Introduction
1.The value of Aleutian Islands real estate was appraised even more harshly centuries later, in the mid-1900s, when the United States first began planning to use the island of Amchitka as a site for nuclear-weapons testing. Underground tests were actually conducted on the island three times between 1965 and 1971. The last test, “Cannikin,” on 6 November 1971, was a shot equal to five million tons of TNT and recorded 7.0 on the Richter scale. Cannikin was reportedly the largest underground nuclear weapons test in history. Amchitka would be used briefly in the early 1990s as the site for a Navy high-frequency, over-the-horizon radar.
2.Another native animal first described by Georg Steller, Steller’s Sea Cow, was even less lucky. Fate was cruel to this defenseless, cold-water cousin of the manatee. Although the sea cow’s hide had no special use, its thick subcutaneous fat tasted good, kept well, burned cleanly in oil lamps, and even had a medicinal purpose, as a laxative. In less than thirty years after expedition landfall, Steller’s Sea Cows were extinct on Bering Island, their only habitat. Only use of the blubber as an aphrodisiac could have sped the slaughter any faster. Richard Ellis, Aquagenesis (New York: Viking, 2001).
Americans entered the sea otter trade in 1787–90, when the ship Columbia loaded skins in the Pacific Northwest, took them to Canton, and then returned home to Boston, completing the first American circumnavigation of the globe. A voyage of nearly forty-two thousand miles in thirty-four months, aboard a vessel just eighty-three feet long. K. Jack Bauer, A Maritime History of the United States (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). Sea otter skins were one of the few native American products (ginseng root was another) that found a ready market in China. In the next century, the skins would play a central role in the fabulous China trade. Robert A. Kilmarx, ed., America’s Maritime Legacy (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1979).
3.Other Native American populations suffered the same experience. One century after contact with Europeans, aboriginal populations everywhere were only 10–15 percent of their original number. Imported disease was the principal cause of these demographic collapses. Nobel David Cook, Born to Die (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
4.The hasty, mismanaged American evacuation of the approximately nine hundred natives from the Pribiloffs and seven Aleutian villages in June and July 1942 caused great suffering. The removals were underway before resettlement sites—ultimately in abandoned, derelict camps and canneries in southeastern Alaska—were selected. In mid-September 1942, occupied Attu’s few residents (fewer than fifty) were removed to Otaru, Japan as POWs. All returned three years later to villages pillaged by bored GIs. Dean Kohlhoff, When the Wind Was a River: Aleut Evacuation in World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).
Chapter 1. Crew Six
1.“I have been told by a native of this forsaken land,” one temporary island resident wrote in the mid-1960s, that Adak “is gradually making progress in the general direction of the Arctic Circle due entirely to the unbelievable strength of the winds.” Karl Beeman, quoted in James Bamford, Body of Secrets (New York: Doubleday, 2001). Beeman, an NSA employee, got lost on the island during a hike alone. Searchers found his body days later.
2.“AK 262” identified the second flight out of Adak (AK) on the twenty-sixth day of the month.
3.For a history of the early PARPRO program, see William E. Burrows, By Any Means Necessary (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).
4.And unscripted incidents (such as the EP-3 midair collision with a Chinese fighter off the coast of Hainan in 2001), which could seriously upset international relations, were always possible.
5.The P-2 Neptune, the P-3’s land-based predecessor, suffered from a similar middle-age weight gain. Most airplanes do. That problem was solved in the P-2E and later models with the addition of small Westinghouse J-34 auxiliary jet engines. Thereafter, four-engine flight in the P-2 was described as with “two turnin’ and two burnin’.” The J-34s devoured fuel and were normally used for take off and landing only. The J-34 was Westinghouse’s only successful turbojet engine.
6.The first two P-6Ms, serial numbers 138821 and 138822, were destroyed in crashes in 1955 and 1956, respectively. Bits and pieces of a P-6 are displayed at the Glenn L. Martin Aviation Museum, Middle River, Maryland. No complete aircraft is exhibited anywhere. An intact P-5M, No. 135533, is on display at the National Naval Aviation Museum, in Pensacola, Florida.
7.USS Macon was the last of the Navy’s large, rigid airships, after USS Shenandoah, USS Los Angeles, and USS Akron. (Another big ship, the unnamed ZR-2, exploded in 1921 during trials in England, where it had been built under Navy contract.) The Macon was put into service in 1931 and crashed into the Pacific off Point Sur, California, in 1935. Two other ships had been lost under similar circumstances in violent weather: Shenandoah in 1925 over Ohio and Akron in 1933 off New Jersey. The German-built Los Angeles managed to stay in the air and remain in service for eight years, amassing more than four thousand flight hours, before it was decommissioned. None of the others logged more than eighteen hundred hours. Rear Adm. William Moffett, the Navy’s senior airship advocate, was among the seventy-three who died in the Akron disaster, likely of hypothermia in the cold waters off Barnegat Bay, New Jersey. He gave his name to Moffett Field and to Mount Moffett on Adak. D. H. Robinson and C. L. Keller, Up Ship (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1982).
Navy airships suffered from delicacy in bad weather and from a lack of enthusiasm in senior officer circles, but their real problem was poor timing. The C&O Canal, the Pony Express, and commercial turboprop transport aircraft went into service just as a much better technology appeared on the horizon: the B&O Railroad, the Western Union telegraph, and the Boeing 707. So did airships. In their case, the superior technology was fixed wing aircraft in general and two maritime patrol seaplanes in particular, PBY Catalinas and PBM Mariners.
8.Progress through the ranks was so slow that the Royal Navy forbad duels between officers of different ranks, fearing that deliberately provoking an encounter with a senior could become a promotion strategy for an impatient and reckless junior officer. James E. Valle, Rocks and Shoals (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1980).
9.The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Theodore Roosevelt, would steam in the Arabian Sea in late 2001, launching combat missions day and night against the Taliban in Afghanistan with a crew whose median age was nineteen. “Out of High School and into a Combat Zone,” Carol Morello, Washington Post, 6 December 2001. The Roosevelt would spend 160 consecutive days at sea during the cruise, a Navy record.
10.The Navy could not recruit enough naval flight officers to fill nonpilot aircrew officer requirements until their career path included the opportunity to compete for squadron command and subsequent promotion. Such an opportunity, naturally, came at the expense of pilots. The first NFO took command of a maritime patrol squadron in the early 1970s, Patrol Squadron 5, in Jacksonville, Florida.
11.Crypto hardware captured in the fall of Vietnam likely followed the same route. So rich and sensitive was this new information (and that flowing from rooftop listening stations in Washington and New York City and on Long Island) that in 1968 the KGB established a new directorate, the sixteenth, dedicated to signals intelligence. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
12.If true, this was not the first time that military intelligence would be misused in Moscow. Stalin ignored clear proof from many sources of the Germans’ plans to invade the Soviet Union in June 1941. Reportedly Soviet intelligence services during World War II made little use of the information they were receiving from Kim Philby and the other spies of “the Magnificent Five” because of rivalry and suspicion. Miranda Carter, Anthony Blunt (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).
Chapter 2. Papa Delta Two
1.P-3s had a planned 29.5 year service life. In January 1987, the Navy issued a request for proposals to industry for a P-3C derivative, the P-3G (later P-7), to replace its aging fleet of -Bs and -Cs. The new program had its start as LRAACA, the long-range air antisubmarine warfare capable aircraft (an acronym pronounced as a hawking sound, deep in the throat). Lockheed was selected in October 1988 as the winner of an expanded competition; one that eventually had also considered modified commercial transport aircraft from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. A contract for 125 P-7 aircraft—$58 million each—was signed with Lockheed in January 1989 but terminated in 1990 because of cost overruns and schedule delays, leaving the P-3 in front-line service. Life extension programs have since extended the P-3’s life to about 2007.
The new replacement aircraft program for the evergreen P-3 is called Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Gulf-stream, and the UK’s BAE Systems have expressed interest. Lockheed Martin executives in Marietta, Georgia, with nothing to propose but a modernized P-3 are fearful that the Navy will inevitably be drawn to a newer turbojet airframe. Such a decision would end seven decades during which their company dominated the global market for land-based maritime patrol aircraft, and an era that began in 1941, when the Navy bought the first twenty PBO-1 Hudson coastal patrol aircraft, derivatives of Lockheed’s Model 14 Super Electra airliner. Unless program funds are accelerated, under the current schedule the first squadrons of MMAs will not get to the fleet until several years after the P-3 inventory first falls below operational requirements.
2.The Comet’s introduction into service was no less scarred than would be the Electra’s a few years later. Three early Comets suffered catastrophic structural failures in 1953 and 1954 with passengers aboard. Their fuselages had survived only a few thousand flight hours at the cabin pressurization levels required for high-altitude cruise. The losses grounded the world’s first commercial jet aircraft. When a redesigned and smaller Comet 4 finally went into service in 1958, the new Boeing 707 trampled it. Only sixty-nine Comet 4s were built. Smithsonian, June 2002. Comet accident reports are quoted on the web at http://surf.to/comet. The Nimrod’s manufacturer reportedly intends to propose the MRA4 version of its aircraft to the U.S. Navy as a P-3 replacement in the MMA program.
3.Overload operations could be conducted up to the aircraft’s maximum structural takeoff weight limit of 139, 760 pounds.
Chapter 3. On Station
1.Arctic Rose was built as a Gulf of Mexico shrimper and later modified to fish in Alaskan waters. Many think the ship was too small for the job. On the night it was lost, the crew was fishing for flathead sole. Only the body of the ship’s captain, David Rundall, was found at the time. An expert witness opined during one Coast Guard hearing that the ship had sunk in “chaotic” seas with waves as high as twenty-one feet. The Coast Guard found the wreckage of the Arctic Rose in mid–July, fifteen weeks after it had disappeared, on the Bering Sea floor two hundred miles northwest of St. Paul Island. The mystery of the cause of the sinking was heightened by the discovery that Arctic Rose was sitting almost upright on the sea floor, 428 feet down, suggesting that the ship had not capsized prior to suddenly going down. Extensive reporting on the incident is in the online archive of the Seattle Times, at www.archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com.
2.See Patrick Dillon, Lost at Sea (New York: Dial, 1998). A gripping story told wonderfully well.
3.“Jezebel” might have been named after the powerful, pagan queen of Israel in the Old Testament. The origins of the nickname are obscure. Not so for a companion ASW system, “Julie,” used for explosive echo ranging until active sonar buoys supplanted the complex tactic. Julie was named after an exotic dancer at Washington’s Bayou Club in the 1950s, whose obvious charms were said to make “passive boys (buoys) active.” Julie was a tactical dead end; Jezebel was not.
4.The Liberian tanker would turn out to be MV Mikasa. Looking for help later that afternoon, the U.S. Coast Guard would raise Mikasa on the radio. In response, the ship would report its position (52°30' N, 172°30' W), and continue heading west-southwest for Pohang, South Korea, at a reported 13.5 knots. The position, four degrees east of Adak, was an obvious error.
5.The full story, as told by the pilot, is in Jeff Harrison, “They Said It Would Never Happen,” Foundation Magazine, Spring 1997, 15–20.
Chapter 4. Emergency
1.FNGs stood for Fuckin’ New Guys. The acronym was meant to be descriptive, not critical. The all-purpose F-word lent no particular meaning to the phrase. FNGs were sometimes, less profanely, also called “nuggets.” Unless otherwise annotated, all times are Adak local time, one hour later than local time at the ditching coordinates.
2.Even midsummer serves up challenging flying weather on Shemya. July averages twenty-seven days during which the ceiling is two hundred feet or below and visibility is half a mile or less. Denizens boasted that Shemya’s fog was thick enough to cut into slabs and mail off island as a souvenir.
3.The EP-3’s diversion to Hainan—instead of ditching—after a midair with a Chinese F-8 fighter on 1 April 2001 says less about the two crews than about how the world had changed in twenty-three years. The crew flew home from China after eleven days. Their EP-3, PR-32 (Buno. 156511), was dismantled by Lockheed Martin engineers on site in June, and finally returned in pieces to Marietta, Georgia, aboard a chartered, Russian-built Antonov 124 transport that left Hainan for Dobbins AFB on 3 July 2001.
4.The Naval Air Systems Command, then in Arlington, Virginia, and now in Lexington Park, Maryland, wrote the procurement specification for the suit and established QD-1 inspection and maintenance procedures.
5.Radio transmissions are quoted verbatim from contemporary audiotapes. In some cases call signs and repetition have been removed to improve readability.
6.“Five by five” means loud and clear.
7.“Mayday” (probably from the French m’aidez, “help me”) signaled to any listener that the aircraft was in grave and imminent danger of loss of life and needed immediate assistance.
8.On 1 and 2 December 1941, Tokyo instructed certain important diplomatic and consular posts, including the embassy in Washington, to destroy “purple” encryption machines and most of their codes and ciphers, and to burn other important classified documents. The Navy staff in Washington informed commanders in the Pacific of these intercepts the next day, rightly understood to be revealing of a crisis in relations, and coupled the news with instructions to U.S. Navy facilities in Japan, China, and Guam, to do the same with their own codes.
9.Reflecting its more advanced technology, Cobra Ball’s crypto holdings were even more modest than those of the P-3s. A single, programmable board slotted into the Ball’s KG-35 crypto unit provided on-line encryption for all communications leaving the aircraft.
10.“Charlie” means correct, affirmative. From Morse code practice, where the single letter C signified confirmation.
11.In February 1979, after interviewing Caylor and Flow personally, the wing commander reported his conclusion that “the combination of [the fourth] fire, increased propeller wobble, increased aircraft control difficulties, and the sighting of a ship in the immediate vicinity caused the plane commander to ditch the aircraft when and where he did.” All other reports say the fourth fire blew itself out almost immediately, before AF 586 hit the water.
Ten years earlier, on 1 April 1968, Patrol Squadron 26’s Crew 1 was flying in Buno. 153445 over the Gulf of Siam, not far from Phu Quoc Island on an Operation Market Time surface surveillance mission. They were part of the around-the-clock search for infiltrators trying to sneak arms and men into South Vietnam. They overflew a Cambodian Navy LCM, a former U.S. Navy World War II medium landing craft now in Khmer hands by way of the French, and it fired on them. The LCM’s .50-caliber machine-gun rounds, slugs as big as your thumb and moving at nearly three thousand feet per second, took out the P-3B’s no. 4 engine, holed the wing, and started a fire.
Flying too low to bail out, Lt. (jg) Stu McLellan, the backup plane commander on the commanding officer’s crew, headed his airplane for Phu Quoc and the thirty-five-hundred-foot runway he knew was near An Toi, off the island’s southern tip, while he thought about ditching. Approaching the runway five or six minutes later, McLellan rolled into a left 270-degree turn and made it through 180 degrees before—no more than a minute away from touchdown—the starboard wing burned through and the airplane fell into the gulf, immediately killing its crew of twelve. McLellan’s aircraft was the second Patrol Squadron 26 had lost out of Utapao, Thailand, in two months. The cause of the first loss, Crew 8 in Buno. 153440 on 6 February, was never conclusively established, but it is possible it was also shot down, perhaps by the same Cambodian LCM. I am indebted to Scott Wilson, Patrol Squadron 26’s Crew 12 plane commander, for this information. Wilson’s crew found the wreckage of Crew 8’s aircraft the same day and was relieved on station by the luckless Crew 1 two months later, hours before they were shot down. (Jerry Grigsby’s intuition was better than Stu McLellan’s; he had put his aircraft into the water just before its wing came off. At the survivors’ 4 November press conference, Ed Caylor told media representatives that he thought Grigsby ditched PD-2 just thirty seconds before they lost control.) During the same few months in 1968, three highly modified OP-2 Neptunes based at Nakom Phanom, Thailand, and belonging to Navy Observation Squadron 67, were shot down while dropping sensors from low altitude on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, taking most of their three crews with them.
Chapter 5. Ditching
1.A lengthy “ditching bibliography” is at www.equipped.com/ditchbib.htm. Its focus, however, is on general aviation and commercial transport aircraft.
2.The valve, located aft beneath the floorboards on the port side, normally cycles automatically to maintain cabin pressurization as required. Closing it would prevent seawater from flooding into the opening after touchdown, presumably slowing the rate at which an otherwise intact fuselage would fill and sink.
3.Sea states are described as States 1 (mirror calm) through 9 (sea white with driving spray, waves greater than eighty feet).
4.If Grigsby really did fly at several knots below stall speed, as Caylor later remembered, their final approach to the water would have been at approximately 100 knots, and impact at around 60 knots, or 69 miles per hour. AF 586’s stall speed at the time would have been 106 knots.
5.Estimates of water depth vary enormously. At this point, Gibbons says eighteen inches deep, to the bottoms of the crew seats, and Forshay says knee-high, two feet. All ten accounts agree that the aircraft filled very rapidly and during the latter stages of the escape, the overwing hatches were underwater, requiring the remaining crewmembers to swim out to the surface. Even before then, the rolling of the aircraft had alternately submerged and exposed the hatches.
6.Howard Moore’s account is drawn entirely from memory; he was never interviewed for the record during Lt. Cdr. Jim Dvorak’s fact-finding investigation.
7.One AN/PRT-5 emergency radio was in each raft’s survival kit, but this is a beacon, too, transmitting a constant emergency signal on 243.0 MHz and 8,364 KHz. The PRT-5 cannot transmit voice and has no receiver.
8.Ball and Moore would later fly out of Naval Station Keflavik, Iceland, together, during the squadron’s 1980 deployment to the Atlantic Fleet. Their Crew 4 would wear Cub Scout hats and “Den 4” patches sewn on their shoulders, and warm clothes under their flight suits.
9.Shepard’s and Hemmer’s ditching stations assigned both men to the Mark-12 raft.
10.It was gone during the Adak deployment, leaving only a moustache behind.
Chapter 6. Search
1.On his second look around the Mark-7, Ed Caylor decided that Gary Hemmer, the only “ground pounder” aboard the aircraft, was in the worst shape of the nine in the raft. Caylor was probably correct. Hemmer would have never passed a flight physical. Among other things, he was on a prescription for three hundred milligrams a day of Phenytoin, an anticonvulsant. Attempts to pass this medical information to Mys Sinyavin by radio were evidently not successful. It is not clear if a relay attempt through the Soviet trawler Tajikistan, in the Bering Sea, succeeded. A consular officer from Embassy Moscow finally delivered the medicine to Hemmer in Khabarovsk. Gary Hemmer survived AF 586’s ditching by nearly twenty years. He died 22 June 1998 in Denver, Colorado, five years after he retired from the Navy as a master chief petty officer with thirty years of service.
2.The FAA’s current Technical Standard Order (TSO C70a) governing aircraft life rafts requires 3.6ft2 per person of “usable sitting area” on deck. “Rubber Ducky III,” the raft in which Steven Callahan survived almost eleven weeks alone in the Atlantic in 1982, was a circular Avon six-man raft, about five feet six inches in diameter. He judged it adequate only for two. Steven Callahan, Adrift (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986).
3.Not all. Wagner remained dry in his.
4.The now nearly forgotten draft lottery affected different lives in different ways. Caylor’s draft number was lower still, 26. It was not a factor in his decision to go to the Naval Academy, but it was an incentive to keep his grades up. The year before Conway’s birth date drew 32, William Jefferson Clinton’s came up 311, and he promptly lost all interest in the ROTC at the University of Arkansas. David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace (New York: Scribner’s, 2001). Gibbons’s lottery number was higher still, 324. He had stood no chance of being drafted.
5.Load complete, Crew 12 flew their practice torpedo drops on the weapons range Wednesday. There was no such range at Adak. They were off duty Thursday afternoon.
6.Cobra Ball missions actually carried two crews. The pilots and navigators in the front end of the RC-135S were one. The tactical commander, electronic warfare officers, and technicians in the back end were the other. The two were scheduled and deployed together. Like Crew 6 in AF 586, however, Scone 92’s tactical crew was not a single unit. On 26 October, the men in the back of Scone 92 were drawn from six different 24th SRS flight crews.
7.Winkleman’s first message actually said there was a P-3 “down” and gave latitude/longitude coordinates, which the flight crew took to be merely a traffic advisory about a friendly aircraft far to the south. When this message was clarified to be a report of a ditching, Carter and Feldkamp immediately terminated their mission and turned south, toward the ditch site, on their own initiative. Minutes later, at 3:22, Scone 92 received Winkleman’s direction to do just that. Wayne Winklemann was in a high-visibility job. Its incumbents routinely were selected for promotion to colonel. His quick decision to abort an operational Cobra Ball mission for the SAR could have been criticized because there was already a Navy P-3 heading for the site, but it was not.
8.This time comes from the TSC log. The OPREP-3 message’s date-time group is actually fourteen minutes later.
9.“Gibson girl” because of the radio’s hourglass shape.
10.A heaving line might have saved Grigsby, but only if the raft could have supported another man. Years later, the Naval Air Systems Command’s manual on survival equipment annotated its discussion of the Mark-7 life raft (then renamed “LRU-13”) with the note that “newly procured LRU-13 liferaft assemblies will be configured with heaving line assemblies. Earlier configurations without heaving lines will be considered serviceable.”
11.As soon as Jarvis left the fuel pier, the Kodiak-based buoy tender CGC Ironwood moved alongside to top off with diesel oil, in case it was also ordered to the SAR scene. The long trip west for the much smaller (180 feet) and slower (fourteen knots) Ironwood would have been futile and perhaps dangerous. Fortunately, it was not ordered to sea. The tough wooden ship was decommissioned in 2000, after fifty-seven years in service.
12.AMVER, is the Automated Vessel Reporting system. Sail plans, weather, or other reports filed by cooperating ships allow the U.S. Coast Guard to identify vessels near a ship or aircraft in distress, so they can be diverted to provide assistance. Participation is voluntary. In 1978, the system was managed at Governors Island, in New York Harbor, but run on a CDC 3300 mainframe computer located at the Transportation Computer Center, at Department of Transportation/Coast Guard headquarters, in Washington, D.C.
13.Sinyavin had not filed a sail plan with the Coast Guard (most Soviet vessels did not), so its position was not continuously updated by AMVER. Sinyavin appeared in the system’s “static plot” database only because it was reporting the weather. On the course (225°) and at the speed (eight knots) AMVER held for Sinyavin, its position at time of ditch would have been close enough to AF 586 for timely rescue, but someone would have had to manually update the old position to see that.
14.Between mid-December 1897 and late February 1898, then-Lieutenant Jarvis famously led a three-man relief expedition from the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear overland on foot fifteen hundred miles, driving nearly 450 reindeer before them, food to save hundreds of whalers stranded in the Arctic near Point Barrow, Alaska. Six vessels were caught fast in the ice. Two other ships had also stranded their crews. Rescue of all finally came in August 1898. One assessment is that Jarvis’s contribution was less the food than discipline, without which the motley band at Point Barrow would have disintegrated into rabble. John Bockstoce, Whales, Ice and Men (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986). See also “Report of the Cruise of U.S. Revenue-cutter Bear and the Overland Expedition for Relief of the Whalers in the Arctic Ocean,” Treasury Department Doc. 2101 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1899).
15.Tony Tuliano, then a damage control man in the cutter’s engineering department and riding below the waterline, remembers bone-rattling shudders and the seas shaking the cutter hard as it plowed through them toward the site.
16.All of the Ball’s sensors and observation windows are on the starboard side of the aircraft.
17.The message was sent under the classified originator address of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman.
18.“Gaslight” is visual contact on the incandescent heat plume of a Soviet ICBM reentry vehicle.
19.Three weeks later, Capt. D. K. Cho, the new master of MV Hanwoo, would tell Juneau that his predecessor was fired (“dismissed from the mastership of Hanwoo”) because of his failure to respond positively. Too late (for Cho’s predecessor), it would be discovered that the ditching coordinates he had been passed were in error by five degrees of latitude, fully three hundred miles. Some of the crew wives, Shelly Wagner was one, were told Thursday night that a Korean vessel was on the way to rescue their husbands. They were deflated Friday morning when they found out this had not happened.
20.This is similar to the geometry of the Williamson Turn, known to sailors worldwide for its use in maneuvering a ship to come down the reciprocal of its current track, often used in searching for men overboard.
21.Mike Harris would later comment that continual requests from Yokota for information over the primary SAR radio frequency had been “detrimental to the effort.” The Soviets would make a somewhat similar complaint on Sunday, 29 October, telling an American embassy officer, “The fact that U.S. aircraft were always on [Sinyavin’s] radio channel did not help communications between the ship and port.”
22.When Petty Officer Horning went aft to act as drop master, Porter replaced him in the C-130 flight engineer’s seat with one of the crew scanners, Seaman Dan Mallot. Young Mallot had never filled a cockpit seat before, so Porter kept the instructions simple. He pointed out the pilot’s altimeter on the panel and told Mallot to tap him gently on the shoulder if the big hand went below two hundred feet.
23.On 21 March 1991, two Patrol Squadron 50 P-3s had a midair collision in a training area offshore San Diego, California. Twenty-seven died instantly in the collision of Bunos. 159325 and 158930.
24.A C-130 with H-3 helicopters was also available at Kadena AB on Okinawa, but the Kadena Rescue Coordination Center was understandably reluctant to launch its SAR team on what would have been a twenty-hour, fifteen-hundred-mile repositioning flight across the North Pacific.
25.As 65825 headed east toward the mainland, Adak’s winds were twenty to thirty knots, with gusts nearly twice that strong. The aircraft would participate in later searches for Grigsby and Miller with a squadronmate, 65824. When the 71st Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron at Elmendorf finally closed its books on this mission on 29 October, squadron aircraft had flown thirteen sorties and almost fifty-six flight hours.
26.Sinyavin would be laid up in 1996, after twenty-five years at sea. Captain Arbuzov would then move ashore and become the director of fleet security for Pilenga, a Russian-Japanese fishing joint venture with offices in Yuzhno on Sakhalin Island.
27.Ron Price’s statement has Sinyavin originally steaming 240°T, away from the site when XF 675 arrives overhead, however, the above account is consistent with the quoted contemporary description of events by A. Lavrov, chief of navigation safety and communications of the Far Eastern Fish Association. Moreover, Cliff Carter’s hand-written log of the flight says that Sinyavin was already heading for the crash site “with all marker lights and search light [illuminated]” when XF 675 marked on top.
28.The story is told and this dialogue is taken from Bill Porter, “Manislov [sic], This Is Bill,” Alaska Magazine, December 1979, online at http://www.upnavy.com/upg_mishap.html.
29.In early 1942, three U.S. Navy enlisted aircrew men survived thirty-four days in a raft in the Pacific, living on rainwater and very little else. Starting only with the contents of their pockets, by the thirty-third day they had lost even their clothing. Robert Trumbull, The Raft (New York: Henry Holt, 1942). Callahan began his eleven-week trial in Rubber Ducky III with only three pounds of food and eight pints of water. He lived on distilled water and sun-dried dorado jerky and lost one-third his weight.
The large library of literature about survival at sea in temperate or tropical climates is not matched by a similar body of work about survival afloat on cold water. The explanation is found in the fact that one cannot survive as long in the cold. What can be endured for days or weeks on warm water cannot be survived even for hours in extreme cold. One classic tale of survival on the cold ocean is that of Sir Ernest Shackleton and the crew of the Endurance. On 24 April 1916, during his second Antarctic expedition and five months after his ship was destroyed by pack ice, Shackleton set sail with a crew of five in a small boat from near Elephant Island (in the South Shetlands group) to South Georgia Island, eight hundred miles away across the Scotia Sea. They were in the James Caird, the largest of Endurance’s three surviving boats and named after one of Shackleton’s financial backers. The six would make the autumn crossing in a wooden boat that was not even thirty-three feet long and boasted just over two feet of freeboard. Granted James Caird was decked over, but only at both ends; it was uncovered amidships. In this small lifeboat, Shackleton’s party would sail and row east for two weeks, successfully seeking help for the twenty-two men stranded on Elephant Island by the loss of Endeavor and for themselves. F. A. Worsley, Shackleton’s Boat Journey (New York: Norton, 1977). Expedition photographs are in Frank Hurley, South with Endurance: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition, 1914–1917 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).
30.Rascher was not among the twenty-three German doctors and medical administrators tried by the allies during December 1946–August 1947 for committing atrocities. This truly evil man—he had conducted terrible experiments in high-altitude physiology, also—escaped trial and execution, but not justice. Rascher and his wife had deceived Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler into believing that she had given birth in her late forties to three children, later discovered to have been adopted kidnapees from orphanages. Himmler’s revenge for the deception was to imprison the two in Dachau and Ravensbrueck, where both died. William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960). The availability of Rascher’s database, in a document called “the Alexander Report,” has raised profound ethical questions for researchers. (“The Treatment of Shock from Prolonged Exposure to Cold, Especially in Water,” Leo T. Alexander, Major, M.C., AUS. Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, Item 24, July 1945.) For the most part, these have been answered by rejecting its use or general publication.
31.Temperature (thermo-) regulation is done by the hypothalamus, in the central core of the forebrain and atop the brain stem. In reaction to extreme cold, the hypothalamus initiates vasoconstriction, elevates the metabolic rate, and triggers shivering. It also helps regulate blood pressure and the rate and force of heartbeat. At around 29 degrees C, the hypothalamus can no longer regulate.
Chapter 7. Washington and Moscow
1.Shulman, an academic, served Secretary Cyrus Vance as a special advisor for Soviet Affairs, with the rank of ambassador, from 1977 to 1980. Not until the eighth message had passed between the State Department and the embassy was the aircraft correctly identified as belonging to the Navy.
2.In the 1950s, “CB” painted on the vertical stabilizer identified Patrol Squadron 9 aircraft.
3.This was the first of at least four such expressions of gratitude from the American side. Two others were sent by President Carter and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown to their counterparts, Brezhnev and Marshall D. F. Ustinov, after the successful completion of the humanitarian mission. Carter’s message to Brezhnev mentioned his own navy service, implying a special understanding of the heroism of the Soviet rescue crew. The Coast Guard’s 17th District commandant, Rear Adm. Robert Duin, also sent a telegram of thanks to Moscow.
Chapter 8. Rescue
1.By the 1970s, extended confinement in a small box had become a survival training cliché. USAF reconnaissance aircrewmen decades before the war in Vietnam were closed up in wall lockers at Forbes AFB for thirty-six hours, while their “captors” pounded on the outsides, screaming insults and orders.
2.Caylor and others could not get a winter jacket for the 1978 Adak detachment. They were not able to get one the next year, either, when Patrol Squadron 9 was deployed to Misawa, Japan, and aircrews were regularly flying over the cold, Western Pacific Kuroshio and Oyashio currents. Shepard had one with him aboard AF 586 but did not wear it out the hatch. He thought that it would be too bulky beneath the QD-1 and survival and flotation vests.
3.The QD-1 suit mittens were not much better. The squadron’s Rescue Report said of them, “The mittens provided little protection and easily filled with water and allowed no mobility.”
4.Izvestiya indicated in a 31 October article datelined Vladivostok that three other sailors were also aboard the whaleboat, Y. Trofimov, R. Kilibayev, and V. Matveyev. None of the five in the small boat got any other recognition for their heroism. Soviet press coverage of the rescue was factual and restrained. In the capital, Pravda, Sovyetskaya Rossiya, and evening and morning TV news programs covered the story, also. On 7 November, Pravda published a mawkish commemorative poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, “attempting,” in the embassy’s words, “to extend the humanitarian aspect of the P-3 rescue to international affairs generally.”
5.The shiver reflex seems to be shut off by a high level of calcium in cold muscle cells. Shivering stops at a loss of about 10 degrees F in core temperature. By this time, oxygen consumption has dropped to about 70 percent of normal, signaling a roughly proportional decline in metabolic rate.
6.Squadron Operations at Kodiak briefly explored the possibility of getting the airfield on the south end of Amchitka opened temporarily for CG 1500 (Porter would have to fly past the island on his way to Adak), but it proved to be impossible to get Amchitka’s runway lights on in time.
7.The request was in the form of a joint Department of State–Department of Defense message.
8.They were all wearing the standard-issue “Jacket, Flying, Man’s, Intermediate, Type G-1,” the same type of jacket that Grigsby had put on that morning. Almost every crewmember in XF 675, CG 1500, and DF 704 was wearing a similar jacket.
9.Some at Moffett Field who knew “Inu” Shepard from his tour in Patrol Squadron 40 were especially concerned that he might be forced to reveal all he knew to the Russians. Shepard was thought to have a photographic memory, and believed to have remembered everything he had ever seen about U.S. Navy antisubmarine tactics, equipment, and intelligence during his long career.
10.A normal reaction to hypothermia is increased urine production, a signal that the kidneys are trying to cope with the body core fluid overload associated with constriction of blood vessels in arms and legs. The survivors in the Mark-12 resisted the urge to urinate, fearful that the waste water would carry precious body heat away with it.
11.P-3s now carry a neoprene “quick donning anti-exposure coverall” in place of the old QD-1. Used together with cold weather underwear, an insulated coverall, and a life vest, the resulting new CWU-62P “apparel assembly” is designed to provide flotation without a raft and at least six hours protection from hypothermia, the old specification. Mittens and gloves are attached to the ends of the suit’s sleeves, and the hood is stored in a thigh pocket.
12.The concept and the quotation come from Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). The opposite view is in Mike Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard (New York: Crown, 2002). “Studies of shipwreck survivors have shown,” Dash writes (in connection with the grounding in 1629 of the Dutch East Indiaman Batavia on Morning Reef, off western Australia), “that men who do have hope outlive those who may be physically as strong or stronger but give way to despair. A stubborn determination to make land, perhaps see a wife or family again, has helped many sailors survive long periods in open boats.”
13.The importance of “the will to live” is a very durable idea. In the mid-1990s for example, TWA’s B-747 flight handbook was instructing its international flight crews “the most important requirement in survival is mental attitude, the will to live.” The handbook then went on to concede that “exposure to the elements is the greatest problem in survival.”
14.Gary Hemmer reported that he thought the Mark-7 sank while the Sinyavin’s boat crew was trying to bring it aboard. The others believed it was brought aboard with them, but they were mistaken. Neither raft was available for inspection as part of the investigation. In 2001, Arbuzov sounded apologetic that conditions had prevented them from recovering the rafts.
15.See Peter Stark, “As Freezing Persons Recollect the Snow . . . the Cold Hard Facts of Freezing to Death,” Outside Magazine, January 1997, online at http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/0197/9701fefreez.html, for a description of the process on land. Also included in Peter Stark, Last Breath, Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance (New York: Ballantine, 2001). See also www.sarbc.org/hypo.html, a site of the Search and Rescue Society of British Columbia.
16.Shepard was so concerned about Hemmer’s dazed condition and all the man knew about the capabilities of SOSUS, the Navy’s acoustic ocean surveillance system, that he tried to remain close to him, to ensure against any unconscious, mumbled disclosures to the Russians.
17.He received aspirin but no other medication. In time the bruise went away, and Forshay easily passed Navy physicals for the next twenty years. He retired from active duty in the Naval Reserve in 1998.
Chapter 9. The Search Continues
1.Their postmission “purple” report spoke of looking for the “one crewmember [Grigsby] which [sic] was lost at sea.” Detachment personnel on Adak had already decided among themselves that Miller was dead, but Grigsby’s fate was less certain.
2.The Krivaks were a class of small combatant ships operated by the navy and by the border guards. Two unidentified Soviet Navy vessels would also appear and remain within a few miles of the abandoned Mark-12 through Saturday night, 28 October, despite weather that was then reported as “500 to 1,000 overcast, seas 30 feet, winds 310°/40 knots, white caps, visibility 1–2 miles.” Gibbons was surprised to see how well the trailing Krivak was riding the seas.
3.Bud Powers, on the radio in the Patrol Wings Pacific command center and listening to everything during the crisis, would slowly get past the natural thought that with an aircraft in his squadron lost at sea his career was over, and move on with the last few months in squadron command. Powers would soon fly to Japan with Crew 6’s medical records, to greet them there on arrival from the Soviet Union. He would be denied the use of a squadron aircraft for the trip by the wing commander, and fly in a commercial airliner instead. Powers, a 1960 graduate of the Naval Academy, would later be selected for captain and retire in that grade in May 1987.
4.The DFC is traditionally awarded for “heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight.” Gibbons was proposed for the Coast Guard’s Gold Life Saving Medal, for his successful pursuit of the Mark-12 raft. The award was denied because one of the lives saved by his courageous action was his own.
Chapter 10. Petropavlovsk and Khabarovsk
1.This figure includes as many as twenty-five million civilian and military deaths during World War II alone. Mortality estimates are in Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone, Death and Memory in Twentieth-Century Russia (New York: Viking, 2001).
2.When AF 586 went down, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was still fourteen months away. Nine hard years would pass before the last Soviet soldier in Afghanistan, Gen. Boris Gromov, hiked across the Friendship Bridge back into the Uzbek SSR. Gromov’s retreat confirmed the Red Army’s first military failure in forty-five years, the first since its defeat of two German armies at Stalingrad. But not until the evaporation of East Germany and the Red Army’s further humiliation in Chechnya would the West get a clear look at the wizard behind the curtain, and suddenly realize how badly it had overestimated its adversary’s vitality, practically until the day of the collapse. Surprise at the collapse was near universal. An example is Caspar Weinberger, whose seven years as secretary of defense under President Ronald Reagan should have made him one of the best-informed people in Washington, if not in the world. Weinberger’s first biography, Fighting for Peace (Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1990), reveals he was entirely unaware of the possibility of the Soviet Union’s imminent implosion.
3.The next year Bering discovered the Aleutians and the Commander (Komondorski) Islands on the way to North America. He died in December 1741 of scurvy. In 1991, on the 250th anniversary of his death, the site of Bering’s grave was discovered, aptly, on Bering Island.
4.The Voyska Protivovozdushnoy Oborony Strany, more commonly PVO Strany. Air defense was one of five separate services in Moscow’s military structure.
5.Also a busy fishing grounds, but less a secure “lake” than it was thought to be. Beginning in 1971–72, the submarine USS Halibut repeatedly entered the Sea of O’ covertly to tap the Soviet underwater communications cable between the submarine base at Petropavlovsk and fleet headquarters in Vladivostok. Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, Blind Man’s Bluff (New York: Public Affairs, 1998).
6.U.S. engineers had the same time warp sensation when inspecting Lieutenant Victor Belenko’s MIG-25 Foxbat, after he defected to Japan with it on 6 September 1976. Belenko’s front-line air defense interceptor had a welded steel (no titanium) fuselage and its fire control radar used vacuum tube (not solid state) technology, both twenty years behind the U.S. state of the art. In twenty-five years, the world would change so much that a self-indulgent tourist could charter a demonstration flight “to the edge of space” in a Foxbat for $12,595.
7.During Brezhnev’s last decade in power, Georgy Markovich Korniyenko was the foreign ministry’s chief “Americanist,” next to Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko himself and to Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow’s “ambassador-for-life” in Washington. (Dobrynin was the Soviet ambassador through the terms of six presidents, Kennedy through Reagan.) Korniyenko’s personal involvement is one indication of the high level of attention AF 586 received in the Soviet government.
8.Embassy cables go out over the signature of the ambassador automatically. Toon’s personal participation in this incident, however, is confirmed by the message exchanges with Shulman and by Bud Powers’s telephone conversations with the ambassador directly during the period Powers’s crew was held in the USSR.
9.The families’ anguish was unfortunate and unnecessary. The embassy’s team at Khabarovsk had already reported that all ten men were “basically in very good condition,” and its report was in Washington, in wing headquarters at Moffett Field and on Adak early Wednesday morning.
10.The photos were purchased from merchant seamen or fishermen, whose ships had access to the port. The U.S. Navy paid well for the many photographs it bought from these sources.
Chapter 11. Homecoming
1.The same “purple” was the source of the erroneous information that there were three rafts in the water, and that Scone 92 (called Gull 92 in the report by mistake) had “attempted location of surface vessels to assist with pickup.” Headquarters, Fifth Air Force also referred to Cliff Carter’s RC-135 as Gull 92.
2.The loss of this aircraft, call sign Juliet Bravo 022, is a story in its own right (a very short story, the flight lasted only fourteen minutes and twenty-seven seconds). JB 022’s no. 4 propeller and gearbox were not recovered, so the cause of the initial failure was never established conclusively. Audio and most data channels of the flight recorder operated normally, however, so accident investigators were able to reconstruct the other events during the flight in great detail, including a stall and a momentary 11,400-feet-per-minute rate of descent during the first quarter turn of a spin before recovery was effected. JB 022 stalled again on short final approach as it slowed below minimum control speed, at 38 feet altitude, and then the right wing tip hit the water. The aircraft splashed down at 127 knots (146 mph) weighing more than sixty-two tons. The impact tore the wings from the fuselage, and broke it into three pieces. The five deaths were from drowning. Lt. Bob Verschure, the plane commander and one of the survivors, had 1,270 pilot hours in the P-3.
3.The lack of information to the squadron from Department of Defense comm. channels is striking. Very few, a handful, of the literally hundreds of messages about AF 586 that flew between interested commands included Patrol Squadron 9 or its Adak detachment in their address.
4.This account is taken from the Powers’s recollections. Others, officers on the Wing staff, remember Admiral and Mrs. Prindle’s roles very differently, describing him as extremely supportive of the squadron and instructing his staff to be as helpful as possible.
5.Media interest in the men was intense, albeit fleeting. Crew 6’s audience included AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, NBC, television and radio, and all four daily newspapers in the San Francisco area, with the result that the press conference stretched to half an hour. Even though they were treated with deference, the crew found the experience trying enough that shortly thereafter they refused a request by a national morning news show’s producers to fly to New York to appear on their network TV broadcast. The refusal disappointed the Pacific Fleet’s public affairs officer, who welcomed the opportunity for Navy visibility on network television.
6.Perhaps anticipating this result, Howard Moore had annotated his travel reimbursement voucher before he submitted it. “Living conditions,” he observed on 6 December, “in a liferaft with four people while being buffeted by high waves and most inclement weather is [sic] most unacceptable. Per diem while in Russian territory unknown, notwithstanding the caviar and vodka served.” His good-humored appeal for special consideration got him nothing.
Chapter 12. Postmortem
1.Patrol Squadron 9’s two most senior enlisted men in the maintenance department came to it from attack squadrons, with no prior service in a maritime patrol squadron and with no experience in the P-3 aircraft.
2.The flights out of Cubi Point were styled as the “First Annual Joan Baez Boat People Hunt,” honoring the singer-activist, who reportedly flew aboard one of them. Matt Gibbons swapped ditching stories with the survivors of the Patrol Squadron 22 accident when he passed through the Philippines.
3.The title “commodore” was an honorific. MacKay was a senior captain at the time. A few years later he would be promoted to rear admiral and move to Moffett Field to command the Pacific Fleet’s patrol squadrons.
4.For a sympathetic natural history of the albatross, see Carl Safina, Eye of the Albatross: Visions of Hope and Survival (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). One in ten of the fledgling albatross chicks Safina saw learning to fly over Tern Island (770 miles southeast of Midway) was eaten by tiger sharks waiting in the lagoon below.
5.The failure did happen again, ironically the very next time it was with Bud Powers in the left seat and Howard Moore as the in-flight observer in the tube. They landed on three engines.
6.Engineering Change Proposal (ECP) 936, which defined the work package on new production aircraft, was approved on 23 October 1980 and introduced in November 1981 with Buno. 161336, the ninety-first aircraft to come off the assembly line after PD-2. Three years later, in August, a similar program was approved for aircraft out of production and going through overhaul at the rework facility at Alameda, California, where Jerry Grigsby had been assigned almost fifteen years before. The first modification of an aircraft in service, however, was not actually done until May 1987.
7.U.S. communications with the official addressed him as “Soviet Fleet Commander Alexeev,” but Alexeev himself used the lesser title of “expedition chief.” Alexeev’s message of condolence to the 17th Coast Guard District Commander late on 31 October said that Sinyavin and an otherwise unidentified second vessel, Belkina, “did all in their power” to save American lives.