LONACONING, Md.—Our friend, Andrea Bowden, served Bucky Schriver and me lunch at her home in this little former coal mining town on Georges Creek in Allegany County a few days ago. Then Andrea and I followed Bucky in his pickup out of a twisting road up to the summit of Big Savage Mountain in Garrett County.
It was spring, and the trees were leafing out, so when we reached the high plateau, we could see far out across the mountains and valleys. It looked like someone had thrown a quilt over western Maryland. There were the farms, bright green rectangles with dairy cows grazing, dark brown patches of plowed ground, interspersed with forests.
Bucky was leading us to a roadside memorial to the five U.S. Air Force crewmembers, three of whom died, in the crash of their B-52 bomber, Jan. 13, 1964.
We arrived at the stone memorial, a turnout on the deserted mountain road. Bucky pointed west across a field. “The plane came down right over there in that clearing,” he said. “Five crewmen. Three of them died.”
He was pointing at the Stonewall Green farm, now a peaceful meadow surrounded by oak trees.
The crew was flying the B-52, codenamed Buzz One Four, from Westover Air Force Base in central Massachusetts to Turner Air Force Base in Georgia for repairs. It had just been flown back from Europe, where it had been part of a “Operation Chrome Dome” flight in which a fleet of B-52s armed with thermonuclear bombs flew around the perimeter of the Soviet Union.
This round-the-clock Pentagon operation was an attempt to terrorize the Soviet Union—one of the most insane, warlike operations of the Cold War. It finally ended in 1968. Yet, already the U.S. Air Force had recorded 32 crashes of B-52s loaded with thermonuclear H-bombs. These disasters were given the codename Broken Arrow.
Buzz One Four took off from Westover AFB just after midnight, Jan. 13, 1964. Within minutes, flying at 31,000 feet, the plane ran into heavy turbulence. They were flying directly into a blizzard with winds of 167 miles per hour, the plane itself flying more than 500 miles per hour.
The pilot, Major Thomas W. McCormack, struggled to keep the enormous plane stable. It was hit with a devastating windshear that ripped away the vertical stabilizer and tail. The plane nosed down, out of control. McCormack ordered the crew to eject. Four did, still at 30,000 feet, over five miles high, into a raging blizzard with temperatures 40 degrees below zero. The fifth airman, navigator Major Robert E. Townley, was unable to eject and died in the crash. Two others, navigator Robert L. Payne and Technical Sergeant Melvin D. Wooten, died of exposure before volunteers could wade through two feet of snow and high winds to rescue them. Only two survived, pilot McCormack and co-pilot Parker C. “Mack” Peedin.
Buzz One Four was laden with two H-bombs with a combined weight of 8.5 tons. Each of these bombs had the explosive power of 9 million tons of TNT. If one or both of these H-bombs had exploded, it would have incinerated a vast region and made most of the northeast of the United States uninhabitable.
Schriver told us, “The media keeps referring to them as ‘warheads.’ But warheads are mounted on missiles. These were not warheads. They were bombs. They claim these bombs had safety mechanisms that they would never explode. But these bombs had every component to be fully operational.”
He was expressing the deep skepticism of the people of western Maryland, suspicious of the soothing assurances from the Pentagon that bombs aboard these crashed B-52s would never explode.
This suspicion is well-founded. The Defense Department issued a statement that the two H-bombs “were relatively intact in the approximate center of the wreckage area.” But William L. Stevens, a safety engineer at the Sandia National Laboratories, charged that “both bombs broke apart on impact.”
That raised the danger that the highly radioactive U-235 might have been exposed or dispersed in the atmosphere or ground. The plane was carrying tons of jet fuel that might seep down, contaminating the water table that provides drinking water for that region.
Schriver told us about the heroic efforts of the working people of Garrett and Allegany counties to wade through two feet of snow, frigid winds, and sub-zero temperatures to rescue the airmen. He himself was just a child, sound asleep with his four brothers and sisters, when the B-52 roared across the sky, so loud that it could be heard over the blizzard roar. But his mother, Rose, was awake and heard the B-52 above the family home near Lonaconing.
I knew a lot about the crash of Buzz One Four because Andrea had given me, a day earlier, a book, B-52 Down! The Night the Bombs Fell From the Sky by Linda Harris Sittig.
A slim yet highly documented book, I read it cover-to-cover the night before. The book is dedicated to Bucky Shriver, who worked stubbornly to convince author Sittig to write it. In her introduction, she writes that she was at a bookshop in Frostburg, signing copies of one of her books, Last Curtain Call. “A gentleman approached, introduced himself as Bucky Schriver, and said, ‘I have a story that would make a great book and you’d be the perfect person to write it.’ He did not hesitate but launched into telling me about the crash of a B-52 in the mountains west of Frostburg in 1964.”
Sittig insisted that military affairs was not her topic. She writes books about “Strong women.” Bucky replied that there were the wives of the five airmen, the women in western Maryland who had joined in the rescue of the airmen. Schriver persisted, finally phoning her to say that the niece of one of the crewmembers, Gina Townley Swinburn and her sister Lisa Townley Gilbreaux, were traveling from Louisiana up to Garrett County to honor the memory of their uncle, Major Townley, who had died in the crash. Schriver invited her to come and interview them. She accepted.
Sittig’s book, with many black and white photos, is a riveting account of the crash and the heroic efforts of the residents to rescue the airmen.
Yet, the chapters that gripped me were near the end of the book, devoted to questions about the H-bombs. Among those she interviewed was one Garrett County resident who waded through the snow to the wreckage. To get a better view, he climbed up on what he thought was one of the jet engines. But later he realized it was not an engine. It was one of the H-bombs, eight feet in diameter and 25 feet long. He noticed that it had a crack in it.
Chapter 11 attempts to answer the question of what happened to the bombs. How did the Pentagon retrieve them? Sittig writes, “According to all the newspaper reports, Ray Giconi, who owned M&S Quarry, brought over his big flat-bed dump trucks, two payloaders with a long bed and short cab to help with the bomb removal. And even though the Air Force had assured everyone of no impending danger, Ray had borrowed mattresses from the Boys Camp to line the bottom of his truck to give the bombs a nesting place and chains to secure the bombs in place…..Ray and his men used front-end loaders to hoist the two nine megaton bombs onto the two flatbeds and proceed to Westernport Road. A military transport provided by Hazelwood Construction met them on the road and ferried the bombs through the back roads to the main highway and the Cumberland Airport.”
This account stirred much controversy: The sheer terror of two privately owned dump trucks trundling down through Lonaconing, each carrying a nine megaton H-bomb, just waiting to explode! It is so frightening, it is ludicrous.
Bucky and Andrea launched into a discussion. Wouldn’t the bombs be transported by a bomb disposal unit of the Air Force? Wouldn’t they do it in the middle of the night, with full-scale military escort, with the public ordered to stay inside as far away from this lethal cargo as possible?
Yet the story of Ray Giconi and his dump trucks persists. It is one of many stories about the Buzz One Four incident that is endlessly debated and is part of the folklore of western Maryland.
Sittig devotes her final chapter, “Author’s Notes,” to the biggest issue of all: The menace of these nuclear weapons. Yes, “Operation Chrome Dome” was terminated in 1968. But the nuclear weapons remain, they are spreading, with more and more nations possessing them. The danger of a thermonuclear war is real.
Sittig describes in detail the five “Broken Arrow” accidents that occurred in the United States. One occurred on March 11, 1958, when a B-47 bomber took off from Hunter Air Force Base in Savannah, Georgia, with a Mark-6 nuclear bomb on board.
Sittig writes, “Shortly after takeoff, the fault light indicated that the bomb harness locking pin was not engaged. The navigator went below to investigate and mistakenly grabbed the emergency release pin. That action forced the Mark 6 bomb to drop into the bomb bay, and the weight then drove the bomb doors open. The bomb dropped over Mars Bluff, South Carolina. Below on the ground, three young girls were playing. The bomb landed 200 yards from them, and the explosives detonated. Although the girls survived, six civilians were seriously injured and seven nearby buildings were significantly damaged.”
Bucky Schriver is a man of boundless energy, a determination to keep alive the memory of people who have died doing their jobs, like the 713 coal miners who died in roof falls in the coal mines of western Maryland, like those airmen who died in the crash of Buzz One Four. Bucky led the struggle to create memorials for those who died below the surface and above. We need to follow his lead: Make the jobs we do safe! Abolish nuclear weapons!
B-52 Down! The Night the Bombs Fell From the Sky
By Linda Harris Sittig
Freedom Forge Press
August 2021 / 9781940553108
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