B-29 Flight engineer Lawrence Stewart reflects on his war experience and the path crews took to getting home from the Marianas.
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.
During the Pacific War, Ed Vincent initiated the unusual take-off procedure of driving his B-29 bomber over the edge of the 80 foot cliff which terminated the Tinian Island runway at North Field. The drive-off afforded valuable extra air speed at level flight prior to climb out as the bombers were invariably overweight in bombs and fuel load.
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
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