By Any Means Necessary: America's Secret Air War

by William E. Burrows

. with dustjacket, 2001 clean copy, light age toning to pages

Genres: History, Military Fiction, Military History, Nonfiction, War, Espionage, Politics

352 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2001

Reviews

[Jerry Blackerby · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an interesting book about the spy missions (electronic and photographic) following WWII, through the Korean War and Cold War. I flew as a radio and ECM operator off the coast of China during 1954 in Navy P2V-5 Neptune, twin-engined aircraft. Our primary mission was officially anti-submarine detection and tracking shipping. We also recorded electronic signatures of radars we would pick up. Sometimes, we had to force them to turn on their radars to see us by turning off our own radar. They also had equipment to monitor our radars so they could track us by our own radar signals. There were also volunteer missions some crews took to fly close enough to get photographs. My crew primarily was only monitoring electronically.

The book is very interesting and tells about several of the crews who were shot down and in several cases captured by Russia, China or North Korea. An interesting tidbit of information in the book is a detailed story about the P3C that was buzzed so close by a Chinese pilot that the aircraft was damaged and had to land on a Chinese island. The Chinese pilot, Wang Wei, had a reputation of flying close enough that American crews could photograph him in his cockpit. A few months before, he had held up a sign that was photographed and showed his email address.

I remember very well one P2V-5 from another squadron that was shot down in early 1953. I happened to be on duty in the Communications Center on Okinawa when this aircraft took ground fire from Chinese antiaircraft. The plane went down and a Navy PBM-5 Mariner landed in heavy seas to rescue the crew. As the seaplane began taking fire from the shore, it began to attempt an unsuccessful takeoff in the heavy seas and crashed. A Navy destroyer responded to the second aircraft’s Mayday call and picked up the surviving crewmen from the two aircraft.

The book is well worth reading if a person is interested in things that happened during that timeframe, but were kept secret. Much of the information has been declassified, but our government still does not talk about a lot of what happened.

[Lchamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting read. I flew some of these Reconnaissance missions during the cold war and he has his facts straight, with a little too much emphasis (in my opinion) on the bureaucratic desire to keep these secret missions secret. Those of us who flew the missions knew that we were 'on our own' and we just hoped we didn't cause the dreaded "international incident" by being shot down over "denied territory".

I'm now reading another book on the same subject by another author who has a lot of his facts wrong.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have started to collect stories about the covert air missions by the US Air Force and Navy during the cold war. They are a bit like what our submarines were doing, but even more deadly for the crews.

This is a sad book. I mean that it is hard to learn that the US government saw captured airmen as liabilities that they wanted to sweep under the rug. There are accounts and proof that aircrews survived the many shootdowns and were captured by the Soviets, North Koreans or Chinese. The US military didn't want to admit they were sending the planes across borders to recon targets. So the crews were listed as missing and the families did not have closure. The worst part is the aircrews didn't volunteer for such missions, they were ordered.

The author has put together a good set of stories around the missions and the guys who flew them during the cold war. The deadly missions happened before the advent of satellites and the SR-71, during a time that is painted as one of fear and hostility.

The book mentions various aircraft from the Big Safari group, so this is a good stepping stone to digging deeper into such missions.

[Stuart Bobb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting book - though not quite as good as what I consider its "companion" covering submarines - "Blind Man's Bluff".

If you ever wondered why the Chinese reacted the way they did in the close brushes with American Airforce planes in the early 2000s, you get a lot of insight.

If you ever wondered, boy, sure seems like the air force had a lot of "training accidents" in the 1950s and 1960s, this book provides quite the perspective!

One of the real values of reading history is it can reveal a lot of the motives behind other players.

Since I'm writing this short review a decade plus since I read this book, I will note that the history revealed in this book casts incidents like the recent China spy balloon in quite a different light.

In a world of "what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander", we should not be even slightly surprised at getting some of our own medicine. That we were so slow to detect or anticipate is what the outrage really should be about.

[Shrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Deception was part of the war of nerves that ran through the fabric of the cold war."

Pouring with facts, figures and hostile clashes, the book revolves around unavowed tedious war between powerful nations driven towards achieving unparalleled supremacy over the world.
Accounts on development of path breaking aircrafts is quite insightful. Shattering of the humanitarian tower by the authorities and cold hearted attitude towards the grieving families of missing servicemen is moving.
(Might get a bit monotonous due to third person narrative but is a work worthy of acclamation.)

[Pete · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was interesting but like many of the recon missions themselves this became redundant after a point. Would have engaged the reader more if there had been more personal accounts by the pilots themselves.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

During the most intense period of the Cold War, from the late 1940s till the early 1960s, a great many Americans believed that a shooting war with the Soviet Union was likely to come. One nightmare scenario they thought up was a squadron of Tupolev Tu-4s (a Soviet reverse-engineered clone of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress) painted in the US Air Force livery landing on a Canadian military base and having English-speaking crewmen explain that they are American B-29s that have lost their way and run out of fuel, fueling up, and flying away to atom-bomb America and come back to Siberia. A less fanciful scenario was Tu-4s bombing Seattle from a Siberian air base; on a one-way suicide mission, they could fly all the way to Kansas. In order to estimate the likelihood of this happening, and prevent it, the Americans and to a much lesser extent the Britons overflew the Soviet Union and photographed air bases, radars and missile installations. Soviet radar operators did not know whether the plane in front of them was carrying a camera or a bomb; they turned on the radar and tracked it; special recording equipment on the plane recorded the radar signal. Soviet fighters would scramble and sometimes attack the American reconnaissance plane. Some planes would carry Russian displaced persons who could understand and interpret the radio exchanges between Soviet fighter pilots and their base better than the Americans who had studied the language for a year only; it was presumed that should the plane be shot down and the crew arrested, they would suffer harsher treatment than American airmen. In 1955, President Eisenhower proposed that this reconnaissance be legal; this way, the two superpowers would know, how many weapons of which kind each has, and would not waste money trying to make up for phantom bomber gaps or missile gaps. However, First Secretary Khrushchev rejected the proposal: this information would favor the side with the best bombers and missiles, which was the United States. The Americans were determined to obtain it no matter what; so the surveillance continued illegally. Francis Gary Powers was the most famous pilot shot down over the Soviet Union, but in fact over 130 American airmen were shot down. The vast majority died, though there are rumors that a few survived, were interrogated and either shot or sent to the Gulag; Boris Yeltsin acknowledged this much in 1992. Two months after the downing of Powers, MiG fighters shot down an American electronic reconnaissance plane over the Barents Sea; of the crew of six, two survived: the pilot and the navigator. They were held for seven months in solitary confinement in the Lubyanka prison in Moscow, not physically tortured but psychologically pressured to confess to espionage. The two airmen insisted that their plane was over international waters when shot down, so what they did was legal; the Soviets' plan to try them together with Powers failed, and they were released.

Because the planes' missions were clandestine, when the planes were shot down, the United States government did not tell the airmen's families the truth about their deaths. This book tries to correct it. An appendix has a list of the downed planes and their crew members.

[Todd · Rating 4 out of 5]

All I can say about this book is you will be amazed at the outright audacity we displayed with overflights into Russian airspace hot on the heels of the end of WWII. The incidents that occurred and were covered up are so outlandish that they will make you want to re-read some of the passages. They all really happened!

The book covers from the late 40s all the way to the end of the Cold War.

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned a lot about Cold War strategic reconnaissance as the author cited several persons whom I have met or worked with. The book also revealed how foolishly the two countries acted in the post WWII period to the present. It was almost a professional read, and should have been so for us "crew dogs."