Over the weekend Tony and I went camping at New Germany State Park in Western Maryland. Saturday night there was a talk by the ranger about a B52 bomber that crashed there in 1964. It was one of twelve planes that was constantly aloft in the 1960s, carrying two nuclear bombs. The pilots had sealed instructions that they were supposed to open only in the case of a nuclear strike on the United States. This plane had gone to Turkey and back but something went wrong and it landed in Boston instead of Atlanta when it returned to the States.

The commander in Atlanta told … someone …. to get a crew up to Boston and get that plane back as quickly as possible. The result of this was that the plane flew through, not just turbulence but a blizzard over the mid-Atlantic states. It did not have the capacity to fly above the storm, and at some point, as it changed altitude, the tail broke off and the plane crashed. This tail weakness was evidently a known problem with this iteration of the plane, but in the context of the frenzied times, no-one wanted to stop the flights long enough to get the problem fixed. In later iterations of the B52, the part of the tail that sticks up was shortened by eight feet to try to ameliorate this weakness.

There were five crew members aboard and four of them ejected. Of those four, two froze to death and the other two lived. One of the ones who froze had been dragooned into the flight at the last minute and didn’t have a proper flight suit. A book I read, called The Man Who Rode the Thunder about a different Air Force plane crash in the summer of 1960 over Virginia, pointed out that it is COLD in the upper atmosphere. So I don’t even know how the non-flight suit guy survived the parachute ride. Reports on the ground in the area were, that the temperature was well below what was being reported on the radio, that is temperatures in the teens. Below zero was more like it in some areas.

The ranger giving the talk (now retired) had heard the crash when he was eleven years old, and remembered the massive hunt to find the plane and the crew. He talked about the Air Force coming in to take out the bombs and the sensitive equipment. Then they blew up the plane.

As most of the audience was aware, blowing things up doesn’t make them disappear. It just breaks them into small pieces and scatters them around. The ranger said that you could still find pieces of the plane scattered around in the forest even though people have been scavenging for more than fifty years. He, himself, had what was left of an ejection seat that had been stuck in the top of a pine tree for more than thirty years. A hurricane coming through had finally loosened it and caused it to fall. It is destined for a museum that is devoted to this subject — eventually. He clearly felt that he had watched it for years, retrieved it when no-one else was paying attention, and uses it only for the purposes of these talks, so he can do as he pleases with it.

There is a monument to the guys who died but it is a five mile hike from … somewhere … to see it. A fifty-year old man in the audience had hiked out to the monument and said it made him teary eyed. Others in the audience said there was a movie/documentary about this incident but didn’t have a name for it.

My daughter-in-law’s family has been camping in the area for years but has never seen the monument. They may go looking now.

I survived the camping experience. I haven’t slept in a tent for thirty years but I didn’t really want to complain when the weather was only forty outside during the night and I had a reasonably warm sleeping bag. I wasn’t walking through the snow after my plane crashed, hoping I’d find a farmhouse before I froze.

I used a pie iron for the first time and I tried a camping stove that, fortunately, we didn’t have to cook on at every meal. It created flames a foot high from just a few twigs, and scorched everything, but I’m sure a little practice will make it more useful. The general type is called a rocket stove because of some way it is constructed that creates a super air draw. Instead, Tony did bacon over his propane stove and DIL did bacon over the fireplace.

We went to church on a very high hill in a relatively new building with glass in the windows looking out over the hills/mountains. The priest reminded us to think of those who died this Memorial Day so I thought about Roy and the bomber pilots and others. God grant them all eternal rest.