The B-29 crew survived a massive Japanese fighter and flak attack that destroyed one engine and punctured their aircraft with some 100 flak and bullet holes.
Their B-29 was violently shaking and rapidly losing altitude from a damaged engine that had caught fire. The crew faced ditching in the middle of the Pacific.
Search and rescue submarines, destroyers and aircraft operated between the Marianas and Japan to rescue downed B-29s. B-29 crews were periodically assigned to search and rescue as a part of their mission duty.
The 9th BG B-29 Dinah Might made an emergency landing on Iwo Jima on March 4, 1945 while the Battle of Iwo Jima was still ongoing. The crew took Japanese mortar fire while frantically repairing a gas valve.
The tension of the take-offs with about 138,000 pounds gross weight including over 7,000 gallons of high octane gas and ten tons of bombs can never be passed on to a reader of these memoirs. It can't be done. You yourself would have had to have been there as we bounced down the runway hoping and praying. The only voices to be heard were those of the airplane commander and the pilot as they checked off increasing airspeed, etc. The rest of the crew were praying in silence. "Dear God please help us to survive another take off, another mission and return us safely to Tinian, Amen."” – Newell Penniman.
Taking a crippling flack hit over Tokyo, Newell Penniman's B-29 crew was forced to make an emergency landing at Iwo Jima without brakes. To partially overcome the loss, the gunners tossed their parachutes out the exits of the plane upon landing. Read the first-hand story..
The USAAF lost 267 B-29s to engine fires, mechanical failures and takeoff crashes, nearly twice as many as from enemy fire during the Pacific War. B-29 crashes involving heavy fuel and incendiary bomb payloads were violently explosive. The up close experience of explosive B-29 crashes is told first hand by Donald Kearney who served as a runway flagman at North Field.
From October 1944 to the end of the Okinawa campaign, the Japanese flew 2,550 Kamikaze missions, of which 475, or 18.6 percent were effective in securing hits or damaging near misses. Warships of all types were damaged; approximately 45 vessels were sunk, causing great concern to the U.S. military. 2000 B-29 sorties were diverted from direct attacks on Japanese cities and industries to successfully striking Kamikaze air fields in Kyushu to help neutralize the Kamikaze threat.
The existence of the high altitude "jet stream" was a military surprise discovered by B-29 crews during the bombing of Japan in 1944-45. Winds encountered at the B-29's designed bombing altitude of 30,000 ft reached 300 mph, fully disrupting bombing accuracy and even causing negative ground speed under full throttle.
4000 lb bombs were so huge B-29's could only carry three of them. The planes dramatically jumped upward on their release and about a minute later felt the concussion wave of the bomb's horrific explosion three miles below. The bombing raid on the Kawasaki Aircraft Plant in June 1945 with 4000 lb bombs proved ineffective because the B-29 formation was forced to bomb by radar, missing the aircraft plant by 3000 ft!
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