Boeing B-29 Super Fortress
Best known as the plane the dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the B-29 Super Fortress featured innovations such as a pressurized cabin and machine gun turrets that could be fired by remote control. It was the most technologically advanced and revolutionary bomber of WWII, as well as the most expensive military project of the conflict, with a price tag greater than that of the Manhattan Project.
Prototypes first flew in 1942, and the plane was introduced to service in May, 1944. B-29s initially bombed Japan from bases in China, but shaky logistics, with all fuel, supplies, and bombs needing to be flown from India over the Himalayas, coupled with the airbases’ vulnerability to Japanese attack, rendered a sustained bombing campaign from China impractical. The Mariana Islands, located 1500 miles south of Tokyo and thus within B-29 range, were a better option as they could be supplied limitlessly by ship and were beyond Japanese reach. Once they were captured and the necessary airbases and facilities built, B-29s were rebased there and began bombing Japan in October, 1944, from the Mariana islands of Saipan, Tinian, and Guam.
The B-29 had been designed for high altitude bombing, but when it began bombing Japan it was discovered that Japanese skies differed from Europe’s due to a fast-moving jet stream that rendered accurate bombing from high altitudes difficult and often impossible. As a result, B-29s were forced to descend and began bombing from medium altitudes to improve accuracy.
When General Curtis LeMay took command of the 20th Air Force, he introduced new tactics: realizing that Japanese air power by 1945 was negligible, B-29s were stripped of defensive weapons that had become superfluous, in order to maximize bombload. The bombload was changed from the high explosives suitable for European cities of brick and concrete buildings to incendiaries which would prove more effective against Japanese cities whose buildings were mostly wooden. And the B-29s were ordered to bomb from low altitudes. Aircrews were appalled at first, fearing that they would get massacred, but LeMay’s tactics worked, resulting in the incineration of Japanese cities and the devastation of Japan, without corresponding devastation of B-29 squadrons. Japan was reeling from the months of mounting destruction inflicted by Super Fortresses by the time the B-29s Enola Gay and Bock’s Car delivered the atomic coup de grace.
B-29s continued in American service for years after WWII, seeing action again during the Korean War, before they were retired in 1960. A reverse-engineered Soviet copy, the Tu-4, flew for the Red Air Force until the mid 1960s.