could fly enough missions each day to keep West Berlin alive. Air Force leadership had serious doubts, as satisfying Clay’s wishes would leave it with few cargo aircraft for its growing list of missions worldwide. Regardless, Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenburg affirmed that if Washington committed itself fully to the mission, Berlin could be supplied by air. Truman gave the go-ahead, and Clay got his resources.

The Americans and British had actually been airlifting cargo into West Berlin since April. That month the Soviets had imposed restrictions on Western Allied rail travel to West Germany. Considering it an omen of traffic disruptions to come, the Western Allies started stockpiling food and coal in West Berlin. Some of those supplies came by air in an operation dubbed the “Little Lift.” When the Soviet blockade started in June, U.S. and British cargo planes ramped up that air operation. But the primary cargo airframe in the European theater was the Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Most were World War II leftovers, some still bearing their black-and-white D-Day invasion stripes. At most the twin-engine C-47 could carry little more than 3 tons.

The four-engine C-54 Skymaster, on the other hand, could carry more than 13 tons of cargo. Thus, the Air Force started deploying C-54 squadrons from bases around the world to western Germany. (The Navy also provided two squadrons.) Many flew to Germany with only hours’ notice. Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, a C-54 pilot deployed from Alabama, recalled landing in Rhein-Main Air Base near Frankfurt with a contingent of Skymaster pilots and crewmen. Within two hours one of those crews was flying a plane to Berlin. Eventually, 225 C-54s were assigned to the airlift.

The airlift received new leadership—Tunner, who arrived in Germany on July 28. He would command the Combined Airlift Task Force (CALTF), an ad-hoc combined command that would coordinate and direct U.S. and British airlift operations. He’d already earned the nickname “Tonnage Tunner” for having led U.S. airlift operations over the Himalayas (the “Hump”) into China during World War II. Renowned as an air transport expert, he helped create the Army Air Forces Ferrying Command. He’d been watching the early stages of the Berlin Airlift from Washington. When Truman resolved to intensify the effort, Tunner got his chance.

The early days of the airlift were dramatic. Newspapers and news broadcasts ran stories of pilots rushing out to cargo aircraft parked haphazardly around their airfields and zooming off with them into the German skies. To readers and viewers worldwide it looked inspiring and dramatic. Yet to Tunner it reeked of inefficiency. (Halvorsen described the early days as a “real cowboy” operation.) “The actual operation of a successful airlift is about as glamorous as drops of water on stone,” said Tunner, in Over the Hump:

There’s no frenzy, no flap, just the inexorable process of getting the job done. In a successful airlift you don’t see planes parked all over the place; they’re either in the air, on loading or unloading ramps, or being worked on. You don’t see personnel milling around; flying crews are either flying or resting up so that they can fly again tomorrow. Ground crews are either working on their assigned planes or resting up so that they can work on them again tomorrow.

“Under Tunner,” wrote Miller, “the monotony of repetition replaced the romance of flying.” Tunner set out to organize the airlift in exacting detail and refine it into a smooth, efficient operation.

In the first few months of the airlift chaos was not uncommon in the skies directly over Berlin. Aircraft from eight different airfields in Germany converged on just two in Berlin—Tempelhof, in the American sector, and RAF Gatow, in the British sector. When poor weather or problems on the ground made it difficult to land, planes would end up “stacked,” circling at different altitudes as they waited. Tunner ended up in one of those stacks over Tempelhof, in cloudy weather and heavy rains, on that “Black Friday” August 13 flight to Berlin. “A huge, confusing, milling mass of aircraft circled in a stack from 3,000 to 12,000 feet,” wrote Miller, “in danger of collision or of drifting out of the corridors completely.”

Tunner radioed Tempelhof tower: “This is 5549, Tunner talking, and you better listen. Send every plane in the stack back to its home base.” Afterward, Tunner implemented new landing procedures for the Berlin airfields. If an aircraft missed its landing approach, it wouldn’t circle and try again; it would return to western Germany. Such was a far safer and more efficient way to manage landing operations. Air traffic controllers were no longer tasked with inserting stray aircraft back into the landing pattern; they could focus instead on managing a steady stream of incoming planes. “In the same 90 minutes it took to bring in nine aircraft stacked over Berlin,” Miller wrote, “the airlift could land 30 C-54s carrying 300 tons using the straight-in approach and landing at three-minute intervals.”

Airlift controllers closely managed the ways planes flew in the corridors. They used time spacing to separate the aircraft, usually in three- to six-minute intervals. Aircraft announced the times they passed key radio beacons. Each aircraft crew knew the tail numbers of the three aircraft in front of and behind them. When they heard an aircraft announce its position, they would adjust their speed or heading to keep their proper place in the airflow. Any plane that lost radio communications or couldn’t keep its place in the flow had standing orders to fly home.

this article first appeared in Military History magazine

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Pilots flew by instrument flight rules, even if the weather was good. Traffic in the corridors was one-way. The British used six airfields, and all sent their aircraft to Berlin through the northern airlift corridor, which originated north of Hamburg. The Americans flew from bases at Rhein-Main and Wiesbaden through the southern corridor. All aircraft returned to western Germany through the central corridor, which emptied near Hannover.

Tunner realized he couldn’t increase tonnage by adding more aircraft to the airlift. Washington had only so many planes to send, and the traffic patterns in the air corridors and parking aprons at the airfields were already full. So, he looked for other ways to maximize cargo throughput. The northern corridor was shorter than the southern, so planes that used it could fly more round trips per day. The American C-54s could carry more cargo than the C-47s and other aircraft the British were using, so Tunner stationed some American squadrons in the British zone. The USAF stripped unnecessary equipment (such as the LORAN long-range navigation systems) out of the C-54s to enable them to carry more cargo.

The more time a plane spent on the ground, the less cargo it could carry to Berlin. CALTF planners examined every step in the loading/unloading process, looking for ways to cut time, increase safety margins and improve overall performance. Logistics planners realized that if multiple pieces of equipment were used to load aircraft, that added time to the loading process (and increased chances an errant forklift could damage a plane). CALTF switched to putting a plane’s cargo load on just one truck. The truck driver would shadow the Follow Me jeep that guided a newly landed plane to its parking spot. As the crew shut down its engines, German workers would jump from the truck, ready to load the plane for its return trip to Berlin. In Berlin aircrews were told to stay by their aircraft during loading/unloading, instead of going inside for coffee. Mobile canteens, manned by pretty Fräuleins, carried refreshments out to the flight line. After pilots informed Tunner their planes flew sluggishly when carrying coal, CALTF personnel weighed the coal bags. They found that overzealous German workers were packing as much coal in the bags as they could—more than the bags were supposed to hold—resulting in overloaded planes.

Airlift Medal

Authorized by Congress on July 20, 1949, the Medal for Humane Action recognized any service member who performed at least 120 days of duty in direct support of the Berlin Airlift. It depicts a Douglas C-54 Skymaster over a wheat wreath and the coat of arms of Berlin.

The French weren’t part of the CALTF operation. They had few cargo aircraft, and Allied planners were concerned French-speaking pilots might have problems communicating with British and American air traffic controllers. The French did contribute one memorable episode to the airlift story, though. To improve the flow of cargo into Berlin, the Western Allies in November 1948 opened a third airfield, Tegel, in the French occupation zone. Partially obstructing its runway was a broadcast tower used by Soviet-controlled Berliner Rundfunk (Radio Berlin). The French formally asked the Soviets to move the tower, at Allied expense, but were refused. Then one morning that December General Jean Ganeval, the French commandant in Berlin, summoned to his office American personnel working on the airfield. Some minutes into the meeting they heard an explosion outdoors. The Americans rushed to the window of Ganeval’s office in time to watch the tower collapse to the ground. According to several accounts, Ganeval turned to the shocked Americans and said simply, “You will have no more trouble with the tower.” When the angry Soviets asked Ganeval how he could have done something like that, the French commandant reportedly replied, “With dynamite.”

The Berlin Blockade ultimately backfired on the Soviets. It increased support in the American, British and French occupation zones for the planned West German government. “American intelligence analysts reported widespread demoralization and membership loss among Communists in all parts of [Germany],” note Army historians Donald A. Carter and William Stivers. “The Soviet coercive measures against Berlin strengthened the Western position in Germany as a whole.” Alarmed Western European nations became more interested in collective security initiatives, an interest that led to the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in April 1949.

The airlift, by contrast, proved a public relations bonanza for the Western Allies. In April 1949, on Easter Sunday, the airlift staged a one-day transport blitz during which 1,398 flights carried in 12,941 tons of cargo—the same amount West Berlin had received daily by rail, road and water during peacetime. “I hope that the Communists, who have spent so much time insulting us, will realize that we really aren’t such a soft democracy,” crowed Brig. Gen. Frank L. Howley, the U.S. commandant in Berlin, after the blockade ended. The airlift also improved German-American relations. American newsreels praised West Berliners for their determination to endure the blockade. German children played “airlift” with toy planes. Halvorsen gained headline acclaim as the “Candy Bomber,” dropping candy from handkerchief parachutes to crowds of grateful West Berlin children.

Clay retaliated against the Soviets with his own blockade of raw materials and finished goods that eastern Germany desperately needed from western Germany. For instance, Germany’s best source for coking coal, critical in steel production, were the mines of the Ruhr, in the British occupation zone. Meanwhile, the economy of the Soviet occupation zone, still struggling after World War II, was losing many of its own resources and products to the Russians for their own use. “The eastern zone economy suffered grievously from the counterblockade,” Carter and Stivers wrote. By February Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, succumbing to a public relations nightmare of his own doing, had signaled American diplomats he was keen to end the crisis.

Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis called the Berlin Airlift “the first clear Soviet defeat in the Cold War.” In hot wars nations inflict defeat on one another using soldiers, armor, airpower and high explosives. The Cold War was a different kind of war, so it’s fitting that its first major victory was won not through violence, but by persistence and excellence in effort. “I don’t have much of a natural sense of rhythm,” Tunner wrote in his memoir. “I’m certainly no threat to Fred Astaire, and a drumstick to me is something that grows on a chicken. But when it comes to airlifts, I want rhythm.” The Americans and British achieved rhythm in the skies over Berlin. They created an airborne conveyor belt that kept a city alive, helped transform the Germans and Americans from wartime enemies into peacetime friends, united Western Europe and inspired freedom-loving people across the globe.

Don Smith is a retired U.S. Army Reserve officer with degrees in history and intelli-gence studies. He’s worked as a defense contractor with various Defense Department agencies for more than 30 years. For further reading he recommends To Save a City, by Roger Miller; Checkmate in Berlin, by Giles Milton; and The City Becomes a Symbol, by William Stivers and Donald A. Carter.

The Irrepressible ‘Candy Bomber’

Gail Halvorsen joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942 and trained on fight-ers with the Royal Air Force. Reassigned to military transport service, Halvorsen remained in the service at war’s end. He was flying Douglas C-74 Globemasters and C-54 Skymasters out of Mobile, Ala., when word came in June 1948 that the Soviet Union had blockaded West Berlin. During the 15-month airlift (Operation Vittles), American and British pilots delivered more than 2.3 million tons of supplies to the city. But it was Halvorsen’s decision to airdrop candy to children (Operation Little Vittles) that clinched an ideological battle and earned him the lasting affection of a free West Berlin. The beloved “Candy Bomber” died at age 101 on Feb. 16, 2022.

In 2009 Military History editor David Lauterborn was fortunate enough to interview Halvorsen. Following is an excerpt of their conversation, available in full online at Historynet.com/candy-bomber-gail-halvorsen.

What prompted you to start dropping candy?

At the end of the [Tempelhof] runway, in an open space between the bombed-out buildings and barbed wire, kids were watching the air-planes coming in over the rooftops. They came right up to the barbed wire and spoke to me in English: “Don’t give up on us. If we lose our freedom, we’ll never get it back.” American-style freedom was their dream. Hitler’s past and Stalin’s future was their nightmare. I just flipped. Got so interested, I forgot what time it was.

I looked at my watch and said, “Holy cow, I gotta go! Goodbye. Don’t worry.” I took three steps. Then I realized—these kids had me stopped dead in my tracks for over an hour, and not one of 30 had put out their hand. They were so grateful for flour, to be free, that they wouldn’t be beggars for something extravagant. This was stronger than overt gratitude—this was silent gratitude. How can I reward these kids?

I went back to the fence and pulled out my two sticks of Wrigley’s Doublemint, broke them in half and passed the four pieces through the barbed wire….I told them, “Come back here tomorrow, and when I come in to land, I’ll drop enough gum for all of you.”

One asked, “How do we know what airplane you’re in?”

“I’ll wiggle the wings.”

“Vas ist viggle?” he asked.

How did you work it?

My copilot and engineer gave me their candy rations—big double handfuls of Hershey, Mounds and Baby Ruth bars and Wrigley’s gum. It was heavy, and I thought, Boy, put that in a bundle and hit ’em in the head going 110 miles an hour, it’ll make the wrong impression. So, I made three handkerchief parachutes and tied strings tight around the candy. The next day I came in over the field, and there were those kids in that open space. I wiggled the wings, and they just blew up—I can still see their arms. The crew chief threw the rolled-up parachutes out the flare chute behind the pilot seat.

As your efforts grew in scope, did anyone notice?

[One day] an officer met the airplane and said, “The colonel wants to see you right now.” So I went in, and he says, “Whatcha doing, Halvorsen?”

“Flying like mad, sir.”

“I’m not stupid. What else you been doing?” And he pulled out a newspaper with a big article and a photograph of my plane and the tail number. So I told him. He understood, and airlift commander General William Tunner said, “Keep doing it!”

What kept you going?

Without hope the soul dies. And that was so appropriate for the day. In our own neighborhoods people have lost hope, lost function because they have no outside source of inspiration. The airlift was a symbol that we were going to be there—service before self.

Operation Little Vittles dropped more than 21 tons of candy during the airlift. How does that total strike you?

All from two sticks of gum in 1948—unbelievable!

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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The Tupolev airliner rolled to a stop in Moscow on August 19, 1955. Aboard was KGB agent Evgeny Brik, back home for a vacation from his assignment in Canada. Glancing out a window, Brik saw a black limousine with curtained windows pull up and stop next to the airplane. “As he descended the steps leading from the aircraft he was astonished to see Nikolai Alekseyevich Korznikov step from the car,” wrote Donald G. Mahar in Shattered Illusions: KGB Cold War Espionage in Canada. Korznikov was a senior KGB officer who was responsible for the operations of KGB illegals all over the world. “Korznikov greeted him politely and motioned for him to enter the vehicle.”

Brik fought to remain calm. He knew that the most likely fate for a spy who provided information to a western intelligence service was likely a brutal interrogation followed by a bullet to the back of the head. He had reasons for concern. While living in Canada under the alias of David Soboloff, Brik had confessed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Security Service that he had been running a Soviet spy ring inside the top-secret Avro Arrow CF-105 interceptor program. He had requested asylum in Canada.

The KGB knew all this, because RCMP officer James Douglas Morrison had tipped them off in exchange for money to pay his gambling debts.

A.V. Roe Canada Ltd., a subsidiary of the British Hawker-Siddeley Group, was created in 1945 from a merger of Victory Aircraft and several other aircraft companies that had been established during World War II to produce warplanes for the conflict in Europe. A consortium of government and businesspeople set up a subsidiary company, Avro Canada, to design and build civilian jet transports and a jet interceptor. Avro Canada’s twin-jet CF-100 Canuck—Canada’s first homegrown combat aircraft—made its debut flight in January 1950, but the country’s military realized it needed a better interceptor than the subsonic Canuck to counter the growing Soviet threat in the wake of the USSR’s introduction of the long-range Tupolev TU-4 heavy bomber and the explosion of its own atomic bomb in 1949. 

Design work began in 1953 on the airplane that would become the Avro Arrow and the Orenda PS.13 Iroquois engines that would power it, based on specifications provided by the government. “What the airstaff were asking for was the moon,” chief engineer Jim Floyd told author Greig Stewart in 1988. “In short, they required a two-place, twin-engined aircraft with all-weather reliability, long range, short take-off and landing, an internal weapons compartment as large as the bomb bay of a B-29, and a supersonic maneuverability of 2G at Mach 1.5 at 50,000 feet, without any loss of speed or altitude—a requirement which has been met by few, if any, service aircraft even to this day. In addition, it was to be guided by the most sophisticated automatic flight and fire control system ever envisaged.” When the Canadian government issued its operational requirements in 1953, a Royal Canadian Air Force evaluation team concluded that no aircraft then on the drawing boards could meet the required specifications. Avro Canada rose to the challenge with the Arrow, a delta wing, Mach 2-capable interceptor with what was then an advanced fly-by-wire system. The Arrow was envisioned to counter the threat of Soviet bombers armed with nuclear bombs flying over the North Pole to attack North America.

As America would be the Soviets’ main target for a nuclear attack, the United States supported Avro Canada throughout the Arrow’s design, testing and manufacturing stages. The assistance including providing 19 Pratt & Whitney J-75 jet engines, giving Avro Canada access to supersonic wind tunnels, lending it a Boeing B-47 Stratojet for flight testing the Iroquois as well as providing a research facility in Tennessee to test the engines. The U.S. also let Avro Canada use the missile launch facility at Wallops Island, Virginia, to test large free flight models of the airplane.

Avro rolled out the first CF-105 on October 4, 1957. As though to underscore the Cold War tensions behind the airplane, that was also the day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. The Arrow, powered by the American Pratt & Whitneys, made its first flight on March 25, 1958, with the program’s chief test pilot, Janusz Żurakowski, at the controls. The first CF-105 was followed by four more, all fitted with the American engines. With test pilot Spud Potocki flying, Arrow 25204 reached a speed of Mach 1.98 (1,320 mph) while in a 60-degree climb on November 11, 1958. Potocki pronounced himself impressed, telling the authors of the 1980 book Avro Arrow, “I’m not sure that the average person would realize just how really advanced the Arrow was…. The Arrow ‘fly by wire’ control system was easily the most advanced in the world in 1958.”

Avro expected the airplane’s performance would only improve once equipped with the homegrown engines. The Iroquois was intended to be in the 30,000-lb. thrust range (compared to the 26,500 lbs. delivered by the Pratt & Whitneys on afterburners) and was being designed by Orenda, the gas turbine division of Avro Canada. The first example of the MK 2 Arrows, RL-206, was intended to receive the Iroquois engines and was nearly complete on the day the program was canceled in 1959. 

But by then, it appears the Arrow had already been hopelessly compromised by Soviet spies. 

In 1945 Canadian intelligence had received a wake-up call about the dangers of Soviet espionage. That September, Igor Gouzenko, a 26-year-old cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa, defected and turned over files that laid bare evidence of massive Soviet infiltration of western intelligence services, as well as secrets from industrial, political and research circles. As individuals identified in Gouzenko’s documents were arrested and cross-examined, their testimony revealed links to other Soviet spies, who were then picked up secretly to avoid tipping off the embassy.

Gouzenko’s information revealed the extent of the Soviet desire to unlock secrets of U.S. and Canadian defenses. One spy exposed by Gouzenko’s information had given the Soviets samples of U-235 bomb grade fissionable material as well as many nuclear secrets. Another man the security services arrested was a member of the Canadian parliament. 

The Soviets added one more spy to their Canadian roster in 1951, when Evgeny Brik arrived. He had lived in New York City as a child, but returned to the USSR during World War II with his father, a former official with the Soviet trade mission. Trained by the KGB as a deep cover agent and given the identity of David Soboloff, Brik had instructions to establish an identity in Canada in preparation for an intended move to New York City to serve as the radio and signals communication operator for established KGB illegal Rudolf Abel.

Instead, Brik fell in love with the wife of a Canadian soldier and persuaded his superiors that it would be best for him to stay in Canada. In 1953 he went to the RCMP, revealed himself as a Russian spy and requested asylum in Canada. He agreed to serve as a double agent. His handler would be Terry Guernsey, the RCMP officer in charge of counterintelligence operations.

One of the Soviet spies Brik handled had the code name “Lind”—his true identity remains unknown—who was running spy rings in Avro Canada and at the Orenda engine plant. In 1955, with Guernsey’s knowledge, Brik handed his KGB handler more than five pounds of top-secret documents from Avro that he had obtained from the mysterious Lind. The haul included airframe and engine drawings for the Arrow as well as photographs and test data. Guernsey allowed the document transfer to take place because the RCMP wanted to observe the spy cell in operation before they shut it down, even if it meant compromising the Arrow. According to Guernsey, that wouldn’t matter. Someone in government had told him that the Arrow “would be obsolete in few years anyway.”

If there’s any doubt that the Arrow was hopelessly compromised, in October 1958, only seven months after the Arrow’s first flight, Avro Canada’s Jim Floyd was asked by his boss, Fred Smye, to arrange a tour for a group of Soviet aircraft engineers. Smye told Floyd to show the Soviets Avro’s design and manufacturing facilities and “answer any questions they may have.” At first, Floyd said, he refused, but Smye told him he would find someone else to give the briefing. Floyd asked if he should withhold performance specifications. “They already know,” responded Smye. In the end, Floyd gave the tour of the Arrow facilities, keeping his information as vague as possible, and Orenda Engines’ chief engineer, Charles Grinyer, gave a tour of the engine plant. It is almost certain that the order came down from Canada’s Department of Defence Production. Why this was allowed to happen remains a mystery.

The announcement came only a few months later, at 11:00 a.m. on February 20, 1959, in the massive Avro Canada Plant beside what is now Toronto Pearson International Airport, and in the Orenda Engine plant across the road. All work on the Arrow and Iroquois engines was to stop. The government had canceled the program.

Two months later the five complete and flying Arrows and the 37 aircraft in various stages of assembly were ordered destroyed, along with all test data, engineering drawings and all Orenda Iroquois engines and parts. Avro couldn’t survive the cancellation, which threw thousands out of work and forced a substantial talent drain to the United States and other countries. A.V. Roe Canada was out of business by 1962.

The cancellation of the Arrow remains a controversial subject in Canada. It appears that some members of the government felt the program was taking too big a bite out of the defense budget at the expense of the army and navy. Some have speculated that the United States, preferring that Canada purchase American aircraft, was behind the cancellation, but that seems unlikely based on the amount of support it had already provided. It’s also possible the Soviets had other people inside the government who were working to influence the program’s cancellation.

Hoping to keep his team intact, in the summer of 1959 Floyd arranged to have around 30 of his best engineers go to the United States to work on the space program. Floyd himself left Avro to work on the British-French Concorde project. Without the Arrow to replace it, the CF-100 remains to this day Canada’s only mass-produced, homegrown interceptor. 

After he returned to Moscow, Evgeny “David Soboloff” Brik endured 15 years in a Soviet prison, some of that time in solitary confinement, followed by several more years in a work camp. Brik did not know why he escaped execution but felt that it may have been due to the turmoil created by the death of Stalin two years before his trial. Perhaps high-ranking KGB officers did not wish to be associated with an exposed operation or felt that an execution may have focused too much attention on them. In 1991 Brik showed up at the British Embassy in Lithuania and asked if he could return to Canada. He lived in Ottawa until his death at the age of 89 in 2011. 

Did the Soviets incorporate any of the knowledge they gained from the Arrow into their own designs? It’s possible. For instance, they may have pirated some of the Arrow’s boundary layer research and used it to design air intakes for their own aircraft, but the answer to that question—like the identity of the mysterious Lind—remains undetermined. 

Little remains of the Avro Arrow today. Much that escaped destruction survived because Avro Canada employees removed parts from the company without authorization. Today, the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa has an Arrow nose section, along with other bits and pieces and an Iroquois engine. Those artifacts, along with a Pratt & Whitney J-75 and a damaged Iroquois engine at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario, are almost all that remains of an aircraft that by many accounts would have put Canada in the forefront of military aviation—and as a result became the target of Soviet espionage.  

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In 1932 the Aeronautics Branch of the U.S. Commerce Department issued a requirement for a safer monoplane air transport, which Boeing first satisfied with its Model 247. Aircraft designer Donald Wills Douglas soon outclassed all comers with his more advanced designs, including a prototype DC-1, the improved DC-2 and the Douglas Sleeper Transport (DST), with a rounded, more capacious fuselage capable of carrying up to 16 overnight passengers or 24 daytime riders. The DST first flew on Dec. 17, 1935. It and its 21-seat non-sleeper variant, the DC-3, revolutionized air transport as the first truly profitable airliners.

During World War II Douglas militarized DC-3s with cargo doors, hoist attachments and a strengthened floor. Designated C-47 Skytrains by the U.S. Army, Dakotas by the British Royal Air Force and Lisunov Li-2s by the Soviets (who built them under license), they became mainstays of Allied cargo and troop transport. Each plane could carry 28 fully equipped troops or up to 6,000 pounds of cargo, including a jeep or an M3 37 mm antitank gun. More than 10,000 C-47 variants were built.

After the war a new generation of faster four-engine airliners eclipsed the DC-3 on the transoceanic routes, but its war surplus numbers, outstanding safety record and overall performance kept it useful as a medium-range feeder liner for decades thereafter. Most of the transports used in the 1948–49 Berlin Airlift (see P. 24) were Skytrains of the Military Air Transport Service and RAF Dakotas. The U.S. military continued to use the airframe well into the 1970s in a variety of roles, including as the lethal AC-47D Spooky gunship in Vietnam.

This story appeared in the 2023 Summer issue of Military History magazine.

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The Uzi submachine gun (SMG)/machine pistol is an iconic firearms design, with a silhouette possibly as recognizable as that of the AK-47. It emerged in a unique time and space in post-World War II history.

In 1948, the newborn State of Israel, surrounded on all borders by active enemies, recognized the need to rationalize and update its chaotic weapons inventory. Israel Military Industries (IMI), the official state arms manufacturer, commissioned two engineer officers to design a new SMG for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). One of them, Capt. Uziel Gal, lent his name to the winning weapon, which went into service as the 9mm Uzi SMG in 1954 alongside the 7.62mm FN FAL as the standard infantry battle rifle.

Gal’s overall design was inspired by the Czech CZ 25, but he perfected it in a weapon cheap to produce, easy to fire, simple to service, and ruggedly dependable. As with the CZ 25, the Uzi incorporated the magazine housing into the pistol grip and used a telescoping bolt with a blowback action. It could race through a magazine at a cyclical rate of 600rpm and was accurate up to 200 yards (fired in the semi-automatic mode; automatic fire accuracy is much less, about 50 yards).

The Uzi cut its teeth in the IDF’s wars of the 1950s and 60s, where it proved ideal for urban and close-quarters combat. It also achieved major export success, particularly to foreign special forces. The Uzi evolved over time, replacing its original wooden stock with folding metal varieties, developing even smaller Mini and Micro variants, and adopting various rails and accessories. Yet in regular Israeli military service, the rise of the assault rifle in the 1970s led to the IDF’s replacement of both the FN FAL and the Uzi by the 5.56mm Galil assault rifle.

Uzis continued in special forces, armored crews, and auxiliary service until the 2000s, and endures to this day on international markets.

Pistol grip

The combined pistol grip and magazine housing gives the weapon an excellent center of balance in the grip hand and fast reloading through an intuitive “hand-finds-hand” principle. As an additional safety feature, the button on the back of the grip had to be fully depressed by the grip hand before the weapon would fire.

Magazine

The standard Uzi magazine holds 32 rounds, although shorter and extended magazines are available.

Telescoping bolt

The front part of the bolt wrapped around and past the breech end of the barrel, to keep the bolt mass high but the weapon length short.

Receiver

The main body of the Uzi was simple pressed steel with the cocking lever running along the top of the weapon.

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On February 2, 2023, Pentagon officials revealed that a Chinese surveillance balloon had been drifting over parts of the United States, presumably to collect intelligence. “Once the balloon was detected, the U.S. government acted immediately to prevent against the collection of sensitive information,” said Pentagon spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder. In response, China said it “has no intention of infringing on any country’s territory and airspace.”

It’s not the first time that nations have used lighter-than-air devices to spy on adversaries. The United States tried it in the 1950s, with disappointing results.

One program went by various names, among them Grandson, Gopher and Genetrix. By any name it was a wild and crazy scheme—but maybe just crazy enough to work. Approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in December 1955 and run jointly by the Central Intelligence Agency, Air Force and Navy, the program sought  to uncover secrets behind the Iron Curtain by sending hundreds of camera-equipped balloons floating across the Soviet Union.

The polyethylene balloons, constructed by a division of the General Mills company, were designed to float at up to 85,000 feet and carried cameras in gondolas the size of refrigerators. The gondolas rotated to give the cameras maximum coverage during missions that could last up to two weeks.

The first nine balloons were launched from Turkey and West Germany on January 10, 1956, and took advantage of prevailing winds to float eastward across the Soviet Union and out over the Pacific Ocean. Hundreds more followed. The idea was that once these helium-filled spies had floated out of Soviet airspace, crewmembers of specially equipped Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcars would zero in on their homing signals and snag the gondolas in mid-air—the same kind of recovery technique later used to retrieve payloads from the first Corona spy satellites.

C-119s did recover a few gondolas, but not many. One source says only 45 out of 516, with only 32 of them producing usable photographs. The Soviet Union was predictably outraged by the violation of its airspace. The Russians put gondolas they had recovered on display in Moscow and sent angry diplomatic notes to the United States. The U.S. merely claimed that the intruders were innocent weather balloons—much as it later claimed the U-2 spy plane was conducting weather research.

Project Genetrix had limited success, with Eisenhower deciding that “the balloons gave more legitimate grounds for irritation than could be matched by the good obtained by them.” One Genetrix balloon did contribute to the U.S. intelligence effort, though. The images it obtained showed construction of a mysterious facility in Siberia near Dodonovo. Analysts realized the complex was a factory for nuclear refining.

The Air Force tried a similar eyes-in-the-skies effort in 1958 with an improved balloon called the WS-461L. Launched from an aircraft carrier in the Bering Sea, the balloons floated up to 110,000 feet to take advantage of a seasonal reversal of the jet stream and float west across the Soviet Union. The gondolas were set to jettison automatically from the balloon after 400 hours in the air, but no one thought to reset the timers after the launches were delayed. That meant the gondolas plunged to earth while still over the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets were not happy; neither was Eisenhower.

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The briefing took place at 7:00 a.m., and two hours later a Fairchild C-119J Flying Boxcar with the call sign Pelican 9 lifted off from Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii. It was August 19, 1960, and Pelican 9 was on its way to make a historic rendezvous.

Piloting the twin-engine cargo airplane was Captain Harold Mitchell. In World War II Mitchell had served as a bombardier and gunner on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and later flew transports for the Berlin Air Lift. During the Korean War, Mitchell flew C-119s and Douglas C-47s on combat drops of airborne troops at the Chosin Reservoir, as well as resupply, medevac and logistics missions.

Pelican 9’s copilot was Captain Richmond Apaka, who had graduated from the University of Hawaii before joining the Air Force. Also onboard were a winch operator, four loadmasters (two on each side of the fuselage), a photographer, navigator and flight engineer. They belonged to Test Squadron 6593 (Special), under the direction of the 6594th Test Group.

Pelican 9 flew to its assigned patrol area over the Pacific Ocean 300 miles southwest of Hickam. Shortly before 1:00 p.m., a capsule separated from a satellite in orbit high above. Before long Pelican 9 detected a signal from a descending object about 4,000 feet overhead, and then the crew spotted an orange and silver parachute. Dangling beneath it was a gold capsule—“the shape and size of a kettle drum gleaming in the sun,” as Mitchell described it. Mitchell slowed the aircraft to 120 knots and made a first pass as his boom operators tried to snag the target. They narrowly missed the capsule on the first two attempts, but the third time proved the charm, and the crew captured the parachute and its capsule at 8,500 feet. Chief pole operator SSgt. Algaene Harmon got on the intercom. “Good hit, Captain, we’ve got her in tow,” he said. The crew reeled in the metal canister, which was still black with soot from the retrorockets. Once they had it on board, they locked the capsule and its classified payload into a canister and turned back to Hickam.

 Pelican 9 had made the first aerial capture of an object from space. The capsule contained photographs of the Soviet Union taken by a spy satellite of Project Corona, a top-secret and high priority program for the American defense establishment. Corona combined what was then state-of-the-art satellite technology with a decidedly lower-tech recovery process—a propellor-driven cargo airplane using hooks to snatch the capsule out of the air. 

The C-119 Flying Boxcar that recovered the photos traced its origins to Sherman Fairchild (1896-1971), an aviation innovator, entrepreneur and 1979 inductee into the National Aviation Hall of Fame. One of his ventures was the Fairchild Aviation Corporation, the aerospace concern that built the twin-engine C-82 Packet, designed to replace cargo aircraft such as the Douglas C-47.

Fairchild Aviation later developed the C-119 as an improved version of the C-82. First flown in 1947, the C-119 had two 18-cylinder Wright Cyclone 3350 engines, similar to those used on aircraft such as the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The C-119 had a wingspan of 109 feet and was 87 feet long. Early model C-119s had a “clamshell” tail design that opened outward at the aircraft’s rear between and below its twin booms; the later C-119Js had a “beaver tail” that lifted out from the fuselage, an ideal feature for retrieving satellites. As its name attests, the Flying Boxcar wasn’t glamorous, but it served well in any number of roles in the 1950s, including dropping prefabricated bridge sections to Marines fighting in North Korea’s Chosin Reservoir; transporting French paratroopers and delivering supplies to French troops at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam; and carrying materials to build the Distant Early Warning line across Alaska and Canada. By the time production ended in 1955, almost 1,200 C-119s had been built. 

Boxcar pilot and historian Wendell Cosner noted that the airplane had drawbacks. For one thing, the amount of cockpit glass could create greenhouse conditions on warm days. Cosner also said the C-119 was “damn heavy” on the controls, since there were no power boosts for the control surfaces. Other pilots disparaged the C-119 as “thousands of rivets flying in loose formation” and listed numerous mechanical problems, but maintenance crews worked long and hard to keep the aircraft flying. Pelican 9’s Mitchell thought his C-119J, No. 18037, eventually became “an excellent airplane,” but admitted it was “a junk heap” when he first started flying it. “I think I had something like 30 write-ups on it, hydraulic and gas leaks,” he said.

As the Cold War escalated after World War II, U.S. intelligence agencies struggled to learn the true extent of Soviet military capabilities. In 1949 the Soviets detonated a nuclear device, sending shock waves through the U.S. military and political leadership and increasing demands for better ways to monitor the nation’s main adversary. The demands became more insistent after the Soviets began attacking American reconnaissance airplanes that neared their borders, shooting down several.

Project Genetrix, a program approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1955, explored one method of monitoring the Soviet Union from above—with camera-equipped balloons (see sidebar, previous page). Throughout the 1950s, the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military searched for other ways to determine the number and location of Soviet aircraft and missiles. The Research and Development (RAND) Corporation had already started contemplating the use of orbiting satellites for photographic espionage; in 1946 RAND had even issued a report called “Preliminary Design for a World-Circling Spaceship.” That vision came closer to reality in October 1957 when the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik I, into orbit. The Soviet success increased the urgency for intelligence gathering.

Created in 1958, the CIA-led Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) received responsibility for conducting military-related space projects with Air Force support. One goal was to develop a reconnaissance satellite that could photograph the Soviet Union and other Communist countries from space, and then return the film to earth in a capsule (since the technology to download image data did not yet exist). This provided the essence of Project Corona. Approved by Eisenhower in 1958, the program had public and secret faces. For public consumption, the satellites were called Discoverer and their cover story was that they would study conditions outside the atmosphere and develop new spaceflight technologies, including recovery techniques. The real goals of the program remained secret.

James Plummer of Lockheed’s Missile and Space Division became Corona’s program manager. Plummer modeled his team after the Skunk Works, Lockheed Aircraft’s research and development arm that had developed the U-2 spy plane, among many other aircraft. Lockheed would build the orbiting space vehicle. Other major contractors were General Electric (recovery vehicle), Eastman Kodak (film), Fairchild Camera and Instrument (another company founded by Sherman Fairchild, for cameras), and All American Engineering (recovery equipment and classroom training on aerial recovery techniques).

Corona’s many challenges included developing cameras that could function in the vacuum and extreme conditions of space, 100 miles or more above the earth’s surface. Each camera required a three-axis stabilizing system to take clear images even as the satellite was moving at 16,000 mph around a rotating earth. Imaging resolution, the ground size equivalent of the smallest visible view, was originally about 25 feet, but improved over time to six feet. A successful mission would conclude with a capsule physically returning exposed film to earth while protecting the top-secret cargo from the extreme temperatures of reentry.

Corona missions began lifting off from California’s Vandenberg AFB beginning in February 1959. The first 12 failed, either through launch pad misfires, failure to achieve orbit or poor camera operation. A lack of telemetry data made troubleshooting difficult. Parachutes created their own difficulties, as early versions proved unstable and had a too-fast descent rate. Corona and Lockheed engineers redesigned the parachutes, reducing the sink rate from 33 to 20 feet per second. 

CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell met with a frustrated Eisenhower to explain what may have caused the failures. Some in the CIA and the Defense Department wanted to cancel the project, but the president remained committed. Francis Gary Powers and his U-2 spyplane had been shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, and Eisenhower wanted to avoid another incident. Satellites also had the potential to survey much more of the Soviet Union than the U-2 could, another factor that likely motivated the president’s ongoing support for Corona.

Through the perseverance of the project team, Corona began to turn around. In August 1960, Discoverer 13’s capsule was successfully retrieved from the Pacific Ocean’s surface. The mission was a test flight that did not include cameras, but the achievement was still significant as the first time an object flown into space had been recovered. However, Mitchell and his crew in the retrieval C-119 had not been able to intercept the capsule before it hit the water.

Discoverer 14 was launched from Vandenberg aboard a Thor-Agena A launch vehicle on August 18, 1960. The second-stage Agena vehicle separated from the booster as planned and reached orbit. Over the course of 17 circuits around the planet, the Corona camera operated perfectly, taking 3,000 feet of film that covered 1,650,000 square miles of Soviet territory. The only thing remaining was to get the exposed film back to earth and into the hands of intelligence analysts. 

Corona’s planners had decided to use the C-119Js that had proven their worth on Project Genetrix, although making the rendezvous remained challenging. The satellites dropped their capsules from an orbit of 550,000 feet or higher. After the capsule entered the atmosphere, the parachute separated from its heat shield and a drogue chute deployed, followed by the main chute at about 60,000 feet. Ideally, the C-119 would be in position to capture the capsule and film between 12,000 and 15,000 feet over the ocean. 

Once airborne, crews worked relentlessly, dealing with the slipstream, engine noise and recovery gear, often at altitudes over 10,000 feet in an unpressurized aircraft. Crewmen could use oxygen hoses on the side of the cargo compartment. For safety, crew working at the aircraft’s rear wore parachutes and inflatable life jackets and could use a D-ring on their parachutes to hook themselves to a metal cable. Knives were available to cut the capsule’s parachute risers if they became entangled.

Aircraft such as RC-121Ds (a military variant of the Lockheed Constellation) served as aerial command posts. These aircraft had homing equipment to help the retrieval aircraft locate the parachute. Once the C-119 had a visual, the pilot would fly past the capsule—which was falling at about 1,500 to 2,000 feet per minute—circle back and time his flight path with the descending parachute’s trajectory. Ideally, at capture the parachute’s top would be about six feet below the aircraft. The recovery equipment included hydraulically operated actuators that raised and lowered two 34-foot poles, a recovery line with eight hooks to catch the parachute, and a winch to pull the capsule to the aircraft. A trough held nylon lines that were deployed for the recovery. A “guillotine” could fire a pyrotechnic charge to cut the lines in an emergency. Loadmasters in the aircraft’s rear waited for visual sighting of the parachute canopy and listened for the noise of impact and payout of line from the cable trough. Once winched aboard, capsules were often still warm to the touch from the heat of reentry.

As a backup, Navy ships patrolled the expected landing area, with helicopters and divers ready if the aircraft failed to catch the capsule. In the event of a water landing, capsules could float for several days before a saltwater plug dissolved, sinking the container and ending the risk of a Soviet pickup.

Few personnel on Corona recovery missions knew the exact nature of the recovered payload; information was shared on a need-to-know basis. Navigators came mainly from Military Airlift Command with extensive over-water navigation experience. Some enlisted men, such as Airman 2nd Class Daniel Hill of Pelican 9, were assigned to Corona because they had experience with Genetrix.
“To see a live Discoverer payload from space descending towards you on a brilliant parachute was every aircrew’s dream from day one,” Hill said later. Pilot Mitchell had also cut his teeth with Project Genetrix.

After Pelican 9 made its successful recovery of the Discoverer 14 capsule, Mitchell felt “vindicated” after the unsuccessful attempt to snare Discoverer 13. He descended from the flight deck to shake hands with the crew and congratulate them on their work. Winch operator Tech. Sgt. Louis Bannick handed Mitchell a piece he had torn from the parachute. “For you, captain,” he said. “They will never miss it.” Once back at Hickam, the film went to Eastman Kodak for processing and then the images were sent to intelligence agencies, where photo interpreters were “jubilant” and pronounced the photos “stupendous.” Mitchell received the Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission; the others on Pelican 9 received the Air Medal. In addition, the 6593rd Squadron won the 1960 Mackay Trophy as a Unit Award.

The mission, with the science cover story intact, received plentiful media coverage. In one interview, Mitchell modestly described flying the missions as “easy,” but enlisted personnel such as Sgts. Charles Dorigan and Richard Bell thought otherwise, noting the precise flying skills required to reach the capsule without hitting it. Mitchell, 1st Lt. Robert Counts and Bannick traveled to New York City to tape an interview with Dave Garroway for the “Today Show.” All airmen were invited to a formal dinner in Washington, D.C., hosted by Lt. Gen. Bernard Schriever of the Air Research and Development Command. 

The C-119s were not around to share the limelight. No matter how well maintained, the twin-engine C-119Js were not ideal for over-water operations, and the military opted to phase them out in favor of Lockheed’s four-engine JC-130 Hercules. The Hercules started flying Corona missions in June 1961, using the same basic catch and retrieval process, although with upgraded recovery systems and electronics.

The satellite programs remained a huge boost to the U.S. intelligence community, with 153 film canisters retrieved between 1960 and May 1972. In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson remarked, “Because of satellites, I know how many missiles the enemy has, and I can sleep comfortably at night.”

The program concluded in 1972 when the military introduced other airborne surveillance programs such as “Hexagon” and “Gambit.” After President Bill Clinton declassified Corona in 1995, records indicated that the program took about 800,000 photos. Air Force magazine commented that program photos showed “all of the Soviet missile complexes, each class of Soviet submarine, a complete inventory of fighters and bombers, the presence of Soviet missiles in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, Soviet nuclear assistance in China, antiballistic missile defense inside the Soviet Union, atomic weapons storage sites, Chinese missile complexes, air defense batteries, surface ship fleets, command-and-control facilities, and the Plesetsk Missile Test Range north of Moscow.” Corona missions also surveilled and captured films of Communist China’s preparations for its first nuclear test in 1964 and North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile sites during the Vietnam War. In a paper for Studies in Intelligence, Kenneth Greer noted that “the totality of Corona’s contributions to U.S. intelligence holdings on denied areas and to the U.S. space program in general is virtually unmeasurable.”

Mitchell flew 117 missions in Vietnam and retired in 1974 as a lieutenant colonel. His C-119J and parts of the Discoverer 14 capsule are at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, Dayton, Ohio.

In light of the many and varied amazing spy “gadgets” that have appeared in popular films and television shows about espionage—cue Oddjob’s razor-edged hat in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger—anyone can be forgiven for thinking that such over-the-top contraptions are merely the brainchildren of imaginative screenwriters. The truth might surprise you.

The International Spy Museum (SPY) in Washington, D.C. provides visitors with a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the dark world of global espionage. Boasting a vast array of incredible artifacts in its collection which shed light on “spycraft,” the museum has shared a selection of the most devious devices in its collection with Military History Quarterly which span decades of the Cold War—the complex global political struggle between the Soviet Union, the United States, and nations allied with both.

This underhanded “war” had peaks and valleys as tensions between East and West waxed and waned. The Cold War nominally ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, some historians argue that the conflict never truly ended.

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If you’ve thrown a Nerf football, you can throw a grenade against invading Soviets.

At least, that’s what the U.S. Army thought in 1973 — and put that theory to the test.

“At the start of the Cold War, NATO planners envisioned as many as 175 Soviet divisions advancing across Western Europe,” writes Blake Stilwell for Military.com. “In their mind, NATO troops would find themselves fighting the Red Army’s new T-62 tanks in cities and towns, populated areas where the collateral damage from anti-tank missiles could kill civilians.”

Close-quarters fighting called for close-quarter weaponry, and with that, the Army attempted to meld Americans’ love of football with combat.

The Army’s Land Warfare Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland was tasked with creating a football-shaped grenade.

But they quickly found out why the idea wasn’t going to fly.

“Since a regulation size football weighs 14 ounces, it was considered feasible to make a shaped charge grenade within this weight limitation. In addition, most US troops are familiar with throwing footballs,” according to the Army’s test report for the weapon.

So Army researchers simply hollowed out a Nerf football — yes, the foam balls you threw as a child — and placed explosives inside.

Ingenious, sure. Practical? Hardly.

Footballs fly through the air because there is an even distribution of weight surrounding the hollow inside of the ball. But 14 ounces of explosives tended to make the trajectory of the Nerf grenade “unpredictable,” according to the test report.

Army war planners had better luck taking inspiration from baseball. In 1968, as the Vietnam War was in full swing, the M-67 grenade — known as the baseball grenade — saw widespread use in the war.

Despite its ubiquitous use, current Army manuals make no mention of sports or balls when it comes to grenades. “Since few soldiers throw in the same manner, it is difficult to establish firm rules or techniques for throwing hand grenades,” one handbook points out.

“If a soldier can achieve more distance and accuracy using his own personal style, he should be allowed to do so as long as his body is facing sideways, towards the enemy’s position, and he throws basically overhand,” the document adds.

We have nothing to hide.

That’s the basis for the Biden administration’s decree Thursday for the National Archives to release a cache of 13,173 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a watershed moment in American history.

On Nov. 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from the Texas School Book Depository, killing Kennedy and wounding Gov. John B. Connally Jr. of Texas as they rode in an open-topped limousine through Dallas.

After over a year of “conducting some 25,000 interviews and running down tens of thousands of investigative leads, the FBI found that [JFK’s killer] Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The Warren Commission, which spent nearly a year carefully studying the assassination, agreed,” the FBI website states.

Despite this, persistent conspiracy theories have persisted since that day that Oswald did not act alone.

But “the profound national tragedy of President Kennedy’s assassination continues to resonate in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day,” the White House said in its memorandum. “Meanwhile, the need to protect records concerning the assassination has weakened with the passage of time. …

“It is therefore critical to ensure that the United States Government maximizes transparency by disclosing all information in records concerning the assassination, except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.”

Established in November 1992, the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection has been publicly available without restrictions on access since the late 1990s, according to the National Archives. The collection consists of approximately five million pages, and, with Biden’s latest push, over 97% of the archive is now available to the public.

Gerald Posner, an investigative journalist and author of “Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK” told The New York Times that anyone believing that the latest batch might change the “fundamental conclusion” reached by the Warren Commission in 1964 was on a “fool’s errand.”

Yet, Posner continued, “the very fact that we are talking 59 years later about what documents the C.I.A. and other agencies are resisting to release in their entirety absolutely feeds the public’s idea that there is something wrong in the Kennedy assassination.”

To date, 28 records in the JFK collection remain “not located,” which have continued to fuel conspiracy theorists.

The most notable files released are the so-called 201 “personality” files the CIA held on Oswald beginning in 1960 — after his failed defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 — and three years before the president’s assassination.

According to the CIA, more than 50,000 pages were compiled on Oswald before and after the slaying of Kennedy, suggesting that the CIA “knew much more about Oswald before JFK’s death — and specifically, the threat he might pose to Kennedy — than the agency wanted to admit,” wrote Politico.

While the latest batch of documents isn’t expected to change the historical record, the sudden access to over 13,000 files is a boon for historians and researchers.

Biden has also said that the National Archives and federal other agencies have until May 2023 to review the remaining unpublished documents. After that, “any information withheld from public discourse that agencies do not recommend for continued postponement” will be released before June 30, 2023.

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In Four Ages, Michael Mandelbaum, Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins, compellingly traces America’s ascent from rebel colonies to world power, concluding that we have peaked. American foreign policy, he stresses, has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic. The nation tries, with spotty success, to spread its basic ideas: liberty, human rights, free elections. Even as a military power, the United States has emphasized trade, trade sanctions, and foreign investment. Public opinion remains a dominant influence, especially regarding war.

Before the Civil War a weakling, the country capitalized on the Atlantic Ocean and foes’ priorities—Britain always worried more about France than the U.S.—such that by 1860 America had more wealth than most European nations. Civil war ushered the nation into the clique of great powers. By 1900 the world’s biggest economy, America helped win the Great War more with money and manufacturing than manpower. When World War II began, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did what he could to support the Allies but it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to banish the public’s isolationism. By war’s end, America was an atomic superpower whose economy dwarfed all others.

WWII birthed a competing superpower. Hindsight shows the Soviets’ shambling economy to have been a fraction the size of America’s, but the massive Red Army and Marxist cant that world revolution would bury capitalism conjured a facsimile of a true rival.

The Cold War produced a few hot wars and much anxiety over nuclear Armageddon but ended with the 1991 Soviet breakup and America alone as a hyperpower.

America’s 1990s were deeply satisfying, but its 21st century has been a wreck. Terrorism, by nature a police matter, unhinged leaders who expanded our military and plunged into wars and quasi-wars worldwide.

Mandelbaum closes his narration in 2015, but his case still holds. The chaos after the 2016 election and China’s relentless rise ended America’s splendid isolation. We may have the world’s largest military—but we need it because our forces are spread globally. 

America the Hyperpower has become history. With four times the U.S. population and an economy vastly outmuscling the USSR’s, China seems reasonable in thinking to assume world leadership within a decade or two. —Mike Oppenheim writes in Lexington, Kentucky.

This book review appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy: Weak Power, Great Power, Superpower, Hyperpower

By Michael Mandelbaum

Oxford, 2022

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Sixty Octobers ago, a quailing world stood at the verge of ending not with a whimper but a bang—actually, more than a few bangs, and very large bangs at that, courtesy of the nuclear warheads on missiles poised for launching by the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not necessarily in that order. The elevator pitch: earlier that year the USSR, intent on evening the odds posed by an overwhelmingly more powerful American armamentarium, had smuggled a raft of rockets and nuclear warheads and accompanying materiél, aircraft, vehicles, and equipment, plus 43,000 Red Army personnel, into revolutionary Cuba. The hijinks that ensued when the Americans realized what was up spawned a nerve-wracking standoff of nearly two weeks’ duration, featuring a naval quarantine and talk of first strikes and mutually assured destruction until Premier Nikita Khrushchev did as President John Kennedy demanded and hauled his hardware home, caroming the superpowers toward talks on arms limitation. In The Abyss, prolific and skilled historian Max Hastings brings alive that much-told and ever-sobering tale with élan and immediacy, constructing a gripping, multifaceted tick-tock that gets under way well before those 13 notorious days and reaches well past the confrontation’s conclusion, extracting current-day lessons aplenty.

The Cuban missile crisis has never wanted for chronicling and re-chronicling, whether en passant in volumes about the Cold War and the ’60s at large or front and center in histories of the event itself, especially as time has done its work and official documents have leached from under lock and key, and private papers, memoirs, diaries, and other sources have come to light. In 2021, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, having made brilliant use of improved access to Soviet-era Russian archives, delivered the terrific Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which yanked readers into the vortex for an intimate, horrifying ride. Now Hastings, his research handicapped by the pandemic but game as ever, takes his innings, swings for the fences, and connects with a version that operates on a broader, deeper, and equally satisfying scale.

Appropriately for a Briton, Hastings, like a crack bowman, nocks his arrowing prose and lets fly a long and richly fascinating shot. He begins Abyss with a Cold War timeline and dramatis personae of players American, Soviet, and Cuban, then thumbnails the clown-car U.S. Central Intelligence Agency-run “invasion” of Cuba in April 1961 that ushered President John F. Kennedy into the realm of reality after all his tough campaign talk regarding missile gaps and softness on communism. JFK soon would be grasping what it really meant to “oppose any foe.”

By way of context, Hastings addresses Cuba’s centuries beneath Spanish rule and subsequent neocolonial existence under its northern neighbor’s thumb, personified by the 45 square miles of Cuba given over by treaty to an American military base at Guantánamo. American influence germinated the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose excesses triggered the 1959 revolution that Fidel Castro and his bearded legions wrought. Briefly the apple of the American eye—no less than TV variety show host Ed Sullivan hugged him on camera one Sunday night—Castro abruptly turned sharp left, nationalizing American businesses and cozying up to the USSR. In no time, the United States was trying to bring down, even kill Castro and destroy his regime, propelling the Cuban further into the Soviet sphere, a transition the Bay of Pigs completed. Now Fidel feared a full-bore American invasion and called for Soviet muscle to defend against it.

Castro’s demands exactly suited Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was spoiling for a confrontation. Riding high on his country’s initial vaulting successes in space but secretly and painfully aware of the Soviets’ distant secondary status in the nuclear sweepstakes, Khrushchev was bristling. The Americans and their allies were refusing to bow to Russian insistence that they quit Berlin, since 1945 a divided city maintained as a knob of Western willfulness deliberately poked into East Germany.

By treaty the Americans had openly installed across Britain, Europe, and even in Turkey high-powered missiles able to nuke Russian cities. To tilt matters his way, Khrushchev decided to equip Cuba—on the sly—with nuclear-tipped missiles and see how the Americans liked having the mortal tables turned.

Hastings foreshadows the actual undertaking with a rigorous chapter entitled “Mother Russia” delineating factors that induced Khrushchev to make his bold wager: Russia’s ingrained historical fear of invasion from the west, the profound and lingering consequences of Joseph Stalin’s rule and the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet state’s export of socialist revolution, the inevitable rivalry with the United States, the space race, the 1960 downing of an American U-2 spy plane over the Motherland, and multiple Berlin crises but especially Russia’s August 1961 installation of a wall to keep East Berliners red. The wall outraged the West by splitting the once and future German capital. Hastings brings to light previously well-hidden episodes of state violence visited upon dissenting Russians, as when residents of the Cossack city of Novocherkassk in June 1962 rioted over food shortages and labor grievances and for their obstinacy were massacred.

Against this helter-skelter backdrop, Khrushchev, painted by Hastings as an anxiety-ridden and mendacious butterball, opted to sneak a stash of nuclear mischief onto the newly reddened isle that the megalomaniacal Fidel Castro had been ruling for less than two years.

The premier’s goal: shock and amaze the American president. The younger man, whom Khrushchev thought a callow fellow, proved to have the steel and wisdom required to stand fast not only against his opposite number’s oafish bluster but that of his own military advisers and give Khrushchev the psychic elbow room to see reason. You may think you know the missile crisis story, but Hastings’s research and narrative skills will prove otherwise. His cinematic intercutting among scenes in Washington, Moscow, and Havana from the crisis that seemed about to end all crises will startle even the most deeply dedicated follower of Cold War history. If some streaming studio is not angling to option The Abyss for a dramatic series, I’ll eat a jar of fallout shelter peanut butter. —Michael Dolan is editor of American History.

This book review appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of American History magazine.

The Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

By Max Hastings

HarperCollins, 2022

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If asked, “When did America lose the Vietnam War?” most respondents with some knowledge of the war would likely answer, “April 30, 1975.” That day, North Vietnamese Army tanks crashed through the gates of the Republic of Vietnam’s Presidential Palace in Saigon and celebrated a communist victory in the Second Indochina War (1955-1975). Certainly, that day was the end of the shooting war.

But when exactly did the U.S. and its allies lose their ability to win the war? When did defeat become inevitable in America’s efforts to preserve a democratic South Vietnam in the face of North Vietnam’s relentless, ruthless aggression? The answer to that question is key—determining when America lost reveals how and why the decades-long effort failed.

The “Usual Suspects”

If asked to pinpoint the date when the U.S. irretrievably lost the war, some historians would suggest the following “usual suspects”:

Nov. 2, 1963 – Those recognizing the importance of political leaders’ influence might single out the day when South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was killed in a coup. President John F. Kennedy knew of preparations for the coup and his administration supported the overthrow of Diem, who was assassinated in the process. Diem’s murder removed the struggling democracy’s “last, best hope,” as some have called Diem, the only leader whose charisma, popularity, willpower and effectiveness rivaled that of North Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh.

Nov. 22, 1963 – Some tout Kennedy’s assassination as the date the war was irretrievably lost because they believe he would have kept the U.S. out of Vietnam’s “quagmire” or have beaten the Viet Cong insurgency with U.S. Army Special Forces troops, the “Green Berets,” eschewing a massive buildup of conventional forces. However, those are conjectures rather than certainties.

Democrat Kennedy politically could not afford to “lose Vietnam,” especially after another Democratic president, Harry S. Truman, was castigated as the one who “lost China” to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949. Speculation that Kennedy would not have backed up South Vietnam with whatever U.S. military support was necessary to match Hanoi’s escalation ignores the reality of Cold War politics.

Aug. 1, 1964 – Many are convinced the U.S. lost due to a misguided military strategy that focused too much on overwhelming firepower in a futile conventional war to destroy the communist insurgency through attrition. They believe it would have been more effective to emphasize less brutal methods to win the “hearts and minds” of the South Vietnamese and weaken the Viet Cong’s influence in towns and villages. For people with that view, the fateful date might be the day that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the leader most closely associated with the attrition strategy, assumed leadership of Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, commanding all U.S. combat forces inside South Vietnam.

Aug. 2 and 4, 1964 – In the Gulf of Tonkin incident, North Vietnamese gunboats attacked a U.S. destroyer that suffered just one bullet hole. Two days later, two destroyers fired in the direction of signals that appeared to be emanating from approaching North Vietnamese vessels, but were not. These alleged “attacks” prompted an Aug. 7 joint congressional resolution authorizing President Lyndon B. Johnson “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” This gave Johnson permission to escalate the smoldering insurgency into a full-blown and—many historians have claimed—ultimately unwinnable war.

March 8, 1965 – Those believing that the introduction of U.S. “boots on the ground” was the fatal mistake might champion the date when the 9th Marine Regiment, 9th Expeditionary Brigade, 3rd Marine Division, came ashore at Da Nang as America’s first combat troops in Vietnam. From that point, the U.S. was “all in” and the quagmire became inevitable, some would argue.

The Long View

Historians placing Vietnam within the context of the global Cold War might take a longer view that pushes a presumed foreordained U.S. failure further back in history. They might suggest these key historical mileposts:

June 1924 – Nguyen Sinh Cung (Ho Chi Minh’s birth name) was rebuffed in 1919 when he pleaded Vietnam’s case for independence from colonial ruler France at the Versailles peace conference after World War I. Shunned by Western powers, he became a committed communist. That month he attended the Fifth Congress of the Soviet-led Comintern (Communist International) in Moscow. Thereafter radicalized into much more than a “Vietnamese nationalist,” Ho Chi Minh cleverly manipulated Vietnamese popular support for independence to propel his single-minded effort to establish a communist Vietnam.

Sept. 22, 1940 – Imperial Japanese forces occupied Indochina, ruled then by the Nazi-backed Vichy France government. The Japanese invasion united competing Vietnamese factions of the resistance to French colonial rule into a solidified “nationalist” crusade. Japanese imperialism gave Ho Chi Minh the unifying spark he needed to build support for a prolonged resistance to defeat all foreign intervention.

Feb. 22, 1946 – The U.S. deputy chief of mission in Moscow, George F. Kennan, sent his “Long Telegram” to Washington explaining the roots and basis of Soviet expansionism, eventually prompting the April 7, 1950, National Security Council policy paper 68, establishing “containment of communism” as U.S. Cold War policy. This policy ensured that the U.S. would become involved in opposing the communist takeover of Vietnam.

May 7, 1954 – The humiliating defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu by Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh independence fighters led to an agreement, signed July 21 in Geneva, partitioning the former French colony into a communist-controlled North and a democratic South. Inevitably, the United States—committed to NSC 68’s global containment policy, recently demonstrated in the Korean War at the cost of over 36,000 American dead—stepped forward to replace French imperialists and to create and defend a Southeast Asian democracy.

All of the dates listed above are important Vietnam War milestones, but they are not the most significant. To understand why, it’s necessary to first address the enduring but egregiously wrong “popular wisdom” about the war.

What Popular Wisdom Gets Wrong

Historians who claim the U.S. lost the Vietnam War due to a failed warfighting strategy are correct. However, they are wrong if they claim Vietnam was lost because Westmoreland adopted a conventional war strategy rather than a revolutionary war/insurgency strategy.

The communists did not win through a classic revolutionary guerrilla war of national liberation in which South Vietnam’s government was toppled by a widespread popular insurgency of disaffected citizens overthrowing a hated regime. Instead, the Vietnam War was a brutal war of conquest mounted by communist North Vietnam to overthrow South Vietnam’s democratic (and admittedly imperfect) government, initially by guerrilla warfare tactics, but ultimately by a conventional warfare invasion strategy.

From 1954 through 1968, North Vietnam pursued a military strategy incorporating guerrilla war tactics. That effort failed miserably. As early as 1966, Hanoi was forced to replenish its South Vietnamese Viet Cong cadres with northerners brought down via the Ho Chi Minh Trail running through Laos and Cambodia. The communists’ early-1968 Tet Offensive, which relied heavily on Viet Cong forces, was a military failure with catastrophic VC losses. In many places the offensive’s losses virtually eradicated the VC “infrastructure,” eliminating local political and administrative “shadow government” personnel.

Committed to winning a decades-long war, Hanoi’s leaders simply changed their overall strategy and turned to outright invasions using overpowering NVA conventional forces (infantry, armor, artillery) to conquer the South. With U.S. combat forces still fighting in support of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, this new strategy also initially failed. During Easter weekend in 1972, the communists launched a widespread infantry-armor-artillery offensive that achieved early successes, but beleaguered ARVN forces, bolstered by overwhelming U.S. firepower, rallied to totally crush the invasion, inflicting 100,000 NVA casualties.

However, in 1975—after all American combat forces were withdrawn and the U.S. had dramatically reduced financial support for South Vietnam’s military—a similar-sized NVA conventional force executed essentially the same invasion strategy, but this time conquered South Vietnam that April.

For purely propaganda reasons, Hanoi cynically argued that its conquest was led by South Vietnamese VC insurgents—claiming its 1975 victory was the triumph of a “revolutionary war of national liberation,” even though depleted VC ranks between 1968 and 1975 were increasingly filled by North Vietnamese troops filtering south and operating from sanctuaries in officially “neutral” Laos and Cambodia. Additionally, the January 1973 Peace Accords allowed thousands of communist troops to remain inside South Vietnam’s borders, pre-positioned to participate in the final assault.

Facing overwhelming U.S./ARVN firepower throughout the war, North Vietnamese forces necessarily employed guerrilla tactics (including ambushes, hit-and-run attacks, sabotage, assassinations). To actually win the war, Hanoi abandoned its guerrilla strategy of fomenting insurgency and instead was compelled to turn to an invasion by conventional forces to overthrow the South Vietnamese government.

The North Vietnamese communist dictatorship was willing to pay any price in blood and treasure to ultimately conquer the Republic of South Vietnam. Significantly, Westmoreland, on the other hand, was never given the mission of winning the war, only of preventing the South Vietnamese from losing it—two profoundly different missions.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the war was lost due to a combination of failures in strategy, geographic ignorance and a lack of national will. Each of those three factors is associated with a date that marks a defining event inevitably leading to America’s defeat.

Strategy for Failure

Oct. 25, 1950 – America’s defeat in Vietnam was due to a fundamental error in judgment that has bedeviled military campaigns throughout history: refighting the last war. Political and military warriors leading American efforts in Vietnam based U.S. strategy on their last conflict: the 1950-53 Korea War.

America’s Vietnam War leaders were misled because of coincidental, superficial similarities. The Korean War was also fought in a divided Asian nation with a communist North, supported by China and the Soviet Union, attacking a democratic South backed by the U.S. Thus, American leaders assumed Vietnam was merely a rematch.

The date when the result of one president’s decision later compelled the U.S. to commit to a strategy doomed to fail in Vietnam was Oct. 25, 1950. On that day, in response to Truman’s fateful order a few weeks earlier to his theater commander in Korea, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, to cross the 38th parallel dividing the two Koreas and invade North Korea, the first counterattacks against United Nations forces were launched by 300,000 Chinese troops.

 Suddenly, due to Truman’s misjudgment, Americans were in a major war with Mao Zedong’s communist China. For the remainder of the three-year-long Korean War, U.S./U.N. forces fought bloody, costly battles before the fighting finally ended in a stalemate with a July 1953 armistice

A decade later U.S. leaders, profoundly influenced by their woeful experience in Korea, were determined not to repeat that mistake in a new anti-communist Asian war. Fear of another Chinese intervention set the parameters governing U.S. ground combat operations in Vietnam. Primarily intended to give China no possible excuse to replicate its Korean War incursion, American ground combat was restricted to actions solely within South Vietnam. North Vietnam would be off-limits for ground forces—or even the threat of them—throughout the war.

Those restrictions did not apply to U.S. air operations. North Vietnam and the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia were bombed extensively, although the Hanoi area and the key port at Haiphong were not targeted until late in the war when it was too late to be decisive.

Restricting the ground war to South Vietnamese territory meant U.S. military commanders could never win the war outright. They could only keep South Vietnam from losing it, if possible. This was the defining strategic element in the U.S. defeat: American forces were confined to the strategic defensive. Although U.S. and ARVN forces did conduct offensive operations within South Vietnam, the U.S. permanently surrendered the strategic initiative to North Vietnam, which could totally control the tempo of combat by sending troops and war materiel southward whenever it wanted.

The result was a brutal, localized war of attrition that dragged on as long as both sides possessed the will to continue. Hanoi had the “weapons” it needed to continuing fight as long as it took to win: a ruthless disregard of heavy casualties and a tightly controlled population without the freedom to protest.

The Geography of Defeat

July 23, 1962 – Some critics of America’s strategy in Vietnam compare the failure there to successful campaigns against communist-led insurgencies elsewhere in Asia, most notably the British counterinsurgency victory in Malaysia (1948-60) and the defeat of the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the Philippines (1945-54). But victory over those insurgencies owed as much to the countries’ unique geographies as to innovative counterinsurgency tactics and strategy.

Malaya (today’s Malaysia) is nearly surrounded by water—the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca. Only a narrow 65-mile-wide neck of land connects Malaya with Southeast Asia. The Philippines, an island nation, is surrounded by water—the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. Government control over the sea and narrow land approaches helped those countries strangle their insurgencies. Their much-vaunted counterinsurgency strategies were essentially irrelevant as the insurrections died on the vine.

The South Vietnamese government, however, had only the South China Sea on its eastern/southern border as a buffer. It shared a long, highly vulnerable land border with Laos and Cambodia all along its western side—the Achilles’ heel of U.S.-South Vietnamese efforts to defeat the North Vietnamese invaders. The Viet Minh fighting the French and later NVA-Viet Cong forces attacking South Vietnam occupied remote jungles in eastern Laos and Cambodia. They used them as marshalling bases and access routes for funneling troops, ammunition and equipment from North Vietnam into all regions of the South.

This intricate network of footpaths and dirt roads, called the Ho Chi Minh Trail system, was literally the communists’ “highway to victory.” If the Americans and South Vietnamese could stop the movement of troops and materiel down the trail, communist military operations in South Vietnam would be doomed. With the trail open, however, Hanoi could prolong the war as long as it wished, control its tempo and eventually win.

On July 23, 1962, that geographical “win” for North Vietnam was assured when Kennedy administration negotiators signed the International Treaty on the Neutrality of Laos with 13 other nations pledging “to respect” the “sovereignty, independence, neutrality, unity and territorial integrity” of Laos, which was in the midst of a communist insurrection. The other signatories included China, the Soviet Union, North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

Years before the treaty was signed, the NVA had occupied areas of eastern Laos and Cambodia. After the document was signed, the North Vietnamese expanded their control and further developed the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

More than any other event, the Laos treaty all but guaranteed that the U.S. would eventually lose the Vietnam War. Efforts to overcome the treaty mistake through major U.S./ARVN incursions into Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971 were too little and years too late.

The Death of U.S. Will

July 1, 1973 – Despite strategic and geographic failures, there remained as late as 1973 a slim chance that America’s national will—the inherent spirit to overcome adversity and eventually triumph —might win out and prevent a communist takeover of democratic South Vietnam. Failures in war-fighting strategy and missteps in redressing geographic disadvantages might have been overcome if Americans had retained faith in the mission to save South Vietnam from communist aggression.

The deterioration of the American public’s willingness to persevere and win in Vietnam, as reflected in the resolve of its elected leaders, was not precipitated by a single, specific event. It eroded over time.

Even so, one event, in particular, was a serious blow to public support for the war: The communists’ Tet Offensive, which began Jan. 30, 1968, struck military bases and cities throughout South Vietnam. Although the attackers suffered a military defeat with heavy losses, the extensiveness of the assaults and high U.S. casualties came as a shock to many Americans.

There were also “doom and gloom” press reports and commentary that had demoralizing effects on the public. Support for the war, already declining in Gallup opinion polls, dropped to 40 percent in the months after Tet, compared to 50 percent a year earlier, and never recovered.

The real dagger in the heart of the country’s national will was congressional passage of the Case-Church Amendment, signed into law on July 1, 1973. Named for principal sponsors Republican Sen. Clifford P. Chase of New Jersey and Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the amendment (attached to a bill funding the State Department) prohibited further U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia without specific prior approval by Congress. This was, in effect, a death sentence for the Republic of Vietnam.

The Nixon Question

Although defeated in 1972 when first proposed, the Case-Church Amendment was reintroduced in January 1973 and passed in June. President Richard Nixon, politically hamstrung by the ongoing Watergate fiasco—springing from the June 17, 1972, break-in and burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building—was unable to prevent its passage. The Case-Church Amendment was followed by the crippling November 1973 War Powers Resolution severely limiting the president’s ability commit military forces to combat.

Support for the war, already declining, dropped to 40 percent in the months after Tet, compared to 50 percent a year earlier, and never recovered.

Arguably, Nixon still had the power to overcome such congressional obstacles and possibly “snatch victory from the jaws of defeat” if he had still been president in 1975 when North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. Nixon, technically, could have been legally and fully justified in employing overwhelming U.S. air and naval firepower to protect South Vietnam and enforce provisions of the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords, egregiously violated by North Vietnam’s unprovoked invasion.

Nixon knew that the Paris Peace Accords were meaningless unless backed by American military power if necessary, according to his national security adviser and later secretary of state, Henry Kissinger. In his 1994 book Diplomacy, Kissinger explained: “We [he and Nixon] took it for granted that we had the right—indeed, the responsibility—to defend an agreement in the pursuit of which 50,000 Americans had died…Terms that will not be defended amount to surrender…Nixon and his key advisers announced their intention to defend the agreement on innumerable occasions [emphasis added].”

Without U.S. military power backing up the treaty, the Paris Peace Accords amounted to mere words on paper. Congress, controlled by politicians committed to ending the war, focused its attention on Nixon’s presidency rather than on the struggling Republic of Vietnam facing obliteration by communist North Vietnam.

Weakened by the Watergate scandal and facing inevitable impeachment and Senate conviction, Nixon was forced to resign. After he left the White House on Aug. 9, 1974, his successor, Gerald R. Ford, politically crippled by being an appointed vice president after elected Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in a corruption scandal, was neither inclined to nor had the political standing to order the U.S. military back to South Vietnam.

Three Factors

The final vestige of America’s national will to save the South—an effort that killed 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese—died on Aug. 9, 1974, when Nixon boarded the presidential helicopter for the final time.

Incompetent strategy, ignorance of geography and a lack of national willpower combined to hand the communists running North Vietnam a victory in a war that was, at its beginning, America’s to lose.

The next time you hear someone blathering about why or, in particular, when the U.S. “lost” the Vietnam War, ask them about Oct. 25, 1950; July 23, 1962; and July 1, 1973. After noting their blank stares, explain it to them.

Jerry Morelock is senior editor of Vietnam magazine.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Vietnam magazine.

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In the 1950s and 1960s, the Soviet Union was greatly concerned about the United States’ submarine-launched Polaris missiles. The ballistic weapons carried small, relatively lightweight hydrogen bombs that could hit targets more than 2,000 miles away from their launch sites. Even more concerning, submarines could launch the missiles while remaining submerged. The Soviets were highly motivated to develop the means to identify, attack and destroy those submarines. 

Enter Robert Bartini. Born in Austria-Hungary (in what is now Croatia) in 1897, the illegitimate son of a baron, Bartini served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and spent time as a Russian prisoner-of-war. After the war, Bartini made his way to Italy and became an aviation engineer and designer. He joined the Italian Communist Party before the rise of Italian fascism compelled him to leave for the Soviet Union in 1923. His career in his adopted country was both impressive and tragic; Bartini played a major role in the design and manufacture of 60 aircraft and aircraft projects, but he also spent years in prison, from 1938 until 1946, for his association with Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was executed for treason in 1937, and because Joseph Stalin’s regime accused him, probably falsely, of spying for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini—even though it was the rise of Mussolini that had prompted Bartini to leave Italy. Even while in prison, Bartini worked as an aircraft engineer and designer, including contributing to the development of the Tupolev Tu-2 bomber. 

The Bartini-Beriev VVA-14 was both gargantuan and bizarre looking. The aircraft was nicknamed “Zmei Gorynich” because of its resemblance to a mythological multi-headed dragon of that name. With a wingspan of almost 100 feet and a length of 85 feet, the craft featured a high, straight-wing configuration and a long, protruding cockpit. Atop the wing were two large Soloviev D-30M turbofan cruising engines, each of which could produce 15,000 pounds of thrust. Starting engines were to be housed on each side of the nose. Enormous pontoons under the wing and on each side of the fuselage would facilitate seaborne operations. The undercarriage housed a nose gear and a main landing gear for conventional takeoff and landing (using hardware from Tu-22 bombers). VVA-14 could carry 34,000 pounds of fuel in two giant tanks. The planned VTOL engines, 12 Rybinsk RD-36-35 lift turbofans generating 9,700 pounds of thrust each, would occupy a large center space and use a series of air nozzles distributed across the airframe to propel the craft into the air. VVA-14 was designed to carry and deploy torpedoes, bombs and mines. Astonishingly, the imposing craft required only a crew of three—a pilot, navigator and weapons officer. VVA-14 had a service ceiling of approximately 30,000 feet.

VVA-14 was designed to be a wing-in-ground effect (WIG) vehicle. Such aircraft take advantage of the increase in lift that aircraft experience when flying close to the surface, especially when that surface is extremely flat (such as a runway or the sea). Aircraft designers had noted that straight-wing aircraft often functioned well as WIG aircraft, hence VVA-14’s straight wings. 

Bartini’s airplane first flew in 1972. The aircraft was considered a success even though it had serious problems, including severe vibration from the two large Soloviev cruising engines, which caused significant buffeting and even broke the landing gear doors. At first the VVA-14 had inflatable pontoons (an unorthodox idea championed by Bartini himself). While those pontoons did work, they were ultimately replaced with rigid metal ones. 

Bartini died two years later at the age of 77 (the cause of his death was not made public). Without his backing, the program found itself short of funding but still managed to limp along for two more years. The VTOL engines never materialized but the VVA-14 made 100 conventional flights. The Soviets had planned to build three aircraft but only one was completed. Eventually, the government stopped funding the program and the aircraft fell into disrepair. Currently, the VVA-14 airframe is on display at the Central Air Force Museum near Moscow, where it sits partially dismantled and minus its wing but with pontoons still affixed. Plans to restore the airframe never bore fruit.

In retrospect, VVA-14 seems to have been a victim of its own extravagance. The plane was too large, too heavy and was required to fill too many roles. With so many different, and novel, technologies crammed into a single design—any one of which may have needed its own airframe to fully vet—it’s easy to understand why the project was cancelled. VVA-14 is perhaps best remembered as a testbed for a plethora of divergent technologies, all welded into a single chimera-like aircraft. 

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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In his new book, “Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut’s Journey” (Smithsonian Books, 2022), Fred Haise, known to the world for his role as the lunar module pilot in Apollo 13, writes about his career in aviation, including his time as a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base. Aviation History magazine contributor Doug Adler talked to Haise about his book and his career. (To watch the interview, scroll to the bottom.)

you’re known around the world as an astronaut. But after reading your recent autobiography, one gets the impression that you view yourself really, first as a pilot and an astronaut second. would you agree with that?

Yeah, I think all of us at that time, we were primarily former military pilots. Most of us had been in the astronaut business, and with aircraft tasks and so from that, we joined the astronaut program. So, you know, our primary livelihood for years had been with airplanes. And it really, to me, people don’t realize, they think space is something extra special. But a spacecraft is just an airplane with a few different kinds of subsystems because it operates in a different environment. And it has rocket engines versus a jet engine. And so the practice you do—although I have to say Apollo was a huge program, with 400,000 people at peak, so it was bigger than most aircraft test programs I was involved with, as far as the number of players—but the principles involved were all the same. Obviously we had an endpoint with Apollo that was pretty exciting to think about—going to the moon. But other than that, I mean, people don’t understand it. But to me, it was just another exciting adventure.

the section about your initial flight training as a young man, your early naval flight assignments — it’s written with enthusiasm. was this the most enjoyable period of your time as a pilot?

No, no, I’d have to say the most fun time of my career was when I was at NASA Flight Research Center, now named Armstrong, at Edwards, as a NASA test pilot. And because I was involved in so many different things. I probably was involved in three test programs at any given time, sometime only the prime pilot in one test program, I’d be one of the evaluation pilots for handling qualities or something like that on another test program were on, and then I did support flying a lot for the X-15 that was going on at that time, either be a chase, or do the morning weather checks, or go check the upper range the lake beds ahead of time to see if they were safe or if they had the drop in early and check telemetry stations up range at Bailey and Ely, that kind of thing. So probably flying, not every day, twice, but sometimes twice a day, but almost flying every day.

I imagine that flying at Edwards in that period, you must have felt like you’re at the absolute peak of the flying game.

Yeah, it was right at the end of what I call a golden era of aviation tests at Edwards.

You mentioned in the book that it was when you were at Edwards, you decided to apply to NASA to become an astronaut. Did you think it was a long shot?

No, I thought I thought I had a good chance. I had done — call it my servitude and getting the background experience. My resume I thought was solid. I had to think hard about the flying. I almost really thought several times whether I should do that and leave the good flying I was doing because Neil — Neil Armstrong — who was ahead of me about three years with NASA, he joined at Lewis Research Center ahead of me, and then he went to Flight Research Center, and then on into the astronaut program, came back and described his job as an astronaut as sitting in a lot of meetings, sitting in a simulator a lot — lots and lots of hours — and not much good flying. So that was Neil’s description of being an astronaut, which was pretty close to being right. And so I had to think hard about leaving all this good flying and joining the astronaut program. But the thought of getting to the moon was overpowering. So that’s why I did.

In the book, I get the sense that you wish you’d had a chance to fly the X-15.

Yes, yeah, the X-15 is the last space vehicle that the pilot has manually controlled the flight from the time they released from the B-52. They got the engine going. But very quickly had to do a very critical and accurate pull up to a certain attitude that basically reflected the profile that we’re going to fly, just as the rocket has to get to the asset attitudes to go to orbit. And so all manual, there is no autopilot in the X-15, and then they had to change somewhat the flight controls, they went up high over the top because the aerodynamic controls were no longer active, so they had to use little gas rockets to control attitude. And then the setup for a very critical entry, to be set up with the right angle of attack and attitude for when they came back into the atmosphere. They were going fast enough there was heating to deal with and manually all the way through that and setting up and controlling through the entry, then to come out of that at the bottom and from a navigation standpoint to arrive back over Edwards and do a circular kind of approach overhead to affect the landing. All manual at Edwards, with an L over D of about a four and a half. About the same with the shuttle.

So, it’s a manual vehicle and apart from the rocket business, from Mercury on nobody has ever flown an ascent. Only all pilots, I should say astronauts, could do the aborts, but that was the sort of the extent of their capability. You just hope, we all hope, this rocket had been prepared right, and it was fully gassed and that would get us up there. But you are along for the ride. You monitored, of course, how it was doing on the way up should you have to abort. But there was no manual control at all. Through all the ascents.

many astronaut autobiographies have commented that Chuck Yeager was maybe less than enthusiastic about losing people from Edwards to NASA. What was your experience with him overall?

No, I never saw that in Chuck. He was obviously commandant at the test pilot school when I went through for a year and as you know from the book, I shouldn’t have gone through the second half of the school. I was the first civilian ever to go through the second half. Chuck arranged that, actually didn’t arrange it, he said let’s just come on and I’ll get into school and somewhere down the road he decided to tell the Pentagon people he’d had done that. And so I got to go through the whole year rather than the first six months. Which normally test pilots could do, just test pilots would do. And so he was very gracious that way. I flew with him. I described that in the book because I did a little showing off while I had Chuck beside me there in the airplane while we were chasing a lifting body.

You told him you were worried about over stressing the engine a little bit so you shut it down. Correct?

Right. The batteries we had were the older acetate batteries rather the newer ones, so I just kiddingly said I didn’t want to stress the batteries.

The book is titled “Never Panic Early.” what does that phrase means to you?

I think it deals with everyday things for people, in their home if their child has all at once a problem, an accident or something, then they have to mentally go through a process of figuring out what’s the best thing to do. In some cases, do I call a 911 first or get an ambulance or call and ask for help from a neighbor? Or do I try to patch the child up in some way myself? So on occasions for people who have that same dilemma of trying to think through the situation and all the options they might have of what to do, and primarily, don’t do anything too quickly where you might do the wrong thing. Think first.

“Never panic early” has served you well in a variety of situations.

Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve experienced that in airplanes, where you have a system problem and rather than throw any switches or do anything, you normally will study the instrument panel. And think about your knowledge about the system. And what if it’s real or not, for sure, it’s not something false. And then next is the procedures, do you know the system, and then emergency procedures? Now function procedures on what steps you now should take.

Most astronaut biographies describe the astronaut office in Houston, to put it mildly, as an extremely competitive environment. Your book didn’t really do this. what was your experience like?

No, I didn’t find that at all, at least among the group, the original 19 that were chosen in 1966. Frankly, I wasn’t in the office that much. Initially, because after rookie training went on, supposed to go on, I think it was originally 12 months or 15 months. They cut it short at about nine months because we got support crew assignments, there was so much work to cover. And I got assigned to follow the lunar module in testing at Grumman, I and Ed Mitchell. And we were up there for a good part of a little more than a year. So I wasn’t back in the office to see people that much anyway, and I just off on a mission for Jim McDevitt that we were dispatched to make sure he had a good lunar module to fly when he flew Apollo 9, with LEM 3, although we tested I was in from LEM 2 through LEM 6. I was in those vehicles the first time we put power on and getting those ready to get ready to go to the Cape.

Perhaps the fact that you were up at Grumman for so long spared you some of the more tense experiences that other astronauts write about?

No, I never felt competition. I obviously didn’t know and hoped I’d be chosen early. But I had no idea. And none of us knew how exactly the process was going to be in selecting who would get what missions and when. We knew obviously Deke Slayton and Al Shepard, were at the front end of that. And as it turned out, later, we found out that whatever they did, which I guess was rubber stamp most of the time, was actually sent to headquarters before any announcement of that.

I’ve always been curious about life after the mission [apollo 13]. what was it like to return to the astronaut office after coming back from that mission?

Well, we of course, we had public affairs events. In fact, we made the first state department, well, that was sort of a quarter-world tour through Iceland, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, and the first official group to go into Greece. That was after the colonel had overtaken the country and kicked the royalty out. And so, we were tied up with that, although within about a month or six weeks, Deke called me in and I had my next job assignment. I knew that we were going to be, I was going to be the backup commander for Apollo 16. So, for me, it was just back in crew training again as soon as they got rid of the public affairs business, with Jerry Carr and Bill Pope.

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut’s Journey

by Fred Haise and Bill Moore, Smithsonian Books, April 5, 2022

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And your backup position on Apollo 16 put you in a prime slot for Apollo 19, had it occurred.

Had it occurred, that’s right.

You write with a lot of excitement about the approach and landing tests [ALT], the captive and the free flights. These tests were absolutely vital to the success of the shuttle program. how does it feel looking back on the ALT test today as essentially the de facto first person to ever land a space shuttle?

I look back at it as really the highlight of my career. You see, before I got involved assigned as a crew, I had spent four years in the Orbiter Projects Office. So I was in management, in essence, and I was following the design and development of that orbiter that was in the Orbiter Projects Office. So, I was kind of a womb to the tomb experience because actually, I was on a group that evaluated the proposals for who submitted the cut companies as submitted those to pick even who would build the shuttle, which I didn’t advertise much later.

But anyway, so I was there from day one on space shuttle orbiter, at least involvement, and then get to fly it the the first time. It was a program also that was off to the side of the major program. We were given limited assets. Deke Slayton, who I greatly appreciated, actually left his position and became the test director. So really it was back to the aircraft flight test program at Edwards. And he had an accomplice, the number two guy, who had been at Edwards flight test before in his career. We had a good team that came out from Kennedy early, which they’ve never done before. They always sent a few people to the factory previously on vehicles and witness some tests, but they never had hands-on until the vehicle got to Kennedy. But I talked him into going early on this one to get some experience. And they did, we had the very best from Kennedy. And we had a top Rockwell team that was left over from Apollo days of test conductors and test engineers. So we had a Grade A team, but a very small nucleus set off while the rest of the world was worrying about how to go to orbit, in Columbia. So, it’s kind of a neat program in that sense. We’re off to ourselves.

We had two support crew members assigned, Bob Abopco and Overmyer, Bob Overmyer. And we actually had to borrow some talent, steal some talent, with others to help with the software job, which is the biggest job, most probably, to get it flying. Enterprise was also a big programmatic thing for NASA at the time. As we went into that program, NASA had had had to announce a several years’ slip in the orbital flight because of the tile problem. We also faced a new president having come in and it wasn’t his program. It was Nixon’s program. And President Carter had come in. And so, we worried about those aspects. We had no backup. We had a second Enterprise when we started the program. But quickly for cost — the program costs were cut early — we deleted it, so we had no backup vehicle. You don’t like that situation in a test program.

And, and there was obviously time pressure, because at the time there was potential hope of saving Skylab.

Right. Yeah. Skylab was pretty easy to avoid, actually, because it flew in 75. And first orbital flight at that time, early on was, I forget what it was predicted initially, I think ’79. And they had they acknowledged that slip to ’81.

You said something that I thought was really striking in the book. the space shuttle is carried aloft aboard a modified 747, And you said that the flight, for example, when the shuttle was released was actually more dangerous to the crew of the 747.

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, we were on top of the 747, and had we gone out of control at release, had we damaged the 747, that crew could not have gotten out. They had no escape system, whereas myself and Gordo Fullerton, we were sitting in ejection seats. So we had a plan B that hopefully would have enabled us to survive. But Fitz Fulton and Tom McMurtry and Vic Horton and Skip Guidry would have all died had we seriously damaged that 747.

unfortunately, NASA’s Artemis program seems to be creeping forward at a pretty slow pace these days, whereas SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin and the other private space programs are making rapid progress. What are your thoughts on private spaceflight?

Well, private spaceflight, for the most part, at least, Space X is quite mature, particularly at this point. So, they’re almost able to live off the income earned, including what NASA pays them for the ride. And the rest of Artemis NASA has to deal with. Still as depending on the same old problem of getting the budgets cleared through the subcommittee and mainly the House has always been the bigger problem for NASA to deal with, because it’s such a big change out of people. Coming up is midterms and there’ll be a lot of new people that NASA has never dealt with before now entering those committees, to call it re-educate about what Artemis is all about and why it’s worthwhile. But truly, NASA has never had a program with the same, I’ll call it national-level impetus, administration and Congress combined, as Apollo had. There’s never been another program like that.

it’s been very impressive to see how quick they’ve moved, especially Space X. And Space X is very far along with their heavy lift booster. It will be very exciting to see where that goes, I think.

It’s incredible the number of launches they’ve done and then I like their re-use. One booster has flown that first stage has flown five or six times.

Extremely impressive. And it really shows you that I think a lot of people scoffed at private spaceflight. And I think now nobody can scoff at it.

Yeah. Well, way back when I know some of the astronauts went up and made a plea at Congress. They plea was misunderstood, though, and the press took it wrong. What happened was the initial funding that was done, which was needed, because SpaceX had problems early on, had a couple of failures. And they were about running out of worthwhile money to employ if that continued, and NASA gave him I forget how many, a billion plus, and Neil, I think, and [Eugene] Cernan, I think Lovell even went to testify. What they had done though was they gave that money to Space X, which was rightful, but they made NASA eat it, in other words they made NASA take it out of the rest of their budget. In other words, they didn’t give them a Delta in their budget to take care of that. And that’s what I think they were complaining about because it doesn’t just impact the manned space part, it also impacted some of the unmanned programs that had a program plan based on certain funding levels, annual funding levels, so it kind of set them back too.

And it caused a bit of a dust up, although I think Cernan walked back a lot of the comments.

Yeah. I don’t think they thought they’d be a failure, at least I don’t think. I think the main argument they had was they should have given NASA the Delta budget that they then could have given to SpaceX to get started. So going there.

I think we’ll all continue to watch it with great interest. Fred Haise, I want to thank you for taking the time to do this interview.

All right, thank you and fly safe.