STARRS Podcast
STARRS Podcasts includes the series STARRS & Stripes which interviews military veterans, talks about their careers and military service, and their concerns about what is happening in today's military. See our website, starrs.us, for more information.
STARRS Podcast
The Amazing Military Aviation Life of F-4 Wild Weasel Al Palmer
His Army Air Corps grandfather received his pilot license from Orville Wright and knew aviation legends like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. His father served in the Air Force and in Korea. And third generation aviator Al Palmer flew fighter jets in the Air Force--including the famed F-4 "Wild Weasel" missions during the Vietnam War--then later changed to becoming a naval aviator in the Navy flying the new F-14 Tomcats off of aircraft carriers.
We're turning the tables on this episode of STARRS and Stripes and interviewing the host himself, CDR Al Palmer, US Navy ret to learn about his incredible family military aviation legacy, his own combat service as an aviator, and later creating and running aviation museums. There he helped preserve important aviation history that he and his family lived through, serving from World War I to the Cold War.
Al recounts his hair-raising F-4 Phantom Wild Weasel missions flown during the Vietnam War including Operation Linebacker where their mission was to draw out the enemy's missiles so they couldn't be used against the bombers. He discusses firsthand accounts of tactical maneuvers, the dangers of air combat, and the brotherhood among pilots. From the psychological challenges to the tactical brilliance required to outsmart enemy defenses, his stories give a vivid picture of bravery and camaraderie in the face of overwhelming odds.
When the war ended, Al did something most people didn't do at the time: a lateral move from the Air Force to the Navy. There he flew the iconic F-14 Tomcat--brand new at the time--off of carriers. After his service, he recounts his contributions to preserving military aviation history running the San Diego Aviation Museum, creating from scratch the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, securing rare artifacts, his interactions with historic aviation and space figures, and his job running the National Atomic Testing Museum. Al has an amazing military aviation heritage and story.
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Welcome to another Sars and Stripes podcast. Today we're going to do something a little different. I'm Ron Scott, President and CEO of STARS, and today we're going to introduce you to our host, Al Palmer. Al's got a remarkable history and really brings the type of credentials and been there experiences that makes him a very powerful host for our series of podcasts. So today we're going to start off with a slideshow and Al is going to walk us through that to give us a feel for his background, and we'll have a conversation in between Al.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, on, thank you for the introduction and let me tell our audience here how delighted I am to be here with Colonel Scott today. It's great to be in company of heroes and people who know what's going on with our military these days, and it's good to be the host of this podcast. We're off to a good start, I think so, just as background for those who are going to be faithfully listening to this episode of one person's journey through life in the military. I grew up in a family that was military. Journey through life in the military. I grew up in a family that was military.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:My grandfather was an early Army Air Corps aviator, joined the National Guard in 2006, I'm sorry, 1906 in San Francisco, when they had the earthquake. He joined the Army Reserves at the time and then later went full-time into the army in 1917, at the end of World War I. He was an aviator, got his pilot's license signed by Orville Wright and then flew and instructed pilots on the west coast in World War I and did the same thing in World War II and then spent a little bit of time on the front in Italy and at North Africa at the end of World War II. But one of the things that was remarkable about him was he was a squadron commander of a pursuit squadron at Crissy Field, which was in San Francisco. The time was the early 20s. In those days there were air racers that were coming into San Francisco, flying in and out of San Francisco across the ocean to Hawaii in adult air races. But it was also a time when Charles Lindbergh completed his flight across the Atlantic and came in too, and his squadron would host people like Lindbergh as he toured around the country and then the people who were in the air races he helped take care of their aircraft too, because Crissy Field was the only aviation installation for the Army on the west coast at the time. He also established the first Army Reserve Unit in the Army there at Crissy Field.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, one of the occasions he had was when Amelia Earhart came to town and she was doing one of her jaunts across the ocean in 1927. And actually she flew across the Atlantic also in 1927. Actually she flew across the Atlantic also in 1927. Just before she did that, my grandfather had her out one night when they had her aircraft there. They were taken care of, went to a hotel in San Francisco and made her an honorary major in the Air Corps and also pinned wings on her. They bought her a brand new nice outfit to wear and that's the slide number five, cindy, if you've got that. So they had dinner and they made her an honorary major in the Air Corps and pinned wings on her and she was delighted about that. But then she went off and across the Atlantic and so that was an episode that there was a telegram. She wrote back and told the squadron about that and they commended her for being the commander of their squadron and doing a great thing like flying across the ocean.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Problem with that was that photograph that you're looking at now got out into the press. It made its way to the front pages of the san francisco examiner and that was then picked up by a, an author who was writing a book about amelia, and he said aha, smoking gun, that's amelia erhart being signed up to go spy on the Japanese in 1937. Well, I knew it wasn't in 1937. It was actually in 1928. And that made the papers and we finally got it straightened out for the longest time. Some of that's still around. This was part of the conspiracy of the United States to get Amelia to go spy on the Japanese, that didn't work out so well, amelia to go spy on the Japanese.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:That didn't work out so well. The next slide Now, if I can ask you. You know you look at that image there and Amelia is surrounded by four aviators four male aviators and when you look at the facial expressions and the body language, there is a tremendous expression of respect for a woman who was a pioneer in aviation and I think it says a lot about, even in those days, an appreciation for merit over other things that tend to take our concentration away from merit these days. So anyway, I just want to make that observation.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Oh, absolutely. And in fact they were so delighted to have her they bought this outfit for her. She came in a dress. They gave her this outfit, dressed her up and then they pinned the wings and the major's leaves on her to make an honorary major out of her. So you're right, that's how they treated things in those days. They liked people who were adventurous, heroic and also had great merit, as these women particularly were flying aircraft in those days, standing up on the ground out there.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:He was one of the judges for the Dole air races that they initiated to really extend aviation at the time, and this was in 1927. And you can see this Navy lieutenant up there who looks rather old for a lieutenant, but anyway, he was one of the officials there conducting the air races. So the next slide is a picture of my dad. Now my dad was a flying sergeant in his father's pursuit squadron there at Crissy Field. So my grandfather taught my father how to fly in a Jenny and he did that and got through flight training but had an accident. And he did that and got through flight training but had an accident, got some oyster shells in his eye from doing a ground loop right there at Crissy Field. So he became a maintenance officer for the rest of his career. But he was in Korea with F-86s and F-80s, later went into the missile business and became one of the first tactical missileers in the Air Force. So he retired. Both of them retired as colonels.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Then there was me. I was the third one in line. They expected me, I think, to probably get into the services right away, but I was not really ready for that. After was after I graduated from college, I was headed off to medical school. I thought. Unfortunately, the draft caught up with me and I got a draft physical was being drafted and so I got my uncle, who was a lieutenant colonel in the Pentagon, to get me into the Air Force real quickly so I could get into officer training school, which I did.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Finished officer training school, figured I'd successfully dodged the draft and I didn't have much to worry about. Well, after getting out of officer training school, in this next slide I was headed off to pilot training, I thought, and was going to be out and flying heavy someplace and not having to go to war. Instead I found myself going through navigator training and becoming an electronic warfare officer and then heading right off to the war. So instead of dodging bullets in a foxhole, here I am dodging surface-to-air missiles and aircraft fire and flying over bad guy territory a single ship which turned out to be quite an adventure. But along the way I found a beautiful girl that I met in officer training school. We fell in love right away, got married and she became the partner here for the rest of the time and she still is to to this day. My beautiful bride, susan, you've done good, yeah well, that's what she says you, you did well.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So, uh, and people didn't think it was gonna last. I mean, we only knew each other probably for a month or so, uh, and had, when she was printing up all the invitations, she wasn't sure how to spell my name right. So that shows you how quickly that all happened. But that next slide shows now I'm off to war. I hadn't really expected it. A young guy in his 20s, brand new second lieutenant, and I'm heading off to Vietnam, in Thailand.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:This artwork here, this was a painting done by one of our pilots and it shows you a little bit about what we were thinking at the time. Here's family, there's duty, honor and country. You know you're always TDY, on temporary duty someplace or leave, and there's always the presence of war at your back, if not in front of you, and so this kind of portrays that a little bit. Next slide so here I am. You know there's a great little hero photo that I used to take these things all the time just to impress everybody back home. So this was an official photo I took, young Lieutenant standing in front of his airplane with parachute and all that. So that was the beginning of that.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:What kind of an airplane was that and what was its function?
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So this was an EB-66. It was a medium bomber that was developed during the Cold War. It was a tactical bomber that had a nuclear mission. Most of them were stationed in Europe and at the end of the 50s and 60s they put them in the boneyard in Arizona Davis-Motham Air Force Base where they stayed for many years. As Vietnam started heating up and we got busy. In the mid-60s they brought them out, reconfigured those as electronic warfare aircraft. We had two kinds. One was a reconnaissance aircraft. We'd go out and find the signals and find out where the bad guys were, where the radars were. The other part of it was we had active jammers that were very powerful and we'd take those and accompany the strike forces and kind of shield them from the radar sites on the ground, and we carried some pretty sophisticated equipment.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:So anyway, for a hundred minutes and for our viewers, real quick. Al, when you talked about going out and picking up signals talked about going out and picking up signals you could tell by the sound in the headset the type of radar that was looking at you and, given the type of radar, the type of weapon system that it was associated with, and so that was kind of a way of processing and understanding the environment that you were flying up against.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Oh, yes, absolutely, and in the reconnaissance mode, we'd bring that back, and the guys in the intelligence shops would put all that together and they could triangulate the signals and figure out where they were and, as you say, ron, what kind of radars they were. The ones we were looking for most of the time, though, were the anti-aircraft sites, and also the surface-to-air missile, the SAM sites, and those are the ones that were doing the most damage to us, so our job was to either find them and then jam them and put them out of action, if we could. So the slide number 12, cindy, that's the end of the tour. That was 100 missions. At the end of that, you taxi back in one day and they bring the fire trucks out and hose you down and you get to go home. 100 missions was the standard at the time. In the early days of Vietnam, they changed it to a year time. I was there, so I got 100 missions, but I did it about a month before the year was up anyway, so it didn't make much difference, but that's what we usually did in those days. So then, from there it was from eb-66 medium bombers in a jamming stuff to f-4 fighters.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:The next slide in Japan and this is kind of a gratuitous photo of F-4s flying in front of Fuji and it's nice and clear. It didn't usually look that way Most of the time, as Ron knows, because he was the commander in Yokota Air Base, where this was most days. You couldn't see Mount Fuji from Japan, from the Tokyo area, because there was too much pollution in the air. But I kind of like this photo because it's a line right past Japan. But the next slide shows something that's a part of this adventure.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So, being in fighters now, we had the primary role of defending things in the Pacific. We were the tip of the spear, so to speak, with conventional as well as nuclear emissions in Japan and the Pacific. So we were on temporary duty all the time. Everywhere Korea, taiwan, philippines, any place else that they had a problem we would show up with our F-4s. And here's a picture of me leaving on another one of my trips with my B4 bag, as my wife kind of watched and wondered what was going to happen when I was going to come home again. And that's a tough thing on families. We had a real issue with that because we were just gone all the time and, worse than that, that in a shooting war or when you're doing nuclear weapons work, you know that's a bit more of a challenge. So we stayed there for about a year and a half and that was again a long time away from home and stuff.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But uh, there was a period in japan when the the air force and the navy were making more noise around Tokyo with their jets and the worst part about that was the Navy put a couple of jets, the F-4s, into apartment buildings there which didn't go over real big with the local populace. So they kind of politely invited us to leave Japan and we did One morning. Morning we all went out and got in our jets. The boss, the one-star general, saluted us and said take off and go down to Okinawa, which we did. So this is a picture of us arriving in Okinawa. So while I was there I was in three squadrons the 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 36th, the 80th, which was a Wild Weasel Squadron, and then we left there and went down to Okinawa and regenerated as the 67th Tactical Fighter Squadron and that was the squadron that was very active in F-105s in Southeast Asia. So we kind of took over their role and did that.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:And what year approximately is this Al?
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:This is 1971 when we left Japan, you know, and at that time you know, the F-4s were still relatively new airplane. The earlier ones we flew were made in 1963. So it wasn't getting to be an old clunker, but they were starting to age a little bit. The aircraft had to be maintained. Well, some of these have been in Vietnam and re configured to a wide-wheels aircraft with some extra gear, but they still were exposed to all the humidity and the activity of flying in Southeast Asia. So they sometimes had little problems with them.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:It wasn't unusual to take off and maybe your tanks would drop off at the end of the runway and a small fireball would erupt and the local population would say were they bombing us? No, it's just an electrical problem. But that was life, uh, back in okinawa. So, so for there. We were there for about a year, uh, and again gone all the time. Most at the end, in 1972, the Air Force then sent us off as a Wild Weasel detachment to Karat Air Force Base in Thailand, and the idea was that they were running out of Wild Weasel aircraft, the F-105s that were there. They'd suffered some pretty bad losses. In fact the wild weasels as a whole suffered about 50% loss rates in the war and they lost almost all of the first wild weasels that went over there. So our job was-.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Now, when you say a loss, we're talking where they were actually shot down, right.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Yes, so a fifth person, a fifth person, yeah, and not many of them were actually captured in that first group. It was kind of a stunning loss, but it showed how effective the surface-to-air missiles that they got from Russia actually were the surface-to-air missiles that they got from Russia actually were. So the next slide Once we got into country, we were working daily and we were chasing sites down, shooting SAM sites when we found them. We did quite a few of those. But as the end of 1972 started to approach, approach the peace talks in Paris started to fail. The administration thought they could be rational with the North Vietnamese, get them to come to the table, free our POWs and gracefully get out of the war with us. Didn't work that way and so at the end, when President Nixon was elected, they finally decided Nixon did to go in and end it forcefully and decisively, which we did in Operation Linebacker 2, which is also known as the Christmas bombing campaign, so that was 11.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Yeah, let me you know. What you're describing is something that a lot of people don't understand War, as Clausewitz said, is politics by other means, and so those were political decisions. Number one they got us into Vietnam, and it was a political decision. They got us out. Political decision that got us out. Now, in between all those things, as you're in theater and you're aware that you're in a mission that is suffering huge attrition rates, what was it that motivated you to strap on that jet for the next mission?
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, it was the people back home I mean our families, but not our families, just people back in America that had to come to a conclusion on this, and we were, frankly, fighting communism. It wasn't just the North Vietnamese, it was a little larger than that, because the Soviets were supplying missiles to them and ammunition and equipment. So too were the Chinese, and I think the administration was afraid that they would get into a much larger conflict if they didn't do something about Vietnam. So the pressure was there on the end just to end it get out of there and away. We'd go that. Next slide 17, cindy. Well, this is my partner in crime On the left, tom Floyd. He and I were crewed as wild weasels throughout the war and we did some pretty good work up there. But this was after our very first wild weasel mission in Vietnam in the F4s. And so, coming back, you know, our crew chief met us with a couple of beers and we congratulated ourselves and said, hey, okay, maybe it's time to go home now, but the hard work was just starting. Next slide so this was our trusty F-474 that our crew chiefs came out one day and named for them with some nose art. They called it brain damage, which I thought was pretty appropriate Because we were actually trying to do that and putting the surface-to-air missile radar sites out of business. We were trying to put their brain out of business so that they couldn't do anything. So we thought that was pretty good.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But the other part of this story was in November of 72, right before Operation Linebacker 2 started. We were coming back from a night mission over Hanoi. Four aircraft and eight guys. We debriefed with the maintenance guys and then we headed back to our quarters on base there. But it was like 1.30 in the morning, so it was dark out and no one else was around, and so we all had bicycles. We were riding our bikes back over to our hoochies where we stayed, all had bicycles, riding our bikes back over to our hoochies where we stayed, and, uh, unbeknownst to us, there was a uh, an nco who was taking his girlfriend back to the base. He'd had a little bit too much to drink because he was running the nco club on the base. So he came screaming down this road without his lights on and ran right through the middle of a line of ducks going across the road.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:And guess who he hit, yours truly, and I went about 20 feet up in the air and landed in a pile on the concrete. They thought I was dead because I wasn't moving too much and so I probably had a concussion although the flight surgeon never would want anybody to know that. But they had to stitch me up, send me back to Okinawa for a little recovery work with Susan. She got me back into shape, and about five days later I'm back in country again, all patched up. But one of the problems was I had about 30 stitches in the back of my right thigh, and so I ended up flying all those nights of linebacker with stitches that would come unglued because we were pulling a lot of Gs up there too. And we'd come back after a mission and my crew chief would sit there and rag on me a little bit about dirtying up his airplane with blood, you know, and he had to go change the seat cushions in the airplane that way.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But that just shows you back to your question, ron. Why do you do it? How do you do it? That's how you do it. There's nobody else to do it. You have a job to do. You've been trained to do it, you're dedicated to do it, and all of our guys went up there. Nobody fussed, nobody had a real problem.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:The next slide. So this is one of the paintings that somebody did about the B-52s during Linebacker II, and you can see there's a bunch of fighters going down the bottom here F-4s and 105s. That was us. We were trying to get in between them and the surface-to-air missiles that were coming up so that we could shoot them, or, if nothing else, maybe they'd shoot at us instead of them because we were more maneuverable, so we could defeat the missiles where the B-52s really couldn't. I mean, they were sitting ducks, even though they had a lot of jamming that they could use to conceal themselves. It wasn't enough when they started shooting off missiles. And this particular night I think this was done the first night we had 165 surface-to-air missiles in the air at one time while they were doing their strikes at their target times.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Wow, and now the B-52s were. At what altitude? Roughly.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:They were up around 35,000 to 40,000 feet. So what happened, ron, was they all took off from Guam and also from Thailand at Utapau Air Base and then they formed up on the way in. There were three aircraft to a cell and these cells would all come through at the same altitude about a mile, and trail as depicted in this painting, and then they drop their bombs and then turn and go back in the same direction out. Well, you could have put a four-year-old on the ground with a stopwatch and figured out when the next one was going to come through and what altitude they were at and what headings they were going to come in on and then go back out on. So they lost quite a few airplanes that way.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So on the third night of the 11 nights, I was up there with Tom and we came in early off the tanker. We always came in early. Actually, we were the first ones in and the last ones out when they were doing the bombing up there. So we came in and as we did, the MiGs came down out of Phookian Airfield, which was just north of Hanoi. We didn't know that right away, but as we came down there was a chaff flight that was dropping metal chaff that was designed to act like tinsel on a Christmas tree. It gets in the way of the radar signals, breaks them up and it's like a big blanket and it covers the radar, the sites, so theoretically they can't see people. That's why they were dropping it. The problem was they had winds that were over 100 miles an hour at altitude and the winds were blowing the chaff right out. But these guys didn't. They weren't too worried about that. The f-4s were, were seeding. This chap came through nearly supersonic, and they were going. They were moving fast, going across the migs, came down from the north and they missed, they overshot them. And guess who was right there when they overshot us? One airplane and five migs, uh, within a five-mile range of us, and so we ended up actually getting on the tails of two of the MiGs at different times.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:The first time we got a MiG-21 right at 12 o'clock, fired a missile at him. The missile didn't tune and it went right by him, but it went right by his cockpit. He must have seen it because it was still lit and so he boogied out, went back home. Next guy came up behind us. We've got him as well. The next missile that we had the last one we had air-to-air missile wouldn't fire and it just was on the aircraft. It didn't work. So we thought real hard about shooting one of our other missiles. That was one of the SAM guided missiles. But that was not going to help us in what we were trying to do that night. So we just gave up and he went home and we went on our way and did our job that night.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:So you find five MiGs and you're in a one single ship formation. Yeah, it was one V5. And you didn't turn away and run. We've got ammunition, we're going after these guys.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, one of the mistakes that was made, we were blacked out. We were smart enough to know that when we got into bad guy territory we weren't going to have lights on and we also weren't in the afterburner. But the MiGs, in their efforts to catch up with these F-4s that were dropping the chaff, going supersonic, they went into afterburner and as soon as they did we saw them and just pulled up behind them. It's like a big spotlight.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:And we caught that and just zeroed in on it. So Al the Weasel missions were single ship missions. You didn't go out in two ship formations.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:We went out in two ship and four ship when we took off, but as soon as we got off the tanker we'd split because we all had individual targets. We had other times, during the daytime day, vfr. Sometimes we'd fly two ships together, but during linebacker we didn't. It was just you were all there by yourself. You were between the surface-to-air missile sites many of them and the bad guys and Cindy, if you'll go down to slide 20. So this was our office, this was our plane 474 on a tanker, and this is how we were configured. We had external tanks, three bags of gas on the airplane and the only other stations that were open were the wing stations in Borden, and we carried the Shrike missiles there. The AGM-45 Shrikes were designed to home in on radar signals. So whether it was a surface-to-air missile site or whether it was a AAA site, an aircraft site, we could shoot them with these missiles and then head away and go home Next slide.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So the painting that you saw earlier, this is what it looked like on a map. The red dots are all surface-to-air missile sites, the blue dots are airfields and this is what we had to cope with. The circle is around Hanoi, which we called Bullseye and we used that as a reference point so that we would know, when they were calling out the targets, at least the airborne targets, where they were. But this just gives you an idea of the landscape. The next slide will show you… Before you move off that slide, at least airborne targets where they were. But this just to give you an idea of the landscape.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:The next slide will show you Now, al, before you move off that slide. Now, for our viewers, hanoi was pretty far north than the North Vietnam it was, and how close on that map are we to the Chinese border.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:The very top of that map is the Chinese border. In fact, if you look on the upper right hand corner, there you can see the brown line. That's the border with China. So it wasn't very far. And we had a night where one of our guys was being shot at up there by a triple A site went up there, put it out of business and flew right over the border. The word got back from Washington that they wanted to see that crew and find out why they were attacking the Chinese. Well turns out we didn't know they were Chinese or not. Someone was shooting at us and we're gonna shoot back at them. Thank you very much. So wisdom prevailed in that and the way we went.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But what I wanna show you here is the red dots being surface-to-air missile sites. They each had a range of about 20 to 25 miles, but this is what the coverage looked like over the target area. That was solid. There was no place you could hide from a surface-to-air missile site that night, and that's kind of what it looked like. You can hide from a surface air missile site that night, and that's kind of what it looked like. So if you go back down to the next slide, these were a little out of order. These were some of the MiGs that we were against working with up there. This was the MiG-21, pretty capable airplane, hard to see, but it also had some limitations of its own. One of them, you can see, is there's not a lot of rear visibility in it, but they're a pretty awesome adversary.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:And for our viewers, just to give them a feel for the type of thinking that has to go into maneuvering against an aircraft like that. The American air crews would study diagrams and they would understand do we engage them in the vertical or the horizontal? And so the vertical you've got G-forces that can sharpen your turn when you're pulling down from above, or if it's horizontal. A lot of that was really dependent upon how quickly you could accelerate or decelerate and maintain turns inside the other aircraft, and so I'm just giving you a sample for the type of information processing that these crews were having to process while they're up there engaged in these types of missions, that these crews were having to process while they're up there engaged in these types of missions.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So we're talking too, ron, about day and night. The North Vietnamese, their pilots, were pretty good during the daytime. They trained during the day. They didn't do much training in their Soviet instruction at night. They didn't like to fly at night and we didn't fly much at night, so that was kind of an even thing. So when we were up there near Linebacker at night, these guys were probably terrified because here's all these missiles coming past them and it's nighttime, what do I do? I can't see anybody. So they just bugged out and went on home that way. So that was pretty much the end of it for us.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:We worked through the end of Linebacker 2, which ended in December. Oh, by the way, we gave during that 11-day timeframe around Christmas. We gave the North Vietnamese Christmas off. We stopped flying on the 23rd and didn't resume again until the 25th, after Christmas. You know well they didn't really like Christmas that much anyway, and why we ever gave that off to them. I think that was for the folks back home. So we didn't look like we were ogres bombing them during Christmas.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But what that did was it allowed them to rearm. We almost ran them out of missiles and anti-aircraft ammunition. We gave them a couple of days to get it back, which they did, and then we went back again. They're shooting at us one more time, next slide. So this is the bloodshed that I carried. This was a polite way to say when you were shot down. Hey, I need a little help here. If you'll help me out, our government will be generous to you and give you rewards for taking care of us or letting us go to places where we can get out of trouble. Thankfully, we never had to use that Next slide, so this was our plain brain damage. 474. It had the distinction of engaging the only MIGs that we ever saw up there in F-4s on two different occasions. One was Tom and I, and then Bob Tidwell and Denny Haney on another night, in a very similar way. So this aircraft actually ended up having four silver stars to its credit.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Before you depart from the slide, tell us about the medals in the upper left-hand corner.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, those are silver stars. That's the third highest medal that you can get for. That's the third highest medal that you can get for hero, heroism, gallantry, next to a medal of honor. Medal of honor, the service crosses and then silver stars. So that's usually reserved for people who are taking care of airplanes, which we did. Although we didn't get kills, we got them to all go home and I guess somebody figured that was a relatively equivalent outcome.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:The patches here on the right. Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna ask you about it.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Yeah, so the patches here in the white is our wild weasel patches. It's the weasel, but he's, you know, his hair is all standing up because he's scared to death. And the terminology on the bottom. There's a little short story that goes with that. The first guys that they put into the Wild Weasel aircraft was an F-100 pilot and an electronic warfare officer who had been flying B-47 bombers in SAC. So they took these guys out to the aircraft for the first time in Southern California in secret. They had the secretary of the Air Force there and all the bigwigs were there to introduce them to their new airplane. The Hun pilot was pretty good with it because it was a F-100. But the UO wasn't so sure and somebody asked him what he thought about and he says wait a minute, you want to do what? You want to put me in the back seat of a fighter with a crazy fighter pilot. You know, and you're going to have us do what? Go troll for surface air missiles so we can what? Shoot them. You know, you got to be kidding me, sort of. That's the unclassified version of the YGBSM. I think our viewers might be able to figure that out, but that became our motto. We actually came up with another one, which was WTIAFB, which was a little bit more sophisticated, and that was one of our guys who had his eyes watered when I came back and he says what the blank am I doing in this business? And that became a subsequent version of that. So, anyway, so that was the wild, weasel business. We all got back home but, uh we, they gave us about two weeks off after we got back to Okinawa to our wives and families. And then, uh, bob Titus and we have a series on him. We did a podcast on Earthquake.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Our boss sent us off to Taiwan and there we took over for the Republic of Taiwan because they had lost their F-5 fighters to the South Vietnamese at the end of the war. They loaned them their fighters so they could win the war. They didn't, and the North Vietnamese then got the aircraft. Well, what that did to Taiwan was it put them at a really disadvantage with the mainland Chinese. They couldn't defend themselves very well. They had F-104 fighters, but that's okay, but they didn't do very well in dogfights. So they sent us over there to be that supplement to them and we would set air defense alert with them and watch for the Chinese to do something, and it wasn't unusual for the klaxons to go off. Everybody goes out to their airplanes. The guys in the F-104s would take off, come back a couple hours later without any missiles on them, wow, and we'd just sit there and look pretty and do our job. The point there is, we were taking care of Taiwan at a time when they really needed it and I think we kind of years later we had 5,000 people at the base we were at and aircraft and munitions of all kinds, especially some special weapons, but we were there to defend them on their territory and we kind of abandoned them, which I wish we hadn't done, anyway.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So after that it was time for me to go back to the United States. Unfortunately, the Air Force, in its its wisdom at the end of the war, decided they needed to put anybody that was coming along into B-52s because they lost all their people. They all quit after the end of the war too. So that was my orders was to go to B-52s, which launched me into a big campaign not to do that. I fought it as much as I could throughout. The Air Force didn't succeed. So the Air Force sent me up to the far north, up to a beautiful KI Sawyer Air Force Base on Lake Superior and it took me about a year to get out. I finally got a direct inter-service transfer with a lot of work to go to the Navy.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So next slide. So I'm saying goodbye to the Air Force, shaking hands on my way out, and now it's off to the United States Navy. And the deal was at the stroke of midnight. I was sworn out of the Air Force as an Air Force captain and into the Navy as a Navy lieutenant an Air Force captain and into the Navy as a Navy lieutenant. And then I got eight days of travel time to go to fighter town in California and San Diego and start training in Navy aircraft there, in F-4s. And this picture, number 27, is me in my new uniform. And that was kind of fun because the Navy had all kinds of fun uniforms. You know the Air Force only had basically about two or three uniforms. You know the Navy had a whole slew of them, but they all look pretty good and this is one of them here. So this is getting used to that. Next slide.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But what I had to do was get used to my new airfield, which had a little less room on it than what I was used to on long you know, 10,000, 20,000 foot runways. The aircraft carrier turned out to be a real challenge and an avia was, in a way, because the jargon was different, terminology was different and you had to learn a whole new set of things about working off an aircraft carrier at sea. And one of the more daunting things was once you took off and got out a little ways. There ain't nothing else around, there's no landmarks, there's no other airfield. You're all by yourself out in this great, big, huge ocean and after a while you can't see a ship. You don't know where you are. You do have instruments which will tell you electronically where the ship might be, but that doesn't always work in far out distances. So that became a challenge. That was something to get used to. Next slide hey Al, did we have GPS?
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:at that time.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:No, that was the problem. We had TACANs TACANs, was it? And before you would take off in a carrier, the ship would give you its projected position when you were going to be coming back. They had a planned route. So they kind of give you a projected position and you put that in your navigation system and that's where you presumably were going to be. Didn't always work out that way. If you had to get more gas because you're running low now you're going to be miles off and again, you know your distance. You know isn't that great and it wasn't unusual for people to be kind of looking around for an aircraft carrier to land on.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Well, and then also the intensity. I mean, you're not just launching one airplane, you're launching multiple airplanes and then recovering multiple airplanes.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:You are. The teamwork on the deck had to be pretty tight. Oh it was, and honestly, ron, it was like watching a symphony, play music, watching all the people and what they were doing on a flight deck, coordinating that and making sure everything worked. It's something really to behold. This is what we were doing it in.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:This is our trusty Tomcat F-14, like you probably might remember from Top Gun. This was a brand-new aircraft, by the way, when Top Gun was filmed, and so I was in one of the first squadrons that went out to sea Next slide. And this is it. This was Fighter Squadron 24, which I was in. This was the first F-14 squadron to be deployed with the Constellation. Now, if you look at this very carefully, I'm right down. If you look where the star is on the airplane, I'm right down at the bottom there in the first row, but right above me two guys right above me, right where the star is on this aircraft, is a guy named Bob Willard. Bob Willard was a lieutenant, junior grade, like a first Lieutenant in the Air Force, brand new guy out of flight training. He'd been to the Naval Academy, played football, but he went on to be a four-star Admiral in charge of the Pacific Command and ended up being a pretty prominent guy in naval aviation.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But his other claim to fame was he was in charge of all the filming of the Top Guns, all the aircraft in the movie Top Gun, and so he's in the credits for that. If you ever see it, his name will show up. His call sign was Rat, rat Willard.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:So there you go. I have to tell you, even though I was proud and honored to be an Air Force aviator when Top Gun came out, it's still one of my favorite movies.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, I can't tell you how popular that was, ron, to get recruiting up. I mean, it was a huge spike and everybody wanted to do that. I remember I was in San Diego after this exercise in F-14s, after the movie came out in the 80s, and we had dinner one night at the officer's club there at Miramar, where Fighter Town was where they filmed the movie. They had a line of women at the front gate which was probably half a mile long waiting to get in so they could go find their Top Gun guy at the officer's club, or maybe Tom Cruise if they got lucky. So that was something to behold. So, anyway, so the next slide. Well, this is. This is again is a picture in front of the Tomcat, one of my favorites, but that was it. That was my last flight. The next slide is me going off into the sunset.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Now I got to tell you that the Navy was a lot more tolerant of good mustaches in those days.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Oh they were. Oh yeah, they had a good number in the Air Force. In fact, I started mine when we got to Vietnam. I had it since then, probably because it was a lucky charm at the time. Yeah, you're right, ron, there was a little bit of that going around. This is the Tomcat in Afterburner at sunset. Fun picture, next one. Well, this is on my I Love Me wall. This is a little bit of the journey, and I like to talk to younger folks this way. You know, ron, and we raise our hands, all of us, when we do it and we swear to defend the Constitution and defend the country. We don't know where we're going exactly. You know, some people might be auto mechanics, some people might be, you know, admin officers or fighter pilots, or you know any number of different positions in the military. But my point is we don't know where we're going exactly and we don't know exactly how we're going to work out, even if we may not get out of it.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:So I keep this in mind a little bit.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:And how many hours did you end up logging by the time you retired? About 27, 2800 I guess. Uh, almost all of it in fighters, with the exception of the b66s, and a lot and 500 plus hours of combat time and 165 combat missions. So this was the result of it. And there's the medals and rank and all that stuff. This is just to kind of remind myself that I'm a split personality half Air Force, half Navy. My family called me, you know, schizophrenic, but that's another issue.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So after that it was retirement at 20 years. My wife didn't want me to stick around any longer than that. She said you've got the first 20, I've got the rest of it. So we did that and I figured, well, I got to do something other than sit around and play golf all the time. So I I ended up getting into the museum business and we're, we're we retired in haw, hawaii. So they had an army museum there in downtown Honolulu and I became the executive director of that, but then quickly got hired away after a couple of years to go to the San Diego Air and Space Museum in San Diego, which is one of the top five aviation and space museums in the country. Pretty big operation. And so while I was there, you can see, on the right over here is an SR-71 Blackbird. On the left is the Delta Dart, which was a seaplane that the Navy developed. It was a jet seaplane, which was a seaplane that the Navy developed. It was a jet seaplane. It didn't work out all that well, had a few issues, but you can see that the SR-71, the Blackbird is a big airplane.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So when we thought about putting this out there on a stick, we went to the city and the city asked us for a diagram where this was going to be, because it's in Balboa Park, which is a big community park of museums there in San Diego. So they asked for a diagram of how this was going to look. We gave them a model, actually, but it was like a small model. It didn't go out very far, it didn't go out beyond where you see the grass here, and so they gave us permission to put it there. Well, we finally got it in from Palmdale where the aircraft factory was, put it out there, and then they came by. The mayor came by one day. Holy smokes, that thing is huge and it's sticking out way over the parking lot. You didn't tell us about that did you so anyway, but this is the next slide is a bit of a picture of the inside of the museum. This, probably we put these big airplanes up in there.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Let's go back real quick, cindy, to the previous picture, the outside of the museum, the walls there, because this was part of the 1938 Pan American exposition in Balboa Park. This was the Ford building. Ford Motor Company built this to reveal their first V8 automobiles that year, but the walls on the outside of this enclosure are about 75, 80 feet tall. And then back again to the next slide, so you can see inside there's lots of room in this big courtyard inside. What we had to do, though, was crane the aircraft over the outside wall and down into the inside, and then be able to put them on posts that we pre-positioned, so that the aircraft fit on their their pillars. It turned out to be a much more difficult job than we thought, especially when you get a little bit of wind that comes into it with a crane, but we, we did it, and the upper part.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:So did they bring it in from above.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Yes, we had a great big crane and when we did this some of that we had an F4 over here, but on the right hand side there's a Ford tri-motmotor which is a huge airplane. It's not all that heavy but but it's. It's difficult just to get up in the air and over a wall and then down back inside and have the fitting on the bottom of the airplane fit on right, exactly on the post that it's going into. There are a couple of anxious moments on that and we had some TV crews out there filming all that, which made the museum director breathe a little harder too. But you can just barely see underneath this PBY, in the courtyard there, there's a fountain, and the fountain you can just kind of basically see. It's made out like a V8 symbol on the v8 automobile and that was done by ford motor company, so it's still there to this day. Well, I'll tell you that is a magnificent setting oh yeah, it is well.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:we used to have big events out here. Um, I had an event here in in the courtyard event here in the courtyard with about five or six hundred people one night. It was right after 9-11. It was the first part of October, first week in October after the attacks, and it was General Paul Tibbetts, the commander of the Enola Gay, who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I'd set him up well ahead of time to be a lecturer and he was kind enough to come out years later after 9-11. But you can imagine the environment there, with people having an attack on the United States, and then here comes Tibbetts in, flying in, so and he gave a great speech. But afterwards one of the reporters said sir, you were coming in over the city here, did you think about maybe, how that would be bombing something like this here? And he didn't miss a beat. He said no, he said that wouldn't bother me a bit, but it was interesting that the mood of the country then had changed. Notably, and where we usually had 100 people or so, there was a full house crowd here just to see him that night. Wow, next, next slide. So so here's the.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:The fun part about the museum business was you get to meet some pretty interesting people. We had a big dinner for the Apollo-Soyuz crew to commemorate their mission in space the first time that the Americans and the Soviets had conducted a space mission together. And the guy on the left-hand side of this photo is Major General Alexei Leonov, who was the Russian cosmonaut. He was the first Russian, first human to walk in space. Then there's me, and then the next guy over is Eric Lindbergh, who's the grandson of Charles Lindbergh, and then the guy on the right-hand side was a chief pilot for American Airlines. We were all just having some drinks outside this dinner when Eric Lindbergh walked by, recognized me and he came in and says hey, what are you guys doing here? And I explained it to him and all of a sudden, the cosmonaut Alexi. We didn't speak a lot of English, but he did pretty well, alexei, we didn't speak a lot of English but he did pretty well.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:He says Lindbergh, lindbergh, and he just his eyes got big and he almost fell down and he was so astounded to be in the presence of Lindbergh's grandson. Wow, he said. He said that's how I learned how to fly. He was my hero in the Soviet Union. So you never know when people like that show up, but it was really something. And I think, ron, as we talked about the problem that Alexei Leonov had, was the first guy in space.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:He was also the first guy in space to have his flight, his spacesuit fill up like a balloon full of air and he couldn't get back in the spaceship oh my god and they had to figure out how to get them back in, which they did by letting out a lot of the oxygen that he had and he almost didn't make it back in and this wasn't a reversal.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:I mean, this is in space and trying to figure it out for the first time, uh, yeah, and there's no crew.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So we talk a lot about merit, and that existed on their side too. I mean, these guys were really good at what they were doing, but between the two of them they figured out how to get him back in, and even when he did that, he wasn't able to move very well. So Valery Kubasov, his co-pilot, grabbed him by the feet and drug him back into the spacecraft. Then they closed it off and they both survived. Otherwise, neither one of them would have made it back again. And I think is there a movie about it.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Yes, there is, and it's a Russian. It was made by the Russians. It's all got English voiceover on it, but it's so well done because the graphics are perfect. The story is amazing and I'd encourage anybody to do that. To go find it. I think it's called Space Walker, but we can post that on a website here. So after that it was then on to my next job. They hired me away from San Diego to build a new museum at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The Air Force at the time Pacific Air Forces was the commander. There was General Dick Myers, who was a guy that I flew wild weasels with there.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:At the end in Vietnam we flew together a lot Great guy, and so he eventually became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff right, he did, and in fact I talked to him the other day.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:We're going to hopefully have him on our podcast here in a future event, so stay tuned for that. But when Dick was PACAF commander, his idea was there's nothing out here that says all the great things that have happened through Korea, through World War II and Vietnam to talk about air power in the Pacific, world War II and Vietnam to talk about air power in the Pacific. He wanted to put up a museum to focus on that. So he brought me out from San Diego and they hired me as a contractor to develop a plan to do that at Hickam Air Force Base. Well, it didn't work out very well, because the Air Force was not happy about having a lot of people on their Air Force Base. So the Navy, though, happened to be trying to figure out what to do with old hangars on Fort Island, which was the island in the middle of Pearl Harbor where all the aircraft, all the ships were anchored the morning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and this is the control tower that they used for the field. There was a runway there, hangars. This tower was actually where they broadcast the message attack on Pearl Harbor. This is no drill. So there's a lot of history here with this particular spot. It's where the war started. So they brought me out to do this and we finally ended up selecting this site on Pearl Harbor to do it. This is one of the hangars there that we built and reconstructed and made it the museum.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:And if you look at slide number 39, cindy. So it took me about two years to convince the Navy to let us have the property there, the hangers and all that to develop into a museum. By the time we finally did, we had to do some fundraising and get some money together to do that, which we did Next slide. So this is what the hangers looked like when we got finished demoing the inside of it. We had to take out what was a gym inside and some other things. So what we ended up with next slide was pretty much an empty hanger once we were able to get the debris cleared out of this. And then we had to get the debris cleared out of this, and then we had to convince the Navy that we were sane enough to be able to build a museum here to make it work. So we ended up with a 65 year lease on the property on Fort Island and now we're on slide 41.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So this is the big hangar pretty much in the center here with checkered covering on the outside. There is where we built a museum in the first of the hangars that were there. This hangar was one of the ones that got shot up. There are two other hangars that went with it that we had to also rebuild, but some of them still had bullet holes in the glass that was on the doors of the hangars. We preserved that, kept all that where it was. The tower over here. This picture has just been taken in the not-too-distant past. We reconditioned it, restored it, made that into a library where the hangar operations were on the shorter part of the structure. But it turned out to be quite a process. But it took us 90 days from the time that we started demolition till we were finished with the museum. Next slide Wow that's amazing.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, I mean, even if we well the other, the part that was difficult about it was this was a World War II structure that didn't really have much in there, just a place that they could put the aircraft and work on it. There was no operating electricity to it. There was no operating water or sewage. There wasn't a grease facility to capture all the grease if we're going to put a restaurant into it, a grease trap. So we had to do those kinds of things. Plus, we had to redo the roof on it and the siding and everything else. So what we had was the structure of four walls and a roof and that was it. So now I had to go out and find some airplanes. So we did that, Went out and begged the Air Force for a few, the Navy for a few got some stuff. But I was also able to find a guy who did some replicas which were able to hang is good, but this was one of our better finds. This was a japanese zero, an a6 m20 the very same kind that actually attacked pearl harbor. This one could have actually been part of that. Uh, we're not sure about that, because this aircraft was found by a guy who was an aircraft recovery expert. He went to Bougainville and they found three zeros there. He was able to get the parts all back and make it into one aircraft, which we've got here, and anybody who's kind of eagle-eyed may notice if they know what a real zero looks like. The engine is a bigger engine. It's actually out of a T-6 Texan. It's a cyclone engine that's American. But they couldn't find the original Sirki engines so they put that into it. This airplane flew for the Confederate Air Force for years until one day they discovered a crack in the wings bar and that ended its flying career. But just as I'm getting ready to open, to get ready to finish opening the museum, we did a deal with these guys to buy the airplane and then it came and we built a recreation of the aircraft carrier Hiryu, which this aircraft was probably on, and did a sort of a diorama exhibit for it, which was kind of cool.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Next slide. But we needed some other things. So here you can see, at the top there's a B-25 bomber. This is a Doolittle Raider that we rebuilt from a standard B-25J. I did a deal with somebody for a B-25 we had at Hickam Air Force Base that we owned, but it was so corroded by the time we got it into the museum we couldn't use it. So I traded it with a guy who had some extra parts. He wanted it for a movie so he could blow it up. So we just traded, even for this other other b25 back here, which actually turned out to be pretty, pretty cool airplane.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But this, uh, this aircraft in the front is an uh, an f4f wildcat. It's a straight wing wildcat. That made it in two versions, one of them for the marines it was straight, the other one for the navy, which had folding wings for the aircraft carriers. This, this aircraft was recovered from Lake Michigan. It was lost during a training accident training new pilot and it sunk to the bottom of Lake Michigan where it was nice and cold and anaerobic, meaning there were no bacteria there and organisms that could get onto it and de-rate it. So the Navy hauled it up. A guy bought it from them, restored it into flying condition and that's where I discovered it at the Museum of Flight up in Seattle and I did a deal with the owner to buy the airplane, met him in a restaurant at the Museum of Flight Museum where it was on temporary display, and I said so how much do you want for this thing? He says I'll sell it to you, but it's going to cost you a million dollars.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Oh my gosh.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:And I kind of gulped real hard and I thought I'm just a poor museum director here, I can't dip into my bank account and do that. But fortunately we had some money in the museum's account. So I wrote out a check for a million dollars, sitting at a table in a restaurant, and that's how we got the airplane. And then we had to transport it by, you know, surface transportation to get it to Hawaii, as we did, by the way, with all these other airplanes, and that was a pretty large task. But we're running out of time. We had to open a museum by Pearl Harbor Day in 2006. And I only had like a month or two to do all this. Next slide.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:So we put it in another diagram. What kind of a staff did you have? Did you have a team of folks that were also on? I did. I had a couple of great.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:I had about five or six people initially and we expanded that right before we opened. But I had a great curator. His name was Mike Wilson. He was a former airline pilot. I had actually had him as an employee, as a curator, in San Diego at the Aerospace Museum. So he came out.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:I talked about it coming out. He was a surfer, so he didn't mind going to Hawaii at all and he's still there doing that. But you'll remember, back to the zero we talked about. This is let's go, cindy. First is slide number 45.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So this is a zero that crashed on the island of Nihi Hau right after during the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a zero. He got shot up and was leaking fuel and attempted to land on the island, not realizing that the guys the two brothers that owned the island had plowed the flat areas on lake beds that were dry up with furrows on them, two and three foot deep furrows. So the Japanese thought they could use this island as an alternate airfield, if you will, for the attack. Anybody got shot up, ran out of gas, would land here. They parked a submarine off the edge of the island so that they could get the guys and get them back home again. Well, unfortunately this guy realized he couldn't do that. He couldn't land there, attempted to land on this kind of sloping hill but it didn't work and he ran into a whole bunch of very thick brush, crashed the airplane and this is what it looked like when he finished with it. But he got out. So this aircraft sat on the island all those years.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Unfortunately, when at the end of the attack on Pearl Harbor, on this island, which was totally remote, it only had native Hawaiians and these two brothers that were the owners of the island living there. So when the attacks were all over, the Army sent a team of sailors and soldiers out to recover what they could from this wreck so we could analyze it. They picked up a few things and spent about a day there, but on the way out this young lieutenant wags his finger at the guys on the island and says you can't talk about this with anybody. This is national security secrets, it's top secret, it's state secrets. You can't ever talk about this and anything that you've got that you might have picked up is government property and it's top secret. You can't do anything with this and anything that you've got that you might have picked up is government property. It's top secret, you can't do anything with it and, of course, they're local Hawaiian natives. So, okay, you know, away they went.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So years later, when I was doing the museum, I got wind of this from the owners there. I went over, looked at it. What was left of it wasn't much, but what we decided to do was bring it back over to the museum, along with the tractor that they used to plow up all the furrows and everything, and make this a story about the first successful battle of Niihau, because the rest of the story is the pilot who survived was captured. He was put in a barn and locked up, but there was a pair of Japanese expatriates who were also there working for the brothers. They actually freed him because they could communicate with him.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:He ended up getting a shotgun, went back to the Zero, got the machine guns out of the Zero and captured the whole damn town, held them hostage for about four or five days and they were terrified. It was just through the actions of one great big Hawaiian guy there and his wife that they were able to get this guy and they threw him up against the lava rock wall and killed him, and that was the end of it. So that was the first battle that we won during World War II. How did you get access to?
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:that story.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, the story was known. But there was somebody I knew on Oahu, where we were in Honolulu, that knew the brothers well and he said hey, look, I'll introduce you to them. And so we went over there. And nobody went over there. I mean, there's no roads there, there's no airport, there's no TV, no radio. It's a really isolated place. Only way you can get in there is on helicopter. And so we got them to use their helicopter, went over, took a look at it and I realized there was a real good story in this and it was also a good way to capture the Hawaiian audience, because you know they were saying, hey, there's airplane museums anywhere we can go look at airplanes. Well, here's something that you can't find anywhere else and it's about Hawaii.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So we went over there and recovered the remains of the aircraft that the kids used to play on on the island all the time. Go back, cindy, now to slide 44. So went over there, took pictures of where the remains were and this is what it looked like. Uh, we came back and just redid the whole thing, with the backdrop and everything, just before we found it on the island as if it was still in the red dirt with the shrubs and stuff in the background. This was what was left of the zero. Uh, not much, but, but we put it right next to the restored zero that was on the flight deck which this represented. So here's the real remains, along with the real zero, parts of which may have actually been part of another zero that did the attack. So we thought that worked out pretty well. Wow, so we finished the museum. Wow, so we finished the museum.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:I have a trivial question, but when you say the pilot got out of that airplane, did he climb out of the aircraft or did he parachute out?
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Oh no, no, he climbed out, he crash landed on it, he collapsed the gear and came down and he crushed the whole bottom undercarriage of the aircraft because he was landing her essentially on lava rock which is very jagged and very rough so he destroyed the airplane pretty much and and it caught on fire so he was able to get out.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But but anyway, that's an interesting story. So so we opened in on Pearl Harbor Day of 2006. We had a whole bunch of really great people there for it. We had Tom Brokaw, chuck Yeager, wally Schirra, the astronaut, who were all on our board, and General Tibbetts. We also had a whole bunch of Japanese pilots who were flying Zeros and Zeke bombers who decided to show up too. That was a little awkward for the Pearl.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Harbor survivors. But it ended up working out okay. So from there, next slide 40, yes, museum. So I retired from that for about the third time. I decided that was enough museum work.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Unfortunately, when I moved back to Texas they found me about a month later not too long and hired me off to be the head of the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas, nevada, and they needed somebody who knew how to expand the museum and also how to make it a little bit more visible. So that's why they brought me in. It wasn't a big place but it was kind of a nice, kind of retirement museum, if you will. But their story was about testing nuclear weapons in the desert north of Las Vegas, which in itself was a kind of a neat American story. People would go to Las Vegas to gamble, then they'd go out there in the diving boards near the swimming pool and watch the bombs go off in the distance. So it was kind of a cultural kind of thing. So that was kind of fun.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But while I was there, the CIA declassified most of the information about Area 51. And why is that important? Well, because Area 51 was immediately adjacent to the north part of the Nevada test range where they were doing all the bomb testing. You could literally go from gate to gate, you know, right into the one or the other. So we figured, well, that might be an interesting story to include in this museum.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So as I started talking to my curators about the great technology that was done out there stealth all of the spy aircraft, including the SR-71, the A-12 at the time, which turned into the SR-71.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:But those were so advanced that the technology run was so amazing with those aircraft and what we were doing for stealth technology, plus a lot of other stuff that happened later with, you know, the YF-117 Nighthawks and all too. But so I said, look, guys, we can put this story together. We'll tell about all these great things we can do now, right, and they said, yeah, boss, but what are we going to do about the UFOs and the aliens? And I said, excuse me, well, people are going to ask where are they? Because there's a big rumor that there's aliens and UFOs out there and they're hiding in front of American people and keeping it from us. And I said, stop, stop, stop, I don't want to hear that. But they said, no, that's okay, and we have some things and some people we know who can help you with that, and they have artifacts and things like that.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So I said, all right, we'll do this on one condition. We're going to tell this is a two-part story. One story is about how we really did things and how amazing that was and still is to this day, and how it's worked out for us, and then the second story can be about UFOs and aliens and rumors that go with it. And so that's what we did. But the next slide is what we call this exhibit, area 51 myth or reality, and, and you'll notice, ron, the, the shape of this ufo that's there. That's actually the, the head-on view of the sr71 or the a12 it's just a head-on profile uh, you know, profile.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:So that's why we were doing this kind of double entendre thing with is it real or is it not real. So that got me into the alien business and here's one of the exhibits we did in the museum me hanging out with one of the UFOs here. Sorry, the aliens and UFOs, but along the way next slide we were doing a lot of advertising for this locally in the media there to get people to come out and see it, and it was hugely successful. I even had a Smithsonian conference there that talked about UFOs and things and I had to convince the Smithsonian Institution that we could do that, because they said, hey, we're not into UFOs and aliens, we don't do that at Smithsonian. And I said, yes, you do. And they said, no, we don't. Yes, we do.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Because I had a guy who was a reporter I was working with who had actually been a part of a conference they did back there in the 70s talking about aliens and UFOs at the Smithsonian. So we convinced him that that was an okay thing to do as a Smithsonian affiliate. But this advertisement we were doing we did it on this one radio station. It was a CBS radio station in Las Vegas, and so I was doing a lot of advertising. When they called me up one day, the manager did and he says, look, how'd you like to be on the radio every Saturday night and you can talk about this with people and you can talk about things that go bump in the night and aliens and all that might be interesting advertising for your exhibit? I said, yeah, I could probably do that. I've done some of that before.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Yeah, so what year was this?
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:This was 2013. And so so they were doing this every night for a night and I did it for a month or so and finally, just in casual conversation one day, I said, look, this is. And I said why did? Why did you pick me? He says, well, we needed somebody to fill a slot. And you're kind of a personable guy.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:The guy we had here wasn't. He was kind of a cynic, and not only that, he was very conservative and he was kind of a nutcase, and so his ratings weren't good and we just fired him. We said sorry, can't work here anymore. This was CBS radio. And I said, well, that's interesting. Well, can you tell me who that was? And he said, yeah, his name was Mark Levin. And that's what I said. I said, really. So. So I filled in for Mark Levin. Thereafter, I even used a little bit, a little bit of his shtick, you know, about being in a nuclear hard bunker underneath the ground and we just had a lot of fun with it and we'd get some really interesting people that we had on the show and we'd talk to them about alien abductions and, you know, ufos underground at Area 51 and big caverns and all that. So that's me.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Have you met Mark and had a chance to commiserate with him?
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:No, I haven't actually, but I'm working on that. That's one of my projects, sir. I think I'll have to get to him because he's into this, as you know, ron, as we are from the Marxist standpoint and from the abuses of government and he's a smart guy, so, yeah, he'd be good to have on a podcast. But what that taught me was being able to work with people and take differing views on things. I mean, I had a lady one day. She called me up and she says I want to talk to you about chemtrails.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:I says what the heck is that? She says those things in the air, you know those big white lines in the sky. There are airplanes up there spreading chemicals and they're trying to kill us all. And I said how do you know that? Oh, I know FEMA's been buying body bags and no one will talk to us about what's in those fumes that they're putting out up there. And I said, lady, do you have any idea how much liquid you'd have to take up there to spread around for that? And the aircraft, first of all, wouldn't be able to get off the ground. But if you're putting it out of the engines, the engines would fail and wouldn't work. Oh, I didn't think about that. So we had some very interesting discussions with people, but it was a good way for me to gain a little bit of skills in what we're doing here now. So that led to the last slide, which is our Stars and Stripes podcast.
Col. Ron Scott, USAF ret:Well, al, I'll tell you what. What a great story. And you know, as I listened and watched, uh, you know the. The thing that really stands out to me is number one. You made history in your earlier flying days and, and now you're into preserving history. You've done it through the museums and now you're doing it through these stars and stripes podcasts, where you're doing it through the Stars and Stripes podcast, where you're interviewing people that have been there. They've done that and a chance to reflect on what it's all about. So I'll tell you what Stars is so blessed to have you in that seat narrating these podcasts, and I thank you for that.
CDR Al Palmer, USN ret:Well, Colonel, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you and for our listeners out there. We'll have more of these kind of things to talk about, hopefully, and if you have any questions, if you're interested, go to our website, starsus, and you can see what Colonel Scott and the rest of our brilliant folks here are doing.