THE WILD BLUE YONDER

By ANDREW MCGINN

a.mcginn@beeherald.com

Size matters not, Yoda once informed us. But that Yoda — not a good newspaper editor would he have made.

The bigger the headline, the bigger the story. Which is why, every so often, the Herald’s page designer, Rob Strabley, will ask me to come up with a few extra words for a headline, so that something like, “City hikes sewer rate,” when sized to make it across the entire page, doesn’t look essentially like, “JAPAN BOMBS PEARL HARBOR.”

So when The Des Moines Register landed on doorsteps the morning of June 30, 1958 — sadly, it landed with a much more resounding thud 62 years ago — readers were hit with a headline of immense magnitude.

IOWAN BREAKS JET RECORD

The story was about a pair of U.S. Air Force tankers that made a transatlantic flight in under six hours, a world speed record.

An incredible feat of aviation, for sure, considering it took Charles Lindbergh 33½ hours, 31 years earlier, to sputter across the pond in the Spirit of St. Louis.

But records rise and fall all the time.

As you know, this has been an unusually hectic year (which is a nice way of putting it), but did you know that a British Airways jetliner back in February, with the help of a strong tailwind en route to London from New York, broke the transatlantic speed record for subsonic flight in just under five hours?

It barely registered a blip, then was promptly buried and forgotten by the 24-hour news cycle.

The British Airways 747 beat a record of five hours, 13 minutes set by Norwegian Air in 2018 — and I honestly don’t recall a single story about that flight.

Simply put, it was a different world in 1958.

I’ve long wanted to retell the forgotten story of Lt. Col. Quentin Wayne Raaz — a Jefferson native who was at the controls of the KC-135 Stratotanker, call sign Bravo, that streaked across the Atlantic in record-breaking time in June of ’58 — but I wasn’t sure when to do it.

I wasn’t yet back in Jefferson to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Raaz’s feat, and I admittedly missed the 60th anniversary. (Contrary to popular belief, we in the media don’t have a master calendar containing the anniversary dates of every single historic moment.)

But the longer the 2020 presidential campaign dragged on, the more I became convinced that now is as good a time as any.

Roughly speaking, this is where we are in America: half the country believes the other half to be communists, and half believes the other half to be Nazis.

It’s never more apparent that a common enemy — take your pick, fascists or commies — is what kept us from turning on each other.

The outsized threat posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War — whether it was real or exaggerated to feed the military-industrial complex — unified conservatives and liberals in ways now unimaginable.

Let’s not forget that nearly 30 years after the Soviet Union collapsed, the missiles are still pointed at one another. What we’ve totally abandoned, however, is the belief that “divided we fall.”

I’ll admit. On one hand, it seems kinda nuts to pine for the Cold War era — a time when thermonuclear annihilation seemed never more than one goof-up away, when Black men and women literally had to fight for their lives just to get a piece of pie at a Woolworth’s lunch counter, and when women in general were little more than property.

But the American way of life was still something millions envied.

And in June of 1958, the message sent by then-Maj. Wayne Raaz’s record-breaking flight was crystal clear: Any threat to democracy, anywhere, and we’ll be on top of you in five hours, 27 minutes and 42.8 seconds. 

Give or take.

IOWAN BREAKS JET RECORD — it was that big of a deal.

A statement at the time from Strategic Air Command (SAC), which had dubbed the record attempt Operation Top Sail, indicates there was no real purpose for the flight other than good ol’ fashioned theatrics, “to demonstrate that the Air Force could send high-performance jet tanker aircraft anywhere in the world, and do it quickly.”

This was, after all, the era in which SAC famously maintained a nearly one-to-one ratio of KC-135 tankers to B-52 bombers.

“The Air Force was particularly good at finding things to make a big show of,” explained nephew Richard Raaz, 76, a retired U.S. Navy captain and an old cold warrior himself who was born in Greene County.

In 1957, for example, the Air Force sent three B-52s on a nonstop flight around the world — the first by a jet aircraft.

In 1960, Air Force Capt. Joseph Kittinger parachuted from a height of 102,800 feet — the longest free fall on record.

The ironic thing is that Wayne Raaz — known by all as Chiefy and to his nephew as Uncle Quent — was as modest as they came.

“This guy was a straight arrow,” said Richard Raaz, living the retired life in Idaho Falls, Idaho.

His uncle was also “incredibly thoughtful.”

However, Richard Raaz believes that, through their actions, men like Wayne Raaz and his own father, Dean Raaz, made the U.S. Air Force what it is.

Not bad for a couple of Jefferson boys who had a meager upbringing during the Depression.

“Those guys were Air Force to the core,” Richard Raaz said. “They were desperate to create an identity for the Air Force separate from the Army Air Corps.”

A shaky takeoff

Matriarch Erma Raaz was pretty much left alone to raise seven kids — three boys and four girls — after their father left the picture during the Depression, according to Richard Raaz.

“It was a pretty tough life,” he said.

When World War II came, the three boys all did their part: Dean Raaz flew as a B-17 bombardier in the South Pacific; Virgil “Kyb” Raaz was in the Army; and Wayne Raaz (given name Quentin) served as a flight instructor for B-25 and A-26 pilots.

When the Air Force became its own branch separate from the Army on Sept. 18, 1947, no two men were more proud to be blue than Dean and Wayne Raaz.

Sent to law school by the Air Force, Lt. Col. Dean Raaz became a judge advocate and received the Air Force Commendation Medal in late 1958 for his distinguished service in Japan.

A 1937 graduate of Jefferson High School, Wayne “Chiefy” Raaz — Velma Radebaugh, who died in 2019 at the age of 98, was the Class of ’37 valedictorian — initially returned home to Jefferson after World War II and joined Kyb in business at the Jefferson Bottling Co.

There, they bottled Spur, Hi-Spot, Mason’s Root Beer and other brands of soda pop, including a concoction of their own, Raaz’s. (And, here, you thought Barq’s was the strangest-looking name in the soft-drink biz.)

But Chiefy — who was married to a Jefferson gal, Ilah Mae Richards — wasn’t meant to hawk O-So Grape the rest of his days.

Before long, he had re-enlisted and was back in the air fighting a new kind of war — an ideological power struggle between good and evil that would be known as the Cold War.

Piloting a C-54 Skymaster, Wayne Raaz participated in the Berlin Airlift in 1949, saving the residents of West Berlin from starvation and the elements after the Soviets blockaded access to the city. The U.S. and U.K. responded by flying food and coal right over their heads into the hands of the people.

By the time the crisis subsided, NATO had been established and the Western way of life became the stuff of envy for those trapped behind a curtain of iron.

The Berlin Airlift had been organized by the cigar-chomping Gen. Curtis LeMay, who then assumed command of the newly formed Strategic Air Command near Omaha. (Where he also became something of an inspiration for the characters in “Dr. Strangelove,” Stanley Kubrick’s nuclear black comedy.)

Wayne Raaz found his calling in SAC as well, in the burgeoning field of in-flight refueling.

“He was one of the original Air Force tanker guys,” said Richard Raaz, whose own military career would find him in charge of thermonuclear Trident I ballistic missiles as commander of the submarine USS Georgia.

Richard Raaz said the Air Force’s tankers remain critically important across all branches. When participating in war games or any other exercise, he recalled, everyone’s first question was, “How many tankers we got?”

“They are vital,” he said.

Air Force tankers in 2018 alone refueled aircraft every five minutes in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to Stars & Stripes.

The Air Force, unbelievably, has no immediate plans to retire the KC-135 Stratotanker, the flying gas station Wayne Raaz put to the test in June of 1958. (Modifications, according to the Air Force, have enabled the KC-135R and the KC-135T to be 25 percent more fuel efficient and 96 percent quieter than the original KC-135A.)

A four-engine military version of the Boeing 707, the first of 20 KC-135As had arrived at Westover Air Force Base in Massachusetts in August of 1957.

How and why then-Maj. Wayne Raaz, 38, of the Westover-based 99th Air Refueling Squadron, was selected for Operation Top Sail — the Air Force attempt to break the transatlantic speed record — no one alive today can say for sure.

The previous flight record — six hours, 16 minutes from New York to London; seven hours, 29 minutes from London to New York — had been held since August of 1955 by Capt. J.W. Hackett of the British Royal Air Force, flying a Canberra, the RAF’s first jet bomber.

Even to this day, it’s a commendable clip.

The average flight today from New York to London is about seven hours.

Of course, that’s assuming you’re not going supersonic. It used to take the Concorde, British Airways’ supersonic passenger jet, little less than 3½ hours to make New York from London ferrying the rich and famous.

The Air Force’s fabled SR-71 once crossed the pond — a distance of 3,470 miles — in one hour, 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds. Its average speed on that flight in 1974 was 1,806 mph. Ironically, the only time it had to slow down was to refuel behind a specially modified KC-135.

Just after midnight on June 27, 1958, four KC-135s prepared to take off from Westover on what was to be one for the record books. Their destination: RAF Brize Norton, near London.

The Air Force, according to later press reports, had toyed with originally calling the record attempt Operation Sure Thing.

In reality, it was anything but.

The lead KC-135, call sign Alfa, took to the summer sky piloted by a Texan, Maj. Burl Davenport, followed a few minutes later by Wayne Raaz in Bravo.

Then, the unthinkable happened when the third KC-135, call sign Cocoa, stalled just after takeoff, hit power cables and skidded as a fireball across the new Massachusetts Turnpike.

It was later determined that Cocoa’s flaps were deployed at the wrong angle at takeoff, causing the crash that killed all 15 on board, including eight journalists who were riding along. Among the dead was Brig. Gen. Donald W. Saunders, a veteran of 25 combat missions over the Pacific in World War II and the commander of Westover Air Force Base.

While the fourth KC-135 was grounded, Alfa and Bravo unbelievably continued unabated as they flew first to New York, then made for London. Radio silence between Davenport and Raaz meant they apparently didn’t learn of Cocoa’s fate until they actually reached London in record-setting time: five hours, 27 minutes, 42.8 seconds for Davenport; five hours, 29 minutes, 37.4 seconds for Raaz.

That was a new west-east record.

With an average speed of 585 mph, they broke the east-west record on the trip home: five hours, 51 minutes, 24.8 seconds for Davenport; five hours, 53 minutes, 30 seconds for Raaz.

In Massachusetts, tragedy overshadowed the whole affair. But in Raaz’s home state, it was pure elation. IOWAN BREAKS JET RECORD, the state’s biggest paper beamed, carrying a full report on the Jefferson pilot’s deeds.

Raaz, who passed away in 1999 at age 80, would speak little of it.

“He didn’t blow his own horn,” said daughter Tekla Housley.

For Richard Raaz, Uncle Quent would fill an important role following the death at age 62 of his own father, Dean Raaz.

In Dean Raaz’s absence, Wayne Raaz would watch his nephew’s impressive Navy career blossom with a father’s pride. Richard Raaz, who served as a technical adviser on the Sean Connery movie “The Hunt for Red October,” said Uncle Quent was there for change of command ceremonies and even his retirement.

“I loved him to death,” Richard Raaz said. “All the big events in my career, he was there.

“He was a great man.”