The Night 2 H-Bombs Fell on North Carolina (Told By the Man Who Dismantled Them)

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show. January 23rd, 1961, just four days after President John F. Kennedy was sworn into office, a B-52 bomber crashed near Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Two H-bombs, each 250 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan marking the end of World War II, were thrown out and fell at a velocity of 700 miles per hour and crashed into Goldsboro, North Carolina. Information about this event was kept classified until 2013. This is the true story of that mission, as told by the man who actually dismantled the H-bombs in the aftermath of an accident that could have been the worst man-made disaster in history. Here was Earl Smith with a true story of the Goldsboro Broken Arrow.

Oh. I graduated high school in 1956 in Hattan, Alabama. And like everybody else around there, the day after you graduate high school, you go to Kalamazoo, Michigan. So I go to Kalamazoo to visit my brother. I had a brother and two sisters lived there, and my brother had a neighbor about my age, and so we decided to go downtown on a Saturday morning, just food around, and so there was a recruiter station. I said, “Let’s go and make that thing.” God, I think we’re going to join. So it was in the morning we were down there. So by 3 o’clock that afternoon was putting out on a train for the processing station in the Air Force. So, anyway, when I went back, my brother’s name was about to have a heart attack. “You said, ‘You did what?'” I said, “I joined the Air Force.” “No, you didn’t!” “Yeah, I did. I got my leave, and I left.” We signed up on a buddy plan. After that, I never saw my buddy again. So he goes to California for school, and I go to Texas. And the first school I went to is called munitions school, and, uh, they give you different tests to see kind of what you qualified for. So this, uh, versus assignment, they sent me down to Puerto Rico, Ramey Air Force Base. So I go down to Puerto Rico there, and, uh, well, I’m doing the job and what ammunition maintenance, uh, called for, which is basically taking care of the bombs and AMO in the storage area and loading them on the plane, what have you. Well, the Air Force decided to start an airborne alert with nuclear weapons. So we had 33 B-36 bombers down there. So they started what they called Operation Curtain Raiser. Every day at 1 o’clock, a plane would leave Ramey, and at the same time another plane would leave North Africa. There’s one always, always in the air. In five on the ground were five days. On the ground was loaded with neutral weapons, each one ready to go in ammunition. So, anyway, when I leave Puerto Rico, they formed a new squad and called a 53rd MMAS, which, Ammunition Maintenance Squadron, and we wound up at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Back then, I, you know, I just figured I’d rather disarm a bomb and eat when I was hungry, you know, but real regulously, you know that back then. But I’m the same kid that when I was growing up, all of the neighbor kids older me, they taught me into turning over neighbors’ beehive and stuff like that, and I thought it was bucketing. Well, the old dug wells, I’d do stuff like that. I was a real dry, so I guess it stems from back from something like that. I had put in for bomb disposal school. But before you can get in, you have to, I understand, have to have a grade of nine year above, I believed, from your nation man for them to put the money behind you. And it’s strictly voluntary. So I received an appointment after a few months to go to EOD School in Indiana at Maryland. Well, the school, the school, like I say, was extremely hard. You just literally live from day to day and hope you can make it through another day. Because the men, when they’re in the indoctrination—first of all, I take you out in this field. It’s about, about a 20-acre field, and they have everything that’s ever been thrown, dropped, or projected from all over the world up to a V-1 and V-2 rocket. It hadn’t gotten to the big rockets at the time. And a man tells you, said, “Gentlemen, before you graduate this school, if you’re fortunate enough to graduate this school, you’ll be able to walk up to any piece of ordnance out here and don’t tell me what it is. What kind of explosive used in it, what kind of fusion system, and what country is from, and how to disarm it?” Everybody put you every. Yeah, sure, uh, yeah. I mean, it’s, but before you leave that school, that’s one of the easier things you can do. You haven’t even gotten into the, the big, big missiles and what have you. But really, the nuclear bombs hadn’t entered and hadn’t entered my mind. I just never dreamed that I’d have anything dropped in my lap, like was dropped in my lap. But once I, uh, I get back to my base after I graduate, and, uh, it happened to be my night on standby. It was January, exactly January 23rd, 1961, when the control tower called me, and they said, “We have a B-52 coming in, tail number 187, with a few leaks in the bomb bay area.” Well, I knew that was serious because when they go to let the landing gear down, he possibly have sparks, could, you know, create a fire. And I lived off base, so it had been snowing on the ground. There was about 10 degrees that night. So I got dressed right quick, and I didn’t bother to lace my boots on. I just wrapped the strings around them, tied them. By the time I got to the base, they determined he had crashed off base about 12 miles. So General Moore had already had a helicopter waiting for me, because the lead man has first priority on what they call a Broken Arrow. The bomb that fell was a Mark 39 bomb, which is actually 3.8 megatons of explosive, and a lot of people don’t know how much a megaton is. If you take a railroad car, a coal car, and you load it heaping up with TNT, it would stretch all the way across the United States back in far Chicago. That’s only one megaton, only one megaton. That’s 3.8.

And you’ve been listening to Earl Smith and The True Story of the Goldsboro Broken Arrow. You’re going to want to hear the rest of this story here on our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history, from war to innovation, culture, and faith, are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t come to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue here with our American Stories. And we just learned from Earl Smith that just one of the two H-bombs that fell on Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1961 contained 3.8 megatons of explosives. Here’s Earl making that statistic understandable to the layman.

The experts claimed that it would, with a fallout and everything, if one of them had gone off, it would have killed everybody all the way from New York City, all down the Eastern Seaboard to the tip of the Florida Keys, so, pretty much wiping off the whole Eastern Seaboard. It was 250 times stronger than what was dropped on Hiroshima, which was only 40 kilotons. So this thing was, it was just, just a monster. So when we get out to the, to things, he had a light under the helicopter, and we’re flying around, and I see a parachute. I said, “My God, they’re not supposed to be connected!” Uh, so I said, “Set me down as close as you can get to it.” And the guy said, “But I don’t want to get too close.” And said, “It doesn’t matter what. You can get me as close as you can.” So General Moore tells me, he said, “Now, you can’t touch that bomb or anything until we get permission from the Atomic Energy Commission.” I said, “No, sir, that’s not the way it works.” And that scared me. So I got off and saw what to do. When I walked up to the bomb, when I opened that access door and saw that red A, I mean, I just, I just turned cold. I mean, it’s the scariest thing. I was 24 years old, and, and there’s the old saying, “What am I doing here?” You know? That was, uh, something I just didn’t sign up for. But, uh, it was. It was. It was armed and functioning, and, and I thought—I really thought at that point when I couldn’t find it out—I thought I was dying. I mean, it’s funny what you can tell your, your mind, you can tell yourself, and I did. I was pained. I had the pain in the chest, and everything was right around. I mean, buddy, I knew I was going, I was going fast. But I had to get done what I could, and I happened to look over in the distance. There was about a 5-mile area that was literally lit up, parts of the plane burning, and I saw a hamlet somewhere with a big, big cross on it, and I started to feel better for some reason or other, you know. So a few hours later, a few hours, ever, in general seemed like an Air Force showing up, and, uh, General Moore, who was a general—Moore was a one-star general—and General Sweeney, who was the, the, uh, the commander of Eighth Air Force, of which I was assigned to. Anyway, he starts asking me, “What all, what did you do first?” Blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, “Well, so, I’m probably in a lot of trouble.” He said, “What do you mean?” Well, when General Sweeney found out that I had been told by General Moore that I had to get permission from the Atomic Energy Commission, he turned to his aide and said, “Get General Moore over here!” I said, “Oh Lord, I’m in trouble!” So General Moore comes up, and the very words he said to General Moore were, “General Moore, if you don’t know this man’s damn job, I suggest you have him up to your office about two to three times a week for coffee and donuts so he can explain to you what the hell he does.” Oh Lord, my heart just sank because General Moore was going back to Eighth Air Force, and here I’m going to be stuck on base with this general. And I’m a little wireman, a first-class enlisted man, you know. And he made him look bad, made him look real bad. Nothing ever came of it, but that—I was more scared of that than I was the bomb. I wasn’t worried about the bomb. I knew I could take it. Well, an hour and a half later, three more of the EOD men—a Sergeant Fletcher, a Sergeant Fincher, and Sergeant Evers—they came out to pick up, and we proceeded to disarm the first bomb. And what happens? Those bombs are so powerful they have to be let down by parachute because they blow the plane out of the air. But they can be set up to 46 hours. This can be that long a delay because they don’t worry about the Russians coming up and disarming them. Because they don’t do exactly the steps, is they’re supposed to be, it’ll blow up anyway. So we knew that part, too. So you’ve got to disconnect one CKT wire and then wait 3 minutes or so, and then, you know, it’s the steps. You have to do it exactly. So that’s the reason for the parachute. So, anyway, we get this, I’m taking care of, and I called out the motor pool for them to bring a flatbed truck out so they could get down in the lift to get this bomb to go back to the base. It’s taken care of. Well, 8 and a half hours after this happened, this Lieutenant Ravel shows up with a crew from SAC Headquarters, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and he comes marching out there like Little Lord Fauntleroy taking charge. Well, the first thing he did was we, we finally found a second bomb, and that was—well, it really took about, about three days before we really got to the core, because everything had to be done. We had to be real careful digging because we had 92 that night that were alive, and those had to be, each one had to be counted for and put in a little container, and got back to the base. Well, when he got down, dug deep enough for the big afterbody part where the parachute was still in—well, a Lieutenant Ravel and his group removed that out of the ground. You have was just that afterbody. Well, I was the lowest-ranking man on there, so I got the good duty of getting down in the hole—down in the muddy water and icy water and everything—reaching down in the hole and pulling up parts of the bomb and identifying what each one was. And, uh, I reached down, and I got the nuclear core righted up between my legs, and I handed it to somebody—I don’t remember who it was—but I told him I probably won’t ever have any more kids, and I didn’t after that. So once we got all of that stuff out in a tritium bottle, then there wasn’t really anything else for them to. You know, that’s explosive to where the big, the big diggers couldn’t come in. And, uh, the local people wouldn’t drink the water. They were scared of death. I wouldn’t drink the water. So we got permission to bring three of the old-timers around. I don’t remember even what the names were. But, anyway, I took a cup and poured some water in it, and I drank it, and I said, “Well, you know, when you think I would drink it if you know?” So that kind of gave them peace of mind. So we never heard any more about that. But they told us they didn’t want the public to know what we were looking for. There was one part that ran about 3,000 pounds, which was uranium-235 and -238. It hit hardpan and kept going, and we were looking for this. That’s what all the digging was going to be about. But they told us to tell everybody, when they would report anybody else, that we were looking for a part to an ejection seat. It made a lot of. Now, that’s what we actually had to say. But one, one poor man was a sharecropper, and he looked up and saw this humongous parachute with something in it. He thought the Russians were invading, so he grabbed a pone of cornbread and some milk and some blankets. They found him 7 hours later under some bushes from where they were looking for Major Shelton. He was something who killed him. The body. Three bodies were killed, and two bodies were in the wreckage immediately close to where the bomb was, but five men survived. One man, Captain Maddox, he didn’t have an ejection seat. So when everybody else ejected, he said he saw, he saw a hole, and he just dove for it, never dreaming he’d get out. So he made it through, and then he hitched a ride somewhere back to the base. He still had a parachute, and the gate guard was talking about going to arrest him. Thought he’d stolen the parachute. But nobody, to my knowledge, has ever escaped jumping out of a jet plane and survived.

And you’re listening to Earl Smith, and my goodness, what he was up to that day in North Carolina. Well, we never knew about it until fairly recently. There’s been a book written about it, a big bestseller. It’s being optioned as a movie. “The Goldsboro Broken Arrow” is the thriller by Joel Dobson. The book inaccurately recounts the story from the perspective of Jack ReVelle, and that’s why we’re bringing you Earl Smith’s account. He was the guy who did the work, not the guy who wanted the credit. And we know the difference between those two when it comes to political theater and showboats. When we come back, we’re going to continue this remarkable story—the story of how one of the world’s greatest man-made disasters was averted—here on our American Stories. And we continue here with our American Stories. And we love telling you these stories from history because they’re important. In my goodness, these are the things ordinary Americans do that are, well, they’re just extraordinary. Let’s return to Earl Smith, picking up with three other men who helped him dismantle the H-bomb back in 1961 in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

They’re the real heroes, too. Like I said, they’re, they’re all dead now. And what had happened before this, before I found out about all this? Somehow, this Lieutenant Ravel had found out the other three guys were dead, so he thought I was dead, too. So he proceeded to tell the story like how he took care of that bomb, which was a bunch of crap—I mean, just out and out blatant lie or something or not—because he had nothing to do. That bomb was ready to the time he got shot. Come on. Team was taken care of, ready to go back to the base. And I imagine he was quite shocked when he found out that I was still alive. After I came up there, and there was a lot of publicity about it. After I got back home, this movie producer called me from Paris, France, and he said he was making a movie he called “The Cold War,” and he loved to tell my story in it. And he said, “I’ll fly you back up there, and we’ll pay all expenses and everything.” I said, “Okay.” So I went back up there in April of that year. Well, the man, who—Kirk Keller, who is a Princeville person—he wants everything to be historically correct, and he’s the president of the Historical Society for Goldsboro. Well, this lieutenant, when he was telling his story, neither me nor the three other guys were ever mentioned about anything—never mentioned, never mentioned. So that set me on fire to get everything straight. So that’s when I went back. Kirk Keller invited me up to tell the story. As a matter of fact, uh, when we made this movie, the man who was flying over from Paris, the guy who’s the director or president of the Historical Society, he said this Lieutenant Ravel was invited to be a part of it, too. He said, “I’ll take bets he won’t show up.” And guess what? He didn’t. I was sure hoping the hell he would, after all that he told and this stuff. And after three dead men—Sergeant Fincher, Sergeant Fletcher, and Sergeant Evers—with all they’d done, and they, they co