BY NEALE JAMES
Sixty three years ago, just after 4pm, on the 28th February, a B-47E Stratojet belonging to the United States Airforce, a strategic bomber designed to strike targets from very high altitude in the Soviet Union lifted from an airbase called Greenham Common in leafy Berkshire, England, sixty miles west of London, a further 1,800 miles west of Moscow. It was loaded with 103,000 lbs of aviation fuel. One minute into the flight, technical problems forced the crew to shut down engines two and three of the six available to this aircraft. The crew requested an immediate go around and emergency landing.
Because of the large amount of fuel aboard the aircraft, air traffic control gave the order to drop their 1,700 gallon external fuel tanks in a specially designated ‘drop zone’ first.
At 4.23pm, the ‘drop tanks’ procedure was initiated, but one tank struck a hanger, and the other a hard stand area, close to a parked B-47E. There are conflicting reports of a pilot being on board the aircraft on the ground and the possibility of a weapon loading operation being in progress. The parked plane is reported to have been carrying a 1.1 megaton nuclear bomb. The aircraft and bomb were engulfed in flames.
I live close to Greenham Common on the ‘right side’ of the now abandoned airfield, not an indication of direction, but a suggestion that the ‘wrong side’ for years had suffered from a cluster of unexplained cancer cases, possibly the result of a nuclear accident nobody wants to talk about. Or was it? Did it even happen?
Last Sunday, I set out to attempt to find the place the tanks landed, the drop zone, Stand 32. I’ll tell more of the story in audio format. Join me on my Nuclear Photowalk.
I’m not one to subscribe to conspiracy, I do think we have a predisposed ability to embellish a story. Our forefathers and those for all their generations before them could and I am sure did the very same. But I’ve always been fascinated by this huge former airbase, once the home to the longest runway in Europe, a most infamous women’s peace camp, enough nuclear warheads to unleash nuclear winter and a story that nobody can quite agree on.
Today you can run, cycle and enjoy rambling across miles of paths across land that would once have been privy to Britain and America’s closest secrets behind razor wire, guarded by elite special forces. The land gives clues to what was once here. Some buildings and landmarks have slowly started to be devoured by bushes, shrubs, trees even. Some will never leave, such as the massive silos used to house the vehicles destined to deploy deadly intercontinental cruise missiles.
White cattle roam freely on this now common ground. This one is walking in roughly the same area as aircraft will have taxied and stood on ‘standby’ in view of the old control tower, very recently refurbished to become a visitor centre, café and pop up wall space for art. Sadly closed whilst we await the end of pandemic restrictions.
Disused fire and emergency buildings with the large central command centre in the background which still houses a special launch bunker. The mock-up aircraft remains as a historical remnant, designed to resemble a C-130 aircraft. It would be doused in aviation fuel and set alight so that firefighters could train to retrieve people and ‘items’ in a worse case scenario.
Close to the end of what would have been the main runway, from my research possibly the intended ‘drop zone.’
