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00:00For nearly half a century, one aircraft alone has dominated the skies.
00:26During those years, it has dropped more conventional bombs than any other airplane.
00:33With a maximum speed of 650 miles per hour, a range of over 8,000 miles, and capable of dropping 70,000 pounds of bombs, it is the most lethal bomber in the world.
00:45It can also deliver nuclear bombs, missiles, and precision-guided weapons.
00:51When a United States president wants to wield his big stick, he sends in the B-52s.
00:58When the United States wants to punish an enemy, we send the heavy bombers, and one of those is the B-52.
01:05The B-52 has now become a symbol of more than a bomber. It's a symbol of America's resolve.
01:10Using extraordinary archive film and calorie enactments, battle stations enters the world of the B-52 Stratofortress.
01:20As far back as World War I, the use of aircraft as a means of delivering explosives was accepted as an effective way to strike at the enemy.
01:37As aircraft became bigger, so too did the amount of bombs they could drop.
01:43With the outbreak of World War II, Adolf Hitler unleashed his bombers, smashing enemy territory in advance of his armies.
01:56But as the tide of war changed, it was the Allies who used the bomber to its full destructive potential.
02:03With raids of 1,000 bomber aircraft at a time, Allied heavy bombers such as the British Lancaster and the American B-17 proved their superiority by pounding Nazi Germany into submission.
02:20Japan, too, was systematically destroyed by vast armadas of American B-29s.
02:25In early August 1945, two bombs were dropped that changed the face of war forever.
02:37And with it, the birth of one of the most terrifying instruments of war, the nuclear weapon.
02:47For the first time in over six years, the world was at peace.
02:50But signs of another conflict were already on the horizon, the growing threat of war with the Soviet Union.
03:01The USA began to prepare for hostilities with the Eastern Bloc.
03:06On March the 21st, 1946, an organization known as SAC, Strategic Air Command, was established.
03:13There was no office building, so we used offices in the old Martin bomber plant on this airfield.
03:20And we start seeing people that we had fought the war with coming from all over the place, mostly all B-29 types.
03:31SAC wanted air combat units capable of flying huge distances and employing the latest and most advanced weapons.
03:37But what America did not have was an aircraft powerful enough to meet these intense requirements.
03:48With this in mind, the Boeing Company began working on various designs for a long-range bomber.
03:54These included radical swept-back wings and jet and conventional propeller-powered aircraft.
03:59But it wasn't until October the 21st, 1948, that Colonel Henry Pete Warden of the Wright Air Development Center met with Boeing engineers.
04:14They arrived with a wealth of documents and designs.
04:18But Warden paid little attention to the paperwork and requested a prototype using turbojet engines.
04:23He wanted the plans for this new prototype, and he wanted them fast.
04:30Pete Warden gave them just two days.
04:34It was a daunting request, but the team were not going to let Warden down.
04:40We were the ones that had to do it, and we knew what we had to do.
04:43And, you see, I had all my aeronautical data on the B-55,
04:47because I'd just made a report on the airplane to Pete Warden earlier that week.
04:53So we had all the data, but we had to move it into the size of the B-52.
04:59The genesis of the mighty B-52 came about in humble surroundings,
05:04in a room of the Van Cleve Hotel in downtown Dayton, Ohio.
05:08It was a classic small-town hotel.
05:12I think the Boeing Company had a suite on the seventh floor.
05:15It consisted of a kind of a sitting room.
05:18It had a big round table and a couch.
05:21So that was the suite.
05:23It was pretty good for the Van Cleve.
05:26The first thing we did on Saturday morning is we kind of figured out what we needed to do.
05:32We needed some drawings.
05:35We needed a performance document.
05:37So Vaughn and I, we were the airplane technical people.
05:42So we started in on the performance, taking my B-55 data and transferring it into the bigger airplane.
05:50And Ed Wells and George Shire disappeared.
05:53And at the time, we didn't miss them until they were gone.
05:56They came back about two hours later with some balsa.
06:01And what they'd been out doing, they decided they wanted a model.
06:04And they had to go around to the model shops and find the biggest piece of balsa in Dayton.
06:09And that set the scale of the model.
06:11Shire was the best aerodynamicist in the world.
06:15And Vaughn and I were a little upset with him because here we had this massive document to put together.
06:19And here he was sitting in the corner whittling a model.
06:22But anyway, that's what he did.
06:23Over the following 24 hours, the aircraft began to take shape.
06:28It would be an eight engine jet using potted pairs of the Pratt and Whitney engines.
06:34It would have a top speed of 490 knots and the potential to deliver a 10,000 pound bomb load over a range of 5,320 miles.
06:43It would also have a radically redesigned wing with a span of 185 feet.
06:48By Sunday noon, we had things pretty, pretty good shape.
06:55So we called in the secretary of the Boeing officer and Miss Hines and she typed up all the material that we'd written.
07:03The document has a few pages in it.
07:05On the Monday morning, they presented their work to Colonel Warden.
07:13He was impressed with the jet powered plans and asked the Boeing engineers to continue with the design.
07:22Endorsement of the aircraft didn't happen for another three months, but in January 1949 production started in Seattle.
07:35Over the following two years, Boeing worked and tested their new plane at a feverish pitch.
07:42Nowadays, they have what they call computational aerodynamics and they can do it with a computer.
07:52But in those days, the wind tunnel was, was, was the way we did it.
07:56And that's why it took about a year of wind tunnel testing.
08:00That was mostly in figuring out how to put the engines on the wing.
08:04And the data turned out to be okay.
08:07On April the 15th, 1951, the B-52 was wheeled out.
08:15Called the YB-52, it was prepared for its maiden flight at the Boeing field.
08:22We knew we had a winner before we flew it.
08:26The first flight on the airplane, I was really excited about that.
08:31It had taken seven years from the initial United States Air Force request for a new bomber,
08:36to get the B-52 on the runway.
08:40It didn't look like any other airplane, but I'd been deeply involved in the, in the testing in the wind tunnel,
08:46and I knew it should fly.
08:48But when it finally took off, the flaps hanging down, the swept wing,
08:53and I was real happy to see it disappear over the horizon.
08:56The test flight entailed checking out the airplane and checking out the systems.
09:05Now, like for instance, the control forces turned out to be many times greater than what they should have been.
09:14And so, it took both of us to turn the airplane under certain conditions.
09:19The flight lasted two hours, fifty-one minutes, and ended with a perfect landing at Moses Lake.
09:37Feels like a airplane now.
09:38It was universally agreed that Boeing was onto a winner.
09:47Over the next three years, Boeing and the United States Air Force tested, developed, and refined the aircraft.
09:52Many improvements were made. One of the most noticeable was by the head of Strategic Air Command, General Curtis E. LeMay, that they changed the crew seating configuration.
10:07Now, the first airplane did not have the right cockpit on it.
10:14General LeMay decided he wanted a side-by-side cockpit.
10:18And we didn't have the time to hit the first airplane.
10:24The first three or four airplanes that came off the line were B-52Ys, I think.
10:29And they had the tandem cockpit.
10:33Finally, in 1955, the new B-52 was revealed to the public and ready for active service.
10:41But the Soviet Union had by now developed its own atomic and hydrogen bombs,
10:46and America desperately needed a heavy bomber to strike back if necessary.
10:49Would the B-52 fit the role so urgently needed by Strategic Air Command?
11:04During the mid-1950s, the Soviet bloc began to build a terrifying arsenal of nuclear weapons.
11:10America was determined to provide a deterrent to prevent the Soviet Union from ever using their bombs.
11:15This era of the Cold War now needed a strategy.
11:20We initiated and developed and planned and wrote the first nuclear war plan.
11:27It was a SAC war plan, but it became a national war plan.
11:32It was into this uncertain and highly charged environment that the B-52 came into service with the Strategic Air Command.
11:40Early B-52s had a six-man crew.
11:45On the upper flight deck with a pilot, co-pilot and electronic warfare officer.
11:50On the lower deck were the radar navigator bombardier and navigator.
11:56In the rear of the aircraft was the tail gunner.
11:59Cram threw out the wings and fuselage with the fuel tanks.
12:05And along the lower fuselage were the massive bomb bays.
12:11For some of these elite crews that SAC had selected, it was the first time they'd ever seen a B-52.
12:18When I walked around a B-52 and I thought, wow, this is really cool.
12:26And then I look at the skin on this B-52 and it's all wrinkled, kind of like mine.
12:32And I thought, this is, this thing can't fly.
12:36This is not going to be good.
12:38You cannot be serious. You cannot be serious.
12:39So I was not a happy camper, eh?
12:48I was just absolutely awestruck by the sound, the noise, the motion of the airplane.
12:55But it did fly and it flew very well.
12:58It took a lot of strength and very fatigue.
13:00Imagine yourself told to drive a big 18-wheeler Mack truck down the highway.
13:09Not only down the highway, but into the neighborhood and around the corner and back it up.
13:13And that's what a B-52 feels like in comparison, say, to an F-4 fighter.
13:17Which is like driving a Lamborghini.
13:21You put the throttle forward on all eight engines.
13:25The entire airplane shakes, you have this noise, and it's sitting there on the end of the runway.
13:29Everything's vibrating.
13:31You know, it's almost like a sprinter ready to take off.
13:34And then you get moving, and it slowly starts accelerating.
13:39And then it gets a little faster and a little faster and a little faster.
13:42And then you have about a 12,000-foot runway.
13:45And you finally take off, and you slumber up, nose down, and you climb.
13:51Until you, you know, reach your altitude and go on.
13:54But the first time, it's really an exhilarating experience.
13:56The B-52 wasn't necessarily difficult to land and take off the airplane, except in a crosswind crab system where you could dial in the crosswind crab so that you could land the aircraft while it was pointed relatively into the wind, but you were flying actually sideways.
14:16So it was a very unusual and spooky sequence.
14:21As U.S. military thinking developed during the Cold War, the greatest fear was of a sudden pre-emptive Soviet strike.
14:28So SAC ensured that 12 B-52s, fully armed with nuclear weapons, were airborne 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
14:38The plan was known as Chrome Dome.
14:42It was the plan in the Cold War to arm the bomber fleet with nuclear weapons and achieve a high state of readiness and comply with our national policy, which was to encircle the Soviet Union.
15:02Operation Chrome Dome had B-52s flying three basic routes.
15:09A northern route across North America and Canada, past Newfoundland and Iceland, up past Greenland and the Arctic Circle, across Alaska, and back down the western side of the U.S.
15:22A southern route across the Atlantic, orbiting the Mediterranean, then back to the U.S.
15:33And one B-52, constantly on patrol over Greenland, 24 hours a day.
15:39Each patrol was designed continuously to monitor critical targets in the Soviet Union that would never be more than two hours flying time from a patrolling B-52.
15:52But these missions, some as long as 26 hours, took incredible stamina on the part of the cruise.
15:58Sitting in an injection seat, you had a 35, 40-pound parachute on your back.
16:07You were wearing a helmet, fairly heavy, and thermal underwear.
16:12You may have heavy boots.
16:15You may have a winter flight suit or a summer flight suit.
16:17It was normally dark down there because you needed to have good visibility when you were watching the radar scope.
16:26Most of the times, it was cold, negative 55 degrees.
16:30And of course, the skin of the airplane in some places wasn't that well insulated.
16:37And then you had on top of that your high altitude and your low ambient humidity, and you would lose a lot of moisture.
16:44There were many times that I would lose five to ten pounds, usually just in water, from a long, stressful mission.
16:54It was very cramped. We had air mattresses. You could lie down and rest.
16:59Obviously, the one pilot would be flying the airplane, one navigator navigating.
17:05We, early on, had a small oven where we could cook what I characterized as an early TV dinner.
17:12We had a hot cup where you could have coffee or heat up some soup.
17:18And we had boxed lunches as well.
17:21All over the range of over 8,000 miles, the Cold War B-52s had to refuel twice on each mission.
17:29But with these massive aircraft, each refueling was a maneuver fraught with danger.
17:34You are in very close proximity to the airplane.
17:39And you imagine driving down the highway and you like to have two seconds between cars.
17:44Well, we're talking maybe 20 feet between the airplane that's above you and the bomber right below.
17:50And in a fraction of a second, if you hit an air bump or some kind of clear air turbulence, you'd have the capability, you know, of his tail coming down and your nose going up.
18:02And, yes, it could ruin your whole day.
18:05The boom operator and the tanker, he flies the boom.
18:13You had to fly the B-52 into this envelope, into this narrow air space under the tanker that the boom operator liked.
18:22And some boom operators were so damn picky that if you didn't have it within a foot where they wanted you, they wouldn't stick the boom in.
18:29You know, and I'd say, put the damn thing in, you jerk.
18:34Any time of the day or night when you, with a pilot, were air refueling, taking on at least 40,000 pounds of fuel, when I finished, my body would be wet.
18:48Just absolutely soaked.
18:50Prespiration.
18:52From October the 1st, 1957, during normal periods of readiness, 40% of SAC's bomber force was on continuous ground alert.
19:03Ready to get airborne at 15 minutes' notice.
19:10When that klaxon went off, of course, you never knew for sure whether it was a training exercise or whether it was a real thing.
19:16Somebody fumbles over to the wall, finds a light switch, turns it on, jump into your flight suit, get that on, gets your boot on,
19:34grabs your park or whatever else you need, depending on where in the world you are, and then you run like mad out to the airplane.
19:41the airplane and then the heart starts beating and the adrenaline starts if you don't know what's
19:47going to happen and the next message may be the you know call to go to war despite the hardships
19:55and training the reason why the crew's alertness was so vital was that every b-52 was armed with
20:01up to four thermonuclear weapons each warhead was more than 1700 times more powerful than those
20:10dropped on japan and if they were needed then only the president could order them in
20:26in the early 1960s strategic air command was the key deterrent against any attack by russia
20:33the spearhead of this force were the mighty b-52s
20:36there was a story that used to be told there was a journal and he'd go to the
20:43russian premier and the question was uh is today the day we can take on the united states and we
20:49can come out ahead the general say not today sir and our job was to make sure that every day that
20:55was his answer to enable the u.s to keep that high state of alert strategic air command required the
21:04b-52 crews to undertake the long stress inducing tours of duty the average tour of duty uh... for
21:12sec combat crew members uh... in the early sixties you would normally pull two seven day alert tours per
21:19month so that's fourteen days out of roughly thirty or thirty one days that you could expect to be
21:24the nuclear ground alert and you expected to be able to launch within fifteen minutes and go strike those
21:34targets if given the order to do so so in addition to the pulling of the ground alert you could expect to
21:43fly maybe three maybe four training missions per month so your your time was totally consumed uh... with
21:51those responsibilities the continuous training of the crews was hard and rigorous only the best
21:59survived but it was not enough to be the best they had to pass the psychological tests as well
22:06you had the psychological profile which is very important in other words you're talking about taking
22:11a nuclear weapon and dropping it on a country and a lot of people can't handle that and physiologically
22:17are you able to take the long missions the the twenty plus hour missions that are required you have
22:22the stamina and you're given physical uh tests to see if you had that stamina
22:30the training required everyone to do their job not just the crew
22:35but the maintenance people and all the support people even the people that made the lunches
22:40everyone had to do their job to keep the fleet in the air when it was needed
22:47the driving force behind this quest for a state of excellence was general curtis e lemay he was the
22:54the big daddy he was the one that uh that started sack uh yeah the and of course the impression
23:00that he conveyed was that uh there's nobody tougher than curtis e lemay
23:05uh first of all a brilliant person to to have than the concept he had and he knew what his mission
23:11was there there were moments that he was a loving father he was uh he had times that he he he could
23:19show compassion but on the outside he was just a rough gruff son of a bitch i guess
23:26but should an attack be launched against america a series of defensive steps were put into action
23:31incoming missiles or bombers would be picked up by the early warning radar tracking stations
23:40once verified the alert that the u.s was under attack was passed on to strategic air command hq
23:45in omaha nebraska they would put the entire b-52 fleet on alert and scramble the planes
23:57sack would then consult with the white house
24:00the president was never more than a few feet from the war plan if and only if it was necessary the
24:06president would give the final order to go
24:11then the b-52s that were already airborne would receive their coded instructions known as the go codes
24:18to fly to their targets there was a coded message that you would receive and it required you
24:25and another what they called positive control crew member to authenticate this message and it was in
24:31the there was a code the code was a letter code if you and the other positive control which was radar
24:37navigator the bombardier if you will and if both of your cards matched the message then that meant it was
24:43an authentic message and it would authorize you to strike your target most b-52 crews had already made
24:50arrangements with their families for when and if they were ordered to bomb their targets
24:56i had taken the opportunity as had many other satcom act crew members to instruct
25:02my wife as to what she needed to do
25:05given a nuclear attack on the united states
25:08and that included putting together the items and materials that she would need to take care of the
25:14to take care of the children packing the automobile and have it ready to go to leave the immediate
25:23target you know our sack bases were all targeted and get away from it
25:32every mission carried with it an awesome responsibility
25:35it's kind of a terrifying thought you see i had seen an a-bomb go off in bikini
25:47not many had seen one and i knew how horrifying it was that we were carrying things much much more
25:56powerful and of course all of us were keenly aware of the significance of the cold war
26:05and the threat that was posed by the soviet union and the warsaw pact nations and we were committed
26:12if need be to take them out we also knew that we were never committed to a first strike or a preemptive
26:20strike i felt confident that every crew that i was on would fly the assigned mission you know
26:26we'd go there do the best we could if we were able to strike our targets if not if we were
26:30blown out of the sky we were blown out of the sky because you know if that happened it meant that
26:35our country had already been struck each b-52 bomber was then on its own heading towards its target
26:46they can't pull you back once you have that you're committed to the target you just orbit there
26:53waiting until one of two things happens either you get that message that tells you to proceed on to your
27:00target or if you don't get it you have to determine how long you can stay there in orbit at that point
27:07before you have to head back so you can make it back to a base and land without running out of fuel
27:13should the enemy bombers or missiles get through and destroy sack headquarters there was an alternative
27:23plan to guide the mid-air b-52s to their targets it was called looking glass we also had the looking
27:32glass the sack airborne command post which flew continuously from february 1961 until 1991
27:41with a sack general officer on board with a full battle staff those were eight and a half hour
27:47missions they flew three missions a day and of course that system was designed if strategic air
27:54command headquarters was lost due to an attack then that general officer would find himself running
28:01the war and talking to the commander in chief the president of the united states and the secretary
28:05defense i was privileged to fly 358 of those missions in the 10 years i was a sack general
28:12officer this flying command center was a vital lynchpin in the doomsday scenario
28:22but thankfully it was never needed as just one misguided bomb would have resulted in a nuclear
28:28catastrophe with potentially not a single living thing left alive on the planet
28:35but accidents with all these nuclear armed bombers did happen
28:39and when a b-52 with 450 megaton bombs crashed the world held its breath
28:45on january 17th 1966 a b-52 on regular mediterranean patrol was refueling at 30 500 feet over the coast
28:57of spain we had a mid-air collision uh over spain between a b-52 uh and a kc-135 jet tanker the kc-135
29:08crew was lost many of the b-52 crew survived the weapons were deployed if you will and had to be recovered from the sea
29:20and it created quite a sensation we were successful in recovering those weapons and the safety that was
29:28built into the weapons there was never any concern about our nuclear detonation
29:34after another incident in greenland neutral governments began to object that b-52s armed
29:41with nuclear weapons were flying over their territory the risk of a catastrophe was too great
29:51and the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles icbms and nuclear submarines had given the
29:58united states an alternative retaliatory arsenal those events uh created such a stir uh on the world
30:06scene that strategic air command and the civilian leadership of the united states decided to to stop
30:14them to curtail that operation in september 1968 the air alert system of chrome dome was decommissioned
30:23the men who had flown those missions the b-52 had fulfilled its role as a world peacekeeper
30:32looking back on it i i don't regret the 17 years i spent in sack i think they we we did a lot for
30:39our country i think we one of the things we're talking about is that uh most people think the war the
30:45cold war just ended it doesn't we say that we won the sack won the cold war for over 10 years the b-52
30:52had patrolled the skies waiting for the go codes that fortunately never came
30:59but its days as a bomber were not over it was about to take on a new mission over southeast asia
31:14when southeast asia came about and there was a need to deliver large firepower that is
31:20conventional ordinance iron bombs as we referred to the air force looked around and the best delivery
31:26platform they had was in fact the b-52 in march 1965 in the escalating conflict in vietnam president
31:36johnson gives the go-ahead for operation rolling thunder the bombing of north vietnam
31:41again the b-52 is mobilized and again it is modified to conduct its mission we modified the b-52d models
31:55with what we call the big belly modification to the point where between external and internal carriage
32:01they could carry 108 750 pound bombs from 1965 onwards the b-52d big belly versions would carry
32:11the burden of the conflict single-handedly until joined by the b-52g versions in the final stages of
32:17conflict between 1965 and 1968 in rolling thunder b-52s flew more than 2 000 sorties and dropped over
32:28630 000 tons of bombs this was the first time that the b-52 had entered the theater of actual warfare
32:37i had already told my crew if we get hit we're gonna ride that airplane until it blows up i didn't think
32:44they'd be taking any prisoners when you were flying over there uh it was a large non-stealthy airplane when
32:55you would put a radar scope on it it would stand out almost like a flashlight because of the the sides
33:02you know it was metal sides and we reflect radar energy that's why there were so many ecm electronic
33:09countermeasure aircraft flying with the missions and the electronic countermeasure officer on board
33:15but still even with that it was pretty much sitting duck at high altitude
33:18apart from sam's surface to air missiles the b-52s had to face the russian-built mig-21 fighters
33:33we didn't really have a problem with migs trying to attack the b-52s we found the migs flying in
33:38formation with us and they're flying at our altitude at our speed at our heading and they were
33:43transporting this information down to the gunnery to the sam sites so here's a guy on the ground he
33:49knows your heading your altitude and your airspeed that simplifies his gunner his process of shooting
33:55you down by 1970 the heavy bombing also extended outside vietnam to cambodia and laos sortie rates had
34:04risen to over 3 000 a month but the best-known manifestation of the massive u.s air effort in vietnam
34:15was still to come it would bring losses of aircraft and crews to the b-52s the like of which they never
34:23before had to face by 1972 the conflict in vietnam was raging and peace negotiations had reached a
34:36stalemate so a major escalation of the b-52 bombing was ordered operation linebacker 2 this was to be the
34:44systematic bombing of key objectives in north vietnam so december 15th we got the alerting order
34:57uh linebacker 2 and for security we nobody was allowed to go off base or make off base phone calls
35:04and so we were told to prepare for a three-day maximum effort mission with the possibility of
35:09extended indefinitely and at that time we were told the targets would be hanoi
35:15normally when you briefed you had a cell three b-52s 18 people and usually they were talking to each
35:22other and the briefers trying to brief and nobody pays any attention to him because it's the same
35:26briefing every day and we go in this room the room's packed with crew members and this briefer could
35:33have spoken without a microphone in a whisper and everybody in the room would have heard every word he
35:38said it was so quiet in that place thing i remember is looking around and i thought you know
35:43some of us probably aren't going to be alive some of us are going to be dead in four or five hours
35:47we're not coming back
35:51three days into the operation on the evening of december the 20th john ewell's b-52 was making
35:57its bombing run over hanoi when it came under attack by sam missiles
36:04to see these lights these little spots of light and then as they came up through the undercast you could
36:09see the rocket plume of the engine of the surface-to-air missiles and there were a lot of
36:14surface-to-air missiles coming up by a lot
36:20i got it edub are you targeting anything we've got something off the nose
36:25just about five seconds before bombs away and i looked out and there's this i could just see this huge
36:32sam right right off the nose of the airplane i thought get above us before you detonate
36:49the next thing i knew the airplane was in a 30 degree bank all the windscreens were completely
36:54shattered but intact and half the red lights in the cockpit were on so i thought well i'm gonna try
37:02to level the wings but probably won't be able to out on the left wing i see fire i look out there and
37:08my number three and four engines are on fire and just as i'm looking at that fire light the second sam
37:14hits the airplane another one coming up off the nose obviously put a pretty big bowl in the crew
37:19compartment because we had explosive decompression we lost our pressurization and the noise was deafening
37:25it was just like you were standing next to a train that was going by on track at 80 miles an hour just
37:31deafening noise now i look out and the engines aren't just on fire now the wings on fire i'm trying to
37:39decide do we stay with the airplane until that wing snaps so i thought i better get the crew out and
37:49the way i did that is there's an emergency bailout light in each in front of each crew member and you
37:54have a guarded switch which a pilot can activate and when you hit that switch it turns that red light
38:00on in front of each crew member and that means eject
38:03it's a kick in the butt when that thing fires and i thought this is not a good day
38:14john yule was captured by the north vietnamese and taken to the infamous hanoi prison camp nicknamed
38:20the hanoi hilton after three days of solitary confinement yule was on the receiving end of a b-52
38:28bombing raid i can remember being huddled back in the corner of that cell with my fingers my ears as
38:33deep as i could get them and i just knew my eardrums were going to rupture and the plaster is falling
38:38down from the ceiling in the cell and there are wooden shutters over the bars on the door and they're
38:43like they're made out of cardboard they're flapping back and forth from the concussion from these bombs
38:48and i'm sitting there thinking three nights ago i was up there dropping those bombs
38:53the way i'm going to check out is being bombed by my buddies who i was up there bombing with three
38:59nights ago isn't that ironic december the 20th was the most intense night of operation linebacker
39:07six b-52s were destroyed and 17 airmen lost their lives
39:13after 93 days of captivity john newell was finally released but for him his savior was the b-52
39:22that b-52 was such a sturdy airplane such a tough bird that it took two direct sam hits
39:30and i was in it for at least 50 or 60 seconds trying to decide whether to bail out or stay with it
39:36and all my crew got out everybody survived during linebacker two the b-52s flew over 700 sorties in
39:45north vietnam they kept up the most sustained heavy bombing of the war dropping over 15 000 tons of
39:52ordinance they destroyed 1600 military installations 10 airfields 500 railway tracks three million gallons
40:01of petroleum and eighty percent of all electrical power but for the sac crews a high price was paid to
40:09complete to complete that objective over the 11 days of the operation 15 b-52s were shot down by sam
40:16missiles of the 92 crew aboard these planes 61 went down over north vietnam roughly half were killed
40:25and half were taken prisoner hanoi could not take a further battering and a ceasefire was signed
40:33in march 1973 the last american troops left vietnam
40:43throughout the 1980s and 90s the b-52 remained the principal strategic heavy bomber in the u.s air fleet
40:50constantly updated to incorporate the latest airborne technology the b-52 was always ready to go into
40:57action on september the 11th 2001 as it neared its 50th birthday the b-52 was called on again
41:09on the 11th of september we were in the middle of an exercise and we watched the airplane hit the
41:16second tower at which point we knew then that this was not just an accident that it was an attack on the
41:22the united states so really hit home at that point that we needed to take the attack back to the enemy
41:31their targets were the taliban extremists who for five years had held the afghanistan people
41:36in an islamic reign of terror home to the al-qaeda terrorists this organization was held responsible for
41:44the september 11th atrocities
41:46so began the war on international terrorism the b-52 has at least three different precision weapons
41:57those bombs can drop within 40 feet or 13 meters but we have seen in actual combat that we're actually
42:03beating that by a long margin on the 10th of november this past year we had an air force staff sergeant
42:09on horseback in afghanistan who was under attack he made a mayday call much to his luck that day
42:15a b-52 orbiting close by was able to direct himself in that direction with within eight minutes of
42:21being contacted we laid down 16 of these wind corrected munitions dispensers killing about 250
42:28to 300 of the advancing troops allowing him and his northern alliance teammates to escape to fight
42:33another day the mere sight of a b-52 overhead sending a signal to those on the ground that we're here to
42:41stay we're watching and we're not going to abandon you for nearly half a century the extraordinary b-52
42:51has been at the forefront of u.s policy in the air the remarkable range of the aircraft means that from
42:57bases in the u.s it can strike at targets anywhere in the world what a bargain we got as taxpayers and
43:04i don't know of very many airplanes that have been around still flying since 1952 current projections are
43:13that the b-52 has a combat life until 2045 almost 100 years of active service no other bomber in history
43:22comes close to this record i believe it will probably be the most famous airplane ever and certainly one
43:30with perhaps the longest longevity of any combat airplane that we've ever had in the inventory
43:37started in the 40s 50 60 70 80s 90s you know and now 2000s so the original designers
43:45give them an attaboy for me because they did a very good job
44:00and we've the last of today's special spring bank holiday battle stations programs right after the
44:05break as we meet some of the men who fought in the m1 abrams super tank considered the most sophisticated
44:11tank ever built
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