WHITTIER -- They called it the Cold War. But for the crew of a Navy patrol bomber based in Kodiak, things got very hot when Soviet MiG fighter jets swarmed them, guns blazing, during a routine maritime patrol over the Bering Sea on June 22, 1955.
The P2V-5 Neptune was cruising at about 8,000 feet, recalled David Assard, a navigator on the flight, when Lt. Richard Fisher, piloting the plane, got word from the back, “There’s jets out here. And they’re firing at us.”
There were six MiG-15s in the attack, Assard said, “two high, two below us and two shooting in a scissor pattern.”
Within seconds, 23 and 37 mm cannon fire had raked the plane, wounding several crew members and setting fire to the left wing and engine. Fischer recalled “the sound of ripping metal and tinkling glass” in a 2006 article in Foundation magazine. He rolled the plane and dove into the clouds.
The maneuver put out the fire temporarily and lost the attackers. “Apparently they didn’t see us,” Assard said. “Or else they thought we were done for.”
So did the men on the plane. As Fischer slowed and leveled the plane about 50 feet off the ocean, the fire in the magnesium metal frame reignited. Those with a view off the left could see the wing spar, the skin burned off. It was twisting and appeared ready to rip away.
“We all thought the wing was going to fall off,” Assard said.
By shifting fuel from the one remaining tank to the one remaining engine, the Neptune might reach Nome, in theory. But Fischer was sure the wing would fail before then. He briefly considered ditching at sea while the wing still held, but with one life raft ripped up by enemy fire and questions about whether the other could be deployed and half of his men without rubber “poopy” dry suits, he expected that even in a best-case scenario they would die in the cold water before help could arrive.
1955 - Soviets shot down American Bomber in Alaska
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