It was overcast, cold and damp with over a foot of snow on the ground when we first arrived at the Missile Support Area in late January, 1962. Located in the Eifel forest some ten miles from the Bitburg Air Base, we had the last of five hangars in the remote compound, the Flight Controls/Guidance Systems Checkout hangar at the top of a small slope.
Entering the hangar for the first time was like a scene from a movie. It was as cold inside the hangar as it was outside. No heating system had been built into the building! The only light pitifully illuminating the crates and wooden boxes that filled the musty hangar was from a row of small windows twenty feet above us that ran down two sides of the building. A missile sat forlornly its launcher in the Flight Controls area, still "wrapped" from the shipment from the Martin-Marietta plant in Maryland. It was hard to tell what was there, much less figure out where it was supposed to go once we uncrated it. The hangar floor, however, was totally unexpected. It was a carefully laid, gray and blue vinyl tile as if in a school building. The hangar had no heat, but a sensitive floor that was obviously going to get a lot of our attention. The adventure we trained forty-six weeks for was about to begin.
It started with our new, shiny, forty-cup, percolator coffee pot. The one we bought by taking a collection from all the airmen who were going to be working in our brand-new maintenance hangar. It was our first, full-team effort as members of the first Air Force Mace "B" guided missile unit in Germany. Our very first duty that day was one for the record books: We were ordered to shovel the snow out of the ditches that ran parallel to the walkway leading to the maintenance office. We were then ordered, all of us, to remove the wet morass of dead leaves and pile them up on the side of the ditches. We were a long, long way from our first Operational Readiness Inspection.
We were the first TM-76B Mace "B" crew in Europe, having been diverted from our original assignment to Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, as we signed out of the 4504th Missile Training Wing in Orlando. The one hundred and fifty of us had just graduated from the Air Force Tactical Missile School. Our assignment orders to Kadena were red-lined and we were handed new orders to report to Bitburg Air Base, Germany, instead.
Of course, all of our winter uniforms and long sleeve fatigues in our hold baggage didn't get diverted, they went to Okinawa just fine. It would be months before the long johns and gloves we bought back in systems school in Denver would arrive in cold, wet Germany. We had to rely on the goodness of the guys in the 36th Supply Squadron that took pity on us and went out of their way to scrounge up field jackets and liners, parkas, and of course, long johns. Almost all of the water-proof cold weather gear we were issued was labeled U.S. Navy. A pretty group we were not. At least we were warm.
There was one bright spot. During the second day or so, one of our sergeants found a power outlet on the wall in the hangar that had live 115 VAC, although 50 cycle, power if we switched on the huge inverter mounted just outside the hangar wall. The power unit was so big, it had its own building built around it after it had been placed on its concrete pad. The ever resourceful sergeant immediately asked for a pickup truck to take him straight to the Base Exchange where he bought a brand new, shiny, all aluminum 40 cup coffee maker! From there to the commissary in the housing area to buy coffee and sugar. Surprise! Both coffee and sugar were rationed items! Back to the Missile Support Area to collect ration cards, then back to the Commissary. Finally armed with enough coffee and sugar to keep the Guidance Systems Checkout guys, Flight Control troops, and the Airframe and Engine guys in the next hangar happy, he headed back to the Missile Support Area out near the Oberweis Highway.
We all stood watching our breath in the cold, dimly lighted air, in our new parkas, as the new pot was carefully filled with water. Our intrepid sergeant, facetiously making a military ceremony out of initiating the maiden pot of coffee, slowly, meticulously added coffee to our new piece of communal equipment. He turned to us and said prophetically, “Well, here goes!” He plugged in the new coffee pot and dramatically turned on the power switch. The lights in the hangar went out immediately. All the lights. Not even the security lights were on. The new, incredibly expensive inverter died, taking the entire hangar’s electrical system with it. Killed by a forty cup coffee pot.
For the next nine – yes, 9 – months, all power to our hangar was supplied by two 50 KW portable generators mounted on 25 foot flatbeds trailers, on at each end of the hangar. We finally got a single 150KW mounted on a trailer outside near where the defective inverter sat, but we had to move it out of the way for the crane that was used to lift out the inverter, once they took the roof off the building. Once the inverter was taken out, the 150KW became our prime source of power and the two 50KW units were relegated to back up duty.
We began receiving the A.C. Spark Plug Inertial Guidance units – they called them AChiever units, the same one used in the Thor ballistic missile – not soon after our power source crapped out. They were temperature sensitive units. The gyros had to be maintained at a specific temperature to prevent catastrophic gyro failure. It was imperative to maintain all the gyros at their required level. That wasn't the problem, however. Being resourceful young, highly trained technicians that we were, we soon had schedules down for maintaining the equipment that was indeed critical.
Except for dodging falling ceiling tiles. The huge slate ceiling tiles randomly began to fall during those first months, shattering when they hit the floor. The first safety action was to require everyone to wear their helmets inside the hangar while once again the German contractors were summoned back to fix yet another problem. In the several weeks it took to get new mounting tabs welded to the hangar ceiling, we wore our full army helmets, not just the liners. We all had gas masks assigned to us as well as the mandatory dosimeters. We kept the gas masks and ammunition in our personal equipment lockers, the dosimeters had to be with us at all times. We each had an M-1 Carbine and two magazines of ammunition assigned to us as well as we all had alert security duties in addition to our maintenance jobs. The carbine rack was just inside the main personnel door. It was not chained or secured, but everyone kept their own ammunition in their respective lockers.
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| A2C Len Calkins models the OSAT dress. In reality, no white shoe laces or pistols and we wore the gas masks on our legs for mobility when on the missile. |
We were back to the original problem of no heat in the building, even though the contractors had started work on some sort of heating system for the hangar. The main guidance system temperature control unit when the guidance system wasn’t installed in the missile was a unit called a "Mod B". It monitored the required power that was used by the gyro heaters. It was an ingenious little power unit that controlled a "Mod C" generator that was used to supply power to the nose section during transportation to and from the launch sites. It also had one massively huge 28 volt DC NiCad battery in it that weighed a ton in case the generator failed. The "Mod B" also had a very, very loud warning horn to let everyone know when the voltage fell below a safe level.
No one on earth could have slept through a power failure, at least not in the beginning. We had no less than twenty nose sections running on our makeshift power grid twenty-four hours a day, and when the generators failed, which they did often, all the Mod B failure warning horns went off at once. By the time we had gone through 72 hours of straight alert duty during the Cuban Missile Crisis, though, it seemed just about everyone could do it. Their wives today probably wonder what's wrong with their husbands who can sleep anywhere, anytime, through any incredible noise. We slept when we could in the few office chairs, or on the concrete floor, with our old WWII M-1 carbines, ready for the imminent invasion of the Red Army. We were all Outside Security Alert Teams, OSAT, to defend our compound in the wet, damp German October weather. When we weren't on post, we were cleaning equipment, eating food taken from the mess hall, or milling around the break room in the Test Equipment Maintenance shop waiting to go back out again. Catching a nap in the two hours off got to be quickly acquired habit. No one went back to base for anything.
When things had slowly resumed normal operations, we were hit with a major setback. Half of our people were pulled out of the squadron, including our Chief of Maintenance, to go to different bases throughout Europe to pull all the active ballistic missiles out of service. It was part of the Cuban Missile Crisis resolution. Some went to Turkey to pull out the Jupiter sites, some went to Italy, whether to pull out Thor sites or the Italian Jupiter sites, I don't know. We were cut to half strength, and didn't get replacements until the next class graduated from Orlando six months later. We eventually found out it was Operation Pot Pie. Everybody knows what happened, but nobody asked where did the Air Force find enough trained missile people to pull off the operation. Surprise! Bitburg had a whole missile maintenance squadron with apparently nothing to do. We were very proud to be "the first" of the Mace B groups in Europe. As it turned out, we would be the only Mace B group in Europe! The people who left never returned to our squadron.
We had every guidance unit in our hangar, except the ones that were in the gyro ovens in the Test Equipment Maintenance hangar at the other end of the complex. When the 150KW needed to be refueled, which was once every two days, we had to switch to the back up 50KW generators. Of course, the 150KW failed more than once, so we got to be very, very good at starting the backups and switching over, clearing the Mod Bs, and checking every single unit in an incredibly short time. We were so good at it, when we had a power failure, the NCOs would simply get out of the way.
The problem wasn't just keeping the gyros warm, it was keeping all of the test equipment from failing in the cold hangar. Not many pieces of the Guidance Systems Checker, or even the Flight Controls tester were reliable when the average daytime temperature in the hangar was 37 degrees Fahrenheit.
We were finally given two portable aircraft heaters, the gasoline fueled units usually found on cold, wet tarmacs and runway ramps, pumping hot air into aircraft cockpits through the over-sized, flexible yellow hoses that invariably got wrapped in duct tape. We "modified" the personnel doors at either end of the hangar to allow hose access without keeping the doors wide open. The heaters sat safely 10 or 15 feet outside the hangar, just to the right of the diesel 50KW generator, and the flex tubes ran twenty feet or so inside the hangar. Lo and behold, the hangar actually could be kept warm enough to work in just a field jacket. We built, assembled, tested, painted, and retested every piece of equipment in bearable temperatures.
The portable gas aircraft heaters were the problem. They had to be refueled often. The flexible neck gasoline cans used to carry the gasoline were stored with the standard 55 gallon drums, mounted in hand-made drum holders out behind the hangar. When the heaters ran low on fuel, the smaller refueling cans were filled from the 55 gallon drum and used to pour gasoline directly into the heater’s gas tank. The heaters were shut off, refueled and then powered back up. The system worked safely and efficiently, but not to be tripped up in the upcoming ORI, the Technical Sergeant in charge of the guidance section decided to bypass a potential trouble spot: UGLY CANS!
Worried about the upcoming inspection, he had the red gasoline cans painted yet once again, then had them chained to the gasoline drum stand so they wouldn't get used without his permission. During the "A" shift, the NCO In Charge had a key to the chain. If you needed the cans, he would unlock them, supervise the refueling, then return the cans to their secure location behind the hangar. Unfortunately, he only worked one shift. He did not pass on the key. The only way to the front heater was through the hangar.
The heaters were usually refueled every couple of hours, and was done off-shift with whatever we could find that didn’t leak, from mop buckets to bent butt cans. A butt can, as every GI knows, is simply a bent coffee can. To say carrying gasoline in buckets was as stupid as digging snow out of a ditch to remove dead leaves is an understatement. Here we were, supposedly the "best and the brightest," all AFR 35-1/99-1 certified, carrying open buckets of gasoline through a hangar like a bucket of water. At first, we thought he suspected someone of stealing gas from the 55 gallon drum, but the really odd thing about the gas possibly being stolen was most of the people who had cars that could have benefited from “free” gas were all NCOs who worked day shift.
Invariably it had to happen. It happened to Ray S., one of the power specialists, the AGE troops. He was trying to trickle gasoline into the fuel tank of a still hot, although powered off, heater about 2:00 am one cold, miserable morning when he accidentally sloshed gasoline onto the hot manifold of the heater. The fuel ignited and blasted up the sleeve of Ray's parka. Ray instinctively threw the can of gasoline away from the bucket and the heater. Unfortunately, the full butt can bounced off the front of the hangar, sloshing burning gasoline under the hangar door, whereupon the supposedly "flame retardant insulation" on the inside of the door burst into flame.
Bill Krebs, Ted Jarvi, and Louis Meyers put the fire out with the two, big stand-up fire bottles that stood just inside the hangar. There was a fueled missile sitting not fifteen feet away from the burning door when the accident happened.
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The "powers that were" tried to blame the accident on Ray, who was unharmed in the incident, other than his ego and a badly scorched parka sleeve. As soon as the first accident board’s findings were “leaked” to the squadron, however, the “board” apparently changed their minds. The personnel situation at the missile squadron at Bitburg was already so bad an article about the squadron had been printed in the German newspaper, “The Overseas Weekly.” The fire in the hangar with a missile just feet away and the almost mutinous, blistering comments from the troops would not only have have been on the front page of the German newspaper, but may have made international headlines as well.
But then, apparently no one was at fault. Ask the Non Commissioned Officer In Charge, the last time we saw him he had been promoted to Master Sergeant.
The door insulation was replaced by the new silver stuff, but we had a suspicion it was as dangerous as the original material. New crews that came in for the next several years were caught staring at the scorched wall.
When they asked what happened, we simply said, "we did it to pass our first ORI."
I took a photograph of the hangar on the last day of operation, April 30th, 1969, at the end of my second tour at Bitburg, almost six years after the accident. No one ever repainted the scorched hangar. The area above the hangar door, was still scorched black all the way to the ceiling.
© George Mindling 1999, 2012 – All Rights Reserved
