by Jon Erwin
Am hoping and praying I get a letter from you tomorrow. Good night and pleasant dreams, darling.
I really felt miserable that night when I had to leave and you cried. I felt like cutting out my heart.
Darling, you’re so good and wonderful and I love you truly. You’re the one who means all the world to me. I’d give anything in the world to be near you.
I miss you very much and I love you with all of my heart. Every night before I go to bed I look at your picture and whisper “Goodnight, Darling.” Looking at your picture and thinking of you makes you feel very close to me. I’d give anything to be there tonight.
From the moment I saw you I’ve never cared about being with anyone but you. And the last time I was home was the most wonderful thing which ever happened in my life. Then I knew what life was really for. I’m so very happy knowing that you love me, knowing that I have everything in the world to live for and something to come home to.
I lie awake at night thinking of you and my heart aches. I love you, darling. If my letters make you happy then I’m happy because yours make me happy knowing I have such a sweetheart as you.
My belief has always been if anything is worth doing then do your best because I believe there’s a silver cloud ahead. Like a motto I once heard “To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”
Words can’t express how I care for you, Bet. It’s something beyond that. It’s like a hunger in my heart and deep yearning. I can see you all the time (daydreaming habit) and I think to myself, “you’re a lucky guy, Mr. Erwin” with a girl like her.
Since I started writing you I’ve been the happiest man in the Army.
I close my eyes and there you are. I know it sounds like a fairy tale.
The letters worked. Red gathered up the courage to ask Betty’s parents for permission to marry her. At first they thought she was too young, but they soon warmed to Red and gave their blessing.
On December 6, 1944, Red and Betty were married in a simple, small ceremony at her family’s house, performed by the local Methodist minister and attended by family and a few friends. A neighbor played the piano. Betty was eighteen and wore a Sunday dress instead of a wedding gown. Red was twenty-three and wore his army air force uniform.
He didn’t have much money, so the diamond he bought her was a small one, which was fine with her.
While Red and Betty were courting, Red had decided to volunteer for a highly dangerous, experimental new military program that would take him into the thick of combat.
It was a project that would strike a direct blow at the very heart of the enemy—and possibly end the war.
Chapter Two
TO END THIS BUSINESS OF WAR
LATE IN 1943, RED ERWIN HEARD A FANTASTIC RUMOR: the United States was building the ultimate long-range weapons platform, a gigantic high-tech battleship in the sky. It was an aircraft called the B-29. And when the opportunity came, he jumped at the chance to volunteer to join it.
Red explained in a letter to Betty, “The B-29 is the latest super-deluxe bomber of the army, better than the B-17. The B-29 carries 8 tons of bombs and the guns on it are radar-controlled. Very little is known about it. It’s very secretive. My inner sense tells me Tokyo is where they’ll do their baptism because they’re capable of flying 8,000 miles non-stop. I’d like to see 500 or 1,000 over Tokyo and end this business of war.” His hunch was right. The B-29 was specifically designed to blast the military might of Japan from the face of the earth.
By early 1944, Red had achieved excellent ratings in his radio operator training at the technical school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the advanced class at Truax Field, Wisconsin. After a short time in B-17s, Red joined a B-29 crew of the Fifty-Second Bombardment Squadron (Very Heavy) that was being mustered in June 1944 for combat training at Dalhart Army Air Base in Texas. Later they were posted to Pratt Army Airfield in Kansas.
The B-29 was nicknamed the Superfortress. It was a very heavy long-range strategic bomber, the largest combat aircraft up to that time ever to go into full production. It had the potential to strike a death blow on the Japanese Empire and end World War II without the need for the Allies to invade Japan, without the possibly apocalyptic civilian and military casualties that such an invasion would trigger. The plane could carry a 16,000-pound bombload a distance of more than 3,000 miles, and a crew of eleven men: pilot (usually called the air commander), copilot (called the pilot), navigator, bombardier, radar bombardier, radio operator, flight engineer, central fire control gunner, and right, left, and tail gunners.
When Red first laid eyes on a B-29, he was stunned at how big it was, as many other servicemen were. “Whew, it’s some ship,” he explained to Betty in a letter. “The nose of the plane looks like a dirigible itself. We have to have a pass to get into the airfield itself and then another pass to get into the Radio School. Lots of radar equipment and it’s really guarded. We also have a pass to get on and off the air base itself which makes three passes altogether.”
When pilot Ernest Pickett saw one of the planes, he recalled, “We could hardly believe our eyes.1 It was huge, twice the size of a B-24. We stood on the ground looking at it, absolutely awestruck.”
Someone muttered, “That thing’ll never fly.”
Pickett was especially struck by the “enormous Plexiglas greenhouse which comprised the nose of the craft [and] took some getting used to.” He explained, “We were up higher and back farther from the nose than we had ever been before. Instead of the co-pilot sitting right next to the pilot, it felt as if the seats were across a room from one another.”
Since the pilot’s seat was so unusually far off to the left of center, on early practice flights he brought a man along to sit between him and the copilot and holler instructions back and forth to keep the nosewheel on the center line during taxiing and takeoff, until they got used to the feel of the behemoth.
Another airman recalled, “The first impression of a B-29 is, and I’m sure most B-29ers will recite the same words, ‘I can’t believe it will fly. It’s too big!’ The second thought was how beautiful it was. That airplane was almost aerodynamically perfect. It was a beautiful sight to behold. It truly was.”
This feeling extended to Japanese observers too, including Emperor Hirohito’s wife, Nagako, who in 1945 wrote to a friend about the awesome sight of the sleek, gleaming aluminum plane: “Every day from morning to night, B-29s,2 naval bombers and fighters freely fly over the palace making an enormous noise. As I sit at my desk writing and look up at the sky, countless numbers are passing over.” She concluded, “Unfortunately, the B-29 is a splendid plane.”
When Japanese combat ace 1st Lt. Isamu Kashiide first spotted a B-29 in the glare of searchlights over Japan, he was amazed. “I was scared! It was known that the B-29 was a huge plane,3 but when I saw my opponent it was much larger than I ever expected.”
As 1944 drew to a close, Red’s plane was designated as part of the Fifty-Second Bombardment Squadron, Twenty-Ninth Bombardment Group, Twenty-First Bomber Command, Twentieth Air Force. Most of his crew were in their early twenties. They hailed from all over the United States. And from the start, they meshed very well together.
“We were regular guys,” remembered Red. “We took pride in how we functioned as a crew, and we were as close as family.”
The plane’s pilot was Capt. George “Tony” Simeral, a cool Californian whose boyhood dream was to be an army officer. The copilot was Lt. LeRoy “Roy” Stables. The plane’s navigator, Capt. Pershing Youngkin, came from Texas, where much of his family was involved in the oil business. When the war started, Sgt. Vern Schiller, the flight engineer, was working at the Florence Stove Company in Kankakee, Illinois, wondering if his dream of becoming an aviation engineer would ever come true. The war came, and his dream became a reality. First Lt. William “Bill” Loesch was managing a finance office in Cleveland when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He decided to get married, joined the army air force, and wound up as the highly skilled bombardie
r aboard this B-29.
Crew of the City of Los Angeles in Kansas, prior to deployment to Guam. Back row, left to right: Pershing Youngkin (navigator), Roy Stables (pilot), William Loesch (bombardier), Leo D. Connors (radar-bombardier), and George A. Simeral (air commander). Front row, left to right: Vern W. Schiller (flight engineer), Herbert Schnipper (right gunner), Kenneth E. Young (tail gunner), Vernon G. Widemeyer (left gunner), Henry E. “Red” Erwin (radio operator), and Howard Stubstad (central fire control gunner). (Alabama Department of Archives and History, http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/photo/id/5922)
Radar operator–bombardier 1st Lt. Leo D. Connors was a low-key, quiet man from Wisconsin who had a talent for sleeping soundly through those parts of long missions when his job wasn’t needed. Like radio operator Red Erwin, Connors dreamed of becoming a pilot but washed out during training, in his case for a weak stomach. He was happily married to a woman who told him, “You’re the nicest guy in a million.”
Rounding out the crew were the four gunners: New Yorker Sgt. Herbert Schnipper; Ohio-born Sgt. Kenneth E. Young; Sgt. Vernon G. Widemeyer, who grew up with ten siblings on a North Dakota farm; and Sgt. Howard Stubstad, a wiry, beaming former Minnesota millworker who was so beloved by the other crewmen that they came to him for advice and encouragement. He had a wife and a newborn son back home.
The B-29 program was the most expensive military project of World War II, costing about $3 billion, compared to the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb). It was a colossal gamble since the plane went into mass production before it was fully flight-tested. Early B-29s were so buggy that as soon as they came off the assembly line they were rushed to maintenance facilities for extensive repairs and rebuilding. Major mechanical problems, some fatal, plagued the aircraft throughout the war. The engines overheated and shut down during takeoff. Propeller speeds were volatile. Fuel consumption was unpredictable. Bomb bay doors got stuck. Bombs jammed in their racks. And electrical systems malfunctioned.
An early flight was aborted due to a major engine fire. On February 18, 1943, a prototype at Boeing Field in Seattle caught fire and crashed, killing test pilot Edmund Allen, the ten-man crew, twenty workers at a nearby meat-packing plant, and one firefighter.
By the summer of 1944, the Allied victory seemed increasingly inevitable in the wake of a series of strategic battlefield turning points, including the D-day landings at Normandy, the American victories in the Pacific at the Coral Sea, Guadalcanal and the Solomons, and Midway and the Philippine Sea, and Soviet victories at the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk. The only questions were how soon the end would come in the form of the surrender of the Axis powers and how many people would die before that happened. The B-29 was built to make that surrender happen as fast as possible. Nearly four thousand were built.
Red’s B-29 aircraft, serial number 42–65302, was first christened Snatch Blatch by pilot Tony Simeral. This was an esoteric, bawdy reference to a witch who appeared in the satire Gargantua and Pantagruel by the French Renaissance satirist François Rabelais. It was in the tradition of risqué names for bombers across all the war theaters, such as Hore-zontal Dream, Filthy Fay, Hump Happy Mammy, Ready Betty, Mrs. Tittymouse, Ramp Tramp, and Urgin’ Virgin. The aircraft sometimes also had suggestive pinup-style artwork painted on the fuselage.
There was a rumor that the first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, was distressed by the bawdy aircraft artwork during her morale-boosting tours of military installations, and word of the randy nicknames filtered back to the ladies’ aid societies in the States, who also objected. An order came down that the salacious references should be scrubbed. Henceforth, B-29s were named after US cities, which some B-29ers thought was a dull idea. Nonetheless, the Snatch Blatch became the City of Los Angeles, named after Captain Simeral’s hometown. In practice, however, the original nicknames lingered. A compromise was reached: a plane’s nickname was painted on the left side of the nose and the city name was painted on the right. Official photos would only be taken of the right side.
The B-29 was both a masterpiece of advanced engineering and a mind-bogglingly complex aircraft, requiring lead contractor Boeing and thousands of subcontractors to develop tens of thousands of design plans. The technical challenge was to build an aircraft that could strike Japan from long distance, requiring round trips of 3,000 miles, and deliver its bombload on various Japanese targets. No less than six hundred thousand rivets were needed to bolt the plane together.
The man in charge of the problematic megaproject was the commander of the US Army Air Force, Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, the only five-star general in the air force. General Arnold was a bulldozer of a man, temperamental and aggressive, a West Point graduate who by late 1943 was fighting a losing battle with the Boeing assembly line, which was overwhelmed with delays and bottlenecks. Arnold himself was beset by health crises; he had five heart attacks during the war. An anxious President Roosevelt was breathing down his neck, wanting B-29s to be stationed in China and India and put into action immediately against Japanese targets. But in January 1944, Boeing cranked out just ninety-seven aircraft, and only sixteen were serviceable.
An uneasy Arnold visited the main production facilities in Kansas and found a situation “so chaotic that it was obvious upon my arrival4 that schedules could not possibly be met.” In his eyes, the program was “void of organization, management, and leadership,” constituting a “disgrace to the Army Air Force.” He launched a crash program to get 150 B-29s deployed to the China-Burma-India (CBI) theater by mid-April. Arnold’s confrontation with Boeing became known as the Battle of Kansas—and it worked. Arnold established the first B-29 force as the Twentieth Air Force, an independent command that reported directly to him at the Pentagon, as a member of the joint chiefs of staff. This gave the project an unusual degree of power, prestige, and autonomy.
General Arnold had the authority to reject requests for support from titanic personalities such as Allied theater commanders Adms. Chester W. Nimitz and Louis Mountbatten and Gens. Douglas MacArthur and Joseph W. Stilwell. At the same time, however, he could demand they support B-29 operations. It was an unusual, highly effective, bureaucratic structure.
Red Erwin described the B-29 bomber as “big, heavy, and fast. It had beautiful, unbroken nose contours. For practical purposes it was divided into two halves, with part of the crew forward of the bomb bay, the other part aft, connected by a [pressurized] crawl tunnel above the bay. As the radio operator, I sat with my back to the bulkhead in the rear of the front half, looking forward at the flight engineer, the two pilots, and, in the very front, the bombardier, who had the best view in the house.”
The B-29 was first conceived as a hemisphere-defense weapon to prevent Axis forces from establishing bases in Latin America, and then it was seen as a successor to the smaller workhorse B-17 Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator bombers in the Allied arsenals, which were doing major service in Europe. In 1936, Boeing started working on an experimental long-range bomber dubbed the XB-15, which anticipated some aspects of the B-29 design, including four engines, tricycle landing gear, and an all-glass nose. Around the same time Germany was also working on a surprisingly similar ultra-long-range heavy bomber dubbed the Me-264 Amerika Bomber, which was intended to hit targets on the East Coast of the United States and return to Germany. But only three buggy prototypes were ever built. The Germans abandoned the program, but the Americans pressed on and, in a big way, eventually built four thousand Superfortresses.
The B-29 was a quantum leap beyond anything in the Allied or Axis arsenals, a high-tech marvel that also was the biggest and most expensive aircraft of World War II. It was the world’s first mass-production long-range heavy bomber. It featured the first computer-assisted remote-control weapons system, and pressurized compartments that enabled the crew to work in shirtsleeves rather than have to wear bulky clothing and oxygen masks. The aircraft had a maximum range of more than 3,000 miles, a cruising
speed between 200 and 250 miles per hour, a maximum speed of 375 miles per hour, and could fly at nearly 32,000 feet, which was beyond the reach of most Axis fighters and antiaircraft fire.
Once perfected, the B-29 was an aircraft that bristled with superlatives. It was the biggest and heaviest aircraft that had ever been mass-produced. It was the largest operational aircraft of World War II. The colossal aircraft had a wingspan of 141 feet, was 99 feet long, and weighed 133,500 pounds when fully loaded. It carried up to 10 tons of bombs, four times more than the capacity of the B-17.
The plane was powered by four temperamental, turbo-supercharged 2,200-horsepower Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone 18-cylinder radial engines, which had an alarming habit of catching fire. The engines were the most powerful force in aviation, and they turned the largest propellers, sixteen and a half feet in diameter.
One of Red’s crewmates, Robert Bigelow, explained the aircraft’s cutting-edge design: “Although it replaced the B-17,5 the B-29 was a radically different airplane, featuring significant aerodynamic innovations.” The fuel tanks were self-sealing, and later models featured bomb bay doors that snapped open in seven-tenths of a second and closed in three seconds.
The B-29 featured what was by far the most advanced high-tech defensive gunnery system in the air, featuring as many as twelve air-cooled Browning M2/AN .50-caliber machine guns mounted in four remotely operated, powered turrets as well as a 20-millimeter M2 cannon in the tail. The gunner stations were mounted in Plexiglas bubbles, or blisters, on the exterior of the aircraft; the gunners worked from these remote sighting stations, and a first-of-its-kind analog computer-assisted system enabled them to operate their weapons independently or to hand off control of multiple guns to each other, depending on the nature of the threat and which crewman had the best view and position. The computer calculated and corrected for gravity, temperature, humidity, lead, deflection, range, elevation, and size of attacking aircraft, and also accounted for the B-29’s altitude, airspeed, and wind speed.
