As the sweep second hand on my cockpit clock went by 0500, I turned on my exterior running lights for the catapult officer to let him know I was ready for launch and in three seconds, the A4D was airborne. I flipped the wheels-up lever and eased up the wing flaps. The power stayed at 100 percent as I swung to my departure course, turned off my lights, and commenced the long climb to thirty-five thousand feet. Not even a good-bye from the carrier. We were in radio silence. The entire launch had been done without a radio transmission.
At altitude I felt really alone in the cockpit. No crew, no wingman, and seven miles from the nearest fish. The A4D did not have an autopilot, and at this altitude, with two 250-gallon tanks on the wing pylons and the centerline weapon, the little plane was wallowing and required constant pilot attention. At 0542 I throttled back to 85 percent and commenced to let down according to my preplanned flight profile. Leveling off at ten thousand feet would get me under the coastal search radar, but not for long. Ten minutes later another descent would be required. I had planned to wait until sunrise at 0617 before dropping down to my twohundred-foot ingress altitude, after I had gotten a visual check on the coastline to verify my position at the start of the overland leg. With the rising sun behind me and just a trace of morning mist, I was able to easily confirm my landfall position, the confluence of two rivers on an otherwise unbroken coastline. Leaving the coast, the navigation would be harder: four hundred miles of flying at two hundred feet altitude and 360 knots. I had selected a series of geographically prominent features as my navigation checkpoints, and they all turned up on schedule. I had a time on target (TOT) of 0748. At 0700 I pushed the power up to 100 percent to squeeze five hundred knots out of the A4D. I had jettisoned both of the 250-gallon drop tanks as they had emptied, and now the Skyhawk was cleaner and lighter. At 0747 I was over my initial position but still three minutes out. I was going to be two minutes late — more headwind than I had expected — and it was not possible to make it up. I concentrated on getting a good hit on the target. Dropping down to fifty feet, I eased off a percent of power to give me exactly five hundred knots, set the armament switches on the weapons console to arm the Mark-28 bomb on the centerline rack, and selected it for automatic release. And then I concentrated on flying the final maneuver.
Suddenly there it was. A whitewashed, pyramid-shaped building, just like the intelligence photos. As I crossed the target, I pulled back the stick firmly but smoothly to about four Gs, and as the G forces jammed me down in the ejection seat, the anti-G suit pressure, squeezing on my legs and abdomen, forced the blood to my head to prevent me from blacking out. I concentrated on keeping my wings horizontal. As I pulled up into the half Cuban eight maneuver, I was flying entirely by reference to the instruments of the low-altitude bombing system (LABS). As the nose of the plane went through the vertical straight up, I felt a slight jar as the MK-28 weapon was kicked loose. The bomb would continue in its vertical trajectory up to thirteen thousand feet, then it would fall straight down as gravity overcame the upward velocity imparted by the airplane. As the A-4 completed a full half-circle of a loop and reversed direction in a vertical turn, I shifted my eyes from the cockpit instruments to outside the canopy. The plane was on its back with the nose falling through the horizon. At this point I rolled the plane right side up. I was in a thirty-degree dive with the engine at full power. This was the escape maneuver — a half Cuban eight — to put the maximum distance between the delivery aircraft and the MK-28 bomb. It had been set for a five-hundred-foot airburst, an altitude that would maximize the blast effect of the 350-kiloton thermonuclear warhead — more than twenty times the explosive power of the A-bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II.
As the A4 streaked away on the deck from the bomb’s trajectory, I watched in the rearview mirrors on each side of the cockpit plexiglass canopy for the explosion. And there it was. Not the blinding flash of a thermonuclear detonation in this case, but the dirty brown smoke from the TNT “trigger” that would have set off the charge of plutonium if the thermonuclear warhead had been installed. This had been an operational test of a war reserve weapon, selected at random from the nuclear-weapons stockpile. These operational tests, which were conducted periodically to ensure the reliability of the stockpile, attempted to duplicate as closely as possible all the conditions of a war shot. In this case, the carrier had been off the coast of Florida, and the bomb was dropped on a ground-zero target at the specially instrumented bombing range at the Eglin Air Force Base Proving Grounds just east of Pensacola, Florida, on the Gulf Coast. Theodolites on the range had tracked both my delivery aircraft and then the bomb through its trajectory to the detonation to measure every parameter in the delivery sequence.
The exercise was not over. To get back to the carrier, I had to rendezvous with a tanker aircraft from the Essex that should be waiting in a port orbit at ten thousand feet over the Gulf of Mexico, twenty miles south of the eastern tip of Padre Island. Still climbing to thirty thousand feet to conserve fuel, I spotted the twin-engined AJ-1 Savage tanker below me in a port orbit at ten thousand feet. He was trailing a refueling drogue, a large funnel at the end of a fifty-foot fuel line. Because we were still in radio silence, I joined up on his wing and we exchanged hand signals. The tanker straightened out on a steady course at 250 knots and I plugged the A4D-2’s refueling probe into the drogue and took aboard seven thousand pounds of fuel, three and a half tons of JP-5. Then breaking away, I began the long flight back to the carrier. When the carrier was finally in sight, the landing signal officer was flashing the Morse code letter “Charlie,” which meant that I had a ready deck on arrival and was to land immediately. The task group was still in radio silence.
Within an hour, Eglin Proving Ground had followed up with a message to the Essex reporting the results of the exercise. The weapon had detonated within three hundred yards of ground zero, which was not as good as a direct hit but was within a radius that would have achieved the desired amount of damage at the constructive target, a Soviet fighter strip in Hungary.
The operational test had been part of a three-day exercise in which the Essex had participated, simulating a conflict in the Mediterranean that had escalated from an incident in Berlin to all-out nuclear war. The flight flown for the test of the war reserve weapon had been the replication of a profile from a launch point in the Tyrrhenian Sea to strike an airfield in the Balkans from which Soviet fighter aircraft would operate to intercept Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombers en route to targets in the Soviet Union. The U.S. Navy was committed to maintain, at all times, two carriers in the Mediterranean, each of which had an embarked squadron with the mission of special-weapons delivery, “special weapons” being the euphemism for nuclear bombs. These were tactical nukes that could be targeted against “tactical” targets, as opposed to strategic targets, which were a responsibility of the SAC.