I will never forget the first time I saw a B-29. It was in the late summer of 1990 when Fifi, the only Superfortress still airworthy, made a stop at the Warren County Regional Airport in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Fifi was a part of the Confederate Air Force (now called the Commemorative Air Force) and tours with Diamond 'Lil, a B-24 Liberator, as part of a traveling museum. (For more information visit the B-29/B-24 Squadron's web site). They fly to different cities during the summer and allow people to walk around and even look inside the aircraft.
Description
My uncle, James Simmons, was the only person I knew at that time who had ever seen a B-29 during the war. Uncle James, who had married one of my father's older sisters, Ruth, joined the US Navy during World War II and served on Guam with the Sea Bees (Construction Battalion). He and my father got to visit each other a couple of times when my father happened to be on Guam. Uncle James had seen his share of B-29s and hod told me about them. He had compared looking up into the bomb bay of a Superfort to looking up into a tobacco barn, making the plane cavernous to my young imagination. This image was in my head as we drove to Bowling Green to see Fifi.
I was excited to see Fifi that day. The trip had fulfilled a dream, but it also left me disappointed. I came away thinking, "How small! How antiquated! How did they do it?" I had compared the B-29 not only to my mental image of the plane, but also to modern planes I was used to seeing, and it had fallen short. To my eyes it looked too frail to have done the job it was asked to do. Actually, I had failed to appreciate the B-29 in the context of the 1940s.
The B-29 is small compared to many airliners flying today. Actually, it's about the size of a C-130. When I sized up Fifi that day I figured you could fit three B-29s parked nose to tail on my high school football field and they would just barely fit between the goal posts, which would be almost as tall as the tail fin. If the planes were parked down the center of the field the wing tips would be inside the sidelines by 4.5 feet. Looking inside I felt jumping up to touch the tunnel would be like jumping up to touch a basketball rim. It was a good thing Diamond 'Lil was parked nearby to remind me what an average sized bomber of World War II looked like. Compared to the B-24 (and the B-17) a Superfortress is massive.
Cutting Edge Technology
The inside of Fifi was cramped, and that was with the ammo cans of the gun turrets removed to provide more space. The instruments looked too old to be reliable. (To be fair, Fifi does have some modern instrumentation aboard so that it can be certified airworthy.) Looking around I wondered how the plane ever made it on a mission to Japan and back. What I failed to see were controls to a plane with cutting-edge technology for the 1940s. The Superfortress was state-of-the-art in World War II and the men flying on them were proud of that fact. For example, the B-29 was the first military aircraft to feature a pressurized cabin allowing the crew to work without oxygen masks and in short sleeves at altitudes above 10,000 feet.
I have never yet gotten to tour the rear compartments of a B-29, but another modern feature was the central fire control system. The gunners on other bombers actually had their hands on their guns — not so on a B-29. These gunners used a gun sight to aim remotely controlled guns. The central fire control system took the aiming information from the gun sights and corrected for things like bullet drop due to gravity, the amount to lead a moving target, the effects of wind on the bullet as it is shot from a moving aircraft, etc. This computer predates solid state electronics, much less the computer chip so common today.
The Superfortress also sported an AN/APQ-13 radar which would look at the ground as an aid to navigation and a backup to visual bombing.
History
What's even more amazing about the B-29 was the fact that it was developed as quickly as is was. It went from plan to prototype in just three years (the normal time was five ears). The Army, originally wanting a bomber that could attack Germany from New England if Great Britain were to fall into Nazi hands, placed an order with Boeing for the B-29 before the first prototype was ever built. This was unprecedented.
B-29 development was plagued with setbacks, including a crash of one of the prototypes, because it drew upon so many new technologies. The threat of cancellation loomed over the project for many months. One of the biggest problems was engine overheating. The command of the B-29s had been given to Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold and it was he who would see to it that B-29 production would happen in spite of these complications in what was later called the "Battle of Kansas." By the time the Superfortress went into production the blueprints alone weighed 50 tons, heavier than a completed B-29. In time 3,970 B-29s were built before production finally ended in 1960. The average plane was built at a cost of $640,000.
The B-29 enjoyed an illustrious career in World War II in helping to destroy the enemy's capacity to make war. There were really only two variants of the B-29 in World War II. Most were B-29As with the B-29B appearing later. The Star Duster was a B-29A. The B-29B had fewer guns and an improved APQ-7 Eagle radar. A third variant, the B-29C, was drawn up but the order was cancelled when the war ended.
There were 15 Superfortresses specially modified to deliver the atomic bomb. The most famous is the Enola Gay which delivered the first bomb to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. A second bomb was delivered to Nagasaki by Bockscar three days later because the Japanese government had refused to surrender.
Post World War II
After the war some B-29s were converted to tankers and participated in early in-flight refueling tests. Another B-29 was used as a mother ship to launch Chuck Yeager in his X-1 when he first broke the sound barrier in 1947.
The B-29 had been made obsolete by the jet engine by the time war broke out in Korea in 1950-1953. In spite of this handicap the Superfortress delivered some 200,000 tons of bombs against North Korean targets.
A fourth variant, the B-29D, was ordered after the Korean War. By the time it was produced it was known as the B-50 instead. The final variants of the B-29 were phased out of operation during the 1960s.
The Tu-4
An interesting note to B-29 history came when three B-29s made emergency landings at Vladivostok in the southwestern corner of the Soviet Union during World War II. These landings happened on separate occasions, and as the USSR had not declared war on Japan the crews were detained for a time before they were released in the Middle East. They never saw their planes again. The planes were reverse-engineered by the Russians who then used the design to develop the Tupolev Tu-4 bomber and Tu-70 transport. Like the B-29, the Tu-4 was operated until the 1960s.
