Cold Comfort for Families of Cold Warriors

The colors were presented, the national anthem sung. Taps was sounded and 21 guns fired in final salute. But what was most auspicious here Saturday was not the military pomp and pageantry of this solemn ceremony.

Most noticeable was the chill that hung in the air.

For four decades these men in gray hair, these women with bent backs, these children grown to adulthood with the burdens of life on their shoulders have borne the scourge of the Cold War. An undeclared war between the United States and the Soviet empire, it was a test of wills where no one was supposed to die so that all mankind could endure.

But here at Ft. Meade, where the mercury had dropped and the autumn rains had forced the ceremony inside, that lesson seemed far from true. Here, the families of a dozen airmen from another time received Purple Hearts and Distinguished Flying Crosses in honor of those loved ones who did not come home from a war we were not supposed to be really fighting.

On June 13, 1952, while flying a sensitive intelligence mission, the 12 men aboard an RB-29 reconnaissance bomber were shot down over the Sea of Japan. For 40 years they were written off, their deaths wrongly classified by the Pentagon as caused by bad weather or aircraft malfunction.

On Saturday the record was finally set straight. They had not simply disappeared off the radar screen. Rather, they had been shot down by two Soviet MIG-15 fighters. And the medals the families received in their names, while surely a tribute to their valor and heroism, were bittersweet nonetheless.

“Bitter is not the right word for how I feel today,” said Hank Service of Deer Island, Ore., who was two days away from his first birthday when he lost his father, Capt. Samuel D. Service, forever.

“It’s closer to anger. I am angry that we had to wait so long for this.”

Charlotte Busch of Huntingdon Valley, Pa., whose brother, Maj. Samuel N. Busch, was among the 12 doomed airmen, is equally adamant that medals and three-pointed folded flags cannot erase the anguish of a lifetime.

“It was a covert mission, and it was the Cold War,” she said. “Even today, nobody wants to admit what was going on at that time.”

Military leaders were quick to concede that speeches and accolades can never totally relieve the tremendous sacrifice of a life given in service of one’s country. Nor, they said, should the families of the dead believe any longer that that sacrifice is unrecognized.

At a noon ceremony, Air Force Maj. Dorothy Whitlock spoke movingly in a clipped cadence, evoking duty and honor and borrowing the words of President Abraham Lincoln to assure those assembled that these dead “shall not have died in vain.”

She noted that the crew members never saw the fruits of their victory, never saw the Berlin Wall come down nor the fall of Soviet communism. “But their bravery helped forge the future we enjoy today,” she said. “I promise you, these men will not be forgotten.”

The year 1952 came at the height of the early Cold War period, when the world’s two superpowers fought a perilous and largely clandestine chess match in the age of the nuclear threat.

Spy satellites back then were not a reality. Yet to come were high-speed reconnaissance jets. American intelligence-gathering relied instead on planes such as the B-29, which were to fly close to Soviet airspace in an attempt to get the enemy to reveal its radar signals.

The planes were bulky and slow, vulnerable to attack. The crew of the RB-29, designated No. 44-61810, was nicknamed “Alone, Unarmed and Unafraid.”

When it was lost, the Air Force notified the families that the aircraft was simply missing. Three years later, the families were advised that the Air Force was officially declaring a “presumptive finding of death.” The Air Force also ruled that the deaths were “non-battle” related, meaning they did not qualify for posthumous honors.

But in the intervening 40 years, the families refused to accept such an ignoble end. Many family members, like the relatives of U.S. servicemen believed still missing in Vietnam, relentlessly hammered at the Pentagon for more answers.

“They were very condescending,” Charlotte Busch said of the military’s response to their protests. “They would just give us books to read or they denied everything we brought to them. Everything they denied, denied, denied, denied. And in actuality, every bit of it was true.”

In April, 1993, Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin confirmed that the Soviets had indeed shot down the plane. That surprise announcement came after a special task force had been launched to allow U.S. military researchers permission to comb Moscow and the Russian archives in search of any clues about the Cold War missing.

Army Col. Stuart Herrington, who helped pass out the Purple Hearts on Saturday, was a founder and former deputy director of the task force. He said there were another 120 or so missing U.S. military servicemen from the Cold War, compared to the 78,000 missing after World War II and the 2,200 unaccounted for in Vietnam.

But even though his task force got lucky when researchers found confirming documents in the Russian archives regarding the 1952 episode, the fates of the rest of the Cold War missing are still not completely known.

“It’s all ancient history now,” he said. “The trail is cold. The trail is very cold. But nonetheless, we are doing the best we can.”

To some family members, especially those of the 1952 airmen, the full truth remains elusive. They heard accounts that some of the crew members might have survived the wreckage in the Sea of Japan.

They heard stories that lifeboats were seen near the crash site, reports that some crew members may have ended up as prisoners in a Soviet gulag, sightings that placed one wounded airman in a Russian hospital.

Greg Skavinski of Herndon, Va., the nephew of Master Sgt. William R. Homer, came to Saturday’s ceremony wearing a missing-in-action bracelet honoring his uncle. He left with it still on.

“This does not close the book,” he said, vowing to push on to determine whether his uncle and the others survived the crash, whether they possibly lay buried not far from the crash site, in the Russian seaport of Vladivostok.

“It is up to the Russians again,” he said. “They know what happened on that fateful day.”