The first giant Flying Fortress had hardly taken off from the Boeing factory at Seattle, in 1935, before its engineers began to think about bigger and faster super-bombers. As the new Fortresses shattered records for speed, pay load, distance, and altitude, farsighted Air Corps leaders also began to think about more powerful super-bombers.

By 1937 the brains and labor of Boeing engineers and production men created the first of the super-bombers. It was the giant Boeing XB-15 and it actually dwarfed the Flying Fortress. With a gross weight of 35 tons, 13 tons more than the Fortress, the XB-15 was 20 feet longer, 3 feet higher, and had a wingspan 45 feet greater. Its general appearance, however, was patterned after the Fortress. Only one XB-15 was built. It was used for experimental purposes by the Air Corps, and the Boeing Company went ahead to build the high-altitude Stratoliner and the big Clipper planes for civilian use.

Thus it was that even before the Nazis swept into Poland in 1939 the Air Corps had been thinking of an airplane that would dwarf the Flying Fortress. Size alone was not enough. General Arnold and his associates wanted an airplane which would carry a heavier bomb load farther, faster, and higher than ever before.

Few people aside from the Army knew of the XB-15, and the development of the super-bomber was one of the best kept secrets in history. One of the greatest surprises of the war was the War Department’s announcement on June 15, 1944: “B-29 Superfortresses of the United States Army Air Forces’ 20th Bomber Command bombed Japan.”

Just one year after the announcement of the first Superfortress attack on Japan, five hundred of these giant ships took part in a single raid against targets on the Japanese mainland. In groups of four and five hundred they blasted Japan almost daily. Superfortresses bombed Japan to her knees in the spring and summer of 1945. Then in August of that year a lone Superfortress dropped the world’s first atomic bomb on Hiroshima for the knockout blow that brought us victory.

Half again as large as the Flying Fortress, the Superfortress carries twice the load of the Fortress. It has a wingspan of 141 feet and its highly streamlined fuselage is 98 feet long. Powered with the largest engines yet in service, it has a speed far in excess of 300 miles per hour. The pressurized cabin of the B-29 permits its crew to fly without the use of heated suits or oxygen masks at substratosphere altitudes. In military terms this means better physical condition, more skilful gunnery, more accurate bombing, and more comfort for the crews. In the Superfortress we see great ideas, born years ago in the minds of our airmen, come into being with overwhelming and disastrous effects on our enemies throughout the Pacific.