GLOBEMASTER DOWN

The “unsolved, untold mystery” of a missing Air Force plane.

War reporter Robberson’s story begins at the height of the Cold War with a C-124 Globemaster cargo plane on route to a British Royal Air Force base north of London, carrying 53 passengers and crew and, according to the official flight manifest, two empty aerial-refueling tanks. The flight went off course without explanation, then apparently exploded and crashed into the ocean. No wreckage nor bodies were recovered, except for some splintered wood, a canvas satchel and a magazine. All 53 on board were part of the Strategic Air Command, the U.S. Air Force division responsible for the nation’s long-range nuclear bomber and intercontinental ballistic missile forces, including a top-ranking brigadier general famed for reconnaissance flights during World War II. After 75 years, the investigation files and the details of the flight mission are still classified, leading to conspiracy theories aplenty and frustrated family members still seeking answers. Those are the facts. Now comes the speculation: The tanks weighed “roughly the same as a ‘Fat Man’ atomic bomb.” Robberson, whose wife is the granddaughter of a SAC pilot lost in the crash, suggests that an atomic bomb was indeed the actual cargo, and that the disappearance of the plane was no accident. The author asserts that the SAC personnel were to establish a U.S. Air Force military base in England, and that the plans were super-secret because the Americans didn’t want the Soviets to know there would be an atomic base close enough to Russia for a surprise attack and British leaders didn’t want their citizens to know atomic weapons would be stationed in England. It’s a fascinating story, woven, by the author’s own admission, with “some level of assumption and conjecture, properly labeled as such, to fill in the gaps in the record.”

A highly readable account of a story that “fell into a historical black hole.”