A COLD WAR VETERAN'S MEMORIAL

The sun was going down at 8:00 p.m. on a warm September evening in 1958. August Kahl and his 15 year old son, Loren, were loading tomatoes into their farm truck so they could get an early start from their farm in Inver Grove Heights to the market at South St. Paul, Minnesota the next morning.

The sound of jet engines high overhead were nothing new to the Kahls. They had heard the sound before. There were the new jet airliners landing at Wold-Chamberlain Field 15 miles away, and there were the Air Force bombers on training missions that could be heard every so often. But tonight, the sound seemed unusual. Loren Kahl followed the path of the sound as it circled around him. It was getting louder. And louder. And all at once the farm lights blinked out and there was a muffled "booom" from an area on the other side of the barn.

The Kahls were enveloped in a fireball that swirled around both sides of the barn. They began to run toward the farmhouse nearby...but the fireball seemed to surround them. The ground was on fire and a noisy hot wind was blasting at their unprotected skin. Loren could feel the skin on his face tighten from the heat. August Kahl tripped on something and fell headlong into the roaring ground fire, regained his footing and managed to find his way to the house.

Inside the house, six other members of August's family were struggling to understand what had happened as the house was engulfed in flames. Part of the stairway had been carried away and grandpa Kahl needed help to get to the bottom. They managed their way out of the house and staggered some distance away from the heat to look back and catch their breath, in shock and aghast at the scene.

Only scant minutes before, the cause of the massive explosion and fire had been an Air Force B-52D Stratofortress maneuvering at 36,400 feet overhead. On a Cold War training mission to simulate a nuclear strike on the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the plane had been home to six flight crew members and two instructors. The plane, from the 69th Bomb Squadron, 42nd Bomb Wing of the Strategic Air Command (SAC), had departed Loring Air Force Base, Limestone, Maine earlier in the day. It had made ECM runs at Bath, Maine; Albany, New York; Williamsport, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Bellefontaine, Ohio. The flight had continued to Richmond, Virginia where a GPI Nav-Bomb run was started which was to terminate at Minneapolis. There it would be scored for bombing accuracy by the Air Force Bombing Radar Site at Osceola, Wisconsin.

Four times the big plane crossed the target, with "bombs away" for the fourth run at 2016 CST, Minneapolis. As it rolled off the last bomb run, something went wrong. An elevator trim "excursion" began to send tremors through the ship. Whatever happened will never be known, for at this point, parts of the tail assembly broke off the airplane, and it began a high-speed plunge straight for the ground. There was no remark heard from the crew, no cockpit voice recorder or black box to record the last moments. From 36,400 feet, the ship gyrated toward the earth, and in 108 seconds, ground radar showed it had crossed through 8000 feet. Moments later, control tower personnel at Wold-Chamberlain Field across the river, witnessed an explosion in the direction of Inver Grove Heights. The plane's main structure had impacted on the August Kahl farm, just a few miles south of the South St. Paul Airport.

Though the crew had remained silent, they had never-the-less taken action. Six crew members had ejection seats and four of them fired themselves out into the dusk almost immediately. The two instructors, with no ejection seats had to find an open hatch and leap to safety. The centrifugal force of the planes gyrations kept all four pinned to their crew positions, and they were unable to exit. They rode the plane into the ground, being consumed in the explosion and fire.

Of the four that ejected, all were subjected to a 600 mile per hour jet-stream outside the ship. Flailing arms and legs and contact with the aircraft structure produced fatal injuries to three. They were found long after the searchers and investigators arrived, still strapped in their useless seats, their parachutes ripped to shreds by the air blasts. The co-pilot was the singular survivor. He landed in a tree on a farm adjoining the Kahl property. Neighbors helped him walk to a waiting ambulance sometime after the crash.

Aerial photos taken the morning after the crash showed that the plane had come in at a flat angle and exploded. The blast tore off the top of a billboard alongside State Highway 52, just 50 yards from the impact spot. Five craters marked the positions of the fuselage and each of the four twin-engine pods. One of the engines had bulleted through the Kahl farmhouse, smashing off the lower staircase. Pieces, large and small, littered the entire farm and spread across neighboring farms. Parts of the aircraft's tail were found some three miles to the West. The Kahl family survived, though each member was horribly burned. Loren Kahl's face and arms, today, bear witness to the awful event.

Though this event was traumatic, and carried as front page news in the local papers for the next two days, apart from convincing the local citizens that the plane was not carrying a nuclear weapon, the accident was soon hushed up. The area had been cordoned off, recoverable pieces of the aircraft were taken to the big Air Force hangar at Wold where they were laid out for the Air Force accident investigation team. No further news was given to the public. Very little information about this accident reached the major media. Aviation Week Magazine, the weekly journal for worldwide aviation news, for example, never carried a single mention of the event.

But the Air Force did take action. As a result of the investigation, numerous changes were adopted in both the B-52 ejection procedures and in the design of the ejection seats themselves. That many B-52 crew members were able to eject safely from future stricken Stratofortress's over Vietnam and beyond is a testament to the costly lessons learned from the crash.

The accident had happened on September 16, 1958. In the Fall of 1995, 35 years later, a contractor had been designated to landscape the crash area preparatory to apartments being built on the site. Jake Ebertz, a bulldozer operator unearthed a large boulder and pushed it to one side. At a meeting of his model airplane club, Ebertz told a fellow member, Noel Allard, about the boulder. Allard had been researching local aviation and knew about the crash. In January, 1996, the pair made a presentation to the Inver Grove Heights City Council suggesting that a memorial be built at the site to commemorate the lives lost. The boulder would serve as the perfect platform for a memorial plaque. In the following weeks the Board let Ebertz and Allard know that they had approved the plan. Allard, immediately designed and produced a zinc plaque for the stone and had a mortuary service mount the plaque permanently. The plaque memorialized the seven persons who lost their lives. Ebertz suggested they have the name of the surviving co-pilot, Captain Jack Craft, engraved below the plaque. That was also accomplished. A dedication ceremony was held on September 14, 1996.

The stone lay at the crash site, the intersection of Broderick and Brooks Boulevards for four years, then was moved 100 yards away for another three years. During which time, the planned apartment complex was built nearby.

In 2003 the City of IGH then planned to construct a water tower very close to the stone marker and the boulder was again moved, this time to a place in front of the airport terminal building at Fleming Field, South St. Paul, where it resided until 2006 by which time the City of IGH had constructed a beautiful memorial spot near the original crash site. The memorial site included a three-car parking spot, a gravel base for the stone and natural prairie plantings around the stone. The city added twin flagpoles in 2018. The local EAA chapter put in solar lights the same year.

Several aviation groups contributed to the cost of the plaque and its mounting. Contributing to the memorial were the Twin City Aero Historians; Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame; Planes of Fame, East Museum; Air Guard Historic Foundation; American Wings Museum, Anoka County Airport; Commemorative Air Force, Southern Minnesota Wing, St. Paul; and the Air Force Association, Rawlings Chapter, St. Paul, MN. If you are proud of your country, and your freedom, you may want to visit the site and offer a thank you to those lost Cold Warriors.

The memorial can be found at Broderick and Brooks Boulevards, accessed from the 80th Street South exit from MN Highway 52 in Inver Grove Heights, MN.