Overview

Air Force navigators and bombardiers have long laboured under the shadow of pilots—their contributions undervalued, misunderstood, or simply unknown to the general public. This was especially the case with the non-pilot officer aircrew in the Vietnam-era B-52 Stratofortress. Of the six people who operated the bomber, three wore navigator wings—two of those men were also bombardiers, the other an electronic warfare officer. It is no exaggeration to say that without the navigator-bombardiers in particular, executing the nuclear war strike plan or flying Southeast Asian conventional bombing sorties would have been impossible. This book reveals who these men were and what they did down in the“Black Hole,” the story told by one of their own. Beginning by thrusting the reader into the thick of the Vietnam War’s climactic 1972 Hanoi Christmas bombing, an operation so poorly planned, it nearly became an epic disaster, the narrative then flashes back to the origins of air delivered ordnance beginning with the first“bombards” of fourteenth-century Europe. Following chapters explore the science of navigation, trace the development of optical and radar bomb aiming techniques, discuss air instrumentation breakthroughs, explain the evolution of bomber aircraft, recount the 1940 creation of dedicated“navigators” and “bombardiers,” and then focuses in depth on the Vietnam-era B-52. The final chapters return the reader to the “eleven-day Christmas war” over Hanoi and Haiphong, an insiders narrative of the conflict’s defining battle and likely the last the world will ever see of massed, heavy bomber raids, before culminating in detailing the twenty-first century B-52 and its capabilities.

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9781591143598

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Author Information

Robert O. Harder was an Air Force ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. He served in the Strategic Air Command and flew 145 combat missions during the Vietnam War as a B-52D navigator-bombardier. He later became a commercial pilot and certificated flight instructor. A retired chain retail executive, he is pursuing a writing career. He and his wife, Dee Dee, live in Chicago and at their summer cabin on Big Sandy Lake, Minnesota.

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