was hard-packed dirt. Not that it mattered — usually nobody was rushing to get in or out. Palomares was just a tiny farming village in the back of beyond. It didn’t even appear on most maps of Spain.
Palomares sat on the southeastern coast of Spain, about forty miles south of Cartagena. To the south lay the Costa del Sol, booming with foreign tourists and high-rise hotels. To the north stretched the Costa Blanca, also popular with European travelers. Between them lay a Costa without a catchy name and the town of Palomares. Palomares had a beach, the Playa de Quitapellejos, but its sand was hard-packed and windswept, unattractive to both tourists and townspeople. The town itself rested on a gentle rise about a half mile inland.
Despite their proximity to the Mediterranean, the villagers of Palomares worked the land, rather than the sea. Around the town lay the evidence of their labor — flat plains furrowed with farmers’ fields.
On either side of the fields, mountain ranges ran down toward the sea. The “mountains” were actually large hills, deep brown from a distance and desert tan up close, thick with scrubby gray-green bushes, prickly pear cactus, and tall, spiky agave. The landscape looked remarkably like the American Southwest — so much so, in fact, that areas nearby had served as sets for spaghetti westerns. A few years earlier, Clint Eastwood had graced the desert to film his hit movie
For the most part, the 250 or so families living in Palomares farmed the land or raised sheep. In ancient times, people had mined and smelted ore from the nearby hills. But the mines had been tapped out long ago, and farming now seemed the only real option. But it was not an easy one. The town lay in the Almeria desert, the most arid region of Europe. The region is so parched that when people speak of a “river,” they actually mean a dry riverbed. In the rare cases where a river runs with water, locals call it a
Faced with these tough conditions, forward-thinking farmers had formed an irrigation cooperative about a decade before. With money borrowed from local banks, the men had sunk nearly a hundred wells and created a pumping and irrigation system to water the dusty fields. They also started using chemical fertilizers. These upgrades allowed the farmers of Palomares to scrape together some respectable crops, including wheat, beans, alfalfa, and, most important, tomatoes. In Palomares, tomatoes ruled the roost. They were the town’s crown jewels, its salvation. Under the relentless desert sun, they grew into magnificent, succulent red orbs, prized throughout Europe. In 1965, the town sold 6 million pounds of tomatoes to cities in Spain, Germany, and England.
Tomatoes had given the tiny, isolated town a measure of prosperity. Though most villagers still lived in small, low houses attached to animal pens, they kept the outside walls neatly whitewashed and the inside rooms brightened with electric lights. The townspeople had enough money to support seven general stores and three taverns. Some villagers still rode donkeys, but others had made the leap to motorized transport. All told, the residents owned fourteen cars and trucks, a handful of tractors, and a lot of scooters. Exactly eight television sets flickered their blue glow in Palomares. Most homes had radios. Few, however, had indoor plumbing. The nearest phone, in the town of Vera, was fifteen miles away.
Manolo Gonzalez was more privileged than most of his fellow townspeople. His father, a prosperous landowner, was known as the “Mayor of Palomares.” Palomares didn’t actually have a mayor, but the elder Gonzalez worked for the post office in Cuevas de Almanzora, about fifteen miles away.
Since Cuevas was the seat of local government and Gonzalez was the senior civil servant in town, any local administrative duties naturally fell to him. His son Manolo had inherited some of this status. A cheerful, outgoing man, Manolo trained as an electrician and never had to work the fields.
He and Dolores were good-looking and youthful, more middle-class than peasant farmer. They lived in a house adjoining the school. The house had a bathroom with a small sink and toilet but no running water. Like almost everybody else in Palomares, Dolores had to carry water from a nearby well.
Gonzalez drove his little Citroen down rutted tracks past fields of ripening tomatoes and headed to the nearby hills. He had seen an orange-and white parachute falling to earth and wanted to investigate. When he arrived at the chute, he saw an ejection seat nearby, with a man still strapped to it. The seat had toppled forward and arched over the limp body. Another villager had already reached the man and started to cut the straps with a pocketknife. Together, Gonzalez and the other man tipped the seat back and looked at the man. It was Ivens Buchanan, the B-52 radar operator who had ejected from the bomber and pulled his parachute out by hand. Still alive but barely conscious, Buchanan shivered violently. He said nothing except “I’m cold, I’m cold.” Gonzalez drove the injured man to the medical clinic in nearby Vera. Then he sped back to Palomares to see what else he could do.
Wendorf’s bomber had not been alone in the sky at the time of the crash. It had flown the entire route in tandem with another B-52 from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. For the first third of the flight, Wendorf’s plane had taken the lead. The two planes had planned to switch places after their turn around the Mediterranean. But after the first refueling, because of a minor radar malfunction in Wendorf’s plane, he had relinquished the lead to the other bomber.
When Wendorf’s plane exploded, the other bomber, with its own companion tanker plane, was a couple of miles ahead, completing its own midair refueling. This gave the boom operator — the only man with a backward- facing window — a view of the explosion. The boomer shouted the news to the cockpit, and the tanker crew radioed the news to their base in Moron. At 10:27 a.m., the Moron Command Post radioed the Sixteenth Air Force headquarters at Torrejon Air Base near Madrid with the first news of the crash. The call sign for the undamaged tanker was “Troubador One Two”:
Moron: We just received a call from Troubador One Two. He reports smoke and flames aircraft behind him, and he has no contact with aircraft. We’re getting coordinates now.
Torrejon: Roger, thank you very much.
Torrejon: (Two minutes later) Was that in his aircraft or in the aircraft behind him?
Moron: That was the aircraft behind him. Troubador One Two says they have not made contact with the number two bomber. Reported sighted smoke and flames behind their refueling formation.
The tanker, after finishing the refueling, wheeled back to survey the scene. Flying at 4,000 feet, the crew reported what appeared to be the tail section of the B-52 in a dry riverbed, burning wreckage about a mile inland, and still more aircraft debris farther toward the hills. Meanwhile, Moron reported the incident to SAC:
Moron: Believe possible mid-air collision KC-135 and airborne alert B-52. It is not confirmed at this time. Was reported from Troubador One Two. The boomer sighted a burning aircraft spinning behind him in the formation. They have been unable to contact either the bomber or the tanker. The KC-135 from Moron Tanker Task Force… The B-52 from Seymour. Of course, weapons aboard.
As the news crisscrossed Spain and the Atlantic, the phone rang on the desk of a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force lawyer named Joe Ramirez. Ramirez worked in the staff judge advocate’s office at the U.S. Air Force base at Torrejon. The person on the phone told Ramirez to get over to headquarters on the double.
Ramirez grabbed a notebook, told his boss about the call, and hustled across the street to headquarters. In the war room, things were humming. “The general was there, and people were running around back and forth,” said Ramirez. “We had sketchy information at the time, but I did learn that there had been a crash between a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker.” Ramirez knew that those were big planes and that the tanker had been full of fuel. A crash between them could be catastrophic.
Ramirez had never heard of Chrome Dome and had never seen a nuclear weapon. He worried more about damage from falling aircraft debris. He learned that the crash had happened over a remote part of Spain and was told to be ready to fly down there soon, probably within an hour, to help assess the damage on the ground. Ramirez went back to his office, grabbed a “claims kit” full of forms, and called his wife. He told her that there had been a crash and he had to go somewhere in southern Spain but would probably be back that evening or the next day. Around 12:30 p.m., he boarded a cargo plane with thirty-five other members of the disaster control team and headed for a town that nobody had ever heard of. He still had the keys to the family car in his pocket.
