The Battle of Palmdale (LBE)

While I was recuperating from a nasty head cold last week, my Dad loaned me a book to read about the X-planes like the Bell X-1, in which the then Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and North American X-15 Rocket Plane.

The book was really interesting - but its focus was on the various crashes suffered by the experimental planes and how they came to their dire predicaments and sometimes fatal ends and attempts by the author to find their crash sites often many years later, hoping to find remaining debris to place it in his museum.

The book's very lengthy appendix has literally dozens of pages of plane crashes that have occurred in the vicinity of the Edwards Air Force Base, listed line by line.

While not exactly entertaining fare, I found myself riveted to it...and after the NyQuil madness cleared I found myself wondering if I had been hallucinating when I read about a battle over Palmdale, California.

So I went back and checked and indeed, Palmdale is one of few Southern California communities to have suffered through an air-launched rocket attack. This historical incident is worthy of Ripley's Believe it or Not!

Following World War II, a number of Grumman F6F Hellcats were converted to target drones. On August 16, 1956, one of these radio-controlled Hellcats was launched by the Navy from Point Mugu as a target for a missile test.

The Hellcat took off at 11:34 a.m., climbing out over the Pacific. As controllers attempted to maneuver the drone toward the target area over the ocean, they realized it was not responding to radio commands [and heading for downtown Los Angeles!]

With the runaway aircraft headed for a major metropolitan area, the Navy called the Air Force for assistance. At the time, Oxnard Air Force Base was five miles from the Navy’s Point Mugu facility.

The Air Force scrambled a pair of Northrop F-89 Scorpions from the 437th Fighter Interceptor Squadron to shoot down the [Grumman F6F] Hellcat, which had been painted bright red for high visibility.

The F6F was a very successful, rugged, but long obsolete by 1956, propeller-driven, WWII fighter plane that was used extensively in the Pacific against the Japanese.



The Northrop F-89 Scorpions scrambled by the Air Force were the latest thing for combating the ‘Red Menace’ of the Communists.

The jet crews, which consisted of a pilot and a radar observer, waited for the drone to reach an area that was relatively unpopulated. But when the crews attempted to fire, a design glitch in the automatic fire-control system for the Mighty Mouse rockets repeatedly prevented launches while the attack planes were turning.

The Air Force fliers opted to abandon their planes’ automatic system and fire their rockets manually in an attempt to bring the drone down.

The interceptors made their first attack run as the Hellcat crossed over the mountains near Castaic. Firing salvos of 42 rockets each, both planes missed the target, he said. "Rockets blazed through the sky and plunged earthward to spark brush fires.

While fires burned in its wake, the errant drone meandered northwest, toward Palmdale. As it did, the jets followed, expending the rest of their weapons in two more salvos of 32 and 30 rockets each as the two interceptors attempted to bring the Hellcat down ... What happened was that the obsolete, unpiloted, unguided, unarmed, propeller-driven drone evaded the state-of-the-art jet interceptors. In all, 208 rockets were fired without scoring a single hit.

As the drone passed over Palmdale’s downtown, Mighty Mouse rockets fell like hail. Miraculously, no one was hurt, and the [F6F] drone finally exhausted its fuel supply, sputtered and fell, crashing into an open field eight miles east of the Palmdale airport.

According to the Aug. 23, 1956, edition of the Valley Press, one of the air-to-air rockets fell to earth and nearly hit a station wagon being driven by 17-year-old Larry Kempton of Leona Valley when a rocket exploded on the street in front of his car. Fragments from the explosion shredded Kempton’s left front tire and put 17 holes in his radiator, hood and windshield.

Shrapnel also damaged a home near Avenue Q-8 and Third Street East and a home near Avenue Q-6 and Fourth Street East. Edna Carlson, who lived in the home on Third Street East, said a chunk of shrapnel from one Air Force rocket burst through the front window of her home, ricocheted off the ceiling, went through a wall and came to rest in a kitchen cupboard. J.R. Hingle had pieces of metal blasting into his garage and home on Fourth Street East, nearly striking a guest named Lilly Willingham. Both homes are still standing and in use.

Three good-size fires and numerous smaller blazes were ignited in Palmdale by the rockets, in addition to the fires near Santa Clarita. The Placerita Canyon fire burned 75 to 100 acres before being brought under control by a team more than 200 firefighters, who helped save the Bermite [Oil processing] plant.

Another fire was seven miles north of Castaic on the old Ridge Route and burned 50 to 75 acres before being brought under control late in the afternoon" by about 100 firefighters.

The third and largest blaze was in Soledad Canyon. At sundown, it had burned over 300 acres of heavy brush and continued to burn the day after the disastrous drone debacle despite the best efforts of 350 Forest Service firefighters. Eventually, 500 firefighters were called to the Soledad Canyon blaze, which was brought under control only after 350 acres had burned.

The Battle of Palmdale was won without a single shot striking the intended target.

Is it any wonder I thought I had been hallucinating?

The U.S. Military still buys these rockets to this very day.

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