The angled deck changed all that. This innovative design was invented by a British carrier pilot, Rear Admiral Cunningham, Royal Navy, but was first installed on the U.S. carrier Antietam in 1952. The angled deck had a major influence on carrier air operations from then on. It eliminated all of the bad features of the straight deck design. The angled deck was aligned ten degrees to the left of the ship’s centerline, and equipped with transverse arresting wires; it was the landing area for the carrier’s planes. Landing aircraft followed a mirror beam glide path to a touchdown on the angle where its hook caught a wire. If the hook failed to engage a wire, the pilot added power and continued down the angled deck to take off and circle for another landing approach. To miss a wire and go around again was to “bolter.” The axial deck became the parking area for the planes that had just landed, keeping the angled deck clear. The forward end of the straight deck was also the aircraft launching area, using the installed catapults. The angled deck had been installed on the Essex in 1955, a project that took almost a year in the shipyard. It was worth it, however, and all of the Navy’s carriers were being converted to the angled deck at the highest priority.
Weather conditions in the Mediterranean during the winter were generally nasty, with high winds and heavy seas. In February, the commanding officer of the Essex AD Skyraider squadron crashed into the sea during an approach to a night carrier landing under stormy conditions. He was lost in the rough seas and dark night before the plane guard destroyer was able to recover him. Night air operations from carriers in the late 1950s were primitive, with inadequate ship’s radars for aircraft control and a deck lighting system little better than a row of flashlights down each deck edge.
Most of VA-83’s flying during the work-up phase, land-based at Oceana before going on board the carrier, concentrated on the special-weapons delivery mission. In the event of general war with the Soviet Union, SAC bombers from British bases, and SAC fields in the United States would head for their main targets inside the Soviet Union. B-52 bombers were also launched from SAC bases in the United States to orbit in the Atlantic. This put them closer to their targets in case war was declared and reduced their vulnerability to a preemptive Soviet nuclear strike on their air bases. The bombers’ route to their targets overflew the Warsaw Pact countries of central Europe. The military airfields in the satellite nations were used to base Soviet and Warsaw Pact fighter planes and surface-to-air missiles to engage the strategic bombers along their penetration route. The Sixth Fleet special-weapons delivery squadrons — there were two on each carrier, one jet squadron and one propeller squadron — were responsible for neutralizing these satellite air defense bases with nuclear weapons. Each VA-83 pilot had an assigned nuclear weapon stored in the Valley Forge’s magazines and a specific target in the satellites. The information on each target was contained in a top secret dossier available only to the specified pilot and one assigned air intelligence officer.
My target in the Rollback Campaign, as it was called, was a fighter strip in Bulgaria. My flight profile was to climb to thirty-eight thousand feet over the northern Tyrrhenian Sea and then let down to five hundred feet north of the Carpathian Mountains and penetrate the target area underneath the radar coverage. Upon reaching my assigned airdrome, I would pull up in an idiot loop, and my bomb, a tactical thermonuclear weapon, would be released over the center of the field. After delivering my bomb, I would then fly to a designated geographic location near Bari on the coast of Italy, trusting that the SAC computers at Omaha had provided me an exit route that kept me clear of a friendly bomber’s ground zero.
At this rendezvous point would be a Navy AJ-2 Savage tanker from the Valley Forge, circling at ten thousand feet as the pilot waited to transfer sufficient fuel to get us back to the carrier. The flight planning provided the A4 pilots with only ten minutes of fuel remaining as we arrived at the rendezvous point.
The Essex, with its embarked aircraft, was scheduled to complete its Sixth Fleet deployment in July 1958 and return to Norfolk. That was not to be. The CNO was then Adm. Arleigh Burke, and Burke had astutely foreseen problems in the Middle East and wanted to have naval forces in the theater to provide whatever presence and military capability the national command authority thought appropriate. Therefore, when the carrier that was to relieve the Essex on station sailed into the western Mediterranean, the Essex was retained in the eastern Med so that the Navy would have three ready carriers in the Mediterranean should trouble erupt. Admiral Burke similarly extended the Marine infantry battalion embarked in the amphibious ready group deployed to the Sixth Fleet. When White House orders came to land Marines in Lebanon, there were two battalions of U.S. Marines, rather then the normal one, available for the operation.
LEBANON
In September 1958 the situation in Lebanon was coming to a boil. A full-sized Middle East conflict was possible unless immediate steps were taken to stabilize the situation. The president ordered the Sixth Fleet to land Marines at Beirut under the cover of air support from the three carriers. The Marine landings were unopposed, and the show of force on the ground and in the air quickly calmed down the belligerents, preempting a major conflagration in the area.
The joint commander of the Navy, Army, and Air Force components in the landing force was my father, Adm. James L. Holloway Jr., USN, who was regularly assigned as commander in chief, Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean, a JCS theater command, with the additional contingency responsibility as “commander, Specified Command, Middle East,” another and separate JCS force. This specified command by designation was to be activated when required to conduct military operations in the Middle East, which at that time was on the eastern boundary of CinCLAnt and the western boundary of CinCPac. That was before Central Command (CentCom) was created.
The Marine landings and U.S. occupation of the Beirut area provoked a strong and unpleasant reaction from the Soviet Union. Within seventy-two hours after the Marines had hit the beach, Khrushchev made a statement from the Kremlin that the USSR “viewed this American adventuring with alarm, and that the Soviet Union was very capable of turning the Sixth Fleet aircraft carriers into flaming coffins for the American sailors.” Meanwhile, the Sixth Fleet carriers’ fighters and attack planes were maintaining a constant air presence over Lebanon loaded with conventional bombs and forward-firing rockets. But with the belligerent statements from the Kremlin, the nuclear capability of the Sixth Fleet was placed in a higher readiness condition.
VA-83 was ordered to have two planes on nuclear strike alert. The first A4D-2 was on the port catapult with a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon in its centerline station, the pilot in the cockpit, and a starter cart alongside and plugged in. A Marine with an automatic weapon stood guard over the bomb. Behind the port catapult was a second VA-83 A4D-2, also with a thermonuclear weapon hung on the center station. This pilot was not in the cockpit but allowed to relax next to his aircraft. Otherwise he was ready to go, fully briefed with his plane fully preflighted. These were designated the ready aircraft, and they gave rise to an alarming incident.
I was just entering the squadron ready room to get ready for my next hop over Lebanon when I heard the intercom from the ship’s operation center tersely order, “Launch the ready standby aircraft.” It was like being hit in the solar plexus. Once an A4D-2 with a nuclear weapon was launched, the plane with the weapon attached could not land back on the carrier, so this could not be a practice takeoff. When the nuclear-ready planes went, we could expect them to go all the way.