The United States Air Force announced Thursday that its final squadrons of B-52 Stratofortresses have completed their operations against Daesh in the Middle East and the Taliban in Afghanistan, and are back home at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.
The bombers used nearly 12,000 weapons on the extremist groups in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, according to an April 12 statement from the Air Force. The B-52 is commonly referred to as “BUFF,” or “big ugly fat fellow,” and has been in service for 63 years. For the past two, it's been the main bomber of the US Central Command.
“In every war that America finds itself in,” Lt. Col. Paul Goossen, commander of the 69th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, said, “it keeps being reinvented and it keeps showing its usefulness and its relevance.”
The B-52 broke a number of records during its past two years of operations. The 23rd Bomb Squadron ran 400 consecutive missions without any maintenance delays, which broke the previous record set during Operation Linebacker II, part of the US war on Vietnam.
During Operation Linebacker II, also called “the Christmas Bombings,” the US dropped 20,000 tons of explosives from 129 B-52 Stratofortresses over Hanoi, the capital of the communist government in north Vietnam. More than 1,000 Vietnamese were killed; in just one night, more 2,000 homes around a busy shopping street were destroyed, killing 280 people and injuring…
