07 May 2007
Able Dogs
I don't want to visit the current war this morning, not again, and it was bad over the weekend. I have been gone long enough that I cannot quite capture where the Congress is, since they follow the issues like little kids around a soccer ball.
I hear the House intelligence committee wants to spend a few billion looking at global warming. Of course it is a national security issue. Like, Duh!
But really, shouldn't we have something like a unified approach to this? It is cold this morning, ten degrees or more below the normal mean temperature for this time of year, and there is even a frost alert. What gives? Colder when it is warming? It does not take much to make an eddy in the vast jet stream, and hotter someplace makes it colder some place else.
A little chill on the Potomac is better than being out there on the great flat lands, where there are now massive swirling tornados a mile across at the bottom that can vaporize a little city in the blink of an eye, more powerful than a nucelar weapon. It happened over the weekend in Kansas. I'll stay hunkered down east of the Blue Ridge, thank-you very kindly.
I'd rather kick back and ruminate on the past, when this awful reality was not coming to pass, and I am immersed in it anyway, since the publication I edit is hanging over my head like a black cloud. I was talking to a pal who used to be in the same business, the strategic deterrence industry, only he did it twenty years before I did.
It was after Korea, and before Vietnam. Think of Taiwan as a different sort of issue, with China not a high-tech peer competitor, but rather swarming with millions of ill-armed troops in quilted green jackets. Imagine yourself sitting in the modest-sized mission-planning space of a modified WWII Essex Class carrier- what they called the “27-Charlie” ship alteration to permit jet operations. The war-surplus smell of old sweat and Camel cigarettes are in the ventilators and the odor of very old coffee in the big percolator near the entry hatch permeates the air.
You don't have to have actually experienced what it is like, flying aboard one of these big ships, and suddenly being the new guy, butt of all the jokes and wary of an alien environment. Someone will take you under their wing, and tell you a sea story.
The difference between a sea-story and a fairy tail is how they begin. A fairy tale starts out “Once upon a time,” while a sea-story begins “Now, listen, this is a no-shitter….”
You are a little sleepy and hungry from the gentle motion of the immense gray ship. The other people are talking about what movie they might be able to draw from the rotating stock that the Ship maintains, and sizing you up as a prospective projection officer, which is just one of the skills you are about to learn. The cruise you are on is not limited to six months. In fact, at times it seems eternal.
We were talking about nuclear weapons, not that I would confirm or deny that we had them in that funny magazine with the surly looking Marine guards. In my time, I was actually responsible for the planning of the missions to meet the specifications of the Theater Commander. I even planned the wrong list of targets one time, but it turned out it was the Headquarters that screwed up and I managed to save my career, such as it was.
It was stranger back in the days when the propeller-driven AD Skyraiders were entrusted with the Special Weapons, and they planned things without the benefit of satellite imagery and automated mission support systems.
Back in the day, they made up their own target folders by hand, cutting up carts with scissors and pasting the routes on note-cards.
The pilots did their own work, since they were the ones who had to carry the Shapes, and chances were that they would not be back. It was a little surreal, planning for Doomsday. The big planning tables were separated from each other and the middle of the room by some nice green drapes, shower-curtain hooked to some pipes the ship had welded into the overhead for that purpose.
Everyone had their own name for the planning spaces. My friend's ship called it the “Green Room” because of the color of the Government Services Administration drapes.
In my time we had hard-copy pictures from space that were tightly controlled. In the decades before that, there were few overhead pictures of anything in the Communist “denied areas.” The carriers did have some Top Secret "non-attribution" high-altitude photos of certain places in the Soviet Far East and China. When plotted, in square format, they were of haphazard orientation along some kind of wandering flight path. The planners were not cleared for this compartmented program, probably managed out of Langley. They figured the images were taken from free balloons launched in Europe and picked up, hopefully, in the Pacific later.
That was before Gary Powers and the U-2s, and then the urgent requirement to get cameras above the range of surface-to-air missiles.
The charts were not very good, either. Many of the maps of China and Korea bore the legend that “base data was acquired by the Great China Land Survey of 1937." That meant the Army Mapping Services had lifted the information from Imperial Japanese Army charts for operations in Manchuria.
The pilots of the AD Skyraiders called them “Able Dogs” for the two-letter designation the Navy affixed to them, and the fact that they were tough, rugged platforms. My Dad flew them around that time, before Mom convinced him to give it up. They did not acquire the nickname of the “Spad” until Vietnam, when they were the last prop-driven front-line combat aircraft.
Able Dog drivers liked to follow railroad tracks, since they normally went somewhere and they flew at relatively low altitudes. My friend discovered that in Korea, one railroad line was shown continuous right over a modest cliff. It seems the Imperial Japanese railroad builders didn't want to let the home office know they were behind in their RR construction schedule, so they faked the progress of the tracks.
The assumption was that the "go-pilots" would be the only survivors of the nuclear strikes, since the ship would either be a big hole in the water, worst case, or best case long gone eastward by the time they came back. The ship basically planned to head out to sea at max speed as soon as the "go" launch was completed. The carrier could travel a long way at 30+ knots, while the Able Dogs were chugging in and out on a 10- or 12-hour mission at an average speed of about 160KTS.
The pilots were encouraged to find a likely place to crash land, where they might evade capture and not plan on coming back to the ship at all.
The whole thing was both solemn and surreal. There was no internal bomb bay on any Able Dog, so everything hung from external racks, unless you count the mostly empty box lunches the pilots tossed out of the cockpit on long-range low-level hops.
My friend tells me their nucs weren't too obtrusive when carried by ADs. They were always carried on the main, centerline rack. A real war-shot was painted silver, though he never knew why. But when surrounded by two 300-gal white external fuel tanks on the two main stubs, it could be easily confused with just another tank. That was pretty much the way it was on our jets twenty years later, though silver had changed to ghostly white for the real thing. Mostly crews trained with practice shapes painted robin's-egg blue.
The whole thing was near unbelievable, but that is what was going on then, and it was not a great deal different after Vietnam came to an end. We were still out there, still planning. Not that I would confirm or deny anything.
But it certainly is weird to sit down with someone and discuss the best place to crash land and strike out on foot, after the first round of the nuclear exchange.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com