BELL’S FIRST BOMBER
ON NOVEMBER 1, 1943, THE FIRST OF 668 B-29 SUPERFORTRESSES PRODUCED BY THE BELL AIRCRAFT CORPORATION DURING WORLD WAR II ROLLED OUT OF THE COLOSSAL PRODUCTION PLANT SPECIALLY BUILT IN MARIETTA, GA., TO MANUFACTURE AMERICA’S NEWEST BOMBER.
That first Superfort was a milestone for Bell, for Marietta and for Georgia. What happened to it?
In April 1944, 11 men boarded that first Bell B-29, fired up its four massive Wright R-3350 engines and took off from an airfield in Pratt, Kan. My father, Ray Troll, was among them. He was the navigator and, at age 27, the “old man” of the crew. As they flew the B-29 out of the Kansas prairie, the crewmen knew that it was huge—one-third again the size of the stalwart B-17; it was innovative, with a pressurized cabin and a remotely controlled gun system; and it could fly faster, higher, farther and carry a heavier bombload than any other four-engine airplane. A “gentleman’s aircraft” as the pilot, Captain Robert Haley, a hefty B-24 instructor, first remarked when he slid into the left seat and took the yoke with his burly hands. What the crew most likely did not know was the significance of this particular B-29 to Georgia history.
Their destination was Gander, Newfoundland, then across the Atlantic and North Africa with stops in Marrakech, Cairo and Karachi to their new home at Chakulia, near Calcutta, India. The Bell bomber was among the first of what would eventually become an armada of B-29s that would inflict a fiery conclusion to the war with Japan. Its tail number was 26222, leading the crew to christen it Deuces Wild.
It was clear from the outset that Boeing, designer of the B-29, would not have the capacity to produce
