B 29 Superfortress in Action

B-29 Superfortress in Action (Aircraft 31)ByStive Birdsall

Publisher:Squadron/Signal Publications Inc.1979 |49Pages | ISBN: 0897470303 | PDF | 13 MB

"People of Japan. Evacuate the following cities. The B-29s are coming soon. Your Warlords are powerless to stop them. The next cities on the list are: Yawata, Osaka, Tsu, Fukui...." And so the warnings would go, a chilling psychological blow, blatantly listing the targets for the huge, gleaming armada which was methodically destroying the remnants of an empire.

The story of the B-29 began with an "official requirement", to be translated by the aircraft companies into a design. In February 1940 the companies were asked to design a heavily armed, high altitude bomber capable of carrying a maximum bomb load of eight tons, a ton of them for over five thousand miles, at a speed of four hundred miles per hour. Four companies submitted designs - the Lockheed and Douglas submissions never proceeded, Consolidated's saw brief life as the B-32 - Boeing's Model 345 would become the Superfortress. Two prototypes were ordered on August 24, 1940. and designated XB-29, and a third was ordered in December, along with a static test specimen. Construction of the prototypes began in April 1941 at Boeing's plant in Seattle, and with the prospect of war becoming uncomfortably real, the new aircraft was given top priority. Fourteen YB-29s were ordered for service testing, and a production contract was issued for 250B-29s in September 1941. So when the Japarese attacked Pearl Harbor in December, the bombers which would eventually kill their people in the hundreds of thousands were already being ordered.

NO PASSWORD

!!!No Mirrors below, please! Follow Rules!