With
a few more dicey episodes along the way, we completed the flight loads program
early in 1955, then our “004” was selected by the Air Force to be the test
effects B-52 in one of the nuclear weapons test series being conducted at
Bikini and Eniwetok atolls. It would be
“Operation Redwing” in 1956.
The
airplane would be flown by an Air Force crew and maintained by mechanics from
Wright Field, both trained by Boeing in Seattle. Boeing contracted to furnish the test
planning, position calculation (as close to the thermos-nuclear blasts as
possible without destroying the airplane), data recording and transcription,
and the final test reports.
By
that time, I have been promoted to first-line supervision and was offered the
position of Flight Test Operations Supervisor on the Operation Redwing team
that would go to Eniwetok for the duration of the test program (four months). We had to provide personal histories going
all the way back to birth with no gaps.
During the weeks that the investigation took, my mother got letters from
relatives in the Missouri Ozark that questioned, “Is Conrad in some sort of
trouble? FBI agents were here asking all
sorts of questions about him and the family!”
I could tell no one, even my wife, where I was going or what I would be
doing. I could only say that it was for
a high security clearance for an important job.
[Considering
the tenor of the times, it is not surprising that my father’s family and
neighbors wondered about what was going on with him. Wikipedia lists the years of the Red Scare as
being from 1947 to 1957. I would say
that it lasted longer than that, or maybe it was just that I was afraid longer
than that. My father’s security
clearance assured that we have a private phoneline.]
 |
| Con's coffee mug from both Eniwetok operations |
The
stories of those nuclear weapons tests in Operation Redwing and, two years
later in Operation Hardtack when I went back again with another B-52, could be
a complete book. For this summary let it
suffice to simply record that our participation was a complete success and we
obtained data on every test shot in which we participated. There were about two dozen ranging in size
from the Hiroshima atomic bomb to thermo-nuclear (hydrogen) bombs with yields
in the multi-megaton range.
That
four-month isolation on Eniwetok atoll was the first of many long absences from
my little family and the new house we had bought in the Lake Hills area of
Bellevue. Shirley was not very
self-sufficient. She resented my
absences although she was proud that I had considerable amounts of overtime
that I was paid. That and my increasing
salary allowed for purchase of a second car, new furniture, and a color TV.
We
had many happy times when I was home, but the long absences and the world
travel in which I became involved in the 1960s had an adverse effect on little
Stephanie also. Year later when
something came up about events in her school life and developing years that I had
miss she cried out in an anguished voice, “But Daddy, you were never there!”
That memory remains painful.
I
feel in my later years that perhaps one problem in my ill-advised first
marriage and my performance as a father may have been that I was selfish in
pursuing the adventurous career in which I was so supremely happy. I seldom “took my work home with me”, but I
was eager to get to work every day for thirty years. I was never happier than when—travel
authorization, passport, and airline tickets in hand—I left SeaTac Airport for
some foreign lands.
[I
have a collection of letters, postcards, and dolls that are testament to how
much my father was gone from my childhood.]
I
went back to Eniwetok again in 1958 for Operation Hardtack. This time we instrumented a B-52B, 6591, that
we christened “Tommy’s Tigator” (the pilot was Major Tom Sumner, USAF). We painted a snarling green-striped tiger on
the nose of “591”. (When there is time
for more detail and anecdotes from these operations I will tell you what a “tigator”
is.) [I was enough enamored of the Tigator when I saw my father paint it on Major
Sumner’s helmet that I had my father paint one on my lunch box. I was a
standout at Phantom Lake Elementary.]
For
Operation Hartack I went to Eniwetok as overall Flight Test Supervisor at
first, then took over as Boeing base manager when my boss, Jim Webber was called
back to Seattle for another program. We
participated in and witnessed another eighteen or twenty nuclear explosions and
once more turned in a perfect record in obtaining our data. On one test our precisely controlled position
at Time Zero was so close that the shock wave caved in the bomb bay doors and
blew off the ECM radome on the bell of the airplane. That was close enough! On another some high clouds reflected enough
heat from the immense fireball that the paint was burned off one side of the
airplane. We got great structural and
temperature data and the B-52 came off with an excellent record that it could
deliver the largest thermos-nuclear weapons and survive.
During
one Operation Hartack test, we on the ground witnessed the detonation of a
five-megaton weapon only twenty-two miles away across the Eniwetok lagoon. It was indescribable—rather like peering into
an open door of Hell and I came away an advocate of banning all nuclear weapons
in the world.
[It
was around this time that I became convinced that I was not going to live to
adulthood. Because of his experience on
Eniwetok, my father thought it was good for the family to be prepared for a
possible nuclear war. He did not build a
bomb shelter, but he was concerned about the fact that he considered Boeing and
Seattle to be a USSR target. My mother
was instructed to keep a quarter of a tank of gas in the car at all times. If there was a warning of a possible nuclear
strike, I was to walked to the crosswalk at the bottom of the school yard. She would then drive the two of us to my
grandparents’ beach house in Seaview, WA where he believed the off-shore wind
would blow fallout away from the coast.
Once when we were visiting my mother’s sister and her family in
Vancouver, WA we children were sent to bed because the parents were going to
watch a TV program on thermo-nuclear war.
A typical youngster told that I could NOT watch something on TV, that
was exactly what I wanted to do. I crept
to the bedroom door where I could see the television and watched a program that
led me to believe that the grown-ups were probably going to have a war that
would kill us all, if not in an initial blast, then with fallout. Shortly after that experience my mother drove
me by the construction site for Sammamish High School and gaily said, “There’s
where you will go to high school.” Right,
I thought. There’s something that will
never happen. Imagine my surprise when I
got to my junior year of high school that it seemed that I was going to have to
be an adult afterall.]
