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.
The B-29 bomber had just redefined warfare in its unique capability to strike a crippling military blow to an enemy by carrying heavier bomb loads over significantly greater distances. What transpired was a stunt. The standard B-29 was incapable of flying non-stop, 27.5 hours to Washington DC. Yet, four B-29s on November 1, 1945 did so.
The Superfortress B-29 Story. Twenty years ago this fall the first B-29s, operating from the newly captured Marianas, struck the Japanese home islands. It was the first blow in an aerial campaign that, in the next nine months, was to reduce Japanโs war industry to rubble and so lower the morale of the Japanese people that, many say, the war in the Pacific could shortly have been ended without either atomic bombs or the scheduled land invasion.
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