As a member of the Vander Schans crew my most enjoyable experience as far as missions go was to drop supplies to the POW camps. We were assigned to fly over to Saipan where our aircraft was loaded with pallets for the camps. A couple of us thought we should enclose a note and a news magazine that we had.
During the low level nighttime firebombing raid over Osaka on March 13, 1945, a Japanese military arsenal violently exploded hurling a directly overhead B-29 upward 5000 feet, flipping it upside down and into a slow roll, high speed death dive to the ground.
The top secret atomic bombing mission of Hiroshima was even kept from the Search and Rescue teams for that mission. B-29 Flight Engineer Lawrence Stewart tells the fascinating story of his Search and Rescue assignment for the Hiroshima bombing and what he was told.
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.
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.
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!
The severely wounded crew limped their flak crippled B-29 700 miles on two engines and lost steering control to the safety of Iwo Jima, which the Marines had taken months earlier. Unable to land, the crew bailed over the island. Co-pilot Harry George's fiancé made her wedding dress from the parachute that saved his life. Read the harrowing story
[This article is an excerpt from Sgt. Creek’s military memoirs Short Stories of World War II.] It tells the story of a B-29 that caught fire due to being hit by flak. Half the crew bailed out thinking the plane was going down. They were caught by the Japanese and spent months at Kempei Tai HQ Prison as described in the B-29 POW page.
Measured against all other bombing missions flown in WW II, prior to Aug. 6, the most devastating were the two largest low level “firestorm” missions over Tokyo on the nights of May 24 and 26 in which 15 square miles of the city were completely destroyed. On May 30, 1945 Lt. Charles Scholsser wrote a letter to his wife about this mission
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