A visibly strained Lieutenant General Bill Knudsen (left) and Secretary of War Robert Patterson meet Douglas MacArthur in New Guinea, August 1943. Courtesy of the National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library
There is in America a spirit that drives people to want to do different; they are just ornery enough that they will not stay where the rule was laid down. In that I believe you will find the greatest hope for America’s future.
—William S. Knudsen
ON AUGUST 17, 1943, a U.S. Army Air Force plane was making its way from Brisbane, Australia, to Port Moresby, New Guinea. It was Lieutenant General Bill Knudsen’s longest trip yet as head of the Army war production effort, covering more than 9,000 miles from Washington and Los Angeles, to New Guinea, headquarters of General Douglas MacArthur’s command.
Knudsen had no windows to catch a glance of the Pacific’s azure waters as they began their descent to Port Moresby, and the incessant roar of the plane’s four engines made conversation with his companion, Assistant War Secretary Bob Patterson, almost impossible. Flying in Air Force bombers had taken some getting used to. It meant lots of noise, no pressurization, and icy cold at cruising altitude even here in the steamy South Pacific. Knudsen had flown in his first when he was on the Defense Advisory Committee and made a field trip out to the airplane factories on the West Coast.1 That was almost three years ago, he realized, when everyone wondered if America could produce a thousand airplanes, let alone fifty thousand. They had left those numbers far behind. Now, at Secretary Patterson’s invitation, he was going to see how those planes and other weapons they were producing at such prodigious rates were being used on the battlefield.
As they touched down on the tarmac, the tropical jungle heat rose up to embrace them. Knudsen stripped off the coat he had been wearing and tucked it under his arm as General Douglas MacArthur and an array of generals and admirals stepped forward to greet their two distinguished visitors. Under MacArthur, Americans had just scored two significant victories, first at Buna and then in the battle of the Bismarck Sea, securing a foothold in Japanese-occupied New Guinea. The general gestured the way toward Government House, where he intended to explain to Patterson and Knudsen his plan for victory on the island, and then his strategy for the ultimate goal: the liberation of the Philippines.
In the crowd Knudsen picked out a familiar face. It was a long, rather cynical face that someone might have mistaken for that of film actor Humphrey Bogart, sitting atop a tall lean figure in an Air Force general’s uniform. It was MacArthur’s air chief and commander of the Fifth Air Force, General George Kenney. Knudsen had met him in Washington a year ago when he was still settling into being head of Army production and had to help Kenney get the planes, equipment, and spare parts he would need for his new South Pacific command.
George Kenney was tough, charismatic, outspoken. When MacArthur’s chief of staff tried to protest how Kenney was handling his airplanes and crews, Kenney had grabbed a piece of paper and drew a pencil dot. “The blank area represents what I know about air matters,” he growled. “The dot represents what you know.”2
Kenney respected few men in or out of his profession, but one of them was Bill Knudsen. “His expertise in his field was unquestionable,” he remembered after the war, and Kenney was drawn to Knudsen’s simple, straightforward patriotism and wry sense of humor. Once Knudsen came out of a long Munitions Building meeting where no decision had been reached, shaking his head with a weary smile. Suddenly Knudsen said, “George, do you know what a conference is?”
Kenney said no.
“A conference is a gathering of guys that singly can do nothing and together decide nothing can be done.” Knudsen also gave him his succinct translation of status quo. “That’s Latin for what a hell of a fix we’re in.”3
Now Knudsen found himself standing next to Kenney. He glanced at his watch. It was nearly six o’clock. “If you can give me dinner,” Knudsen whispered to Kenney, “I’d like to get away from all the brass hats and talk airplanes.”
And so they did.
Their dinner lasted almost until one o’clock in the morning, and would have gone on longer if Kenney hadn’t promised to get Knudsen back to MacArthur in time for a breakfast meeting.4 As Knudsen recalled, “In our talk we practically took planes apart and put them back together”—just the kind of talk he loved.5 They talked about the B-24 Liberator, which Kenney believed was the perfect bomber for long-range operations among the widely scattered islands between New Guinea and the New Hebrides, and North American’s twin-engined B-25 Mitchell, which Kenney’s engineering wizard Irving “Pappy” Gunn and North American field rep Jack Fox were transforming into a low-flying strafing machine—at one point even trying out a 75mm cannon in the nose.6
Knudsen in turn told him his impressions of the captured Japanese planes he had seen when he stopped in Brisbane, including the much-vaunted Japanese Zero. He had been less than impressed. The planes struck him as “standard construction, but generally lighter than ours”—and the products of a Japanese industrial base that was still stuck, like the German’s, in a handcraft tradition.7
But mostly they talked about the twin-engined Lockheed P-38 fighter, which the British had nicknamed the Lightning and which had become the mainstay of Kenney’s fighter force. “The Jap fliers give her wide berth,” Kenney told him, and with her twin Allison turbocharged engines with sixteen hundred pounds of thrust supplying her speed (up to 414 miles per hour) and power, and allowing her to carry four .50-caliber guns, a 20mm cannon, and enough fuel to travel 475 miles, the Lightning was just the sort of long-range fighter needed over the big distances of the Pacific.8*
The Lightning had proved indispensable, but now the Army Air Forces had newer planes and designs than the Lightning, including the P-51 Mustang (Knudsen had seen a plant in Brisbane where the Australians would be making Mustang engines), and wanted to shift production away from the Lightning.9
Don’t do it, Kenney and Whitehead pleaded. They took over an hour explaining how the P-38 was the ideal airplane for long hops over water and jungle, and how unlike in Europe if a pilot ran out of fuel and had to bail out, the enemy wouldn’t just capture him but torture him to death. They fumed and stormed until “we finally ran out of both breath and argument,” Kenney remembered.
Knudsen said nothing. Then, absolutely deadpan, he turned his face to Kenney and said in his biggest Danish accent, “George, I gather you like P-38s. Okay, we’ll build them for you.”10
Kenney laughed. That’s what he and other Air Force people loved about Knudsen, his ability to cut through the red tape and fog of decision making and close in on the heart of the matter, and get it done. The P-38 would remain in production, and almost 10,000 would be made during the war. Together with Grumman’s Hellcat, it would sweep the once-feared Zero from the skies and help to clear the way for the last stage of the war in the Pacific: the invasion and defeat of Japan.
Knudsen learned that was not going to be easy. What amazed him, touring aircraft plants on both coasts and the Midwest, was how confident everyone was that America was going to win, and win without effort. He feared it was beginning to affect production schedules, as both managers and workers were unwilling to work flat-out—in fact, people were feeling more and more free to take time off. The very success he and his colleagues had achieved, of making war production look simple and straightforward, had its downside. “In general, everyone patriotically supports the war,” he told Don Nelson and his WPB colleagues back in July, “but too many are confident of an early and easy victory”—this, almost four months before the battle for Tarawa and almost a year before D-day.11
Kenney showed him the other, grimmer side of the war. The next day he personally flew Knudsen and Patterson over the Kokoda Trail, where American, Australian, and Japanese soldiers had been locked in a bitter struggle for months in the mountains and jungle, fighting typhus, malaria, and dysentery as well as one another. More than five thousand Allied soldiers had died fighting for the Kokoda Trail, and then in the capture of Buna. Knudsen sat expressionless as Kenney passed over an American military cemetery set high in the mountains, with over 425 white crosses gently winking in the sun.12
So many had died; so many more would die, whether it was in the mountains of New Guinea and Italy or on the beaches of Normandy and Iwo Jima. For Knudsen the goal was always to overwhelm the enemy with war materiel so that as few Americans as possible would have to die. “If the threat against them was with guns, he would meet it with more guns,” his biographer wrote; “if with airplanes, he would meet it with more airplanes; if with bombs, he would meet it with more bombs.”13 Until now all his skill in organization, in forcing through production schedules and battling bottlenecks and delays, had been focused on that end.
It was beginning to affect his health. Photographs of him at Port Moresby show Knudsen looking drawn and fatigued. At sixty-four the gentle giant would have to summon his last reserves of energy for the huge project ahead.
That arrived on his desk less than a month after he returned to Washington in September 1943. Its designers had conceived it as the ultimate weapon, the one they hoped would end the war almost by itself. Now they needed someone who could kick-start it into production.
The project was the B-29, and that someone was Bill Knudsen. It would make the P-38 program look like school recess—and at times even Knudsen would wonder if the biggest bomber ever created would ever get into the air.
The ball had started four years earlier with a midnight phone call at the Fountain Inn in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
General Henry Arnold, the Air Corps’ top general, and his wife were staying there on their way to West Point to visit their cadet son Hank. It was April 14, 1939. In Europe, Germany had just occupied Prague. Italy had invaded Albania. Dutch troops were being stationed on the German border, and in Rome they were conducting air raid drills. But across America, war still seemed very far away—until the phone call brought its reality home.
The phone rang and rang. Finally the Fountain’s proprietor sleepily stumbled to the office in his bathrobe and picked up the receiver. The voice on the other end sounded agitated and urgent. There was also something familiar about the soft tenor voice and the Midwest twang.
“Is General Arnold there?” the voice said.
Yes, the inn’s owner said. But it was late. Who was calling?
Moments later Arnold was awakened by an excited pounding on his hotel door. It was his host. Charles Lindbergh, the Lone Eagle and hero of the historic 1927 transatlantic flight, was on the phone, he explained. Lindbergh wanted to talk to the general at once. Arnold threw on a dressing gown and plunged downstairs.14
Lindbergh was America’s most publicly recognized expert on airpower and had just returned to New York from a visit to Europe. It was vital they meet, he told Arnold over the phone, but he warned the general it wasn’t safe to get together in New York. From the moment the Aquitania had docked, more than one hundred reporters and photographers had swarmed the gangway and followed Lindbergh everywhere. At every step Lindbergh took, he felt the glass of discarded camera flashbulbs cracking under his feet.15
Where could they meet?
“How about meeting my wife and me at West Point for lunch,” Arnold said, “at the Thayer Hotel?”
The next day at noon, a late-model DeSoto pulled up in front of the crenellated stone entrance of the Thayer. The long, lanky form of Charles Lindbergh jumped out and dashed into the hotel dining room, with its splendid views of the Hudson River. Other guests and waiters gawped and tried to steal a peek of the world’s most famous aviator, even though Arnold had arranged for a private dining room.16
Finally the two men decided they had to find a place where they could converse without drawing attention. They found it wandering over to the Academy baseball field, where Army was beating Syracuse. There in the relative anonymity of the bleachers, they watched the game and Lindbergh began to talk.
He talked of Nazi airpower. He spoke of row upon row of gleaming Luftwaffe fighters, of a regime training thousands of pilots and bombardiers, of factories producing hundreds of aircraft engines and bombs. He spoke of the might of a great industrial nation geared toward one end: the creation of an air force second to none.
Above all, Lindbergh talked about bombers. He told Arnold that Goering was building a long-range bomber force that would be able to range freely anywhere in Europe, one that could be used to dump unprecedented tons of bombs on any target but could also transport tons of men and materiel anywhere on the battlefield.17
War was coming, Lindbergh said. He was convinced of it. And Lindbergh told the head of the Army Air Corps that in his opinion Hitler already had the bombers he needed to destroy any city in Europe or Britain—and possibly even eventually reach the United States.
We now know Lindbergh’s information wasn’t entirely accurate. His hosts, Goering and General Milch, had put their best foot forward in their tour for Lindbergh, including flying planes from one aerodrome to the next ahead of Lindbergh’s car to give the impression of a half dozen squadrons of Heinkels or Messerschmitts where there was only one. Nor were all his predictions correct. He told Arnold, for example, that he didn’t think Germany had the planes and pilots for sustained air operations in 1940, which turned out to be tragically wrong.
Still, his picture was accurate enough, and scary enough, to alarm the Air Corps chief. Sitting there in the stands and surrounded by cheering cadets, Arnold realized he would have to drastically revise his plans for future aircraft, particularly offensive bombers.
The general had one last question. Would Lindbergh accept a commission in the Army Air Corps and agree to join Arnold’s advisory committee for future military plane development? Lindbergh said yes. They shook hands and parted.18
Five days later the committee held its first meeting, at the Munitions Building. After listening to Lindbergh, it recommended the Air Corps develop an entirely new four-engine bomber, a longer-range bomber than the B-17—one that could even cross the Atlantic if need be, in case a German victory in Europe left the United States no margin for confronting the totalitarian menace.
The formal recommendation for such a superbomber came in June 1939.19 That summer Hap Arnold and his staff turned to the two men they believed could conceive and create it: Claire Egtvedt and Ed Wells of Boeing Aircraft.
Egtvedt was a lean, spare Scandinavian, and ever since he saw Billy Mitchell use biplane bombers to sink two obsolete battleships, the USS Virginia and New Jersey, he had dreamed of creating a majestic plane that would sweep the skies and rain bombs on enemy targets at will—a true dreadnought of the air.20 In the spring of 1931 he had found the engineer who could design it for him, twenty-eight-year-old Boise-born Ed Wells, who had been building his own cars since he was fifteen and had hoped to work with Bill Knudsen at Chevrolet or Henry Ford at Ford, but was forced to take a temporary job with Boeing because of the Depression.
Wells would spend the rest of his life running Boeing’s Engineering Division. A whiz with a slide rule, pen, and draftsman’s compass, he and Egtvedt came up with a design for the U.S. Army in 1934 for a monoplane bomber with an unprecedented four engines and a wingspan of 105 feet, and able to carry 45,000 pounds of gross weight and 10,000 pounds of bombs. They gave it enough range to patrol both coasts of the United States, as well as reach Hawaii and Alaska.
The Army called it the XB-17, but when Wells and Egtvedt unveiled the prototype on July 28, 1935, the local Seattle newspaper dubbed it “the Flying Fortress” and the nickname stuck. It would go on to be the mainstay of the Army Air Forces in World War II and pass into legend. All in all, 12,731 would be built. Laid wing tip to wing tip, that was enough Flying Fortresses to cover the distance from Washington, DC, to New York City.
That still lay in the future in the summer of 1939, however, when both Wells and Egtvedt were invited down to Wright Field for a chat. Waiting for them were General Arnold, Colonel Oliver Echols of Materiel Command, and Major Donald Putt, head of Materiel Command’s experimental engineering division.
The Air Corps officers put the question straight. Could Boeing come up with an even bigger bomber than the Flying Fortress, one with almost double the bomb load capacity and with a range of say, four thousand to five thousand miles?
Egtvedt and Wells must have looked at each other. It was in fact a problem they had been contemplating almost from the day the B-17 was finished. After all, once you built one four-engine airplane, it was only a matter of pitting the power and lift of bigger engines against the drag of larger wings and fuselage.
Colonel Echols added there was one catch. The Air Corps would want no sacrifice of speed or defensive armament for this kind of superbomber.
Wells said, “Well, we can put in a lot of armament and cut down on performance, or we can keep performance up and stay out of range of fighter planes. Which do you prefer?”
Echols fixed him with a look, and said, “We’ve got to have both.”21
Wells and Egtvedt had a lot to think about on their flight back to Seattle. This was going to require an entirely new concept than the one they had originally doodled up on their drafting boards. It would have to be a plane built around aeronautical principles no one had applied before—certainly one aerodynamically cleaner than any ever built before.
Its projected bomb load capacity meant a plane almost twice the size of the Flying Fortress, closer to 60,000 pounds empty versus 30,000 for the Fort. It would have four engines, of course, but would need almost a thousand more horsepower per power plant, and a wing area of at least 1,700 square feet in order to get a fully loaded, seventy-ton plane into the air up to 30,000 feet—well beyond the reach of any fighter—and a pressurized cabin, so that the crew wouldn’t pass out climbing to such high altitudes or suffer the bends coming back down.
And so Wells and his engineers worked at their drafting tables, so intensely that by the time the Army sent out a formal request for a larger four-engined bomber, on January 29, 1940, nearly every feature had been worked out at Boeing a year beforehand, only months after Lindbergh’s secretive monologue in the bleachers at West Point.22
When Wells and his team were finished, there was no plane anywhere remotely like it. Wells had told his engineers to start from the bomb bay doors, knowing that their size, allowing for sufficient clearance to get bombs into the plane and then out again at 20,000 or even 30,000 feet, would dictate the shape of the rest of the plane—and those bomb bays would have to carry ten tons of ordnance, almost twice that of the B-17.
Boeing also knew that conventional bomb bay doors, which swung wide and open like the doors of a saloon, had become telltale visual invitations to fighter attack. A savvy fighter pilot knew that opening bomb bays meant a bomber had to slow down and hold course in order to hit its target. So Wells created a new, pneumatically driven bomb bay door that snapped open and shut in less than four seconds.23
From there Boeing engineers laid out the plane section by section. More than a thousand test drawings had to be thrown away for every one incorporated into the overall plan.
For their pressurized cabin, Wells and his team worked out a three-“bubble” system instead of trying to pressurize the entire plane—much less complicated and much safer, since sudden loss of pressure in one “bubble” wouldn’t mean loss of pressure in the rest. The first bubble was the cockpit area, where the pilot, co-pilot, engineer, and radio operator would sit. The second was in the midsection where the gunners were, and the third was for the gunner in the rear. He would be effectively locked in for the duration of the flight, sometimes for eighteen hours—doomed to be the loneliest man in the Army Air Forces.24
The guns were a problem. Conventional turrets like those on a Flying Fortress or Liberator couldn’t be pressurized, and areodynamics expert George Schairer pointed out they would also add exterior drag on a plane that could tolerate very little drag. So Schairer proposed leaving them out altogether. After all, the B-29 was designed to fly higher and faster than fighters could reach, anyway. Why worry about protection against a theoretically nonexistent threat?
The Army thought about this. Then, a few days after Pearl Harbor, General Kenneth B. Wolfe, the man who would eventually head the B-29 program, sent his assistant Jake Harmon out from Wright Field along with tech chief Roger Williams. They read Wells and Schairer the riot act. There not only would be gun turrets on the B-29, he told them, but retractable ones, both below and above the fuselage. The Boeing men retorted that this would make pressurizing the interior cabin impossible. They explained the unacceptable drag and other technical problems that would arise. Harmon was sympathetic but adamant.
“The general will bust us both to second lieutenants,” he told Wells, if he and Williams didn’t come back with a pledge from Seattle to install those gun turrets.25
There was some silence in the room. Then Roger Williams happened to mention something he had seen demonstrated at Wright Field by the General Electric Company, an electronic device for aiming and firing the machine guns of fast-flying aircraft: the first onboard airplane computer.
GE’s little machine was like the fire-control systems that had been on Navy warships for years—but they were bulkier and slower and far less precise than a fighter pilot would need. This one could not only aim every gun on a warplane but fire them as well, while correcting errors in direction and angle of deflection simultaneously. Its “brain” was a tiny black box connected to a motor called a selsyn, which was able to compute in fractions of a second the speed and direction of an incoming plane, including variables like wind speed and exterior temperature, then could either aim weapons for firing separately at a fighter making a sweeping pass, or have the guns all converge on a single “aiming point”—all at the touch of a button.26
Wells made a call to General Electric, and working with Sperry Gyroscope, Boeing and GE were able to create a remote fire-control system for the superbomber—the first “smart” automated weapons system and ancestor of today’s precision-guided munitions and “smart bombs.”
That left what to do about the wings. The B-29 would be twice the size of the B-17, but had to have the same drag in order to get the high-altitude performance the Army was demanding. Aerodynamics expert Schairer designed the wing with sleek narrow lines and new lighter metals for the engine nacelles and supercharger system for the Wright 2200-horsepower R-3350 engines. But it was still not enough.
The result was Fowler flaps, developed by aviation engineer Harlan Fowler. They were in effect airfoil spoilers that—unlike most flaps—didn’t just hinge down from the wing. Boeing built them so that they actually slid out from inside the wing and then rotated down, creating a visible slot between the flaps and the wings. The device actually increased the wing area by 20 percent, in addition to increasing the wing’s lift. More wing area, noted George Schairer with satisfaction, also meant more range and a bigger load capacity—not just more bombs but more armored protection for the crews.
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 conveyor 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 lost. 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.