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.
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