I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (11 page)

It was a simple problem. The Americans didn’t want Russian missiles 90 miles off the coast of Florida. But the Russians couldn’t see what the problem was since there were American missiles in Turkey, just 150 miles from its own borders.

Winning this argument meant having a war. So what was needed was a solution where no one lost. And that seemed to be just about impossible.

Since I was two at the time, my biggest concern was… actually, I can’t remember what my biggest concern was, but it probably had something to do with biscuits. My mum and dad, however, have subsequently admitted that they were crapping themselves.

I don’t think this shows them to be woolly-headed liberals. They were simply the parents of two small children and felt that both of us were about to be incinerated. This gave them a sense that the misery and pain of childbirth had been for nothing, because everything was about to end.

Today all we have to worry about are a few disgruntled Algerian youths who maybe have a bit of poison. Back then the world was threatened by two superpowers, each of which had enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world ten times over. It must have been terrifying.

And the symbol of all this hate and envy between Russia and America has to be the B-52 bomber, a plane conceived and built with only one purpose in mind. To drop atom bombs on men, women and children. So by rights we should look at it today with the same venom and hatred that we look at the swastika.

And yet.

A few years ago, long after the Berlin Wall had come down and America and Russia had made public man love, I was at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base just outside Tucson in Arizona. This remarkable place is known as the boneyard
because it’s here that the US Air Force stores its unwanted planes.

The climate is just right – warm and dry – and the soil is heavily alkaline so the aluminium remains untouched by the passage of time. Even the hundred or so F-4 Phantoms that were stored there looked brand spanking new.

But it was not the condition of the planes that startled me most of all. It was the sheer numbers. Hundreds and hundreds of every conceivable aircraft from bombers to helicopters were lined up, some waiting to be scrapped, some waiting to be sold and some waiting for a war. These had had their sensitive equipment removed, along with all their oils and fluids, and were just sitting there, in the dry desert air, looking rather forlorn.

But it was at the back of the base, probably five miles from the front entrance, that I found the most amazing sight of them all. A huge guillotine was on its long murderous descent straight into the left wing stem of a B-52 bomber. The massive plane staggered, the wing fell off and then it seemed to stand upright again, waiting for the next blow. This time its other wing was severed, and then the fuselage was simply cut in half.

This was another example of the Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty (START) at work. It was another piece of the nuclear jigsaw being removed and, thanks to the endlessly clear skies down there in Arizona, the Russian spy satellites would have had a good view of the action. Doubtless they were pleased over in Moscow as they looked at their monitors. I should have been pleased too. But somehow I wasn’t. I was sad, because despite everything I like the B-52. Or as it’s known in the American Air Force, the BUFF. The Big Ugly Fat Fucker.

It’s hard to explain why but I think it has something to do with the innocence of machinery. The bomber never knew that it had been designed to drop atom bombs or what those bombs could do. It didn’t ask to wreak such havoc in Vietnam, or the Gulf or Kosovo. It was simply asked to take off with its belly full of what, so far as it was concerned, may as well have been heavy eggs and fly for anything up to 45 hours – non-stop. It had performed this task, well, for 40 years and now, for no reason it could fathom, they were cutting its arms off.

The story of the B-52 is an epic, with its genesis in those busy, confusing days after the Second World War. In the blink of an eye we’d gone
from a piston-engined world with conventional bombs to nuclear power and jets. So no one seemed to know for sure what sort of planes might be needed, especially as the new threat seemed to be coming from Russia of all places.

Boeing had several attempts to make a long-range bomber for the post-war era but each time they were told to go away and make it faster. ‘And while you’re at it, can you make it carry more?’ So they substituted the turboprop engines for six Pratt and Whitney jets, swept the wings back by 20 degrees, and then they were ready.

‘Yes,’ said the military. ‘But can you make it faster?’ So they swept the wings back by 35 degrees and added two more jets, bringing the total to eight. There was so much on the wings at this point in fact that each was fitted with a small wheel on the tip to stop it dragging on the ground.

By this time Convair was in the race, offering the top brass the biggest plane the world had ever seen, or would see until the C-5 Galaxy came along a full sixteen years later. Theirs was not only bigger than Boeing’s but stronger, capable of carrying a heavier load and, best of all, much, much cheaper. But the military decided to go with the B-52 for one simple reason. With all
those engines, it was 100 mph faster, and speed, they sort of knew, was going to be everything.

And so in 1952, with the wings swept back even more, the BUFF emerged from its hangar in the dead of night under a sheet. Already Cold War paranoia was beginning to settle on the land like a big itchy blanket.

It was huge. The tail fin stood as tall as a five-storey building, and the wing span beggared belief. At 185 feet, it’s only ten feet shorter than the width of a modern-day Boeing 747.

After the inaugural flight Boeing test pilot Tex Johnson told waiting dignitaries that it was ‘a hell of a good aeroplane’. But he was lying. Later that day he told Boeing engineers that pilots of the B-52 would need new flying suits because ‘if we are going to have to manhandle this son of a bitch around, we’re going to have arms bigger than our legs’.

Quickly modifications were made, but already it was beginning to look like a botch job, a machine that had started out as one thing and then been converted into something that was no good, and then repaired to make it bearable. No one back then in 1952 could possibly have known that the BUFF would still be operational 50 years later.

Even though the last of the 744 B-52s was made in the mid sixties, when I was still worrying about biscuits, they will remain in service until 2045. So, by the time the last B-52 flies it will very nearly be an antique. And that, surely, makes it one of the most impressive machines ever made.

What makes it doubly impressive is that it’s never really done the job for which it was designed. It’s never dropped an A- or an H-bomb in anger. But there was a time, of course, when everyone thought it would have to…

In 1960 the Americans figured they would have fifteen minutes to respond to a nuclear attack, so the Air Force was ordered to make sure its B-52s could be armed and airborne within a quarter of an hour of the balloon going up. This was a tall order. It meant crews had to sleep next to their planes, and the A-bombs had to be kept in the fuselage rather than in safe bunkers. That was a security nightmare, but worse was to come.

Just three years later the Americans realised they wouldn’t have fifteen minutes at all. This was the era of the intercontinental ballistic missile, which meant they’d actually have four minutes’ warning. So they ordered the Air Force to make sure the
B-52s could be up there and fighting back just 240 seconds after the hotline phone rang.

Astonishingly, the Air Force tried to comply. Pyrotechnic cartridge starters were fitted so that all eight engines could be ignited at once. Water injection was added to give more power. But the planes were now taking off in plumes of black smoke, and four minutes still remained an impossible target.

There was nothing for it. There had to be at least a dozen B-52s up there, at 40,000 feet, with nuclear bombs on board, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. That meant refuelling them in flight and that was a nightmare. They were going to fly in close formation with a tanker, when their bellies were full of nuclear arms.

How they managed to do this for ten years without a single accident is baffling. Or rather it would be if it were true.

In fact a B-52 did hit its refuelling tanker over Kentucky in 1959, and it did crash with two nukes on board. Happily there was no radiation leak.

But on 17 January 1966 it happened again. A B-52 hit its tanker, this time over Spain, and this time with four bombs on board. Two did spring
leaks when they hit the ground, prompting the biggest spring clean Spain had ever seen.

Guess what. In January 1968, over the Greenland ice pack, a nuclear-armed B-52 crashed while trying to perform an emergency landing and, again, there was fall-out. But this time the US decided enough was enough. By this stage they’d worked out how to put nuclear bombs on submarines so there was really no need to have them in the air any more.

It looked like the end of the road for the B-52. Maybe a few could be used, as they always had been, as airborne launch pads for NASA and Air Force experiments, but its role as a dealer of death seemed to be over.

Not for long. Someone had already realised that, with a few changes to its belly, it could be converted into a conventional bomber. Which would help swing the balance of power America’s way in the Vietnam conflict. ‘Yes,’ everyone thought, ‘a plane this big could carry 60,000 lbs of conventional bombs and that’ll show the slopes a thing or two.’

To begin with things went badly. On the very first mission in South-East Asia they lost their refuelling tanker, and then two planes hit each
other, killing eight of the twelve men on board. The rest did make it to the target, where they unleashed hundreds of bombs. But by the time this happened the enemy had gone home, so the mission, which had cost $20 million, resulted in eight dead Americans, two dead North Vietnamese, two downed bombers and a broken rice store.

But this wasn’t the plane’s fault. This was simply the usual American problem of overconfidence.

Eventually, though, they worked it out and the B-52’s raids became so accurate they could happily drop bombs within 300 yards of friendly troops on the ground. An art they seem to have lost.

We’ve all seen those films of bombs tumbling out of B-52s over Vietnam and I guess we’ve all speculated on what it must have been like to be underneath such an onslaught. Well, to begin with, not too bad it seems. On 11 April 1966 (my sixth birthday) 30 B-52s with 24 1,000-lb bombs in their bellies and 24 750-lb bombs under their wings bombed the bejesus out of a Vietnamese supply route. It was closed for just twenty hours.

Two weeks later the bombers were back, leaving 32 craters in the road. All of which were filled in within a day. The Americans, for a while, stopped bombing the North Vietnamese.

At first the top brass hadn’t wanted to put a B-52 in serious harm’s way because losing one would have been a propaganda boost for the enemy. But by 1972 they were in danger of losing the war, so what was the odd plane.

The B-52s were ordered to bomb the far north of the country, overflying missile sites all the way. Providing, that is, they could get off the ground in the first place. They would actually dip as they flew off the end of the clifftop runway in Guam, and then fight for altitude, or at least to 700 feet, where the downward-pointing ejector seats would have a chance of working.

The operation, known as Linebacker, was so ferocious that the North Vietnamese negotiating team at the peace talks in Paris started to adopt a more positive tone. As a result the raids were stopped, which gave the NVA a chance to repair their anti-aircraft sites, which in turn brought belligerence back to the peace talks.

When the Vietnamese walked away from the table in December 1972 Nixon told his aides, ‘Those bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.’ In other words, he was using the B-52 as an instrument of diplomacy.

In the course of the Vietnam War no one can say how much good the bombers did because America lost. Had they not been there, would it have made any difference? Who knows? What we can say is two were scrapped after sustaining battle damage and seventeen were shot down.

Today one of these – or what’s left of it – sits outside the Vietnamese War Museum in Hanoi. I’d love to tell you I was moved by the twisted and smashed wreckage but I’d just been inside the museum itself, where I’d seen the damage done by those B-52 raids. I’d seen pickled babies with two heads and suffering like you simply wouldn’t believe, and you know what… the mangled plane seemed to me to have got what it deserved.

It is to Vietnam’s eternal credit that this place is now called the ‘War Museum’. When I was there it was called the ‘War Crimes Museum’. They’ve forgiven the Americans and I, as we’ve seen, have forgiven the plane.

That said, as they took off from the base in Gloucestershire and flew right over my house on their way to Iraq recently I must admit they sent a shiver down my spine. It was strange knowing that in seven hours’ time, when I was coming inside to escape the night’s chill, those planes
would be dropping 60,000 lbs of explosive diplomacy on Baghdad.

That’s the strangest thing of all about the long-range bomber. With its cruise missiles and its laser-guided bombs, it’s designed to bring utter devastation to a city. And yet, because of its range, it lives in a birdsong world far removed from this shock and awe. That makes such a thing a little bit alien, a little bit frightening.

For fifty years the B-52 has reminded everyone that behind our ordinary lives the world is not a safe place. And by announcing that it’ll be flying until the middle of this century the powers that be are telling us they don’t expect things to improve any time soon.

The Hoover Dam was the first structure to contain more masonry than the Great Pyramid at Giza. But it’s rather more than 6.6 million tons of concrete. It’s rather more than a white wall, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Yes, it’s spectacular; yes, it is a demonstration of man’s power and ingenuity. But what it is most of all is an engine – a big one.