OUT OF GAS, OUT OF AIRSPACE, AND INTO TROUBLE.
How Howard Breton stirred up the atomic security force
In March of 2011 I was contacted by my step-mother, Lois Breton. She had heard from an old friend of my father, Howard Breton. The friend was Lee Smith, who had worked with my father in the printing/advertising business in San Francisco in the 1960s. They were also buddies in the sense that they shared an interest in duck hunting and flying. Lois said that Lee had wanted to know[i] if she had Howard’s flight record book. Her response was that she thought I might have it and so she called me to see if I did still have it and to give me Smith’s phone number.
Shortly after, I dug out the log book and called Smith. He is retired, lives in Virginia, and volunteers at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center. After our initial getting reacquainted conversation he elaborated on why he wanted to know about the log book. One of the displays at the museum is the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. As a docent, he escorts folks around the exhibits, answers questions, adds spicy tidbits of knowledge and shares his excitement about the exhibits. A story about the Enola Gay that he shares with visitors involves my dad and Smith was calling to see if his flight log book would confirm the story.
My father, Howard Breton, was a rare aviator in that he had both Army Air Force and Navy pilot’s wings. After training in biplane Stearmans, he eventually was assigned to training in Pensacola where he became certified to fly the amphibious PBY Catalina.
PBY Catalina
It was ferrying one of those planes with several others to the Mediterranean that the planes, due to mechanical trouble , landed in Spanish Morocco resulting in the internment of the crews in July of 1943. They were repatriated in February of 1944 where he was then assigned to the 7th Ferrying Group in Great Falls, Montana. His job there was to ferry planes from various locations to where they were needed. In this capacity he flew a variety of planes from single engine to four engines bombers. He flew several planes north to Alaska where the planes were picked up by our allies, the Russians, and then flown over to the Soviet Union to fight against the Nazis.
Douglas A-20 Havoc
Smith’s story, as told to him by Howard, was that Howard was flying an A-20 from Maine to Los Angeles in early 1945. Along the route he ran low on fuel and had to make an emergency stop at the nearest Army Air Force base, which happened to be Wendover field on the eastern border of Nevada. He radioed for permission to land and was refused! He checked his charts for any other nearby field and there was none since he was between the Great Salt Lake desert and the deserts of Nevada. As he got closer and fuel was lesser, he again radioed for permission to land or to advise them of an impeding crash landing. The tower relented after checking his flight records and allowed him to land. Upon landing, a jeep was waiting at the end of the runway and he was ordered to follow it. He did so. From there he was escorted to a remote part of the field where a fuel truck soon appeared. Before Howard was allowed to leave the plane an officer climbed up on the plane and using a long dipstick, confirmed that the tank really was almost empty. My dad was then taken to a waiting room accompanied by the soldiers until the refueling was finished. When the job was done, he was driven back to the plane and allowed to continue his journey. Only after the war did he realize that Wendover field was where the crews were training in the Enola Gay. So, he was close to history being made and had dropped in on the most secret of training sites. He left without knowledge of what was going on, but probably did think it odd that there was such heavy security in such a remote base.
When I checked the logbook[ii] I found that indeed on January 11th Howard had picked up an A-20 (serial number 41-2990) from the Army’s Dugway Proving Grounds in western Utah with instructions to ferry it to Ontario, outside Los Angeles. The Maine part of the story seems to be in error; perhaps it was a misunderstanding or misheard origination site since there is no other mention of an A-20 in 1945. The logbook shows that the trip from Dugway to Ontario was accomplished in four “hops.” Each hop from Dugway to Reno, to Sacramento, to Fresno, and into Ontario took less than an hour, except the hop from Dugway to Reno…that took 3 hours and 35 minutes. The A-20’s cruising speed is around 275 mph[iii] and flight time from Dugway to Reno would be about 1 ¾ hours. That extra hour and three quarters may have been spent landing, refueling and taking off from Wendover. Wendover is close to Dugway, only 115 miles, about half an hour away. Howard may have been instructed to not include the stop in his logbook because, except for the time factor, there is no mention of it. The surprise is that there was such a severe fuel loss in such a short time or that no error in the fuel gauges was detected during the routine pre-flight check.
One day I hope to travel to Virginia and the D.C. area and perhaps meet Mr. Smith who has graciously invited me on a personalized tour of the Udvar -Hazy Center. Having already toured the Air Force Museum at Dayton and the Naval Air Museum in Pensacola, such a tour would complete a trifecta of aviation museums. Getting a behind the scenes look at the Udvar-Hazy and hearing Smith tell the tale to others would be a heartwarming recollection of my dad and his wartime activities.
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