Q: That was a big operation. It went on for, what, almost two months? It
was a massive effort. What was the reason for that effort?
CH: [President] Eisenhower had already proposed "Open Skies" at the Geneva
summit conference in July of 1955. And {Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev and
the others had rejected the proposal, which was that each of the states, the
major powers, should let the other overfly its territory and even base the
planes there to take pictures and eliminate the fears of surprise attack and
allow them to see where they had their military bases and that sort of thing.
So, that this fear caused by not knowing where your military forces were and
how many and how they were arrayed would not exist then. Well, he succeeded in
doing that but not with any one's permission. To overfly with aircraft in
international law was definitely illegal and we were signatories to treaties
from the Aeronavigation Treaty through the Chicago Convention of '44 and later
ones that said, thou shalt not overfly another state without its permission.
Well, to go back to the mission that you brought up, SAC flew a squadron of
RB-47Es which are camera equipped and they had five RB-47Hs which are the
electronic reconnaissance aircraft. They'd fly together, usually they'd pair
these things, and they flew over the pole from Greenland, during that period
that I mentioned, oh daily. They operated from a single runway. They lived in
pretty rudimentary quarters and they didn't lose an airplane. They flew 156
missions altogether and it ended up with six RB-47Es overflying all of Siberia
and landing in Alaska. They came out across Anidon and the Bering Straits and
the Soviets protested the overflight of its northern tier territories very
loudly. And Eisenhower at that point stood down and there was only one further
military overflight and that was the last one, in December of `56, which took
place from Japan and used RB-57s, a camera equipped model called dash zero.
These were single seat, long range, they flew nearly as high as the U2 but not
quite. The Soviets protested that and he shut everything down at that point
but restarted the U2 later.
back to Interview Transcripts
|
PBS Terms of Use Privacy Policy
Pledge Your Support
Stories to Go