A tongue-in-cheek trip sixty years or so back in time to revisit some Matador missile units then on the front line of NATO deterrence.
I was motivated to write the following after rediscovering in my files the copy of a faded, handwritten tale passed on to me a long time ago, I took the liberty to sanitize the language and do a great deal of rewriting and embellishment for presentation here. I must assume the originator of the tale was a disaffected Matador Missileer whose name is unknown. In it he described his view of the watch on the Rhine in less than glowing terms.
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Southwest West Germany
1958
I turned off the state road in the Southwest region of West Germany and onto an unmarked, cow-dung spattered, well-worn path through a farmer’s turnip patch and soon was halted by a US Air Force security policeman when he stepped into view from behind his guard post. With a friendly “Hello” he waved me on through the checkpoint. I noticed his unleashed sentry dog romping happily in the rare sunshine nearby. A bit further down the path I spotted a group of airmen wearing mud splattered combat fatigues. Their World War Two style helmets and 30 caliber carbines lay in the mud behind a missile, where they will be out of the way. It looks like one helluva mess. This is the free world’s front line, one of the many tactical missile launch sites seemingly carelessly scattered throughout the low mountains west of the Rhine.
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Look along the heights of the thickly wooded Eiffel and Hündsruck Mountains and you see here and there patches of open ground where communication antennae stand rusty and seemingly unused, mounted atop ramshackle, faded O.D. colored vans. Our rutted road winds past a secluded thicket where a couple makes-out in the back a ubiquitous MM-1 truck and a bit further on we finally see it, a missile’s dusty nose pointing directly at a tree. It is the nose of an American TM-61 Matador, zeroed in on a tree 100 feet away, on the other side of the launch site. The Matador with its small swept-back wings and a fuselage only four feet in diameter, looks like a model jet fighter plane that junior might have assembled. It is armed with an inert nose cone because everyone is afraid to attach the real W-5 warhead. The Matador is a launch in the awful German weather, day or night missile. It is a somewhat mobile missile, operating from a dingy launching trailer, ready to roll on slack worn-out tires, the world’s shortest runway. Each launch trailer is equipped with its own supply of cognac stashed in one of the under slung control boxes. Should the enemy pinpoint one of the Matador locations, that missile could be quickly relocated to a new launch site, be it another farmer’s wheat or sugar-beet field, where the U.S. Government will again have to pay damages for ruined crops, or even on to a stretch of open autobahn where it will block traffic for kilometers.
For years, gathering dust here in Germany, our Matadors with their technical quirks have driven the most experienced missile technicians to exasperation. At run down launch sites under the noses of all who care to see, American missile crews wait beside the firing button, hoping it works in case of enemy aggression. Their secondary role is to consume the entire output of the nearby local brewery. On a hill just across the Mosel River stands a Biergarten, its welcoming gate faces west along the traditional route of thirsty airmen stopping off for a quick one after a long day or night of alert duty. For it is the US Air Force tactical missileers who provide the German owner with all his profits.
In the event of an actual attack, the Charge of Quarters would have to immediately start calling all the surrounding Gasthauses in an attempt to round-up the off-duty crewmen. Simultaneously, last minute launching and guidance instructions would get bogged down somewhere in the communication morass that connects the various guidance detachments networked all over West Germany. Even before the echoes of the klaxon alarm dies down, the air would be turned blue with curses of airmen wondering who stole their freaking field gear. Most of the first wave of missiles would manage to launch successfully while the misfires drop harmlessly just off the end of the launching trailer. From the forward dispersal areas truck convoys would immediately be fighting bumper to bumper traffic through the narrow twisting village streets, transporting the second wave of Matadors to the now vacant launch sites, and a third wave would be moving from the depot to refill the forward dispersal areas, located near Gasthauses known to be well supplied.
The Matador launch crews on round the clock alert duty exist right beside their missiles. The ready room is likely an earthen pit reinforced with old beer cases and heated in the winter by a little Sterno stove that cannot quite offset the icy winds blowing rain through the many cracks. A loudspeaker occasionally interrupts an all day poker game to broadcast the latest ball scores and race results from the States.
Without warning a lieutenant stumbles onto the site to announce a simulated countdown to launch, a thorn in the side of those who must participate in them. At the launch pad the trailer’s hydraulic system is already giving maintenance men a hard time. About fifty feet away, in the launch control lean-to, with its sagging plywood roof, the launch officer tries to call instructions to the crew with his microphone, gives up and screams for a communications man. The crewmen make their final checks as they clamber over the missile and launch trailer and end up hollering for the medics to treat the sprained ankles as they realize the damn thing was higher than they thought when they jump down. Finally, with everyone behind the shelter of a jumbled pile of sandbags, the launch officer hits his starter button. There is a whine that builds up to a steady scream, then a burst of flame from the Matador’s tailpipe. Before he can be stopped a VIP visitor runs forward to light his cigar from it because he forgot to bring matches. The jet exhaust cuts in with an ear shattering roar, kicking up sandbags, old beer cans, sentry dogs, and an unfortunate farmer in the next field who didn’t move out of the way in time.
Now comes an even louder roar as a T-33 Sim-missile streaks low over the launch site and nearly takes the tops off the pine trees just beyond. In peacetime practice launch missions like this one, the T-33 substitutes for the Matador because, the accent is on realism. Meanwhile, somewhere to the East a crow flying by is picked up on the radar scope at one of the remote guidance detachment and is mistaken for the T-33-cum-Matador Sim-missile. If this were the real thing the controller would attempt to guide the Matador throughout its whole flight to its target destination, and go ape wondering why the blip he thought was a Matador did not respond to commands.
However, once a year some crews do get an opportunity to actually launch missiles. This is during the annual war games, usually given exotic sounding mission names like “Sun” something or other. That is when the squadrons’ missile men got toasted in the deserts of Tripoli, Libya and bargain with the Arabs for souvenirs made out of last year’s war games crashed Matadors parts. It is here at last the launch crews get to see their Matador take to the air and disappear into the sandstorms, to detonate with questionable accuracy, on small X marks-the-spot, somewhere out in the desert. Though the men sleep in field tents, eat C rations laced with plenty of sand and swelter in the blistering African heat, they don’t complain, it is a real break from the mud, rain and cold back in Germany.
Meanwhile, back in Germany, day and night the show goes on at the launch sites, and at isolated mountain top control detachments which are in fact the real nerve centers of the entire Matador operation. Those miserable units are located far from any population center, but always near Gasthauses and the East German border. The crews that spend their tour of duty on those bleak windswept hilltops, out of contact with other Americans, cuss their fate, and swear never to reenlist. In winter the roads to the sites may be blocked for weeks and officers have to resort to packing in their personal supply of cognac on the enlisted men’s backs.
Our vehicle’s wheels churn through deep slushy snowdrifts, late in March, as we struggle uphill to a detachment of the 585th Communications and Guidance Squadron. Here too, everything seemed screwed up. At site A12 the radar and electronic equipment is often out of commission. The four communication and control trailers were parked back-to-back, in the form of a cross, with the deep hole in the center filled almost to the top with empty beer cans and German snap-top bier bottles. The radar crews are thawing out the beer with the microwave diverted from the antenna, and the controller’s breath makes a 90 proof vapor cloud as he watched the blip on his scope, wondering what that blankty-blank crow was going to do next. “We’ve got everything here except women” he said with a grimace.
Most isolated of all are the radio relay stations perched on even lonelier mountain peaks, again with the inevitable Gasthaus nearby. A radio relay site is manned by a team of eight airmen, who live in the nearby Landhaus. They commute up and down the mountains in shifts, providing their vehicles are running. There are no service clubs, movies or newspaper, just living out in the deep boonies with the Germans who are very happy to be getting the American dollars. Morale couldn’t be higher. “I like it here” one of them said. “Days we sit around playing word games with the Missile Operations Center, nights we sit around the Pension trying to make out with the women and for this we get proficiency pay!”
The Germany based missile men have built a forward wall against Communist aggression. They are also helping build things even more lasting like brick Gasthauses, snow fences, mail rooms, etc. The isolation of the Matador operation, in rural areas, drive the crews to drink. There are many friendly brawls. A German family is said to have baked a cake for a young airman based in the village, and laced ground glass on it. A former B-17 bomber crew chief gets the hell beat out of him by someone who was on the receiving end of a bombing raid on Frankfurt during the last war. The crewmen at one radio relay sites set up a trust fund to make sure they never run out of beer money.
Slowly the scars of the time are healing. At Christmas time the missile men gave parties for all the children in nearby villages, later in the year the Burgomaster of one of the villages invited them back to attend a shotgun wedding. Today these former foes face common adversaries, communist aggression and a fear of a dwindling supply of beer. The airman from Sandusky and the burger from Aachen stand side by side, sharing a brew and wondering “vas ist loss?”
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Romeo Bravo
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