<p>In many ways, the often-overlooked KC-135 was the most important aircraft of the era. Its trademark, in most examples, was the J57 turbojet engine which kicked back a gritty exhaust of black soot (as it did when powering most B-52 models) and the KC-135 was surely the plainest, least remarkable aircraft ever to rate a cult following. But never again would any serious plan for employing air power in warfare exclude air refueling as essential in virtually every combat sortie. As an important spin-off, the Air Force's need for a jet tanker was the force which rendered affordable the development of the commercial jet airliner.
</p>
<p>On 16 October 1963, a B-58 of the 305th Bomb Wing at Bunker Hill AFB, Indiana dashed from Tokyo to London in an elapsed time of eight hours 35 minutes (plus a few seconds), averaging about 938 mph (1,510 km/h), an official speed record, for the 8,028-mile (12,920-km) journey. The B-58 was on its way out of inventory, but the bomber was not. With the B-52 Stratofortress now out of production and expected to need replacement by the end of the 1960s, the Air Force invested more than $5 billion into the North American B-70 Valkyrie heavy bomber to replace the B-52—only to cancel the B-70 programme when it was well advanced. Plans to retire the B-52 began anyway (in May 1965, with the first B-52 removed from duty a year later). Everyone assumed that a new bomber would have to come along in another year or two.
</p>
<p>It is unlikely that anyone contemplated, let alone assumed, the developments that actually came along in the early 1960s; President Kennedy's assassination, the civil rights campaign, and growing dissent in the public sector were all signs that the world's most powerful nation was running headlong into trouble. Still, blue-suit staff officers at SAC headquarters and in the Pentagon's D Ring largely ignored the warning signs and kept the strategic nuclear force at the top of their priority list. The operational debut of the F-4 Phantom (in 1962), the despatch of a few B-26 Invaders and T-28 Trojans to Vietnam (also in 1962), and modest investment in a counter-insurgency aircraft which became the OV-10 Bronco (in 1965) all were consistent with the course the world was taking, but ran against the grain in the minds of bomber generals. None imagined, indeed no human could foresee, that far from fighting a trans-Polar nuclear war, the Air Force and the nation—so confident, so triumphant in the postwar era and especially the early Kennedy period—were about to become hopelessly lost in the jungles of South East Asia.
