Freedom's Forge (47 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

Warming up the Pratt & Whitney R-3350 on a B-29. Note the technicians with fire extinguishers.
Copyright © Boeing

IT WAS FITTING.
He had begun his role as America’s armorer by dealing with airplanes. He was going to finish with them—finish with the biggest ever.

First, however, he had some help.

The plane’s progenitor, Hap Arnold, was the first to step in. The B-29 was his baby, from that first conversation with Lindbergh in the
West Point bleachers to one meeting after another with Marshall and Lovett cajoling the War Department into spending still more millions while other generals argued the money would be better used for proven bombers like the B-24 and the Flying Fortress. Arnold realized the Allen crash meant doom to the entire program unless he acted fast.

“We cannot, will not stop,” he told subordinates. Instead he worked up a proposal for assigning the first finished B-29s to the China-Burma-India theater (or CBI), to show American support for Chinese president Chiang Kai-shek. Arnold made his pitch at the Trident Conference in front of Roosevelt and Churchill, and won their approval. Arnold also promised that once the bugs were worked out, B-29s would be ready for deployment no later than January 1944. The Army Air Forces’ superbomber at last had an operational destination, but Arnold had made a promise he had no way of knowing he could keep.
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Because the bugs showed no sign of letting up. On April 15 the very first B-29 rolled off the assembly line at Wichita, but no one dared to take it up in the air. Instead, on May 23 Jake Harmon took up the original prototype once again, only to discover that during a maintenance check someone had inadvertently reversed the aileron control cables, so raising the flaps up actually dropped them down, and vice versa. Harmon had to make an emergency landing after nearly crashing the plane.
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Yet Harmon was still adamant in his faith in the B-29. “A hell of a good plane,” he kept telling people, even after stepping away from his near-fatal crash, “just a tremendous plane.” And it was Harmon who finally figured out how to pull the B-29 program back from oblivion.
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He and General Wolfe sat down together and worked it out. Hap Arnold would be put in personal charge of every aspect of the B-29, from the assembly line to modification centers to the recruitment and training of crews and mechanics. The entire operation would be branded a War Department Special Project, meaning no funding or other changes could be made without prior approval of the Joint Chiefs and the secretary. The industry’s Liaison Committee could then address all engineering and production problems without outside interference, while the planes themselves would be organized as a separate independent bombardment wing. Each would have four combat groups of fifty
bombers each. A fifth wing would serve as an operational training unit to funnel replacements to the other groups overseas.

Every overhanging branch of standard chain of command, every piece of government agency and military red tape, would be cut away. From now on, everyone riveting or engineering a B-29, fixing a B-29, or flying a B-29 would be working for the head of the Air Force himself.

Harmon and Wolfe typed up their plan as a memo. At the bottom they left room for a signature, and typed under it: “H. H. Arnold, Commanding, U.S. Air Forces.”

They went down the hall and gave it to Arnold. The general read it. He said without expression, “Why doesn’t someone else do something for me once in a while?” Wolfe handed him a pen, Arnold signed the memo, and the B-29 Special Project was born.
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Hap Arnold also lifted the veil of secrecy that had been draped over the project since its inception. This meant the bomber had to have a name. Boeing wanted “Superfortress”—a salute to its most famous venture. Others pushed for “Annihilator.” Arnold didn’t particularly care; he had other things to worry about besides the B-29 naming contest, like what bomber groups to send to Europe, and how to keep Kenney and his Fifth Air Force supplied in the Southwest Pacific. He decided Boeing’s name would do.
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That still left the issue of how to get enough B-29s produced to make a difference in the war—and keep Arnold’s promise to have them in China by next year. That’s when Arnold called on Bill Knudsen.

He had always had his doubts about Knudsen. Although Arnold speaks highly of Knudsen in his memoirs, in the scramble before the war he saw him only as an oversold production man, someone who was full of great speeches but knew nothing about airplanes.
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The big Dane didn’t even know what an engine nacelle was.
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But if anyone could understand the complex problems facing the manufacturing end of the B-29 program, it would be Knudsen. He had flown out to Seattle soon after Allen’s death. He had met with Egtvedt and Wells and seen their glum faces and sensed the loss of confidence although not conviction
at Boeing. “The Boeing Company never did lose faith in their baby,” Knudsen wrote later, but they “almost gave up hope following that crash.” Some five months later, there still wasn’t a combat B-29 available, “and the bugs had not begun to be ironed out of the ships that were flyable.”
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That would be Knudsen’s job: to get the bugs out, and the planes in the air and into action. So in the late autumn of 1943, Knudsen stepped in to win what would be remembered forever in Air Force circles as the Battle of Kansas.

As the name suggests, the main battleground was the B-29 plant in Wichita. When Knudsen paid his first visit, it was hard at first glance to see what the problem was. Some 26,000 people were now working in the Boeing facilities, which included 86 million cubic square feet of plant space, offices, warehouses, and hangars, and covered 185 acres—almost half the size of the National Mall.
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Schools, daycare centers, theaters, shopping malls, and some six thousand brand-new homes—most of them paid for by the Federal Housing Administration—surrounded the site, with fifty-four buses moving workers into work every day. Mobile cafeterias rolled through the plant to minimize time off for lunch.

“The Great Boeing Kitchen” dispensed hot food, along with soup, coffee or tea, and buns, all for only twenty-eight cents. “This beats any meal I ever had anywhere,” one young man said. A foreman said the rolling cafeteria meant “my men don’t gripe about their wives as they used to”—and kept their minds focused on their jobs.
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