B-52 Stratofortress Read online

  The power elite of the 1950s: A Stratofortress draws contrails across the stratosphere. USAF

  A Block 90 Seattle-built B-52E prepares to link up with a KC-135.

  B-52

  STRATOFORTRESS

  The Complete History of the World’s Longest Serving and Best Known Bomber

  BILL YENNE

  Contents

  Introduction The Most Formidable Expression

  Chapter 1 The Origins of Strategic Air Power Doctrine

  Chapter 2 Boeing Bombers Before the Stratofortress

  Chapter 3 The Strategic Air Command and a Jet Bomber Fleet

  Chapter 4 What We’ve Been Waiting For

  Chapter 5 Production and Model Evolution

  Chapter 6 The Strategic Air Command and Other Stratofortress Missions

  Chapter 7 War in Southeast Asia

  Chapter 8 Back to the Cold War

  Chapter 9 A Storm in the Desert

  Chapter 10 A Decade of Changes

  Chapter 11 Twenty-First-Century Warrior

  Chapter 12 Back to the Future

  Appendix 1 Specifications by Stratofortress Model

  Appendix 2 Stratofortress Production by Model and Block Number

  Appendix 3 Stratofortress Combat Wings and Assigned Squadrons

  Bibliography

  Index

  Making final flight line adjustments to a Pratt & Whitney J57 as Stratofortresses line up for delivery to the Strategic Air Command.

  THE BOEING B-52 STRATOFORTRESS is the ultimate embodiment of the principle of strategic air power and has been the cornerstone of American air power doctrine since well before the U.S. Air Force was formed out of the USAAF in 1947.

  It looked the part then, and it still does.

  For this author, the first introduction to the powerful Stratofortress came as a young boy growing up on the northern tier of Montana, who used to lie on the lawn on warm summer evenings in the late 1950s and early 1960s staring up at the sky through a pair of high-powered binoculars.

  The Stratofortresses came over, many thousands of feet above, their streaming contrails colored golden by the late rays of summer sun. Often they were in groups of three, and often they were attached to the booms of KC-135s. With the binoculars, the “U.S. Air Force” written on the forward fuselage was easily readable. Also clearly visible were the eight big Pratt & Whitney engines and the distinctive tall tails. The boy watched them until they disappeared over the trees and pondered the formidable power they represented. The boy watched them many times, perhaps dozens of times. The man into whom that boy grew has often wished he could go back and do it again, preferably with a camera and a 500mm lens.

  Also burned into the memory of the boy who became a man is being half a mile from the end of the runway at Fairchild AFB, watching a minimum interval takeoff of Strategic Air Command B-52s. A whole squadron of the big bombers took off 12 to 15 seconds apart, their J57-P-29WA turbojets painting black contrails across the late afternoon sun.

  The personal attachment of that boy who used to watch the Stratofortresses in the sky was cemented two decades later, when, as a man associated with the U.S. Air Force Art Program, he was afforded opportunities to go inside Stratofortresses from bases in the continental United States to Andersen AFB on Guam.

  On June 25, 1980, he strapped himself into the jump seat on the flight deck of a 328th Bombardment Squadron B-52H, tail number 60-0051, at Castle AFB. The aircraft took off for a 12-hour mission that included aerial refueling over Pacific Ocean, a high-level simulated bombing run over the Nellis AFB test range, and the hair-raising and eye-opening experience of low-level operations over the 1st Combat Evaluation Group’s Detachment 5 range near Wilder, Idaho. Down below, he glimpsed a farmhouse out of the corner of his eye and imagined another boy looking up.

  Back in 1954, when the boy was first looking skyward at the sounds of airplanes and the Stratofortress was freshly accepted by the service, Secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles looked up at the immense aircraft and described it as “the most formidable expression of air power in the history of military aviation.”

  It was at night, with the massive bombers bathed in the eerie light of mercury vapor lamps, that the Stratofortress best embodied their characterization as “the most formidable expression of air power in the history of military aviation.”

  The eight throttle levers of a B-52D, with those for the numbers one and two engines—paired in the far port side nacelle—pushed forward. The Stratofortress is the only American jet bomber on which one would have found eight throttles. Bill Yenne

  A B-52H from the 96th Expeditionary Bombardment Squadron takes off from Andersen AFB, Guam. USAF photo, Senior Airman Christopher Bush

  If he only could have known what was to come. Of all the words spoken, of all the attempts at being prophetic that have been heard at the rollouts of new aircraft and weapons systems, none have ever proven to be more accurate.

  Within the American defense establishment, where an environment of concern over costs and cost overruns has been a daily reality for generations, it can be said that there is no other combat aircraft with which the American taxpayer got his or her money’s worth to a greater extreme than with the Stratofortress.

  Nor has any other combat aircraft ever remained in first-line service for so long. Even back in the 1990s, aviation historians commonly mentioned the axiom that the grandsons of the original B-52 crews were then serving aboard Stratofortresses.

  The B-52 first entered service with the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command in the Cold War 1950s, where it would remain on alert until 1991 for the possibility of delivering immediate nuclear strikes at any time and any place in the world. During the 1960s and early 1970s, B-52s were flying conventional bombing missions against targets in Vietnam. In the 1990s, as the fleet was in its fourth decade of service, B-52s were flying conventional bombing missions against targets in Iraq and, later, in the Balkans. In 2001 and 2002, as these great warhorses were nearing their fiftieth anniversary, they were punishing al-Qaeda terrorists hiding in Afghan caves.

  A 5th Bombardment Wing B-52H Stratofortress on its approach to Minot AFB. USAF photo, Sgt. Preston Chasteen

  A B-52H during an eight-hour practice bomb-dropping sortie on April 20, 2011. USAF photo, Sgt. Andy Kin

  The author during a June 1980 training mission aboard a B-52H, tail number 60-0051. Bill Yenne

  In writing about a Cold War combat aircraft that had a subsequent career in Southeast Asia, one would be able to tell a significant story. To write about such an aircraft having a major role in Operation Desert Storm would add a great deal of richness to the tale. To add yet more layers across those five decades, reaching into a new century, would make such an airplane, in a word, unique. Yet, with the Stratofortress, the long and colorful career chronicled in this book is merely the beginning.

  William Shakespeare, in Act 2 of The Tempest, penned the oft-repeated phrase “What’s past is prologue,” meaning that the past is merely the prelude to the present and to the future. The story of no aircraft in military history has ever been preceded by a prologue as extraordinary and as interesting as that of the Stratofortress.

  Its legacy was assured long ago, but so, too, was its future.

  A formation of U.S. Army Air Corps Keystone bombers over the Golden Gate on April 25, 1930, seven years before the famous bridge was built to span the entrance to San Francisco Bay. U.S. Army

  THE USE OF AIR POWER in warfare is said to date back to the first use of observation balloons by the French Aerostatic Corps at the Battle of Fleurus in 1794. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln became enamored with the concept and appointed balloonist Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe to serve as the U.S. Army’s first chief aeronaut. The
Union Army used observation balloons as early as 1861 at the time of the first Battle of Bull Run. The Confederates also later used balloons.

  The use of fixed-wing aircraft in wartime, both as observation platforms and to drop bombs, is believed to have had its debut during Italy’s 1911 operations in Libya against the crumbling Ottoman Empire. The technical establishment was slow to grasp the importance of such operations. In October 1910, Scientific American dismissed the idea of airplanes as war machines, noting that “outside of scouting duties, we are inclined to think that the field of usefulness of the aeroplane will be rather limited. Because of its small carrying capacity, and the necessity for its operating at great altitude, if it is to escape hostile fire, the amount of damage it will do by dropping explosives upon cities, forts, hostile camps, or bodies of troops in the field to say nothing of battleships at sea, will be so limited as to have no material effects on the issues of a campaign.”

  In the skies over World War I battlefields, first as observation platforms, then as war machines, this thesis was proven wrong. Air-to-air combat was a natural extension of the aircraft as an observation platform. Soon, aerial observers flying over the enemy’s lines to observe realized that they could as easily drop something that exploded. Tactical bombing was born.

  Tactical bombing, simply stated, is aerial bombardment of enemy targets, such as troop concentrations, airfields, entrenchments, and the like, as part of an integrated air-land battlefield action at or near the front. Tactical air power is generally used toward the same goals as, and in direct support of, naval forces or ground troops in the field.

  Naturally, there were some far-sighted air power theorists who began imagining that aviation might potentially be deployed in such a way as to have “material effects” beyond the battlefield, thereby shaping the course and outcome of the war itself. This is what came to be known as strategic air power.

  Strategic air power, in contrast to tactical air power, seeks targets without a specific connection with what is happening at the front. Strategic air power is used to strike far behind the lines at the enemy’s means of waging war, such as factories, power plants, cities, and, ultimately, the enemy’s very will to wage war. Strategic aircraft naturally differ from tactical aircraft in that they have a much longer range and payload capacity—certainly more than the average 1914 aeroplane. It was not until around the time of World War I that aviation technology had developed to the point where such aircraft were practical.

  The father of American air power, Gen. William Lendrum “Billy” Mitchell commanded the U.S. Army air component during World War I and afterward became an outspoken advocate of the potential of air power to win wars.

  One of the original pioneers of strategic air power was a Russian engineer and aviation enthusiast named Igor Sikorsky, who would amaze the world 30 years later with the first practical helicopters. His 1913 aircraft, named Ilya Mourometz after the tenth-century Russian hero, was the world’s first strategic bomber. In the winter of 1914–1915, a sizable number of these big bombers were in action against German targets. The payload of each bomber exceeded half a ton, and with a range of nearly 400 miles, they were able to hit targets well behind German lines. After initial victories, the Russian army was, by 1917, defeated on the ground; the Tsar had abdicated, and the events leading to the Russian Revolution were rapidly underway. The Ilya Mourometz had been successful in what it did, but it played only the tiniest part in one of mankind’s biggest dramas.

  Strategic air operations on the Western Front were soon to follow those in the east, with British aircraft launching strikes against German positions in occupied Belgian coastal cities in February 1915. The Germans countered with zeppelin attacks on Paris and on British cities as far north as Newcastle. By 1917, the Germans were using long-range, fixed-wing Gotha bombers against London. In April 1918, shortly after being established as an independent service, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) conducted a series of raids on German cities in the Ruhr and even ranged as far south as Frankfurt, though these raids were more strategic bombing experiments than a strategic bombing offensive. A full-scale strategic air offensive against Germany was scheduled for the spring of 1919, with Berlin on the target list, but the war ended in November 1918 with the plan untried.

  Though the intervention of the United States manpower in World War I may have been of pivotal importance to the Allies, American involvement in the air war was not extensive. Nevertheless, strategic air power made an impression on the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) air units in the war, Col. William Lendrum “Billy” Mitchell. He became the first major American exponent of strategic airpower, but his ideas were never implemented during the war. Strategic bombing, though experimental in British and French doctrine, was not yet accepted by the American military establishment at all.

  After the war, Mitchell argued that strategic bombers were cheaper to build and operate than battleships and that they could be used faster, and more easily, to project American power wherever it might be needed around the world. He raised hackles in 1921 when he told Congress that his bombers could sink any ship afloat. To prove him wrong, the Navy agreed to let him try out his theories on some German warships they had inherited at the end of the war that needed to be disposed of. They didn’t think he could do it, but in July 1921, he proved them wrong, sinking several vessels, including the heavily armored battleship Ostfriesland. Mitchell had dramatically proven his point, but both the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy remained officially unconvinced.

  This picture is symbolic of the advent of air power as a weapon at a time when battleships were still the most formidable expression of a nation’s military power.

  In July 1921, Billy Mitchell’s aircrews succeeded in sinking the captured German battleship Ostfriesland. The U.S. Navy was greatly embarrassed by this demonstration of the potential of air power to sink warships and tried to suppress the report of Mitchell’s success. Many in the navy were in denial for 20 years—until Pearl Harbor. U.S. Navy

  The British Royal Air Force Bomber Command, like the USAAF, demonstrated air power to the Third Reich—the hard way. Here we see an RAF Avro Lancaster over the inferno that was Hamburg, circa 1944.

  A Keystone B-4A of the U.S. Army Air Corps 31st Bombardment Squadron (7th Bomb Group), seen on October 10, 1932, at Hamilton Field near San Francisco. U.S. Army

  Mitchell’s undoing was an unrelated incident in 1925, when, after the loss of life from the crash of the Navy dirigible Shenandoah, Mitchell called the management of national defense by the war and navy departments “incompetent” and “treasonable.” Mitchell was court-martialed, convicted, and drummed out of the service on half pension. He died in 1936, just a few years short of seeing strategic air power play a key role in the Allied victory in World War II.

  Nevertheless, even before the death of Billy Mitchell, the proponents of the still-unproven concept of strategic air power had risen to places of influence within the major air forces of the world. In both Britain and the United States, large, four-engine heavy bombers were in development, while in Germany, air power in general had been fully integrated into battlefield doctrine. When World War II began, the Germans stunned military planners everywhere with the effectiveness of their blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) doctrine, in which tactical air power worked closely with rapidly moving mechanized ground forces.

  Beginning in August 1940, the German Luftwaffe undertook the world’s first major strategic air campaign, the Battle of Britain. The idea was to bring Britain to its knees solely through the use of an air assault on cities and industrial targets. The campaign ultimately failed, but there was no one who understood more how narrowly it failed than the strategic planners in the Royal Air Force. For them, and for the world, the Battle of Britain demonstrated the potential of strategic air power.

  When the United States entered the war against Germany alongside Britain in 1941, a key element of Allied planning was a coordinated strategic air offensive against German
y. The creation of a large bomber force capable of a major air campaign against German industrial targets was a key objective of Allied planning in 1942. By 1943, enough aircraft were available for a Combined Bomber Offensive, which was formally begun in June 1943. Sustained air attacks against Germany were made on an almost daily basis by the RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF Eighth Air Force, operating from bases in England, and by the USAAF Fifteenth Air Force, operating from bases in Italy.

  The stated objective, which provides a good definition of strategic air power, was “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.”

  Billy Mitchell could have told them that, and in fact, he had.

  By 1944, when the USAAF was mounting thousand-plane raids over Germany, there was no doubt of the commitment that military planners had made to the doctrine of strategic air power. USAAF

  Boeing’s huge XB-15, the most massive airplane yet built in the United States, made its first flight in 1937. National Archives

  IN 1941, THERE WAS A BILLBOARD on East Marginal Way South in Seattle, Washington, that carried the slogan “Boeing Aircraft Company, World Center of 4-Engine Airplane Development.” Pictured on this billboard were the Model 307 Stratoliner and the Model 314 Clipper, the transoceanic luxury flying boat that was then in service with Pan American. Leading the way in the picture was Boeing’s Model 299 Flying Fortress, better known by its USAAF designation, B-17.