It Fell From The Sky
October 11, 2013
By Tom Poland
October 11, 2013
I must have been around eight when Uncle Carroll handed me a jagged shard of metal. I couldn’t believe what was in my hands. That jagged piece of silver metal, the skin of an aircraft, was about the size of a postcard but in my mind it was big. Really big. A jet had crashed in northeast Georgia and Uncle Carroll had been to the site and retrieved a piece of it. Holding a remnant of a fighter jet in my hand was one of those moments I’d carry the rest of my life. That torn metal might as well have come from an alien spacecraft. I held it and marveled. It came from a wing, I thought.
What became of that shard is a mystery as is the pilot’s plight. He ejected I imagine. I recall no details but I was elated to hold a piece of a jet in my hand. It was evidence of one of my true TV loves.
When I was a kid, movies about World War II and Korea were always on television Saturdays and Sundays. I particularly liked the dogfights in Korea between U.S. Air Force F-86 Sabres and Soviet-built MIG-15s. The battles were intense and doomed planes rained from the sky. I watched anything I could about WW II and Korea with good reason. We babyboomers were raised on war.
We grew up in the frightening era of the Cold War. We had to practice duck-and-cover exercises and we heard a lot about fallout shelters and radioactivity. It was all a hazy threat but deep inside we were scared and perhaps a bit scarred. We lived in a state of high alert more so than any other generation of kids. So when I heard an astonishing report on Augusta TV at the age of nine I never forgot it either. It was scary what fell from the sky March 11, 1958. And then many years later a writing assignment took me to the place where it happened, a legendary Broken Arrow incident.
A Broken Arrow incident is United States Armed Forces jargon for an accidental event involving nuclear weapons that fall but do not create the risk of nuclear war. The very first such incident happened in a place with an alien name, Mars Bluff.
Mars Bluff is an unincorporated community in Florence County, South Carolina, that bears the distinction of having the first atomic bomb fall on it in the US. One family, the Greggs, felt the wrath of the bomb’s trigger when its several thousand pounds of high explosives detonated near their home.
Here’s how it happened. At 3:53 on Tuesday, March 11, 1958, a group of four B-47s departed Hunter Air Force Base in Savannah en route to England. The small convoy was part of a mission called Operation Snow Flurry where US B-47s would fly to England to perform mock bomb drops. The planes were carrying Mark 6 nuclear bombs. Because the Cold War was in full bloom the B-47s carried atomic bombs in case they had to head to Russia were World War III to ignite.
B-47 No. 876 was fifteen thousand feet above rural South Carolina. In that airplane a navigator by the name of Bruce Kulka was about to make a perfectly understandable mistake as a writer for Esquire put it. Bruce stood in the cramped bomb bay and he faced a challenge. A 7,600-pound plutonium Mark 6 nuclear bomb hung from its harness and that harness had a problem. The pilot had sent him there because a warning light had gone on. When the copilot pulled a lever designed to engage a locking pin in the bomb’s harness nothing happened. That light indicated the pin had not engaged. Bruce’s job was to correct the problem.
From Esquire: The bomb was very big, and Bruce was pretty short. At the time, in the late 1950s, almost all nuclear weapons were very big. They were so big and bulbous and heavy that the people who worked with them, people like Bruce and the pilot and the copilot, usually referred to them not as bombs but as pigs, as in, There’s something wrong with the pig’s harness. The fact that the pig was big and Bruce was short makes the perfectly understandable mistake he was about to make even more understandable. Bruce couldn’t see the top of the bomb. If he could see the top of the bomb, maybe he could see what was wrong with the harness. Maybe he could see the locking pin. Maybe he could figure out why the locking pin hadn’t locked. Maybe he could fix it.
Bruce stretched up and over the smooth, green surface of the bomb’s nose, a slow curvature of surface. He stretched more, unable to see but reaching over the top of the bomb as far as he could. Feeling around he felt something and his fingers closed on it. He intended to pull himself up to get a better look at the harness, to see what was wrong. Instead disaster struck. When he attempted to haul himself up for a better look he opened the bomb’s emergency-release lever.
Esquire: The bomb clanged down onto the bomb-bay doors, and Bruce sprawled face-forward onto it. The combined weight of Bruce and the bomb started forcing the doors open.
‘I wouldn’t even try to imagine what he was feeling in those seconds,’ the copilot later remarked.
The doors opened all the way and the pig fell free. Bruce reached out to grab something, and this time it was a good solid something, not something like an emergency-release lever, and he crawled back into the belly of the plane. Bruce was alive.
The bomb was on its way to Mars Bluff. Unarmed, the errant nuclear bomb slammed into the woods behind Bill Gregg’s home. It burrowed deep into gummy loam and its high-explosive trigger dug a crater 50 feet wide and 35 feet deep.
Had the ground been harder, causing the bomb to detonate closer to the surface, the blast would have almost certainly killed everyone present. The explosion flattened the loblolly pine trees around the impact site. They radiated out like spokes on an inside-out bicycle wheel. A board with nails in it smacked Bill Gregg in his side. Something ripped a gash in his wife’s left temple. Nine-year-old Ella Davies Hudson was there visiting her cousins.
When the thing fell, said Ella, I remember hearing it, the whistle of the bomb coming down. I thought it was an airplane or a jet flying over. I remember thinking that. Once it hit and exploded, I don’t remember leaving that spot and going to the front of the house. I was conscious, because my cousin Walter Gregg, one of the adults there, he saw us start to run and he saw a power line swinging. So, he told me and two other cousins to stop running.
No one died. It knocked the Gregg’s residence off its foundation. Everything in the home was in ruin. The blast totaled both of Walter Gregg’s vehicles.
Nearby on Highway 301 J.A. Sanders was driving along minding his business. Suddenly his car did a 360, turned around by the bomb’s shockwave. Eight miles away, Florence County courthouse employees heard the explosion and from the courthouse roof they saw the explosion’s cloud of dust.
Hours after the incident, the Air Force put up a two-mile perimeter around the site and began clean up. Air Force brass quickly assured the local press there was no threat of radioactive contamination to the community. They also announced that residents should turn any fragments of the classified bomb over to local authorities. Had my Uncle Carroll been around he wouldn’t have been able to keep souvenirs. Some kids did find bomb fragments but turned them over to the Air Force.
The Mars Bluff Incident marks one of the few times during our nation’s history that an atomic bomb has detonated on US soil. Fortunately its nuclear elements weren’t armed. Suppose, though, that the bomb’s core had been armed. Conjure up a mushroom cloud over the South Carolina heartland with clouds of radioactivity drifting toward Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand. It might have altered the course of history. But it wasn’t and it didn’t. The incident did lead, however, to an antinuclear movement in Britain where the plane was bound. And it did something else. It provided the Greggs a horrifying experience and $56,000 compensation from an out-of-court settlement. For years medical ailments plagued many of the Greggs and their cleaning lady and the first fellow who climbed down into the crater I heard died of cancer.
This story, one of this country’s more fascinating events, would be lost in time were it not for writers who see in it a marvelous tale of Cold War procedures gone wrong. But sometimes the writing is discouraged. Three years ago I wrote a feature, Notes From The Road, that chronicled Highway 76’s route across South Carolina. Highway 76 runs close by Mars Bluff and I included the Broken Arrow incident in my feature only to have the editor tell me the publisher didn’t want it in the story. Do you mind cutting it or barely mentioning it, she asked. I covered it with five sentences. The publisher, it turns out, grew up in Mars Bluff. I suppose he had heard the story one time too many.
All that’s left today is a shrubby path that leads from an abandoned trailer park through a pine thicket past the foundation of the Gregg house to the crater. Fifty-five years of vegetation have reduced the once-impressive pit to a bushy depression in the woods. A small observation deck overlooks the crater, a place where the curious can gaze out on a singular history.
In a clearing close by stands a plywood cutout of a bomb the actual size of the massive Mark 6 that Captain Bruce Kulka climbed onto. Nose-down it’s falling from the sky. If you stand quietly and pretend you hear its whistling plummet from the heavens the hair stands on the back of your neck.
Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
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Tom Poland is the author of six books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.
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