Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007

On War's Threshold

His B-52 aimed at Kremlin while Cuban missile crisis played out

On this Veterans Day, meet a man who likes to say he was a "guest of the Gestapo" in a Nazi prisoner of war camp during World War II, but refuses to consider himself a prisoner.

"All they had was my body," Merced's Peter Komlenich said. "My mind was home with my daughter and bride."

Komlenich has another distinction, too. He's the man who nearly started World War III.

"That would have been me," said Komlenich, who controlled four nuclear bombs in the belly of a B-52 during one Cold War mission.

As the generation of U.S. World War II veterans dwindles by 1,000 to 1,500 a day, according to various news agencies, there's been a frantic effort to chronicle the memories of those who served and fought. But then there's a guy like Komlenich, who spent 30 years in the military -- in the war and afterward -- and whose career had some equally important moments. None was more important than the day when he was perhaps an hour or so away from obliterating the Kremlin and all that surrounded it.

In October 1962, Komlenich served as a radarman/ bombardier on a B-52 with the Strategic Air Command at Castle Air Force Base in Atwater.

The Pentagon had determined that the Soviet Union had been supplying Cuba with nuclear weapons, which the Soviets denied even as their supply ships were headed to the island nation 90 miles south of Florida.

President Kennedy confronted Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and the Cuban missile crisis went from a simmer to a full boil. Kennedy demanded the Soviets turn their ships around before they reached a designated point on the map. If they didn't, Kennedy promised, the United States would attack the Soviet Union.

The Soviets ultimately caved, calling back their ships. What they probably didn't know is just how close they came to being attacked, Komlenich said.

"That was something," he said. "You never hear about this. Few people ever knew about it."

A day earlier, Komlenich and the rest of the B-52 crew bade goodbye to their families at Castle, their stomachs knotted from knowing their loved ones were at risk, too. Their mission was top secret. Komlenich could only act as if he were going on a normal training exercise, even though he knew that if the United States attacked, the Soviets would retaliate by hitting key military installations such as Castle.

The B-52 flew east overnight, refueling in midair just beyond the Atlantic coast and again over Greenland. The American plane, one of several involved in the mission, carried four Mark-VI nuclear weapons in its bomb bay, Komlenich said.

Their first of four targets would be the Kremlin, and they had reached the prescribed place where, if the Soviet ships didn't turn back, they would proceed with the bombing run that would trigger nuclear warfare.

Komlenich had studied maps and photos of the Kremlin, and he would have been the one to release the bombs that would have devastated the Soviet government complex and everything else within miles.

It was Oct. 28, 1962. The plane was in the air, waiting for the order to attack.

Suddenly, the mission was aborted.

" ... I heard a shout from upstairs that the Soviet leader had 'blinked first,' and Russian ships had turned back and we had received the 'Green Dot' message and could head for home," Komlenich wrote in his memoirs.

"When I got back with my family, I gave each one of them an extra hug and thanked the Lord for a safe mission."

Armageddon would have to wait for another day, and on someone else's watch.

Throughout his 94 years, Komlenich developed a penchant for coming home safe, if not always sound.