What You Need To Know About The B-29 Superfortress Bomber (2024)

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress strategic bomber was arguably the primary instrument for the United States of America in defeating Axis Japan. The B-29 did not just haul two infamous atomic bombs but also carried general bombs, firebombs, and mines to destroy Japan’s ability to make war. The Boeing B-29 was developed in the late 1930s and early 1940s for strategic reach.

A Strategic Bomber Intended to Cross Oceans

As the 1930s rolled on, and the threat of Nazi Germany taking over even Great Britain increased – the US Army Air Corps – the predecessor to today’s US Air Force – wanted a bomber that could strike across oceans. Bomber technology in the 1930s, with the B-17 coming online, had a maximum range of 2,000 miles. This would be insufficient to cross the oceans, so in March 1936, the B-29 was born.

According to the book Superfortress: The Boeing B-29 and American Airpower in World War II by Curtis E. LeMay and Bill Yenne, work began in March 1936 to develop a pressurized long-range bomber by Boeing. By 1939, the US Army Air Corps received a report written by a board led by Brigadier General W. G. Kilner calling for such. With another world war on the horizon, development became severe after a few designs were drafted inside Boeing. By September 21st, 1942 – less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the B-29 Superfortress prototype would have its first flight.

Cyclone radial engines complicate issues.

However, the B-29 Superfortress’ four Wright R-3350-23 Duplex-Cyclone 18-cylinder air-cooled turbo supercharged radial piston engines would pose a severe development problem. The B-29’s Cyclone engines would easily overheat, especially with a turbo supercharger. These issues required post-assembly modifications, some of which came only after a fiery crash in Seattle on February 18th, 1943.

“Never before in the history of warfare…”

Quoting General LeMay in the book Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott,

The plan was to use the B-29s exclusively in the Pacific Theatre because, at the time, sufficient B-29s would become available, and Nazi Germany would mostly have been defeated. Plus, the B-29 was most effective in operating as a fleet, not individually.

Photo: BlueBarronPhoto | Shutterstock.com

See Also

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See, the B-29 had gravity-fall unguided weapons only: no GPS-guided bombs, no laser-guided bombs, none of that. The B-29 only had the eyeballs of the aircrew and early radar and had much difficulty in distinguishing targets to find targets for its free-falling payload.

However, the B-29 would still be expected to knock Japan out of the Second World War. As leader of the US Army Air Corps, General Hap Arnold was quoted in “Superfortress”;

“Before we got the Marianas, the columnists, commentators, and newspaper reporters had all talked about the Naval capture of the Islands. The Navy would take the Islands and use them as a base. No one had mentioned using them as bases for the B-29s, yet it was the B-29s and the B-29s only that could put tons and tons of bombs on Japan. The fleet couldn't do it, and the Naval air couldn’t do it; the Army couldn’t do it. The B-29s could.”

Taking the fight to Japan

The first B-29 combat missions were launched from India on June 5th, 1944 – mere hours before D-Day in Europe. But the first target bombed was a railyard in Bangkok, Thailand. B-29s based in India would ferry over to mainland China and ten days later attack the Japanese homeland proper after the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata.

By the fall of 1944, the Allied ground forces would take Guam and Tinian so that B-29s could be based there and make the 1,570-mile flight to Tokyo. After bombing the Japanese bases on what is now Tonowas – formerly Dublon Island – in Micronesia starting on October 28th, the first raid to Tokyo would be November 24th, 1944.

Photo: Everett Collection | Shutterstock

As predicted, the B-29s would not be ready until Allied forces landed on mainland Europe on June 6th, 1944. On November 23rd, the Allies were already in Strasbourg, France – now home of the European Parliament in 2024. Clearly, history validated the decision to keep the B-29s concentrated on the Pacific Theatre.

But the B-29s were still having problems. Bombing from tens of thousands of feet above may have made most Japanese air defenses inert, but the bombs could not precisely hit targets due to varying winds and difficulty finding targets. As LeMay explains in “Superfortress”;

“Once the bombardier had gotten the [Norden] bombsight level, it was good only for a short time. If the plane made even a little turn, the gyro processed, and the accuracy would go off. The bombardier needed a straight and level bomb run. To fly straight and level toward the target with the wind blowing the plane off course required heading upwind enough to compensate for it. The bombardier also needed to know the ballistic characteristics of the bomb and to determine how high the plane was, using the barometric pressure and the altimeter. With that set, the bombardier would have to kill the ground speed drift by using the proper drop angle and getting that cross-hair to stay on the target. When the plane was finally going straight toward the target at the proper time and the proper drop angle, the bombardier dropped the bombs. If all those things weren’t done properly, the bombs didn’t hit the target. If the bombardier could see anything on the ground, and if he could identify it as a target, he’d try to make a bomb run on it.”

Something had to be done to replace a complex, unreliable way to bomb – and General Curtis LeMay had a plan. A plan that required a lot of courage to use the B-29’s abilities to the maximum.

Going down low to burn and mine Axis Japan

Although the B-29, like the B-17 that preceded it, was intended to be a high-altitude bomber – wartime circ*mstances would dictate a change in tactics. But for this to work, the B-29s would have to be in sufficient numbers from the production lines. This would not happen until around March 9th or 10th, 1945.

Photo: BlueBarronPhoto | Shutterstock

On that date, according to “Black Snow,” LeMay would launch and send every B-29 he could – namely 325 – to Tokyo full of incendiary bombs at 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level and at night. This would reduce the strain on the temperamental Cyclones, get more accuracy, and allow for more bombs to hit the small factories in Tokyo’s residential neighborhoods that were feeding Japan’s war machine. LeMay believed the firebombing raid would shorten the war, and his Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Col. John Montgomery, said, according to “Black Snow,”;

With the B-29’s unique remote-control turrets, which were somewhat difficult to operate – even against inexperienced Japanese air defense pilots, the fear was the Japanese would up their game with lessons and technologies from their Axis partners. So, speeding up the war’s end by eroding the Japanese will to fight was the only way to prevent a more significant number of lost lives, especially with the looming threat of invasions of the Japanese home islands to force Japan to stop warfighting.

Additionally, quoting Hattie Hearn from the Imperial War Museum video above:

"The individual fires caused by the bombs combined create a blazing Inferno. When it was over, 16 square miles of the centre of Tokyo had gone up in flames and nearly 100,000 people had been killed, more than the estimated casualties of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. A mere fourteen B-29s were lost in the raid. The B-29 had defied its critics, but at what cost?"

The B-29s were versatile enough to handle mining harbors. The B-29 mining alongside Allied submarine and surface warfare pushed Japan to the point of near starvation by August 1945. This was when the average caloric intake fell to 1,680 per day, according to “Black Snow.” The mining was guided by B-29 radars, which initially needed the contrast between coast and water to help bombardiers but was still the first radar on a bomber. However, an improved radar in the AN/APQ-7 Eagle radar helped target refineries and other industrial sites.

Nuclear missions

After several months of using firebombing and mining – the Japanese war machine was being rolled back and teetering on starvation. But several cities were spared – in part because, as General LeMay knew, a devastating new family of bombs was in the works in the atomic bomb.

Photo: George R. Caron | Wikimedia Commons

Much has been written and shown on screen about the use of atomic bombs to end World War II. But the B-29s that lofted those bombs to altitude to drop were stripped of extraneous guns and armor as the B-29s had to be a minimum of eight miles clear of the atomic bombs at the time of the explosion. Both B-29s - first Enola Gay over Hiroshima and Bock’s Car over Nagasaki - would be preserved in museums as the historical artifacts they are.

After World War II

B-29s after World War II would end up inspiring a few variants. For one, the Soviets made a Tupolev Tu-4 imitation from a few B-29s that mistakenly landed in the eastern Soviet Union. The Tu-4 was modified to inspire in-flight refueling testing, electronic warfare, communications relay, and transport variants. But the Tu-4 never saw combat.

However, the B-29 did see combat again in the Korean War. B-29s were sent to North Korea to bomb industrial targets with conventional weapons only. Additionally, some B-29s were modified into KB-29 aerial refuelers that would be the predecessor of today’s KC-135s, KC-10s, and now KC-45s with flying booms like pictured below.

Photo: United States Air Force | Wikimedia Commons

Ultimately, the Boeing B-29 would overcome a problematic development to become a predecessor not just of modern strategic bombing but also the predecessor of aerial refueling. It now lives on in a few flying examples and many museums on static display.

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