Some of the survivors will be back in town April 24-27 for the annual reunion of the B-36 Association, where they will relive the mission that changed their lives.

    It began at 4:27 p.m. Feb. 13, 1950, when a Strategic Air Command Peacemaker B-36B bomber lifted off from Eielsen Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, en route to Fort Worth and Carswell Air Force Base on a simulated combat raid.

    Piloted by Capt. H.L. Barry, the six engine bomber carried 17 crewmen and a 10,000 pound World War II "Fat Man" atomic bomb. According to Air Force records, the weapon did not contain the plutonium core needed to create an atomic explosion.

    Most of the survivors, now in their 70's and 80's, recall how the flight turned into a nightmare as the plane approached the west coast of Canada.

    "We started picking up some ice," said retired Master Sgt. D. Thrasher, 75, of Cross Plaines, west of Fort Worth, then a staff sergeant and gunner on the B-36.

    "Icing was no problem, but then the carburetors on three of the six engines started icing up and that meant big trouble. When the three engines caught fire, it was time to leave."

    Retired Lt. Col. Paul E. Gerhart, then a lieutenant, was the plane's radar officer and it was his duty to drop and detonate the 10,000 pound weapon to keep it from falling into enemy hands.

    "It was about midnight when I salvoed the bomb", he recalled recently in a telephone conversation from his home in Newport News. Va. "It detonated about 4,000 feet above the Pacific."

    The explosion was from the 32 high-explosive "lenses" designed to crush the plutonium core and trigger the chain reaction. With no core, the blast triggered no nuclear reaction, but destroyed the bomb.

    The crew began bailing out.

    Capts. W.M. Phillips and T.F. Schreier; Lt. A. Holie and Staff Sgts. E.W. Pollard and N.A. Straley were the first out and they apparently landed in the Pacific. Their bodies were never found.

    The remaining men followed, but by then, the flaming bomber had reached British Columbia's Vancouver Island and the 12 survivors landed in the heavy growths of pine trees that covered the island.

    Thrasher was among the first down on a dark, freezing cold midnight.

    "I landed in a tree and hung up, but I released the harness anyway and tumbled down into hip-deep snow," he said. "I took out my one-man rubber dinghy, inflated it and crawled under it and went to sleep."

    The next morning, he yelled as loud as he could, got an answering yell and spent the day walking toward the others and wound up with a party of four survivors led by Barry, the pilot.

    "We made a teepee out of a parachute and I remember that we emptied our pockets and wallets of any paper we had to make a fire, except money," Ford said.

    "Once we got the fire going, we tried to dry our socks and get warm, but it was a pretty miserable night, although I didn't even come down with a cold after all that exposure."

    Barry's party managed to make its way to the coast for a rescue by a Canadian Fisherman after about 40 hours on the ground.

    Two other crew members, then Lt. C.G. Pooler and Staff Sgt. Vitale Trippodi, were not as lucky.

    Trippodi, 69, of Brigham City, Utah, was left hanging upside down in a tree with an injured shoulder. Hours later, he was found by Barry and co-pilot Lt. R.P. Whitfield.

    "They managed to get me out of the tree, but I couldn't walk because of frostbitten feet so they made me comfortable at the foot of the tree and told me that they couldn't stay with me; they had to go find help for the others, but that they would come back for me", Trippodi said in a phone conversation from his home.

    "I lay there in that ice and snow for a day or two until I was found by a Canadian rescue team, who got me to a ship."

    The last crewman rescued was Pooler, 82, a flight engineer.

    "Getting out of a tree, I fell 40 feet and broke my right ankle," the retired Air Force major said in a phone conversation from his New Braunfels home.

    He limped a mile down the mountain to a frozen lake and settled in to await rescue.

    "I had one of those search and rescue signaling mirrors and I got it out and began signaling a rescue plane that flew right over me." Pooler said. "It flew right over me twice and I could see the reflections from my mirror dancing on it's fuselage, but the crew never saw me and the plane flew on off."

    He would lie there for three nights, assuaging his hunger with a candy bar he had bought in River Oaks on his way to Carswell Air Force Base to begin the flight.

    "I remember digging out that candy bar and counting the squares and figuring out that if I ate one square of chocolate a day, I could eat for nine days," Pooler said.

    On the morning of the fourth day, he heard the voices of a search party of Canadian sailors from the destroyer Cayuga, yelled, and was saved.

    But fate was not finished toying with the survivors.

    On the flight back to Fort Worth, the twin-engine Air Force plane carrying the men lost one of its engines, but landed safely.

    "That's when some of us seriously thought, "To hell with it," Gerhart said.