Flaps like those on the B-29 are now standard for big jet propulsion planes. But in 1941 they were a breathtaking revolution, one that expanded the envelope of the standard four-engine bomber. Together with a heavy aluminum beam called the spar chord inserted through the heart of each wing, it enabled Boeing to guarantee that this plane would carry a high wing loading of sixty-nine pounds per square foot.27
Impossible, exploded the Air Corps engineers. No plane could sustain flight under that kind of wing load. They dragged Wells, Schairer, and their boss, Wellwood Beall, out to Wright Field in March to show them the error of their ways by running the numbers on a hypothetical airplane called “Design X.” Wells patiently explained why they thought a real B-29 would do better than Design X. The Army engineers listened, and backed off. The Boeing men returned to Seattle.28
On May 17, 1941, Boeing’s president got a letter placing a provisional order for 250 B-29s, with a production goal of 25 B-29s per month by February 1943. Ten million dollars would be advanced for development, with $3.5 million for expanded plant facilities.29 The XB-29 was now the YB-29, and its first three prototypes would be the templates for a warplane whose orders would rapidly expand when war came in December.
Considering that Boeing was already working flat-out to produce its B-17s, the fact that the first prototype rolled onto the runway in early August 1942 was a considerable achievement. It was a stunning sight. Ninety-nine feet long and weighing fifty-eight tons fully loaded, it had a 141-foot wingspan—almost half a football field. Balanced on its tricycle landing gear, its long olive-drab fuselage stood nearly 30 feet high. A B-17 sitting on the ground was only 19 feet high. Yet somehow the YB-29’s four Wright Cyclone R-3350 engines would give this gargantuan beast a cruising speed of 357 miles per hour—70 miles an hour faster than the Flying Fortress—and a ceiling of 31,000 feet—plus an unheard-of range of 5,330 miles, enough to go from San Francisco to New York and back in one trip.
Two more prototypes were finished by September. Still, Boeing had warned the Army that it would take at least two hundred hours of engine tests before any of them were ready for flight. Almost nine hundred different engineering changes had been made by September 9, 1942, when the engines were revved up for the first time and the plane was given its first taxi test.30 On the fifteenth, the engines got still more tests and the plane was put through a series of “hops” fifteen feet off the runway, to test the landing gear.
Then on September 21, 1942, Boeing’s test pilot Eddie Allen climbed into the cockpit of XB-29 41-002 and at 3:40 P.M. was airborne. One hour and fifteen minutes later, the plane flashed over the field, flared out, and dropped her Fowler flaps, then her wheels touched down with a screech. Allen climbed out and was surrounded by a crowd of engineers, designers, and mechanics. “Well, she flew,” he said, and broke into a broad smile.31
By that date, some 1,664 Superfortresses were on the order book. Designing and building the prototype had been the easy part. Manufacturing them would be another matter.
First problem was where. Boeing plants were slammed building B-17s, a production program that had spilled over to Vega and Douglas. Those two firms, Boeing’s erstwhile competitors, would produce the so-called BVD Flying Fortresses, more than eleven hundred of them.32 The only solution seemed to be for Boeing and its subcontractors to set up entirely new production plants to build the B-29 airframes—which also meant training an entirely new workforce—while other aircraft companies and their subcontractors handled the parts and equipment needed for final assembly. To top it all, everything would have to be done under the veil of official secrecy.
No government agency, not even the War Production Board, was prepared to handle this sort of challenge. So in the end, five principal companies—Boeing, North American, Bell Aircraft, Wright Aeronautics, and GM’s Fisher Body—got together with the Army Air Forces to work out a comprehensive production plan.
They agreed Boeing would build most of the B-29s at a brand-new plant out in Wichita, Kansas. It would produce twenty-five B-29s a month by May 1943, they decided—not bad for a facility that didn’t yet exist. North American would in turn convert its B-25 facility in Kansas City to make B-29s, and Bell would build a plant in Marietta, Georgia, to make still more. Meanwhile, Wright would churn out the R-3350 engines the planes would need as fast as they could at their main plant in Paterson, New Jersey, and General Motors would dedicate a new Fisher Body plant in Cleveland to producing the last B-29s needed to fill the Army’s order.
Even this arrangement didn’t last long. It was soon decided to let North American continue to make B-25s in Kansas City and take up the B-29s at a new plant in Omaha. Fisher Body never did make entire B-29s, although they supplied the bulk of wing assemblies and engine nacelles for Wichita, Marietta, and Omaha—as well as for a fourth principal assembly plant in Renton, outside Seattle.33 The production of R-3350s ended up being farmed out, as well, with new plants coming on line in 1943 at Woodbridge, New Jersey, and outside Chicago.
All in all, the B-29 was turning out to be the most massive project in the history of aeronautics. It was also, in the words of historian Tom Collison, “the most organizational airplane ever built.”34 American business had never before been asked to undertake an industrial project of this size or cost or complexity. Even the Manhattan Project turned out to be cheaper. Boeing and its partners set up a Liaison Committee to supervise the entire effort, which included representatives of the biggest of Boeing’s one hundred major subcontractors: Chrysler, Goodyear, Hudson Motors, McDonnell of St. Louis, and Republic Aviation. Major government agencies agreed to stay away. Production and development of the B-29 was left to American business and the Army. In the process, a new working relationship would be forged that would last long after World War II.
And at the center of the entire project were four principal plants in four different cities: Wichita, Marietta, Renton, and Omaha. All four would produce B-29s for Boeing in staggering numbers; all would end up employing tens of thousands of men as well as women; and all would transform the economy of their localities.
But the first, and most important, was Wichita.
“One continuous landing field.” That was one newspaper’s description of Kansas in 1942, and Wichita in particular. Fog was rare in Wichita, and the winters were mild and clear. Boeing already owned a plant there, producing civilian aircraft under the name of Stearman. Two other Wichita companies, Cessna and Beech, had been making small Army and Navy trainers and “puddle jumpers” for the past twenty years.35
Altogether the three companies employed some fifteen hundred workers. When Wichita’s city fathers found out that the new Boeing plant would employ ten times that number, they realized an economic tornado was about to hit their city. Sixty years later, it would still be making its impact felt as Wichita changed from a rather sleepy former cow town into a major industrial center.
Even as construction of the Wichita plant got started, Boeing production managers realized they were facing a massive problem: No one, not even Ford at Willow Run, had come up with an assembly-line layout that could handle the gargantuan size and staggering complexity of the Superfortress, with 40,540 different parts and a million rivets. The solution Boeing came up with was something not even Sorensen or Knudsen or the other denizens of mass production had ever contemplated. Boeing production engineer Oliver West had developed it with his counterparts at Douglas and Lockheed for building the BVD Flying Fortress, and dubbed it “multi-lining.”
This replaced the classic one assembly line with six, all funneling together around three short final assembly lines at the threshold of the plant’s main doors. The workers on one line worked on the nose and forward fuselage sections; those in the second, on the center section and bomb bays; those in the third, on the tail section; and so on, with the center wing, engine nacelle, and the outboard and leading edge wing, including the all-important Fowler flaps, all getting their separate assembly lines, while pushcarts and forklifts and conv
eyor belts kept the parts flowing to each separate line.36
The plan was to keep all the B-29’s preassembly sections as small as possible until the final stage, when cranes hoisted each section into place in the giant final assembly bay, where four B-29s took shape at a time. In the final assembly, workers clambered around and through the fuselages and under the wings, bolting wings together with the whir and thud of a hundred rivet guns, stringing and fixing miles of electrical wiring and control systems, attaching the sixteen-foot props to the engines, and then lowering the landing gear before rolling the gleaming aluminum airplane out of the door to ready it for flight test.
The multi-assembly-line method marked yet another revolution in American manufacturing. First tried at Wichita, it became standard at all the Superfortress plants. Compared to Willow Run, with its long, winding L-shaped construction, a B-29 plant could be built as a square or rectangle: a huge cost saving both for Boeing and the government. And it meant parts didn’t have to travel as far on the plant floor, a saving of time and man-hours impossible to achieve at a plant like Willow Run. It also required fewer workstations than the standard auto single assembly line, and had the flexibility to introduce new engineering modifications almost as part of the flow of production, instead of forcing everything to come to a halt while changes were made.37
That turned out to be important, because no airplane ever required more modifications, both on and off line, than the B-29. It was not only the most expensive machine ever produced, but the most complex. From nose to tail, a B-29 consisted of more than 40,000 different parts—compared to a measly 25,000 for a B-24 Liberator. Building one also required Boeing production managers to keep track of fourteen hundred subcontractors, both large (like GE and Bendix, who made the automated gun turrets, and DuPont, who made the Plexiglas observation blisters) and small, who were responsible for everything from the letters of the gauges on the instrument panels to machine tools for pressing and cutting the aluminum for the wings. A single subcontractor slowdown could throw production schedules into a tailspin, while nearly every inspection, every preassembly test and check, turned up another glitch, another problem in a part that perhaps had never been made before, which had to be engineered out before production proceeded. The engines alone required over nine hundred separate engineering changes from the time the first prototype rolled out until the first flight.
So it was no real surprise that while the first B-29s were ordered in May 1941, and Wichita was up and ready to start making them in August 1942, it was almost a year after that before the first plane came off the assembly line.
In between came one engineering problem after another. As one wag put it, the B-29 turned out to have “more bugs than the Entomology Department at the Smithsonian Museum.”
Allen’s first successful flight, on September 21, was followed by another in the same plane by the Army Air Forces’ Colonel Putt, on the twenty-second. Then on the thirtieth, more tests had to be suspended for engine issues. These were ironed out and tests resumed and then an engine inexplicably failed on prototype 41-002. November 1942 brought more tests on the superchargers and power plants.
On December 26 an engine quit just thirty minutes into the flight. The plane landed and two engines were replaced. On December 29 still another engine quit, and engineers and mechanics realized they would be spending the rest of the old year pulling R-3350 engines apart to figure out what was going wrong.
The next day, Ed Wells watched as Eddie Allen took the third prototype, 41-003, aloft. Everything seemed fine until he reached three thousand feet, when the No. 4 engine suddenly burst into flame. Allen made several efforts to put out the flames with the engine’s built-in extinguishers, but it kept reigniting. Allen had to land with a smoke-filled cockpit, and the ground crew finally got the fire under control.38
Allen was undeterred. He was convinced the plane was a magnificent piece of flying machinery, regardless of the problems, and Ed Wells believed him. Allen had told the Air Force brass it might take four to five months before the prototype was fully ready. So on January 18, 1943, he got set to take the second prototype up again, this time for a three-hour flight that would expose any new glitches with the power plants’ cooling and performance, including a flight test with only two engines.
The fully crewed flight was supposed to take three hours. It lasted barely seventeen minutes. At five thousand feet, a fire started in Engine No. 1. By feathering the prop, closing the cowl flaps, and working the extinguishers, Allen’s engineer managed to put it out. Five minutes later, at 2,400 feet, Allen radioed the tower. The fire wasn’t serious, he said, and no need for crash equipment but he needed clearance for immediate landing.
It was twelve-fifteen. Ed Wells was at a staff meeting with Boeing president Philip Johnson when the phone rang in the outer office. Ed stepped out to answer it. When he came back to the meeting, his face was ashen.
“Eddie’s coming in,” he said, “and his wing is on fire.”39
Everyone rushed out to see. Sure enough, as Allen and the XB-29 made their final approach over Seattle’s commercial district, the men on the ground could see the plane trailing a thick black plume of smoke and leaving a trail of flaming bits of metal.
The men in the control tower heard Allen come back on the radio.
His voice was calm but urgent.
“Have fire equipment ready. Am coming in with wing on fire.”
The horrified men of Boeing watched the radio operator bail out only to hit some high-tension wires, as did one of the props. They caught a final glimpse of the flame-engorged cockpit as Allen banked the B-29 left, desperately trying to ditch in an open marshy field on the edge of Boeing field. Instead, the plane kept banking left toward the Frye Packing Plant on Airport Way.40
A group of Army recruits had been driving on the same road to attend a boxing match at Seattle’s Civic Auditorium when they saw the plane hit the plant’s fifth floor and vanish in a ball of flame. They stopped their truck and dashed into the burning building. Corporal Kenneth J. Christner found a phone on the ground-floor office and called both the fire and police departments. The others rushed to the top floor and rescued the employees still alive there, some of whom were on fire. Private Sam Davis had his eyebrows burned away carrying four of them to safety.41
Eddie Allen and the rest of his aircrew had died instantly, while nineteen were killed inside the Frye building. One firefighter lost his life fighting the blaze. Without Corporal Cristner and his men, the death toll would have been worse. Yet none of them, nor the Seattle police or fire authorities, knew what kind of plane had crashed. The B-29’s existence was still officially a secret, and newspaper reports detailing the tragedy simply said that the plane had been “a four-engine bomber.” Seattle citizens assumed it was an errant B-17 that had taken America’s most famous test pilot to his death.42
Hap Arnold and those who read the news in Washington, of course, knew better—and knew it was an unimaginable setback for the B-29. No one understood the B-29 and its myriad intricacies better than Allen. He had virtually co-engineered the three prototypes, including the plane’s temperamental engine, the R-3350. Many were ready to blame Curtiss-Wright’s creation. But the crash investigation showed the fire had started out on the wing, not the engine. Instrument tubing running through the wing’s leading edge had caught fire from the exhaust system, burning a hole that in turn ignited the petrol tank—and turned the XB-29 into a giant flaming Molotov cocktail. What was miraculous was that all three prototypes hadn’t blown up before.43
For engineers at Boeing, it meant an agonizing return to the drawing board. For Ed Wells, it meant personal heartbreak—and possibly the end of the line for his magnificent superbomber. More than twenty months after the first plane was ordered and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, Wells still hadn’t come up with a B-29 ready for safe flying. Already the word from Washington was that officials wanted to stop the program before any more money was wasted—and any more lives lo
st. The Truman Committee decided the B-29’s engines were defective and substandard, and no more money should be spent. The president himself hinted perhaps it was time to pull the plug on the Superfortress.
Then Big Bill Knudsen came to the plane’s rescue.
* * *
* At Lockheed’s request, aviator hero Charles Lindbergh had flown out to Kenney’s command to show his pilots a few tricks to extend that range even farther. On April 22, 1943, the Lightning performed her most spectacular exploit when a flight shot down the Betty bomber carrying Admiral Yamamoto, Japan’s supreme naval commander and mastermind of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Warming up the Pratt & Whitney R-3350 on a B-29. Note the technicians with fire extinguishers. Copyright © Boeing
This country seems able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose.
—Employee at Bechtel-McCone B-29 modification plant, Birmingham, Alabama, 1943
IT WAS FITTING. He had begun his role as America’s armorer by dealing with airplanes. He was going to finish with them—finish with the biggest ever.
First, however, he had some help.
The plane’s progenitor, Hap Arnold, was the first to step in. The B-29 was his baby, from that first conversation with Lindbergh in the West Point bleachers to one meeting after another with Marshall and Lovett cajoling the War Department into spending still more millions while other generals argued the money would be better used for proven bombers like the B-24 and the Flying Fortress. Arnold realized the Allen crash meant doom to the entire program unless he acted fast.
“We cannot, will not stop,” he told subordinates. Instead he worked up a proposal for assigning the first finished B-29s to the China-Burma-India theater (or CBI), to show American support for Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek. Arnold made his pitch at the Trident Conference in front of Roosevelt and Churchill, and won their approval. Arnold also promised that once the bugs were worked out, B-29s would be ready for deployment no later than January 1944. The Army Air Forces’ superbomber at last had an operational destination, but Arnold had made a promise he had no way of knowing he could keep.1
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