As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
Americans enjoy selective amnesia when it comes to who they are, as who they are as a people, is not who they are as their leaders.
For example we often hear about the Mars mission in landing a man on Mars........and then there is always some muttering scientist in the background talking about a one way trip, and it is a suicide mission.
They came up with the same idea about the moon too, but frankly these geniuses never considered that watching people die sort of takes the glory out of Columbus discovering America.
It is in this that General Chuck Yeager's life was one of an American regime for some damned reason figured he was expendable about every phase of his career. One of the worst was during the Cold War, when the General was deployed to Hahn Germany in the Saber fighters meant to keep the peace.
The peace got quite hot during the first deployment, as Yeager finally received the super Sabers which could intercept the Soviet fliers with a surprise and in that, with Warsaw Pac spring arriving in democratic demonstrations, suddenly the Saber became a nuclear bomber.
The thing in this which everyone forgets is all the American fliers there, did not have the fuel to return to Germany. The thing is, is that about this time also DeGaulle of France decided that nuclear American fighter bases in France were not a part of NATO, so the Americans could deploy in France, but their bombs stayed in Germany. The thing is that the American fliers led by Yeager had absolutely no protocols on how to drop nuclear bombs from Sabers, other than what the experts had come up with in theory. The thing is Chuck Yeager had no idea if he could survive dropping a nuclear bomb and if his Saber did, if he could crash in Soviet territory during a nuclear war and escape and evade capture, back to nuclear scorched Germany.
None of that really sounds appealing and is in reality lunacy, but that is what the Americans had gotten themselves into in a stop gap measure which were suicide missions for hundreds of US pilots.
The tactics in this bombing were...........I will let you decide.
So a Saber comes screaming in on the deck to about 10 miles to target, where the Saber would raise its nose 40 degrees and like an artillery piece fire the atomic bomb at the target.
Second attack would be a Saber coming in on the deck, pull the stick back and go straight up over the target, release the atomic bomb, which would continue to go straight up to about 2 miles, and then nose over, as the pilot would flip the jet over and race for their life to get away from the bomb blast.
Third attack mode was to bomb at 18,000 feet, where the bomb could land 1200 yards from the target for a considered hit, as even with low yield weapons that was a horseshoe hit.
Never mind that the Soviets would have anti aircraft, fighter jets and most likely the weather on their side, because this was Pentagon planning in suicide bombing runs of US pilots. The punchline being that what the Saber squadrons purpose was, was to hit high yield targets so the American long range bombers would have a clear path for their bombing runs, which just so happened to have the resources to get them out of scorched ground zero and to an area for refueling.
The Japanese Kamikaze was disgraceful in national planning in wasting life, and for the Air Force to place its pilots into this kind of suicide runs was equally disgraceful. This was not planning, but the lack of tactical foresight to provide for mission completion.
This is the type of horrid planning which is not be repeated ever in US warfare. It is a reminder that there are always people behind desks in nice retirement packages who always have a penchant for murdering other people for their cause, instead of not getting America into a situation where planning was not carried out to protect the nation.
Nuff Said
agtG
