She was from mississippi everybody knew nicks. He had grown himself a very fine handlebar mustache. The would take so and twisted he would take soap and twist it. The chinese instructors, it turned out to not be allowed. We had a filipino guy that was the barber. The chinese have furnished him with some large clippers, not be squeezed tight the squeeze tight. Type. When they made him cut that off he had his l this barber fashion a mustache on his head. Everyone laughed. That was his way of beating them at their own game. I was in my early 20s, i was in the prime of my life, so i could find a lot of things to laugh about. Iwe were missing out on a lo but we were learning a lot. Anything that you want to add more to this interview . Though, i have told my story no, i have told my story. Monday, arjuna patrick font draws 10 president ial artist patrick font draws 10 president ial caricatures. And historian discusses the president s and their memorable qualities. That is on American History tv. , former navy aviator andrew all, former navy and aviator andrew. Plane caught fire and the crew was forced to ditch the aircraft. In the discussion, he talks about the mission and the rescue of the crew members. The smithsonian hosted the event. It runs a little over an hour. The first thing youre going to hear is an h. F. Radio transmission from the aircraft alfa foxtrot 586 to elmendort radio, this is the air force station on the ground in alaska that is responsible for flight following communications with the airplane. Because its h. F. , its a little hard to understand. If you have trouble understanding it at the end of it ill tell you what you heard. But its really quite remarkable that these transmissions still exist because normally 30 days or so after something is recorded its erased. And yet we have coming up on how many years now, this is 1978 were talking about, decades later, weve got the thing that is so striking, the young man youll hear for the most part is a guy named matt gibbons, who was lieutenant junior grade, age 26 at the time, a graduate of a Spanish Language program at marquette university. And he is on the radio, he is so cool and so collected, that you think he is talking about somebody elses flight. And he is that tightly controlled to 150 feet above the water, seconds from water impact, hes one of the few guys who has a window to look out of, hes got a window right at his Left Shoulder and as theyre coming down, those 30foot waves outside the window must look like the end of the earth. And hes got to know hes going to die in seconds, and yet you listen to his voice and hes like hes calling a ball game. And its just striking. That is about, matt is about my size, he hates it when i say this, but he looks a little bit like elmer fudd, and he is a hero. [laughter] any way, lets listen to this and if you have trouble understanding it, ill interpret it. Courts alfa Foxtrot Alpha foxtrot 586, over. Alfa foxtrot 586, go ahead. Alfa foxtrot 586, were a topper three aircraft, we have a propeller malfunction at this time, our present position, 5222 north, 16430 east. Our altitude is 11,000 feet. Crew true air speed 154. Ground speed 194. We are diverting direct at this time. Over. Alfa foxtrot 586, the aircraft, the navy p3 ohry on, ryan orion, just like this one in the painting, has told el elmendorf that they are terminating their mission, they are flying for an air force base because theyve had a propeller malfunction. Hes about 154 knots, a 40 knot tail wind, oh so hes doing about 190 knots over the ground. Hes hundreds of miles away from chima, and thats hundreds amiles away from his base. But what he is telling elmendorf is that we were terminated the flied, weve got a problem were heading home. And the story im going to tell you is the true story of the rescue of alfa foxtrot 586. When i wrote this in 2003 i wanted to call it the ordeal of alfa foxtrot 586 and the publisher said gee, that sounds pretty grim, why dont we dress it up a little bit. And i leave it to you to decide if this is pretty grim or not. Lets start with talking about Antisubmarine Warfare. World war i is the beginning of a point at which the promise of submarines seems to become a reality. As far back as leonardo da vinci, people had the idea that gee, if we could only attack from under water what a good thing that would be. The technology isnt there in the 19th century either, and the u. S. Navy and the Confederate Navy and a couple other navies around drown a number of crews trying to prove that submarines can work. But by world war i, they can work. This is a picture of the sinking of lusitania, and the New York Times article and the other picture, the one right here, of course, is a woman drowning holding her baby in her arms and sinking in the water as the result of this horrific attack on the lusitania. Whats happened here is the stalemate on the western front in world war i, and the very successful british blockade of the continent during that war, has pushed the germans into something called unrestricted submarine warfare. Before that restricted submarine warfare the submarine meant to be submarine surfaced, sent a boat to its target, inspected their cargo, inspected their manifest, and if they determined it was carrying contraband pulled off to sink it but was obliged to make provision for the safety of the passengers and crew. That obviously isnt going to work. [laughter] consequently, as germany got more and more desperate, they twice inaugurated something called unprestricted warfare which meant you either rose to the surface and fired at the with deck guns or you watched the thing submerge, sank it it and kept on going back so outraged going to riordan that this going. So outraged the americans, weapons the lusitania, that the u. S. Entered the war. The american response to unprestricted submarine warfare was flawed. They did not understand because of poor dip will mattic reporting from washington on their part, the thraks that would bring. They were willing to bet that they could break the british blockade before the United States responded. That was an erroneous judgment. And what happened was that the entry of the United States into war, you suddenly had millions of men available to revitalize combat on the fronts that had completely stablized because of the horrific destruction of lives during the preceding years of the war. Its possible to see world war i as destroying an entire generation of men. And in many towns and cities especially in britain were recruiting was on a regional basis, where are recruiting was on a regional basis there , were no men. The sons, the uncles, the brothers and the husbands were gone. The entry of the United States in the war raised the possibility of millions of new combatants. The europeans for their part saw this as filler for their regiments, that americans would be dropped into the existing european, french and british regiments. The United States under general pershing rejected that strategy and american units went in under american command as coherent american units, but that changed the balance of the war. Never mind that we arrived very very late in the process. At the point that the United States entered the war, there was no successful possibility, no successful outcome for germany and that was triggered by the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare. World war ii begins, nazi germany has i think 55 submarines, theyve learned the lesson from world war i. They understand the power that weapon represents. They start the war with 50 submarines, build 100 new once. New ones. The loss of life is appalling during the conduct of the war. But for a period of time the threat those submarines represented britain, ireland britain, island brinson represent to legend, ireland britain, represent to britain, island britain, is enormous, and in defeat of those submarines through Antisubmarine Warfare campaign is a key moment during world war ii that tends to be neglected. All this is by way of background, because now in the cold war, submarines become an extraordinarily dangerous weapon. These are soviet attack submarines, charlie and victor class submarines, the noise you hear are the machinery noises of the Nuclear Powered propulsion. Beginning in the 50s long before these guys show up, the United States navy concentrates on the problem of Antisubmarine Warfare because theyve seen the dangers that it posed in world war ii. The solution to the problem is very very difficult, because the target at the time is a diesel electric submarine that when operating on a snorkel makes a lot of noise and you can find it with radar. But when operating submerged on its battery is very, very quiet. This results in a determined effort to find a substitute Search Technology for the technology that the allies used at the end of world war ii which was High Frequency direction finding. You waited until that german submarine got a mast and antenna up in the air and communicated with his ways on high freak web sit radio, you intercepted that highfrequency radio, you intercepted that communication and that gave you a position to begin your search to a relatively low speed, relatively limited capacity vehicle. As the war ends, the next generation begins, the u. S. Navy is looking for a replacement for High Frequency direction finding as an asw search tool, Antisubmarine Warfare search tool. And they sort of stumble upon although thats unfair because enormous sums of money are spent, and tremendous engineering talent devoted to it , the discovery that there is a deep sound channel the ocean that is capable of carrying sound through hundreds of miles, this is an illustration and i dont want to get too complicated about this. Picture that there is a duct in the ocean and inside of that duct sound is reflected up and down, and carried long distances. And at low frequency sound especially travels in that duct, oceanic duct, vast distances we are talking hundreds of miles. That sound can be detected, it can be an liced. Analyzed. It and if you have a system that gives you different looks at it , angular looks at the source of the sound, you can come up with a rough estimate of position much the way that High Frequency direction finding works. A rough estimate of position you then send somebody out to that position and look for it. The analysis can be on the basis of broad band noise, which those be familiar to my colleague here who flew these flights with me, or on discreet frequencies and it turns out that any different propulsion plant generates signature noise patterns. And these will travel in this duct possibly hundreds of miles. So those of you who are american taxpayers should be happy to know that in exchange for billions of dollars in the 50s and 60s we wired the Northern Hemisphere for sound. Ok. And it worked. It was possible during the hey day, the glory days of Antisubmarine Warfare, conducted by submarines listening for the same kind of phenomenon or trailing submarines generating those noises, or by great stations on the ground, and ill show you one, to detect the noise of transiting or on station submarines to develop a position roughly, the size of the state of rhode island maybe, and then to prosecute that position down to within the criteria of the torpedoes you carried. That system was called the silent under water surveillance system. Heres a picture of that rig around the island of icelandic iceland, which was a key point because the soviet Northern Fleet was right around the corner here and they would have to pass through the gap between greenland iceland, and the United Kingdom to get into the broad open waters of the north atlantic. So you wire the ocean for sound, there are stations all along here on the east coast, iceland, norway and other places, and listen. And sure enough, from hundreds of miles away, rounding the north cape, here come those engine noises which you just heard a moment ago. And our story begins there because the aircraft were talking about is the lockheed p3 airplane and it was the ground based half of the system that prosecuted these contacts. The sea based half of that system, as one of the marines in the audience knows, attacked submarines who also conducted trail operations and other operations to keep track of all these bad guys. That system, those acoustic rays acoustical rays acoustic arrays out in the ocean, terminated at stations on shore, deliberately inconspicuous. And in rooms such as this, the acoustic data that were collected on those microphones were displayed on the they went the thermographic paper graphs and provide but the identification information that ive just described to you. From the land based aircraft side, you then would send me an airplane out to chase the guy down, to detect and localize the position and then to keep up with him for a while, or simply to confirm that there was somebody there. It was a brilliantly executed technical solution to an enormously complex problem, in salt water physics and under water acoustics. Really neat. The airplane were talking about is flying from adak in the center of the Aleutian Islands not on such a mission. It is being used in a mission to fly along the soviet coast, the contract that coast kamchatka coast, peninsula and hes going to fly along that peninsula just to see how soviet communications and air Defense Systems respond to the presence of an american aircraft off shore. This was part of the peace time aerial reconnaisance program. And it is a little bit teasing the animals, little built of an little bit of an efforts to find out how are they going to reply in the presence of the u. S. Aircraft there, what are we going to learn from electronics eavesdropping, in response to that. So alfa foxtrot 586 is going to take off out of here, this is the bering sea, this is the north pacific, theres the great chain of islands called the aleutians and here is the soviet far east, the kamchatka peninsula. Here it is easier to see, the aleutians like a chain of beads separating the shallow waters of the bering from the keep waters of the open pacific. The navy has an air station, naval station, sweus me, on the island of adak roughly in the middle of this. Adak is otherwise uninhabited except by the navy. There are no natives much they were relocated early in world war ii when the japanese pressed very hard against these islands and in fact landed on some of them and captured them. After the end of the war the navy moves back in, establishes one of those High Frequency direction stations we were talking about, some other intelligence collection facilities and bases some aircraft some Navy Surveillance aircraft at adak to conduct any warfare patrol in those waters. Not in the the bering because its too shallow. It is worth stopping to talk about the bering sea for a minute. It is a famous ship killer terrible weather, and the reason is you very cold weather systems coming off the dry continent of siberia, hitting the relatively warmer moist air of the bering sea, that impact stirs upper up enormous storms. Things that are effectively pole polar hurricanes, and these things form up here in the bering, tear down along a regular track into the gulf of plask and then dissipate as they get over warmer waters. And its a very regular pattern and youll see that developing in the course of this story. The aleutians, the islands we just looked at, are the tops of volcanos, the bases of which were drowned during the melting of the ice at the end of the last ice age. So here are those volcanic tops, they are the tops of those islands i just showed you on the map. Heres another view of them its quite beautiful, i can tell you i have never seen the aleutians looking like that. [laughter] it is never without clouds without winds, without wretch ed weather. Im not sure how they got this picture. It may be a fake. [laughter] i suggest to you it may be a fake. Heres another shot at it, but gives you a sense that you are at the end of the world up here. At chimia it is literally the end of the world, the wind blows so strong there that it is supposed to blow the native foxes off their feet as they for forage for food. And adak was called its closed now, the birthdays of the winds. Birthplace of the winds. This is the patrol squadron hangar at adak and in the period were talking about, late 70s, four crews and three aircraft would be sent to adak on a sixweek cycle, they would stay those six weeks up there, fly out of there, as part of the third fleets effort to understand soviet submarine operations in the northern pacific. And here are the various squadron patches that guys painted on the hanger. The field has long since been abandoned, it was turned over to an Indian Business venture and supposedly put up for sale. Its inconceivable to me what anyone would do buying it. [laughter] but this is the patrol squadron hanger from which this these two guys fly out of. Were going to be speaking about patrol squadron 9. One old at that time 24 navy patrol squadrons, operating the Antisubmarine Warfare mission and land bases because these are big airplanes, and because they dont have a tailhook. You cant put Something Like this aboard an aircraft carrier, thank god. It would otherwise be very thrilling. It this is crew six of that squadron, they are flying a navy p3. 892. Its a 2yearold airplane, its almost brand new. If you got onto it today it would still smell like a new car, the vinyl in the airplane and on these seats and all would have that new car smell to it. It has about 2,000 fight hours on it. They are first run engines, have never been overhauled. And this crew, crew six, is going to take that airplane and fly for nine hours off the soviet coast in the middle of the cold war, 1978, october 1978 , to see what happens. The event on the flight schedule is called alpha kilo 262, all that means is adak alaska on the 26th day of the second flight, and its october 26, 1978. This is the interior of that aircraft. I wi