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.  

this article first appeared in AVIATION HISTORY magazine

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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.

this article first appeared in military history quarterly

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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.

Any mention of Soviet or Russian fighter aircraft immediately brings to mind one name: “MiG.” In fact, to most people the word is as synonymous with Russian fighter aircraft in much the name “Zero” once was for Japanese fighter aircraft. Of course, not all Russian fighters are MiGs, just as not all Japanese fighters were Zeroes, but those names became so prevalent that they became almost synonymous for their respective countries’ fighter planes.

“MiG” actually does not represent the name of a company or even an individual. It was the abbreviation of the names of two Soviet aircraft designers: Artyom Mikoyan and Mikhail Gurevich, and their partnership ended up changing the face of military aviation — in the Cold War and beyond.

In Soviet Russia, Planes Build You

The aviation industry worked differently in the Soviet Union. Aircraft were not the products of companies. Instead, they were designed by engineers working at state-controlled Experimental Design Bureaus, or OKBs. Once an aircraft design was selected for production, it was assigned to a state-owned factory for mass production. The designers did not work for the factory, nor did they have anything to do with its management.

During the 1930s, Mikoyan and Gurevich were aeronautical engineers working at the OKB headed by Nicolai Polikarpov, who had created some of the most important Soviet aircraft of the 1930s, including the Po-2 trainer as well as the I-5, I-15 and I-16 fighter planes. However, Polikarpov fell out of favor during 1939 as a result of the failure of his I-180 fighter prototype, as well as a recent business trip to Germany he had been sent on in an attempt to acquire German aviation technology. While Polikarpov was in Germany, Gurevich presented a preliminary design proposal for a high-altitude fighter called the I-200. He set up his own design bureau in partnership with Mikoyan, whose elder brother was a senior official in Joseph Stalin’s political administration. They took many of Polikarpov’s staff along with them. Initially known as OKB-155, the new design bureau was subsequently renamed MiG, based upon the initials of the two leading engineers.

Before World War II: High Expectations

With war looming on the horizon in 1939, MiG’s I-200 became a high-priority project. It was to be a high-altitude fighter with a speed of 417 mph, a ceiling of 39,370 feet and a range of 621 miles. First flown in April 1940, the new aircraft exceeded 400 mph at over 22,000 feet and proved to be the fastest Soviet fighter ever made.

Unfortunately, it also had issues with maneuverability and stability. As a result, after only about 100 examples of the initial MiG-1 version were built, it was superseded by an improved version known as the MiG-3.

World War II: Wartime Weapon

Soviet fighter units were only just beginning to re-equip with the new Yak-1, LaGG-3 and MiG-3 fighters when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. The MiG-3 was the fastest of the three and had the best high-altitude performance, but since the air war over Russia quickly developed into a mainly tactical conflict carried on at low to medium altitudes, the MiG-3 rarely had the opportunity to operate to its best advantage. The MiG-3 was also more difficult to handle than its counterparts and required experienced pilots, who were in short supply at that time.

However, the most important issue effecting MiG-3 production was its Mikulin engine, which was in demand for use in the Ilyushin Il-2 “Shturmovik” armored ground-attack aircraft.

“The Red Army needs the Il-2 as it needs air or bread,” Stalin himself declared. “I demand more!”

As a result, production of the MiG-3 was terminated in 1942, after 3,422 were built.  

Nevertheless, the MiG-3 played a major role in the defense of Moscow during the air battles over that city in 1941 and 1942. Nearly half of the Soviet fighters deployed in the defense of Moscow were MiG-3s. Many were lost because they were frequently used during night interceptions, a mission for which the MiG-3 was neither designed nor equipped, and pilots flying them were untrained for that role.  

Joining the Jet Set After World War II

Although MiG produced a few new designs during World War II, none of them advanced beyond the prototype stage. It was not until the end of the war that the design bureau finally came into its own through the creation of something totally new.

It was clear to the Soviets that the Red Air Force had fallen behind in jet aircraft technology, since the Germans, British and Americans already had operational jet fighters. Stalin demanded that his design bureaus to come up with jet fighters as quickly as possible. The competing design bureaus came up with different ways to meet that that need. On one hand, Alexander Yakovlev, who was vice minister of aviation in addition to heading his own aircraft design bureau, simply attached a German Junkers Jumo 004 jet engine onto his existing Yak-3 piston-engine fighter to create the Yak-15 jet fighter.

MiG, on the other hand, started from a clean sheet of paper to design an entirely new jet fighter. Powered by two BMW 003 turbojets, the resulting MiG-9 was a remarkable effort for a first-generation jet fighter created in such a very short time by engineers approaching entirely new technology for the first time.

Yak vs. MiG

Both the Yak-15 and MiG-9 were ready for flight testing on April 24, 1946. The order of the first flights was decided by a coin toss, resulting in the MiG-9 becoming the first Soviet jet fighter to fly. It was clear from the outset that the MiG-9 was the superior design. Both fighters ended up being ordered into production, but that coin toss became an omen, since, from that day on, MiG eclipsed Yak as the premier producer of Soviet fighter planes.

Nevertheless, the MiG-9 did exhibit a few issues. For one, firing the armament of two 23 mm cannons and one 37 mm cannon, the muzzles of which projected ahead of the air intake, could cause the engines to flame out. However, those faults were eventually rectified, and a total of 598 MiG-9s were built.   

Cold War: Beating the West

It was MiG’s next jet fighter that really made the world take notice. That story began in 1946, when the British government granted the Soviet Union permission to manufacture Rolls-Royce’s latest jet engine, the Nene. Reportedly, even Stalin was surprised at that lapse in judgement. Although the deal stipulated that the engine not be used for military purposes, the advent of the Cold War quickly abrogated that agreement.

So MiG was directed to initiate development of a new jet fighter powered by the Klimov RD-45, the Soviet version of the Nene. First flown on Dec. 30, 1947, the new MiG design also featured swept-wing technology acquired from Germany. Easily outperforming its straight-wing competitor, the Yak-19, the new fighter was ordered into production as the MiG-15. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the MiG-15 created as great a shock to Western aviators as the Japanese Zero had done a decade earlier. Armed with two 23 mm cannons and one 37 mm cannon, the MiG-15 had a top speed of 669 mph and could outclimb and outmaneuver most Western fighters, only the F-86 Sabre being able to meet it on equal terms.

During 1950, MiG introduced a refined version of the MiG-15, the MiG-17, which superseded it on the production line. Although too late for the Korean War, the MiG-17 became widely used by the Soviets as well as allies such as China and North Vietnam. Allegedly, some MiG-17s are still in active service with the North Korean air force. All told, about 28,000 MiG-15s and MiG-17s were built and used operationally by the air forces of no less than 36 different nations.

Cold War: Going Supersonic

First flown in 1952 and introduced into service in 1955, MiG’s next effort, the MiG-19, was the Soviet Union’s first supersonic jet fighter. Powered by a pair of Tumansky RD-9B turbojets generating 7,100 pounds of thrust, the MiG-19 had a top speed of Mach 1.35 and was a match for the USAF’s latest “century fighters” of the mid-1950s. Although allegedly difficult to fly, a total of 2,172 MiG-19s were build, not including about 4,500 examples manufactured under license in China. They were used by many satellite air forces, including that of North Vietnam.

The 1950s witnessed unprecedented improvements in aircraft performance. A replacement for the MiG-19 would be necessary if the Soviet air force were to maintain parity with the new generation of Mach 2 fighters such as the Phantom II, F-8 Crusader, Mirage, English Electric Lightning, F-104 Starfighter and F-5 Freedom Fighter.

On June 16, 1955, MiG flew the first prototype of a new jet fighter that could match its Western opponents in nearly every respect, the MiG-21. Combining small, mid-mounted delta wings with a conventional tail, the MiG-21 looked like no other jet fighter in the world and eventually became almost as ubiquitous as the AK-47 assault rifle. Powered by a single Tumansky jet engine producing, depending on the variant, from about 7,000 to 14,000 pounds of thrust, the MiG-21 had a top speed of Mach 2.05 and was armed with a single 23 mm cannon and either four K-13 or eight R-60 air-to-air missiles. With a total of 13,896 produced, more MiG-21s have been built than any other Mach 2 fighter, and it has been used by the air forces of no fewer than 44 different nations. Not least among those was North Vietnam, where the MiG-21 became a particular bane of American flyers operating over their airspace.

Cold War: Mach 3 Fighters

During the early 1960s, one aircraft that the MiG-21 was clearly not capable of intercepting was the North American B-70, a Mach 3 strategic bomber under development for the U.S. Air Force. Although the B-70 program eventually was canceled after only two prototypes were flown, the Soviets took the threat seriously enough to order MiG to develop an interceptor specifically to counter it. The result was the MiG-25, a truly gargantuan single-seat fighter plane that, at nearly 81,000 pounds and more than 82 feet, was larger than many World War II strategic bombers.

Powered by a pair of Tumansky R-15B jets producing 22,500 pounds of thrust each, the MiG-25 had a speed of Mach 2.85 and a ceiling of over 67,000 feet, which it could attain nine minutes. Some MiG-25s were also completed as high-speed reconnaissance aircraft.

Despite the cancellation of the B-70, the MiG-25 was perceived as a significant threat to the CIA’s Lockheed SR-71 strategic reconnaissance aircraft. A total of 1,186 MiG-25s were produced, not including an additional 519 of an improved version called the MiG-31, introduced during the 1980s. The MiG-25 is said to have been the last design that Mikhail Gurevich worked on before he retired.      

Cold War: Flexible Fighters in the 1960s and 1970s

Effective as the MiG-21 proved, it did have limitations. By the early 1960s, the Soviets required a more versatile aircraft that could double as an air-to-air fighter or a fighter-bomber. The new fighter needed increased armament, electronic equipment and fuel for greater range. Since the MiG-21’s nose air intake limited the size of the radar sensors that could be installed, the new aircraft needed side air intakes. The newest MiG also ended up featuring another first for MiG: variable geometry swing-wings to optimize performance in a variety of flight regimes.

First flown in 1967, the MiG-23 entered service in 1970. It was produced in a variety of versions, including an armored ground-attack variant called the MiG-27. A total of 6,122 MiG 23s and MiG-27s were manufactured and have been used by a total of no less than 37 different air forces. Artyom Mikoyan died in 1969, so the MiG-23 was probably the last MiG design to which he contributed.

Despite the absence of its two founders, the MiG design bureau continued to develop new cutting-edge fighters. First flown in 1977, their next new product, the MiG-29, was clearly intended to counter the latest generation of U.S. fighters, principally the F-15 eagle, F-16 Falcon and F-18 Hornet. Entering service in 1982, despite some structural issues, over 1,600 MiG-29s have been manufactured. They have been used by over 30 countries.

MiGs After the USSR

In 1978, MiG became restyled “Mikoyan.” After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the OKB was transformed into a corporation and merged with the Moscow Aviation Production Association. During the 1990s, they developed a new fifth-generation jet fighter, initially known as the MiG-1.42 and, subsequently, the MiG-1.44.

However, the firm does not appear to have adapted well to the new capitalist methods, since, after a decade of work resulting in only one flying prototype, development of the MiG-1.44 appears to have been canceled. At present, the only program in which Mikoyan appears to be engaged is the development of an improved MiG-29 known as the MiG-35.

In recent years, MiG’s place as the leading developer of Russian fighters appears to have been usurped by rival Sukhoi. Nevertheless, the legacy of MiG and their place in aviation history rests secure on well over half a century at the top of one of aviation’s most competitive hierarchies: the producers of high-performance jet fighters.

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The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 was a product—and victim—of the brief vogue of supersonic nuclear bombers, specifically the Mach 3 North American XB-70 Valkyrie. Work began on the MiG-25 in mid-1959 and it made its debut flight, with a reconnaissance variant, the Ye-155-R1, on March 6, 1964. The interceptor prototype, Ye-155-P1, first flew on September 9, 1964. By then the intercontinental ballistic missile had redefined the Cold War “balance of terror” and the XB-70 had been scrapped, but the emergence of the Lockheed A-12 (and later SR-71 Blackbird) Mach 3 reconnaissance planes gave the MiG something to intercept. Upon its first public appearance in July 1967, the MiG-25 set 29 speed, altitude and time-to-climb records, some of which still stand. In 1976, however, when Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko defected to Japan, his MiG-25 “Foxbat” (as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization codenamed it) revealed an overweight mass of stainless steel, since the Russians lacked the cutting tools and experience to work with the titanium that made the SR-71 so much more successful.

The MiG design bureau remained committed to produce a total of 1,190 Foxbats, and the airplane’s speed made them quite useful high-speed reconnaissance planes, even if they remained second in performance to their Blackbird rivals. They were also used in electronic intelligence, training and bombing. Although the study of Belenko’s plane devalued the MiG-25s, it did earn them international sales among the air arms of Libya, Syria, Algeria, Iraq and India. They saw combat over the Middle East, especially in the 1980s, when Iraqi aircraft dueled those of Iran. Most uncharacteristically, on January 17, 1991, it was a MiG-25 flown by Lieutenant Zuhair Dawood of No.84 Squadron, Iraqi air force, that shot down an F/A-18 Hornet of fighter-attack squadron VFA-81 “Sunliners” off the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. Its pilot, Lieutenant Commander Michael Scott Speicher, was the first American killed in action during Operation Desert Storm.  

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Sinclair McKay has written multiple books about wartime England, including several about its two “Bs”: Bond and Bletchley Park. In February 2020, shortly before COVID-19’s global emergence, the London-based British journalist broke the mold with The Fire and the Darkness, a detailed retelling of Dresden’s bombing that coincided with its 75th anniversary. 

McKay hunkered down and spent quarantine researching a different German metropolis: Berlin, the subject of a new book published this month titled “Berlin: Life and Loss in the City that Shaped the Century.” McKay mined the city archives, striving to relive the past century’s highs and lows through accounts straight from the mouths of ordinary Berliners. Their testimonies, fluidly woven throughout McKay’s narrative, solidify their home’s unique place in not just Europe but also modern history.

why did you initially pivot from writing about wartime england to writing about wartime germany?

I was partly trying to excavate a sense of reality, like I did with Bletchley Park. With Bletchley, I was telling the story from a slightly different angle other than “How we helped to win the war.” Who were the codebreakers, what walks of life did they come from, what were their lives like? 

But I was also influenced by British guilt, I suppose — the bombing of Dresden by British bombers, and the inferno that rose and destroyed the lives of 25,000 people in one night. In Britain people recoil from it. Even though you might argue about whether it was technically a war crime or not, it was most certainly an atrocity; even Winston Churchill flinched when the news of it came through. I wondered: how do people put their lives back together again after that kind of cataclysm?

what compelled you to tackle berlin next?

I became interested in the experiences of ordinary Berliners not just through the cataclysm of 1945, when the Nazi regime finally fell, but also just the lens of the twentieth century. If you were born in Berlin in the year 1900 and were lucky enough to live to your seventies, your eighties, your nineties, you would have been living through a constant series of upheavals and revolutions and horrors, which I don’t think you could find in any other city.

You’ve got the First World War, and then the immediate aftermath of that — the German revolution and the artists’ uprising; the streets of Berlin turned into sniper canyons as near-civil war broke out. Then there was the Weimar Republic, and all the terrible economic lurches that came with that—the hyperinflation—and, of course, the rise of the Nazis and the genocide that followed. Thereafter, in 1945, the city gets torn into two by these competing ideologies, the West and Soviet Communism. 

From the point of view of an ordinary Berliner, who was just trying to live an ordinary life — going to work, falling in love, just trying to get on — what was it like to live through that?

your book spans 20th-century berlin, but mainly unfolds through spring 1945.

There are moments in history that stand like lighthouses, illuminating all that came before and after. 1945 is one of them. Inevitably, in wanting to find out more about its consequence in Berlin, I also needed to find out who its people were beforehand, and who they were after. So yes, 1945 is the core of the book: I wanted to understand on a day-by-day basis what it must have been like to live through what must have seemed like the end of the world.

How did you research and write this book during a global pandemic? 

The pandemic did pose its own challenges and difficulties in terms of travel and research because, of course, archives and libraries were shot. But there’s a fantastic organization in Berlin called the Contemporary Witness Exchange, which is run by academics and volunteers. 

The Exchange arranges meetings between older and younger Berliners for educational history tours that are like oral history. Some of the extraordinary memories you get from older members involve the days before the Berlin Wall, and then when the wall came along. They were good enough to meet me during gaps between lockdowns when I was able to go over there, and they furnished me with a huge amount of material — literally, two or three carrier bags full of raw material — as well as directions and thoughts. 

how is Berlin different from other European cities?

Berlin openly displays its wounds and scars. The bullet holes are still there in the buildings; there are still big fragments of the Berlin Wall. There are reminders in nearly every street of all the upheavals the city has gone through. And the city wants you to see it.

It’s also a city that’s always favored the young. It has that spark of rebellion and contrariness. I read accounts of boys and girls after World War II running among these terrible Gothic ruins bombed to extinction, playing games and chasing imaginary villains. This shows something about the amazing endurance of childhood, but it also tells us something about Berliners. There’s always been something abrasive and witty and skeptical in the Berliner spirit.

you empathize with germany, which for some is still taboo.

Berlin is very much aware that the city once had a large and brilliant Jewish population. One can understand why those Berliner who weren’t Jewish and survived World War II thought, what right have we to tell the world that we struggled when our neighbors suffered many more atrocities? Even though Berliners in 1945 were all facing absolute Armageddon. They were living their lives more or less completely underground or encased in concrete shelters. Then once the Red Army finally broke through, there were uncountable numbers of rapes throughout the city as millions of women were targeted. This is trauma that countless families must have lived with through generations afterwards, and something we’re only just starting to get a proper sense of now. 

Many Berliners were Nazis — but as you illustrate, many weren’t.

There were people who belonged to the Nazi Party in Berlin, and who were true believers. But then there were the great majority of people who weren’t, and who were forced to live in this regime. When the Allies came in in 1945, they assumed the Berliners were brainwashed, that they’d all become these Nazi cult zombies. But they found this just wasn’t the case. They just wanted to get along with their lives.

Sadly, though, antisemitism remained a Europe-wide phenomenon. It was found after the war in a survey conducted by the Americans that a large number of the population of Berlin and Germany still held fundamentally antisemitic beliefs despite having been shown the horrors of what happened in the camps. It takes more than a generation for these things to work through. 

The point of history is excavating — trying to rescue real people from assumptions laid down on top of them. Berliners have had more assumptions laid down on them than lots of other people.

Could Hitler have succeeded at transforming Berlin into a Nazi stronghold?

It was never truly Hitler’s city, because there were just too many other layers. The art, the music, this pulsating aesthetic life, the pioneering architecture of the Weimar period, which deconstructed and reconstructed the city in a new way. This was also Einstein’s city, where quantum theory was being explored.

Hitler had his architectural models of a completely rebuilt Berlin; as it was, the city was going to be smashed to a rubble and replaced with avenues of neoclassical monuments. But if you look at the models, you see there are no people. There’s no sense of human scale at all, or how we would go from one place to another, or even what we would do in any of those buildings. 

Which German city will your next book be about?

I haven’t got any plans. But Munich is always interesting, as are the northern cities, like Hamburg. Germany itself as a nation has been overlooked by the British, who are always romanticizing France and Spain. Now I think a lot of people are thinking, ‘Oh, hold on a second, what are we missing here?’ Apart from the darkness of the twentieth century, Germany has the literature, the music, the perfume-makers — OK, but not the food.

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The space shuttle was truly groundbreaking. When the design was first unveiled in the 1970s, people were used to the idea of sending people into orbit or even to the moon in relatively tiny space capsules, but the enormous winged shuttles, with their stark, black-and-white color scheme and covering of novel thermal protection system tiles, captured the world’s imagination.

Still, for all its glamour, the space shuttle posed tremendous engineering problems for its designers and its operators. Because the shuttle program deviated from the existing blueprint for putting humans into space, NASA had to extensively test, rehearse and train for every aspect of its flight profile, especially the landing. A shuttle would land like an airplane on a runway (or more accurately, like a glider, since it would be coming in without engines), but it actually flew very differently from most preexisting aircraft. NASA quickly realized that astronauts would have to devote significant resources to learn how to land a 200,000-pound glider that descended so steeply and rapidly that it was referred to as the “flying brick.”

Finding a shuttle Simulator

In addition to training in realistic, ground-based flight simulators, NASA decided that astronauts needed real-world experience flying and landing an actual vehicle that behaved just like a real space shuttle. No such aircraft existed, so NASA had to develop one. The result was the Shuttle Training Aircraft, or STA.

NASA originally considered using a Boeing 737 for its STA, but eventually settled on the Grumman Gulfstream II. The Gulfstream II (also referred to as a C-11 by the Department of Defense) is a twin-engine jet aircraft designed for corporate business travelers. A standard, off-the-shelf Gulfstream II flies nothing like the space shuttle, but NASA changed the interior, exterior and operation of four Gulfstream IIs to create a mini fleet of STAs for their corps
of shuttle astronauts. 

The airframes required heavy reinforcement so they could withstand the severe stresses that came with repeatedly mimicking shuttle landings. Each cockpit received a complete redesign so it resembled the interior of an actual shuttle’s flight deck, with computers, multifunctional displays, flight controls (including the rotational hand controller specific to the shuttle) and heads-up display arrayed around the pilot. The STA pilot sat in the left seat, which was the same design as the seat on a shuttle. Even the windows and window frames were remodeled to replicate the view a pilot would have during a real shuttle landing. The right seat of each STA, where the instructor pilot (IP) sat, retained traditional aircraft controls and instruments. 

What It Was Like to Fly (and Land) the STA

A typical training flight in the STA started with an ascent to 37,000 feet. The aircraft maneuvered to a point abeam the planned landing site. At this time, the IP in the right seat initiated the simulated landing and closely replicated the final few minutes of an orbiter’s descent. The IP lowered the main landing gear and deployed both engine reversers in flight to dramatically increase drag on the aircraft. (The front landing gear remained stowed at this
point, as it could not tolerate the stress of flying in this manner.) The IP then placed the aircraft into simulation mode and at that point the astronaut’s controls became functional.  

In a typical landing, a real shuttle would overfly the runway area and continue on for several miles before completing a 180-degree turn that would encompass parts of the landing pattern’s downwind, base and final legs. In the STA, the astronaut flew this same pattern as the aircraft rapidly descended. Once the STA reached 20,000 feet, it had typically accelerated to about 280 knots. Final approach began at about 12,000 feet with the STA accepting a 20-degree dive angle at an airspeed of 300 knots (seven times steeper than passengers on commercial aircraft experience and with a rate of altitude loss 20 times faster). 

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At approximately 1,800 feet above the surface, the astronaut would level out to a three-degree rate of descent and experience about 2 Gs in doing so. Although the STA had been flying with its nose gear up, the astronauts simulated having the shuttle nose gear deployed. At 300 feet, the IP lowered the STA’s real nose gear for safety. When the astronaut’s eyes were 32 feet above the runway (the height of a real shuttle cockpit), a light came on to indicate that a simulated touchdown had occurred. At this point, the flight profile was complete; the IP resumed control of the STA, deactivated the reversers and climbed away from the landing strip. Once the STA reached altitude again, the team initiated another simulated landing. Full days in the STA could give an astronaut a double-digit number of “landings.” Before a real shuttle flight, a mission commander had to complete 1,000 simulated landings in the STA. 

End of an Era

Once the shuttle era ended in 2011, NASA had no need for the STAs. Although the agency could have used them to transport astronauts when no other aircraft were available, it elected to put the airplanes out to pasture. The STAs are currently displayed in Oregon at the Evergreen Aviation &  Space Museum (tail number 947), in Amarillo at the Texas Air & Space Museum (tail number 946), in Alabama at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center (tail number 945) and in Cali-fornia at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center (tail number 944).

From the outside, the STAs still look like ordinary jets, but their appearance belies what radical aircraft they were and the vital role they played in allowing generations of astronauts to return home safely from space. 

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