Freedom's Forge (49 page)

The Age of the Superpower.

Yet as the winter of 1943–44 wore on, Knudsen’s headaches with B-29 production were getting worse, not better.

As director of the program, he tried to keep the all-important Liaison Committee meetings down to one a month, with each company sending one or two representatives out to Wichita or Marietta or Renton to hash out problems and offer advice on solutions.
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Even apart from the engines, the problems were still multiplying. More and more planes were now in the air, and each test flight, it seemed, raised new issues.

One of the trickiest was adjusting the airframe to the pressurized cabin compartments. DuPont had developed special Plexiglas observation blisters to fit into the fuselage. Unfortunately, they had a nasty habit of blowing out when the pressure outside the plane changed too drastically. On one test at 30,000 feet, all the B-29’s crew were at their stations wearing their parachutes, and one of the side-gunners was examining his sights, when the blister popped.

“It was like an elephant kicking me in the pants, sir,” he related to Knudsen. The boy was sent flying through the aperture, along with his guns, his equipment, and just about everything that wasn’t strapped down.

“So what did you do?” Knudsen had to know.

“Well, sir,” the boy answered, “I found myself up there without any airplane and just pulled my cord.” Knudsen ordered the blister problems solved.
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Since almost every feature of the plane was new, everything needed multiple tests, both on the ground and in the air. At the Bechtel-McCone modification center in Birmingham, enough “mandated changes” arrived every week to paper the side of the main office wall. Even then the bugs didn’t go away. When the Birmingham people finished work on one Superfortress, the pilot pushed the button activating the intercom and the bomb bay door opened instead.
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Outside the center one day, an Air Force officer counted no fewer than thirty B-29s waiting on the tarmac. “If the Old Man could see that,” the man said nervously, referring to Hap Arnold, “Christ, he’d just go through the roof.”
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Arnold didn’t, but he was getting nervous. He had promises to keep—and as the January deadline approached, Knudsen had to tell him it couldn’t be met. They changed it to March. Arnold went to Wichita to see for himself, and his patience ran out. By now he had Leslie Groves and the Manhattan Project people looking over his shoulder, and wondering. He told Knudsen he had to have that first batch of B-29s in the air by April 15. No excuses.

The Battle of Kansas entered its climax. Six hundred Boeing specialists flew out to Wichita and spent the next four weeks working out every problem on the spot. Since there was no place to put the planes as they overloaded the assembly line’s final stages, workers had to work outside.

Huge 114-foot wings were rolled out onto the field, while cranes lifted the four 2,000-pound engines out of the crates in which they had been shipped from the Chrysler plant in Chicago. Then came the massive four-bladed propellers, twelve feet in diameter, shipped from a company in Dayton, Ohio, that before the war had been making refrigerators.
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Finally, there were thousands of gallons of paint stowed under canvas, waiting for the final overcoating—three hundred pounds of paint for the plane’s underwings alone.

Wichita’s supposedly wonderful weather turned nasty. With freezing
winds blowing off the plains, including the occasional drenching snow shower, they labored to install parts, even entire engines, by hand. This involved disconnecting every electrical and fuel circuit and then—while fingers froze—detaching and lifting a defective R-3350 and then, with a hoist and groups of technicians and engineers, sliding in its replacement. Bolts and hoses and lines were reconnected, all in the frigid open air, and then the endless tests began, one after another, as Wichita workers gathered around in the gathering frigid darkness and watched.

This time,
maybe this time
, everything would work out, they thought. Maybe they could go home to their families instead of spending the night lifting out and reinstalling yet another engine from the factory.

The days and weeks passed. Boeing had to scrounge around and find electrically heated flight suits for their workers. Meals at home didn’t get eaten and grew cold, like the workers. In spite of the freezing temperatures, the Witchita managers sweated. What if they couldn’t meet the deadline?

They weren’t alone. Knudsen was so worried about the engines out of New Jersey that he insisted the results from Paterson and Woodbridge be phoned directly to him every day. Sitting in his Pentagon office, he would grab the ringing phone at nine o’clock sharp to hear the daily count. The reports started with four engines a day. Then they grew to five a day, and then seven a day until suddenly they fell back to four again. “It gave me the jitters,” Knudsen said later.
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Then the numbers started to turn around.

They started with Wichita. In November 1943 the plant had managed to produce just 17 planes. In December, Knudsen got that number up to 31—while Marietta completed 3. Then in January Wichita reached 46 Superfortresses, and 51 in March. By May all four plants were producing finished planes, with Wichita hitting 65 a month—unheard of before Knudsen stepped in. By September total production of B-29s was in the triple digits.
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Meanwhile, Wright-Woodridge was still struggling. “Bad planning, bad supervision,” was how Knudsen expressed his frustration in mid-1944 in a report for Secretary Patterson, “rate of rework runs at 50 to 60 percent.”
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But engine production at Chrysler-Dodge was going so
well that in August Arnold’s people began calling for a scale-back in numbers. Workers were putting out at a rate of 11,000 R-3350s a year. The Air Force’s biggest worry now was where to store all the extra motors.
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Meanwhile, by stopping work on all other planes and with 5,200 workers at the Birmingham facility scrambling flat-out, Bechtel and McCone whittled the usual modification schedule down to just nine weeks—nearly half the time it took to build the plane from scratch. In spite of the crazy schedule and the ramshackle conditions, Knudsen was able to deliver his two hundred B-29s in five months. An exhausted Knudsen and his weary team had won the Battle of Kansas, but just barely.
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Perhaps the most dramatic success story, however, had been the Dodge Chicago plant. There had been no organizational flow charts, no elaborate management plans. Managers, executives, inspectors, foremen, and workers had simply tackled the problems as they came up and solved them. Everything had been done on a “making do” basis, and it had worked.

The result, Knudsen had to admit, had been “outstanding.” He was inclined to agree with the Bechtel-McCone employee who said, “This country seems to be able to do more by accident than any other country can do on purpose.” Certainly the production system Knudsen had devised for arming America had raised itself to an entirely new level of coordination and complexity, one that paralleled what was going on at the uranium plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and presaged what would happen when Americans wanted to reach for the moon.

Yet the fiery trials of the B-29 had just started.

A B-29 emerges from the far doors of the Wichita plant, circa 1944.
Copyright © Boeing

BANKING A SHARP
left, Colonel Jake Harmon landed the first B-29 on Indian soil at Chakulia outside Calcutta on April 4, 1944. The runway consisted of thousands of tightly packed stones, which rumbled under his skidding tires until the huge plane finally skidded to a halt. Thanks to Bill Knudsen, Harmon now had a plane. Thanks to Henry Kaiser, in a few months he and other B-29 pilots would soon have the tools of victory in their grasp, from a Kaiser project Knudsen himself had pronounced a “lemon.”

Out of the Battle of Kansas had emerged the first operational squadron of B-29s, the 58th Bomb Wing, made up of three groups, with Harmon in charge. It had been a mind-boggling epic trip from Salina, with refueling stopovers in New York, Newfoundland, Marrakech, Cairo, and finally Karachi before the final twelve-hundred-mile leg to Calcutta. As Harmon stepped on the runway, the heat and humidity rose up to envelop him like a stifling blanket even as a hot wind blew clouds of dust that stung the eyes and choked the throat. He knew that spelled trouble for the mission his boss, Hap Arnold, had laid out for the world’s most complex airplane.
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The B-29 did not deal with heat very well. Given the fact that its engines suffered from chronic overheating, no mechanic or engineer or pilot could be very surprised. The planes that followed Harmon watched their performance plummet the farther east they went. One crashed at Marrakech, a total loss; another crashed at Cairo. Then five more went down, two complete wrecks on the Karachi runway. The rest still en route had to be grounded while engineers grappled once more with the overheating engines. By April 15 only thirty-two B-29s out of two hundred had arrived in the theater of war.
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In the 120-degree heat, no B-29 engine behaved like it did in the States. Cylinder-head temperature gauges started in the red zone and stayed there the whole way. “I’d tell my flight engineer to keep his mouth shut about how hot they were running,” a pilot with the 58th Group, Jack Ladd, remembered. “I said I didn’t want to know.”
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The heat caused other problems. The Plexiglas blisters designed by Bendix cracked as they expanded, then they would contract and explode as planes labored to fly over the Himalayas to their final destination in China—while carburetors froze up at the same time.

They still had unreliable engines and a chronic lack of spare parts and supplies—but on April 26 the B-29 passed one crucial test. A plane flown by Major Charles Hansen had its first encounter with the Japanese, when they ran into a flight of Kawasaki Ki-43 Oscars passing over the India-Burma frontier at 16,000 feet. The Japanese followed the plane for a long time, as if they couldn’t believe their eyes at the size of the plane and its speed at that altitude. When they finally attacked, Hansen and his crew shot down one and came through only slightly damaged after the Japanese tried twelve separate passes. Although the electrical system of the top turrets had shorted out, rendering the guns useless, there was no question left. This was a plane ready for battle.
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In June 1944, Operation Matterhorn was launched, involving a series of attacks on Japanese bases in China, Thailand, and Singapore. On the fifteenth there was even a trial run on Japan itself, with a raid on the steel-producing town of Kyushu that did little damage but proved the planes could operate over Japanese airspace.

All they needed was a way to close the distance a bit. So simultaneously with Matterhorn, the Navy launched into the central Pacific the biggest and most powerful naval armada ever seen, with fifteen carriers, fifteen battleships, twenty-one cruisers, and sixty-eight destroyers—plus hundreds of fighter and torpedo planes and thousands of amphibious craft, including the ubiquitous Higgins boat. It was not only the most powerful, but so new most vessels were less than two years old. Only five of the cruisers were prewar built; all but nineteen of the destroyers had launched since 1942—as had fourteen of the fifteen carriers.
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The force was the culmination of not just a new, modern U.S. Navy, but also the productive forces of American industry and shipbuilding Knudsen and his colleagues had let loose in the tide of war.

The Marianas campaign was focused on capturing a handful of islands. Thousands of Americans would die taking the largest: Guam, Tinian, and Saipan. Yet all the fierce fighting that summer, all the death and destruction, took place in order to provide the Superfortress with the island bases it would need to reach Japan. American technology was now driving military strategy, rather than the other way around.