General Yeager: About 10 months after I arrived at Hahn Air Force Base, life became more complicated and dangerous for all of us. The wing received new airplanes – a bigger and more powerful version of the Sabre, called the H model, which gave us much faster acceleration. The MiGs discovered the fact when a couple of them wandered over our small gunnery range at Furstenfeldbruck outside Munich. I scrambled, leading a flight of four model Hs, and shocked the hell out of those MiGs by catching up with them before they reached their border. We just sat on their wings, eyeball to eyeball with those Czech pilots, who were taken completely by surprise. We escorted them back where they belonged and gave them plenty to report in their mission briefings. The new Sabres had greater range and could carry heavier loads, and our mission was suddenly changed from air defense to “special weapons”. We became fighter-combers carrying nuclear weapons targeted on Russia.
Base security was increased to guard the bombs that were stored in special underground bunkers and we began to train in techniques for dropping them. Each Sabre carried one Mark XII tactical nuclear bomb, which in those days was still heave and cumbersome, about the size and shape of our wing tanks. The bombs were low-yield but we didn’t know whether or not we could really survive the blast after dropping one on the target. We practiced various techniques using dummys. We came in low on the deck until we were about ten miles from target, then we rose our nose about 40 degrees and fired off the dummy bomb in a shell-like trajectory.
Or we’d come in on the deck, then climb straight up over the target, release the bomb, then flip over backwards in an Immelman and race to get the hell out of there!
The bomb meanwhile continued to climb to about 10,000’ before nosing over and dropping to earth. We also practiced high-altitude dive bombing, releasing the bomb at about 18,000’. All we had to do was drop it within twelve hundred yards of our target. And that was a low yield weapon. None of us was happy about coming in on the deck, exposed to enemy ground fire, with an atomic bomb strapped to our belly.
c. GCYI