II

… first encounter with the town’s citizens …

            Another tactical issue regarding the military’s decision to disperse nine Atlas missiles in a rough east/west oval around Fairchild Air Force Base was the problem of transporting a seventy-one foot long and sixteen-foot wide missile over agricultural roads designed for nothing bigger than milk trucks and thrashing machines.  One solution was to add certain unique features to the missile’s trailer.  The other was to rebuild any problem spots in the local road system.

            The Army Corp of Engineers decided one problem spot was the intersection between Crawford, Deer Park’s primary east/west street, and eastern Washington’s primary north/south route, Highway 395.  The Army’s answer was to contract with the Washington State Department of Highways to round the corner for northbound traffic turning east onto Crawford from the two-lane Highway — the turn the missile transport from Fairchild would be making.  While this may have been ideal for the military, it raised ire with the locals who had to drive the route every day.

            By late September of 1960, an angry editorial in the Tribune defined the problem.  The redesign required motorists exiting the Highway from the north to turn significantly more than ninety degrees to negotiate the new curve.  Individuals caught unaware found themselves drifting into Crawford’s oncoming westbound lane.  Those aware found themselves slowing to a crawl before attempting the turn, and immediately becoming a hazard to the southbound traffic behind.

            Within a week of the editorial, a representative from the Washington State Highway Department went before the city council to explain.  He said the redesign had been to military requirements.  He suggested a proposal to ease the turn for southbound interstate traffic by widening Crawford even more might create a greater hazard by encouraging lane drift, which the complaints said was already occurring.  A subsequent Tribune article indicated the council found the arguments provided by the Highway Department representative weak.

            The first Deer Park test of the ground transport system was carried out in the second week of January, 1961, and reported by the Tribune under the headline “Dummy Missile Delivered to Local Site”.

            The ‘dummy missile’ was a  skeletal framework used to check the critical alignments of the bunker’s missile erection equipment.  Covered in canvas for transport, it was delivered to the site on top of a standard Atlas trailer.  But the route chosen was what caught the eye.

            In the early 1950’s, Deer Park, like several other small, rural communities, had been bypassed during the rebuilding of Highway 395.  The old route diverged from the new interstate in a sweeping right hand curve about half a mile south of the military’s new Atlas friendly intersection.  It had been assumed that the military didn’t use this already curving bypass intersection to avoid negotiating a ninety degree turn in the restricted space of downtown Deer Park.  But the ninety degree turn was exactly the route the ‘dummy missile’ took.

            The local newspaper said the transport was able to negotiate the corner at Main and Crawford in “a short while”.  After this article, the missile base practically disappeared from the pages of the Tribune.

            Negotiating local roads was only the last transport problem for the Atlas.  Early on, the missile’s developers recognized that hauling large ICBMs long distances over public highways would be a logistical nightmare.  The answer was the Douglas C-133B Cargomaster heavy-lift aircraft — with cargo bay dimensions exceeding the length and width of the Atlas.

            Powered by four, seven thousand horsepower turboprop engines, the aircraft could lift 150,000 pounds — far more than the 36,000 pound combined weight of the empty rocket and its trailer.

            Designed to be pulled by a big-rig truck tractor, the tubular steel trailer measured just over seventy feet long.  Though a foot shorter than the missile, the fact that the missile’s engine nozzles overhung the rear of the trailer by forty inches allowed the missile’s body to fit comfortably on the trailer.  The trailer carried all the pressurizing equipment necessary to maintain the rigidity of the missile’s fuel-tank airframe.  It also contained the hydraulics necessary to stretch the missile should the pressure system and its backups fail.

            Four wheels on two axles carried the rear of the trailer.  These wheels could be steered when cornering or locked straight for highway travel.  Tillermen reclining in cabins suspended under both sides of the trailer bed, just forward of the rear wheels, could maneuver the rear of the twelve-foot wide trailer and its fifteen-foot wide cargo around tight corners.            Loaded on the trailer at Convair’s San Diego factory, each missile’s first trip was to Vandenberg AFB. The challenge for the transport crew was squeezing the missile and trailer into the Cargomaster.

            Jack Roberts, Professor of Industrial Engineering at Texas A & M recalls, “At the time I was an Airman 1^st Class and Missile Maintenance Technician assigned to the 548^th  Strategic Missile Squadron at Forbes AFB, Kansas.  We were sending one of our missiles back to Vandenberg for a test launch.  My recollection of the missile loading procedure comes from that operation.”

            “To feed the missile into the airplane’s cargo bay, we positioned the trailer behind the aircraft with the missile’s nose toward the plane and laid four sets of metal rails underneath the trailer and up the plane’s loading ramp — rails intended to guide the trailer’s castor wheels.”

            “We jacked up the rear of the trailer, unpinned the rear wheels, disconnected the brake lines and such, and rolled the wheel assembly away.  Since they protruded below the bottom of the trailer’s frame, we removed the tillerman’s cabins.  Then we lowered the trailer down with it’s rear-end castors dropping onto the outside set of rails.  The front castors were locked in their full-up position, and then the front of the trailer’s frame was lowered until the front castors dropped onto the inner set of rails.  All this was done to lower the height of the trailer.”

            “The heaviest part of the missile sat over the rear wheels of the trailer where the two outboard booster engines and their nacelles added another three feet to each side of the rocket’s ten foot core.  The fit was so tight we removed whatever protrusions we could.  We removed the booster nacelles from both sides of the rocket.  The nacelles were aerodynamic coverings for equipment extending beyond the normal skin of the missile.  We took off the dorsal steering rocket — the upper vernier protruding from the top of the recumbent tank section.  The second vernier engine — the one protruding from the bottom side of the rocket’s body — was always removed before lowering the missile onto the trailer.”

            “The trailer was then slowly cabled in using the airplane’s cargo winch.  As the missile inched forward, the castors rolled onto continuations of our temporary rails which had been permanently mounted into the cargo deck of the aircraft.”

            “Unloading the Atlas was a matter of reversing the procedure.”

            “I was the only person on the Cargomaster who knew how to operate the trailer’s pressure control system — or how to put the ‘bird’ in stretch if something went wrong.  I had more responsibility at that point than I had ever had before in my life.  Add to that the fact that this was the first time this west Texas farm kid had ever flown, and you can understand why I was scared to death.  Other then those things, both me and the missile did just fine.”

            “As for what we did with all the stuff we took off the missile and its trailer — wheel assembly, tillerman’s cabins, nacelles — we may have winched them aboard the C-133 or sent them on another plane.  As soon as the bird was safely shoehorned into the Cargomaster, I was so overwhelmed by my own responsibilities that I didn’t notice anything else.”

            “The reason we were taking a missile to Vandenberg is a story cobbled out of the G. I. grapevine and a few official briefings.”

            “Just after the Cuban Missile Crisis the bureaucrats in Washington D. C. worried whether the missiles would have actually worked if President Kennedy had authorized the launch.”

            “To test this concern, Secretary of Defense McNamara ordered the serial numbers of all operational Atlas missiles dropped in a hat and one pulled.  The idea was to place a non-nuclear research warhead on this missile, change the guidance boards to rotate westward to a Pacific target instead of over the pole to Russia, and then send a no-notice launch order to whatever crew happened to be rotated to this particular missile at the decided time.  It would be the first test launch of an ICBM out of an actual operational bunker located somewhere within the continental United States.  That somewhere turned out to be Kansas.”

            “Needless to say, the politicians in Kansas and all the states to the west threw a fit.  After all, even if the rocket over-flew the western states perfectly, the booster section might come down somewhere short of the Pacific coast.”

            “The military modified the test, telling us to take the selected bird to Vandenberg where it would be launched by a Forbes crew.  Once there, the squadron crews were rotated to the Vandenberg launch complex just as they would have been at Forbes.  This went on for almost three months.  Then the crews were ordered to leave the missile and return home.”

            “Apparently the politicians got cold feet.  The anti-missile group worried that the missile might work perfectly.  The pro-missile group worried that it might fail miserably.  Neither side wanted to take the risk.”

            “Later on, a civilian crew from General Dynamics launched our bird.  We were told that the test warhead splashed down four hundred yards off target.  That was close enough after a six thousand mile flight, especially considering that the real warhead used on the Atlas E was the Mark IV.  We knew the Mark IV was a big warhead, but the exact yield was classified at the time.  We now know it produced a blast equivalent to three million, seven hundred and fifty thousand tons of TNT — nearly four megatons.  As I said, with a blast that big four hundred yards is close enough to any target. ”

            On December 6, 1960, a Cargomaster C-133B from Vandenberg dropped out of Fairchild’s cold winter sky carrying the first of the base’s compliment of Atlas missiles.  Then, on a bright spring day at the end of March, 1961, a ground convoy transporting Deer Park’s Atlas left Fairchild for its first encounter with the town’s citizens.

            Traveling down the highway in the center of a six or more vehicle convoy bracketed by trucks with “Caution Wide Load” signs, the rocket couldn’t be missed.  There wasn’t any pretence of secrecy to it.  If a person somehow mistook the canvas covered body of the rocket for a silage silo or fuel tank, the outline of those three giant rocket nozzles protruding in a horizontal line across the back would leave no doubt.  And the slow speeds necessary for moving any oversize object down a public highway, no more than forty miles an hour tops, certainly gave everyone plenty of time to gawk.

            “There were at least two Air Police vehicles in any highway convoy,” Jack Roberts said.  “Those men were armed with carbines and handguns.  An officer or NCO was in charge of the convoy, and usually had his own radio equipped command car.  Usually there was a maintenance vehicle carrying Missile Maintenance Technicians or Ballistic Missile Analyst Technicians, their tools and tech orders — just in case any work was needed on the missile or its trailer.  And normally we had some local cops as escorts.”

            “As for maneuvering the trailer itself, both tillerman positions were equipped with steering wheels, but no brakes.  The tillermen couldn’t see each other across the trailer. Communication between the tillermen, and between the tillermen and the driver was through a headset/microphone intercom system.  For outside communication, the truck driver had a shortwave radio.”

            “There were outside intercom plug-ins on the trailer so anyone walking alongside during tight maneuvers could voice communicate with the three men steering the rig.  Most of the time the outside crew used hand signals to communicate with the driver and tillermen.”

            Richard Hodges, a 1964 graduate of Deer Park High, recalls, “I don’t know how I got down to watch the missile negotiate the turn from Highway 395 onto Crawford Street, since I was suppose to be in school like everyone else.  But there I was, camera in hand.  I recall the State Patrol had to block traffic on 395 to give the transport team time to back the big rig across both lanes and try again.  It was something all the citizens that had gathered to watch were commenting about — how the government spent all that money to reshape the Crawford portion of the
intersection and widen Crawford’s Dragoon Creek bridge just a few yards further east, but still managed to not have enough room.”

            “On the other hand, after spending my working life as a mechanical engineer, I can appreciate how making something work on paper is only the beginning of any job.”

            Having negotiated the turn, the transport team had a straight shot for the next four miles.  That would take them through the center of Deer Park, and due east, straight to the turn off now called Missile Site Road.  While the missileers may have been breathing a sigh of relief, believing that the worse hazards of the thirty some mile journey from Fairchild were behind, there was one more unanticipated danger ahead — the students of Consolidated School District 414.

            An announcement was made at the local high school that the Atlas missile would be parked in front of the Crawford Street middle school (the former high school, and now city hall) for several hours, and that we were free to leave the building during assigned study halls to inspect the rocket.  In fact, all the district’s students would have a chance to see the rocket — this included students bussed down from the old Clayton grade school.

            For me it was much more than a chance to dump study hall.  Both science and science fiction had long been an interest of mine, and the Atlas seemed a blending of both.  I would have to say the sight of uncloaked missile was exotic, but not particularly impressive.  By that I mean it was a shell with little else to see.  I understood its potential — that well demonstrated by its use in the space program.  Still, with the rocket lying mute on the trailer, little could be seen to explain the mechanics of that potential.

            Such mechanics were shrouded beneath stainless steel or fiberglass.  Inserts even hid the interiors of the engine throats.  The missile’s inner workings remained a mystery.

            I can vaguely recall a few fatigue-clad airmen keeping watch.  The one notable thing was that most didn’t seem much older than the high school students.  The only firearm visible was the single service revolver on the hip of Deer Park’s sole, full-time police officer.  Other than that, I can’t recall any brass or flash.

            A good collection of students from primary to high school milled around the missile, when, all of a sudden, the airmen, chief of police, teachers, everyone, began yelling for us to get out of the street. With voices lowered to a serious growl, the men walked down the curb and brushed the students onto the sidewalk.

            Within seconds, the street was clear.  The engine on the truck tractor bellowed.  And the missile whipped away to the east.

            “What just happened?” I asked.  “They were supposed to be here for another hour.”

            The answer came back, “Some idiot threw a rock at the missile.”

            Joseph ‘Buddy’ Farris, now an Encephalographic Technologist at Holy Family Hospital in Spokane, recalled the incident.  “I was in the fourth grade, Mrs. Noble’s class, when we marched up to see the rocket.  After the bunch of us had been herded up on the sidewalk and the rocket taken away, I saw that Mister Hegre, my grade school principal, had a second-grader pinned against a tree and was reading him the riot act.”

            “Asking around, the version I heard said these two second graders got to daring each other as to whether they could throw a rock all the way over the missile.”

            Since the missile, reclining on its trailer, towered thirteen and a half feet above the street, the challenge was obvious.

            Joe continued, “Apparently, the answer was no, since the rock bounced off.  Their defense was that it wasn’t the missile they were aiming at.  That defense didn’t seem to make much difference to the Air Force.”

            Bob Lemley, now retired, was a Ballistic Missile Analyst Technician with Fairchild’s 567^th Strategic Missile Squadron, and served as a launch crew member at most of the local missile sites.  Bob said, “A good size rock could have dented the thin stainless steel skin of the Atlas.  Since little kids throw little rocks, your Deer Park rock was probably too small to constitute a threat.  But what throwing a rock or even threatening to throw a rock would most certainly have done was make the officer in charge of transporting the rocket as mad as hell.  And I would suspect that that’s exactly what happened.”