The Missile Crisis at Tyndall

Front-Line Florida

In October 1962, with Soviet missiles discovered in Cuba, the Florida panhandle was suddenly the front line. Bob Burns commanded the 73rd Air Division of Air Defense Command at Tyndall AFB — and his base was folded into the largest military mobilization since the Second World War.

Forty years later, when his daughter Sue asked him to enlarge on it, he gave the commander’s plain account — not the missiles and the blockade of the headlines, but the unglamorous logistics of supporting the buildup.

“First, the Cuban missile crisis. Tyndall’s role in that operation was essentially to provide a support facility for an army unit which was there on standby. As I recall, they were there for about two months and we supported them. Just what this support was, I left to the base commander. Since we were an air defense activity, we simply helped provide fighter coverage for the lower Florida area.”

The Quiet Half of a Crisis

It is a revealing memory precisely because it is so undramatic. The Cuban Missile Crisis is remembered as thirteen days at the brink; from a Florida air-defense division, it was two months of housing an Army unit on standby and flying fighter cover over the southern half of the state — the ordinary, grinding readiness that a crisis actually runs on. Bob delegated the details to his base commander and kept his division doing what air defense did: watching the sky.

His Tyndall command spanned the early 1960s, and it would later put Perrin AFB’s F-102 interceptor training under his authority as well. Within a few years he would make Major General and trade the Gulf Coast for Karachi — but in that October, his small piece of the world’s most dangerous fortnight was keeping fighters in the air over lower Florida.