Sep 072011
A 1945 War Department film on the manufacturing of the B-29 Superfortress.
[youtube Xui_amVmdqY]
The narrators dialogue is rather goofy, but the footage is pretty interesting.
One Response to “How to build a B-29”
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You know, it’s not much remembered now, but that was as top priority a project as the atomic bomb was, consuming huge amounts of man-hours, money, and material… yet when they did get all of its problems (particularly the engines) ironed out, the way it finally got effectively used was not anywhere near the way intended.
It was supposed to attack its targets by day at high altitude and destroy them via precision bombing, while being defended by its remote-controlled gun turrets.
When Curtis LeMay actually did use them effectively against Japan, they came in at only a few thousand feet in the air at night, carpet bombed the cities with incendiaries, and had almost all of their armament removed to up speed by cutting down drag and upping bomb load.
So as far as the original concept went for effectiveness, the project was a big flop.
Dropped from high altitude, the bombs drifted all over the place from winds between the aircraft and ground, no matter how good the Norden bomb sight was; the Japanese fighters took forever to climb to its altitude by day, and couldn’t see it by night because of crummy Japanese radar, so you really didn’t need all the gun turrets.
The plane was lucky the atomic bomb came along… as otherwise it might have been viewed as a huge high-tech boondoggle after the war.
It would be fun to see a Soviet equivalent of this movie, as all the happy workers start back-engineering it as the Tu-4. 🙂