B-29 mania

If the truth be told, I was never a B-29 guy.

As a World War II history buff, my heavy bomber of choice was always the iconic Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. I think a lot of my affection for that plane probably had to do with the media it received, both during the war and afterwards.

I check out the innards of a B-29.*

Old grainy combat film footage almost exclusively featured formations of B-17s. Then you had movies like Twelve O'Clock High (which also showed up in a television series back in the 1960s) and books about the Memphis Belle (the first 8th Air Force bomber recognized to complete 25 combat missions that could send the crew home from the war. Interestingly, a plane called Hell's Angels actually flew its 25th mission before the Belle by a day, but Hollywood director William Wyler happened to be on board the Belle at the time. So there.) B-17s were everywhere. I even built a Monogram model of the Memphis Belle when I was a kid. I never could keep the wings from sagging.

For a brief span, I came to admire the Consolidated B-24 Liberator, which had a greater range and could deliver a larger payload than the B-17. But the Liberator never really captured the public's imagination in the way the Fortress did. Maybe because the B-24 looked something like a pregnant whale while the Fortress had the sleek art deco silhouette of a ballet dancer.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was a late-war entry that didn't see any combat in the European campaign, even though it was originally designed to fly above the German anti-aircraft fire.

But the B-29 was devastating in the war against Japan. It had a range upwards of 3,200 miles and a service ceiling of nearly 32,000 feet. It could carry 20,000 pounds of bombs at low altitude or 5,000 pounds of bombs at high altitude. And it appeared in the war in early 1945, about the same time that napalm was secretly being developed at Harvard.

 

The cockpit of a B-29.

Napalm had already been used in the firebombing of Dresden in Germany in 1945, but the paper-and-wood construction of Japanese homes made napalm the obvious weapon of choice here. In the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, the B-29 was the delivery system that resulted in 100,000 deaths and 16 square miles of Tokyo's destruction.

B-29s also dropped two atomic bombs, one on Hiroshima and one on Nagasaki, that did less damage than the firebombing raids did, but irrevocably altered the course of world history and world politics.

So when I found out that Doc, one of only two airworthy B-29s left in the world (the other being Fifi) was going to be in Statesville last week, I had to go see this piece of American history. I called two of my friends, Mark Loper and Jay Egelnick, and we made the journey to Statesville Regional Airport.

Doc was never in combat, coming too late off the Wichita assembly line to see action. But it did serve in radar calibration after the war with a squadron of other B-29s, known as the Seven Dwarfs. That's how Doc got its name.

It also worked towing targets for practice shooting and ultimately ended up in the Mojave Desert as a target itself for bomb training. It was rescued in 1987 and restoration began in 2013 with hundreds of volunteers working to make the plane airworthy again.

The B-29 Doc in Statesville.

Anyway, the B-29 is a technological marvel for its time. While it looks something like a silver cigar, it features pressurized cabins for the crew (which meant climate control) and analog computers to operate 10 defensive machine guns in turrets.

I was always fascinated with this idea of computerized gun turrets in World War II. The computer could calculate airspeed, lead time, gravity and weather conditions to make it one of the most efficient systems of the war. While computerless B-17's and B-24's shot down approximately two fighters for every B-17 lost (an atrocious rate), the B-29 had an amazing 11-to-1 kill ratio, virtually making it a fighter/bomber. And as then-test pilot Paul Tibbetts (who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima) discovered, if you took the armor and guns out of the B-29, you markedly improved its flight performance. Consequently, the B-29 then had a smaller turning radius than a P-47 Thunderbolt fighter in mock combat situations.

Sitting in the cockpit of the B-17 Liberty Belle years ago.**

 Mark, Jay and myself spent about 15 minutes in the plane. You entered through the bomb bay (that was loaded with various sizes of dummy bombs. At least, I thought they were dummies), climbed a ladder, then approached the flight deck that gave you a view of the pilot and co-pilot's cabin and the bombardier's station before exiting through the front landing gear well. We probably would have liked to have stayed inside longer, but there was a line of about 100 people waiting to take their turn to tour the aircraft. There were several people on board to answer questions, but there was a hurry up factor as well.

This probably concludes my visit of three of the most iconic American bombers of World War II. I actually flew in the B-24 Witchcraft when it came to Lexington a number of years ago, and got to taxi down the runway in the B-17 Liberty Belle. We were supposed to go airborne in the B-17, but a tail wheel issue prevented us from taking off. No matter. I got to sit in the pilot's seat when it was stationary.

Standing with the B-24 Witchcraft.***

 And then I was able to tour both Fifi and Doc over the years. For a military history nut, it doesn't get much better than that.

*Really great photos by my friend Jay Egelnick. 

** Great photo by my friend Donnie Roberts.

*** Great photo by my wife Kim Wehrle.