Flying Fortress: The Illustrated Biography of the B-17s and the Men Who Flew Them

By Edward Jablonski

Renowned throughout the world for its strength and destructiveness, the Flying Fortress was one of the greatest fighting airplanes of all time. In this comprehensively documented biography, Edward Jablonski tells the story of the Flying Fortress Boeing B-17, America's legendary long-range bomber. From the B-17's near death in infancy to the emergence of its successor, the Superfortress, Flying Fortress captures the exhilarating career of the B-17 with thrilling accounts of the exploits of these planes and their pilots. In this unforgettable history, Jablonski details the Fortress's role in the strategic and tactical issues of air war, and chronicles the B-17's roles in famous raids including Regensburg, Marienburg, Munster, Schweinfurt, Dresden, and Berlin, along with its part in great battles, such as D-Day. Masterfully written, Flying Fortress is a classic in aviation literature with over 400 illustrations (many unpublished action photos) in addition to a section on the design of the Flying Fortress, which includes a number of detailed cutaway drawings. Approximately 60 pages from the Flying Fortress's Piloting Manual are also featured herein. Find out why the Flying Fortress ultimately redefined the concept of war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781648374760

Book preview

FLYING FORTRESS

FLYING FORTRESS

The Illustrated Biography of the B-17s and the Men Who Flew Them

EDWARD JABLONSKI

ECHO POINT BOOKS & MEDIA, LLC

Published by Echo Point Books & Media

Brattleboro, Vermont

www.EchoPointBooks.com

All rights reserved.

Neither this work nor any portions thereof may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any capacity without written permission

from the publisher.

Copyright © 1965, 2014 Edward Jablonski

ISBN: 978-1-63561-969-0

Cover Image: B-17s Over Europe by David Ray

Courtesy of National Archives (6425779)

Cover Design by Adrienne Núñez,

Echo Point Books & Media

Editorial and proofreading assistance by Christine Schultz,

Echo Point Books & Media

For DAVID

It was just that on some nights the air

became sick and there was an unspoken

contagion of spiritual dread, and we were

little boys again, lost in the dark.

ERNIE PYLE

One picture is worth a thousand words.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

NOTE

PRELUDE

THE FLYING FORTRESSES

1.Project 299

2.Milestones and Millstones

3.Fortress I

4.Big Bird

FROM THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN

5.Climb Mount Niitaka

6.Improvised War

7.Turning Tide

ACTION OF THE TIGER

8.O Mistress Mine!

9.This Scepter’d Isle

10.Winter of Our Discontent

11.Impious War

BALLAD OF THE BLOODY CENTURY

12.The Bloody 100th

13.Rosie’s Riveters

FESTUNG EUROPA

14.The 15th at Foggia

15.POW

16.Little Friends and the Dying Luftwaffe

SUPERFORTRESS

17.Sunset

EPILOGUE:The Legacy of Dresden

SUPPLEMENT

Mission: A Photographic Essay

The Flying Fortresses: A Tabulation

Design Analysis of the B-17

Arms and Armaments

Excerpts from the Pilot Training Manual for the Flying Fortress

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

A Note About the Illustrations

INDEX

PREFACE

The pretty German girl pedaled her bicycle to the side of the street. She heard the roar of a speeding truck approaching from behind; it was probably a military vehicle and the wiser course was to get well out of its way.

Safely at the curb she stopped, turned to watch and froze in horror. Just a few feet above the street she saw not a truck but an enormous four-engined aircraft bearing down on her. Black, deadly snouts of machine guns projected from various positions in the plane’s massive body, its upper part a mottled brown and its underside an indeterminate light blue. Near one wingtip she could see a white, five-pointed star—the insignia of the American air forces. As fascinated as she was frightened the Fräulein recognized it as an American bomber.

The enemy plane overtook her in seconds, and as it passed by, she saw the men in the side gun positions waving at her. Although the two gun barrels in the round turret underneath the belly of the plane pointed directly at her, there was no gunfire as the plane thundered over. And, though she could not hear them, other members of the crew whistled at her.

She watched, shaken and at the same time curious, as the big plane reached the square where the two churches stood, their twin spires jutting above the flight path of the bomber. With its engines trailing a black wisp of smoke, the wounded craft merely banked gracefully, one wing almost scraping the cobbled street, and flew between the two steeples. As suddenly as it had appeared from one distance, the great aircraft hurtled into another, leaving behind a pei plexed, shocked girl bicyclist. Little Willie was taking the Autobahn route home to England.

Little Willie was a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, piloted by Bernard M. Dopko of Old Forge, Pennsylvania; their destination: Station 136, Knettishall Airdrome, England, home base of the 388 Bombardment Group (H). Struck by flak over Berlin, with the supercharger on one engine out of commission, and a runaway propeller on another, Little Willie plunged out of the group formation. German fighters swept in for the kill. As tail gunner Robert M. Haydon, Jr. drove them off, Dopko pointed the plane toward the earth to shake off the fighters. When bombardier William Kelly shouted, Look out, Dop, you’re going to run into the curb! Dopko leveled out and they were now fifty feet above the ground on the outskirts of Berlin.

As far as the Group was concerned Little Willie was officially missing in action. The runaway engine was threatening to wrench off the wing, the other engine was useless, the tail was badly damaged and the radio was out completely. Feathering the windmilling propeller, Dopko was able to remain airborne, but barely, and pointed toward England. With only two engines it was impossible to gain altitude, but that was protection from fighter attack. Across Germany and Holland the B-17 never exceeded a hundred feet in altitude; over the English Channel they were down to ten. At this level one of the dead engines came back to life and Little Willie climbed to 5000 feet and easily made Knettishall. The Flying Fortress had brought its crew home again.

This is not strictly a military history, but rather the biography of a single aircraft, the legendary Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, from its inception as the ill-fated Model 299, through its evolutionary modifications and ultimate development as the B-29 Superfortress. While historical content is inevitable and as accurate as I could make it, the emphasis is upon the men who flew in the B-17 and not a little upon the lore the plane inspired.

Officially the B-17 was listed on the Air Force procurement tables as a heavy bombardment airplane; its mission: strategic bombardment accomplished with precision during daylight hours over long distances. Stated in another way, the Flying Fortress was a long-range heavy bomber whose function in time of war was daylight precision strategic bombardment. It is interesting to note how misunderstood and controversial a concept this is, even today. While it made good sense in wartime to fly over enemy cities and bomb them, that was not the purpose of strategic bombardment. Targets, and especially populated areas, were not bombed at random; there was careful selection of targets and the mission of the heavy bombers was to destroy the enemy’s facilities for making war, to make it impossible for him to fight by denying him weapons, machines, and fuel.

This concept has been called by one German writer wasteful, inhumane, and ineffective. The implication is that a war waged otherwise would be humane and not wasteful. The effectiveness of the heavy strategic bombardment program in Europe was attested to in the death of the Luftwaffe which was destroyed in the air and on the ground and in the denial of fuel to the Nazi war machine. No better exemplification of this may be suggested than the absence of air opposition to the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944. In the Pacific the dropping of two atomic bombs made the already planned invasion of the Japanese home islands unnecessary. Just how many lives were spared because of this we shall never know (some estimate about two million). Thus would it appear that Hiroshima and Nagasaki, despite the terrible personal tragedies they brought, were less wasteful, inhumane, and ineffective than it has become almost fashionable to believe. The aim was not retaliation but prevention. There are no degrees of death: a .30-caliber bullet is no more merciful than an atomic blast. The victim—man, woman, or child—is equally dead.

And, it might be remembered, that there would never have been a Hiroshima had there been no Pearl Harbor.

This is not interjected as a means of justification but only as a statement of fact. Another is that the high command of the U. S. Air Force, in wartime, was not dedicated to saving the lives of enemy civilians but to keeping its own losses down while doing its job. In modern war the innocent suffer with the guilty; there is no sharp distinction between soldier and civilian. The latter supplies the former with the means.

The job of the men flying in the Boeing B-17 was to strike at military targets. They did this with courage and skill and their stories are little known. They hated their job, they knew fear, dread, and death. Whatever their varied backgrounds they shared a hatred of war and love for their plane. Many continue to recall the Flying Fortress as the best plane of the war, capable of absorbing unbelievable punishment and still bring them home. In their darker moments they believed they could cling to this plane and it would bring them home. With wings punctured and ablaze, tail surfaces shredded, with chunks of its graceful body gouged out by cannon fire, flak, or mid-air collision, the B-17 brought them home. With an almost human will to live this great plane, shattered and tom beyond the limits of flyability, carried them to safety and, for some, to life itself.

Watching one of these giant aircraft, like some living thing, clawing at the air in a vain attempt to remain aloft or at least in momentary level flight, was an awesome sight. The life and death struggle of so large a thing had its further poignance: there were ten men inside, some dead perhaps, some wounded, some not even so much as scratched, but at that moment all their lives had reached a crisis in that single plane, heaving and smoking in a freezing, hostile sky.

Defining the valor of these men, and many will insist, of this plane, is a difficult task. After more than two decades it is possible for the men to look back upon the work they were engaged in during the Second World War with some detachment. Whatever the arguments of the adherents to the opposite view, it is unquestionable that the men in the heavy bombers—B-17s as well as B-24s, and the B-29s—made victory possible. They shortened the war. They paid a heavy price. They were young when it all began and, if they lived, they were old when it ended. They had, and have, no illusions about the glamour of the wild blue yonder. And because they worked in the air—five or six miles above the earth—they placed themselves in double jeopardy. They had not only all the risks that the ground troops encountered, but had to contend with the element of the air in between. There was no friendly earth to burrow into when the shooting became rough. And there were times when you could not even have the satisfaction of shooting back at those who were shooting at you. It all became a tragic demonstration of the laws of chance as you continued on through the puffs of black antiaircraft smoke. Would it be that the speed of your B-17 and its altitude would chance to be in the particular path which would intersect the path of a projectile which was shot up, more or less at random, and end it all there? Despite this they went out day after day, some came back, some cracked and some gave up. But most of them believed in what they were doing and completed the job.

Today these men recall their war experiences with some dread; it is difficult for them to believe that once they endured such adventures. They would not want to relive them; and not one of them—of the several dozen I interviewed for this book—could be called a war lover. They hated their work, but they knew they had to do all they could to stop the man who had got them their job. And they did in the most devastating demonstration of modem warfare ever known. Neither they, nor we, nor anyone else can afford to have further demonstrations of strategic bombardment. Its application in the Second World War was only the beginning—even at Hiroshima.

There is another, almost ineffable, sentiment shared by these men: they loved their plane. Ex-crew members continue to this day to recall the B-17 with a mingling of devotion, gratitude, and mystique.

The more objective, professional, military evaluation supports their beliefs. Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, pioneer of the Air Force’s strategic bombardment program during its critical period, said, The B-17, I think, was the best combat airplane ever built. It combined in perfect balance, the right engine, the right wing and the right control surfaces. The B-17 was a bit more rugged than the B-24. It could ditch better because of the low wing and it could sustain more battle damage. You wouldn’t believe they could stay in the air.

General Curtis E. LeMay, Chief of Staff of the Air Force and an outstanding air leader during the Second World War, told me that the Air Force kind of grew up with the B-17. It was as tough an airplane as was ever built. It was a good honest plane to fly—a pilot’s airplane. It did everything we asked it to do, and did it well.

By far the best bomber we had in the war, is the opinion of General Carl A. Spaatz, who commanded all air operations of the U. S. Air Force in Europe. I’d rather have the B-17 than any other. The B-29? That was another plane— and another war.

E.J.

NOTE

Proper military historians will discover, perhaps to their consternation, that contrary to correct military usage, I have not capitalized operation code names. The term TORCH therefore, will become "Torch." The use of Roman numerals (VIII Bomber Command) will be avoided. Such proper usage, I feel, can make a book look like a coded message. I leave its distinctive look to more formal histories.

During the period this book covers the United States Air Force passed through various reorganizations and consequently so did its name—United States Army Air Corps, GHQ Air Force, Army Air Forces, etc. Unless the distinction is important, the term "Air Force" will be employed throughout, although the Air Force as such did not materialize until 1947. Whatever it was properly called, it was still the same organization of young American men flying American aircraft.

Finally, although a long list of acknowledgments may be found in the Supplement, special mention should be made of the Air Force’s excellent Book Program under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Gene Guerny. A superb sense of history is responsible for the Air Force’s many remarkable archives, photo collections, and other source materials so readily available to writers, historians and scholars. Everything right in this book must be attributed to the aid and co-operation of the Air Force, the nature of which never interfered with any of my own opinions, however militarily wayward. The contribution of my editor, Harold Kuebler, at every stage of this book’s production is beyond mere praise. The care and attention to details, his splendid suggestions, his wide knowledge of the subject and his genuine interest did more for this book than I can ever fully acknowledge. It was at all times a most gratifying collaboration.

E.J.

PRELUDE

The greatest battle plane of its time, and perhaps of all time, was conceived aboard a battleship—its mother was an unknown necessity and its father a sailor. As it is with most happy illegitimacies, the birth occurred before the advent of the necessity which would come to be known as World War II. Had this birth not happened, the course of recent history might have been tragically different.

In the spring of 1928 Clairmont L. Egtvedt, then a vice-president of the Boeing Aircraft Company, called on Rear Admiral Joseph M. Reeves aboard the Navy aircraft carrier Langley, docked off North Island in San Diego Bay. Egtvedt had flown down from Boeing’s headquarters in Seattle to talk with Reeves, who commanded the Navy’s air fleet, about the latest development in Boeing’s series of little F4B shipboard fighters. In the course of their talks the two men touched upon the subject of the battleship versus the airplane, a controversy which had not been settled despite the efforts of Brigadier General William Mitchell seven years before. Though Mitchell’s bombers had, indeed, sunk the unsinkable German battleship Ostfriesland in 1921, the Navy rejected the results of the experiment as inconclusive because the setting hardly simulated actual battle conditions. The battleship, as well as all the others sunk in the tests, was neither manned nor maneuvering. But there was no denying that it had gone to the bottom.

An Army-Navy Board, with General John J. Pershing at the head, found on evaluating the results of the tests that the battleship would continue as the bulwark of the nation’s sea defenses, though it recommended that aircraft carriers be developed as auxiliary vessels. There was a slight nod in the direction of the air, when the Board conceded that land-based aircraft might very well have important strategic and tactical qualities in operations of coast defense.

A Boeing F4B-1, early shipboard fighter leaving the deck of the Langley.

The function of the little shipboard fighters was to harass any attacking fleet once it had been found by the wide ranging patrol planes, the lumbering flying boats. The best that these planes could do would be to drop its load of four 230-pound bombs (or its equivalent) and return to base for more. An entire squadron of fighters, each plane carrying a single 500-pound bomb, could barely dent a battleship and could hardly equal a single battleship in fire power. With a battery of 16-inch guns and a firing range of twenty miles or so, the battleship was a most formidable defensive as well as offensive weapon.

The airplane, Admiral Reeves told Egtvedt, is not a dreadnought. No airplane now flying can even be compared with a battleship.

Not even the Army Air Corps with its heavy bombers could match that. Under the provisions of the Air Corps Act of 1926 the Air Service was transformed into the Air Corps and fell under control of the Army’s General Staff. Comprised mainly of conservative ground traditionalists, the General Staff believed that the proper function of air power was as a servant to the ground forces. They failed, or refused, to recognize the full implications of the terms air power and air force, which had been suggested merely during the Great War and demonstrated by Mitchell’s declarations and denunciations.

The challenge to Egtvedt was a complex one. Not only would he have to over-come the inertia of the services, but there was an even more formidable problem: how to design, let alone build, an airplane comparable to a battleship?

Boeing F2B-1s lined up on the Langley.

Giantism in aircraft design proved only to be spectacular in appearance; performance was another thing. The 1920 Barling bomber, a triplane with a wingspan of 120 feet and six engines to power it, barely attained a speed of 90 mph and on a clear, calm day might just make a flight of 300 miles. Provided, that is, it were not encumbered by a payload.

There were other, even more subtle, problems. The nation, in 1928, was reaching the climax of its Jazz Age joyride and its mood hardly encompassed the purchase of weapons of war. This was reflected in an isolationist Congress which proceeded to scuttle the League of Nations and to cut itself off from Europe. The War to End All Wars was over and America, secure in a splendid two ocean isolation, could lavish its adulation upon Lucky Lindy, without at all being aware what it was that the young pilot had proved.

When he returned to Seattle, therefore, Egtvedt carried with him the germ of an idea, a challenge, that he would have to set aside while he confronted more immediate problems. Coincidentally, the answer to the challenge lay in a series of developments that Boeing undertook at this point.

Patently the future of an aircraft manufacturer in 1928 did not lay in focusing on military planes. Under the impetus of the Lindbergh flight aviation once again captured the public imagination as it had during the Great War and shortly after; there was a quickening of interest in commercial aviation also. With this in mind Clair Egtvedt and Edward Hubbard, airline pioneer and founder of Boeing Air Transport, decided to work up a design for an all-metal monoplane for commercial use. As a mail and cargo transport it would be more efficiently rugged than the fabric-covered planes; if it were fitted with a thick wing of cantilevered construction it would not only have strength but would be unencumbered by drag-producing external supports such as struts and wires. It was agreed to use a smooth stressed-skin metal covering in place of the corrugated type of skin of the then operational Ford transports.

Clairmont Egtvedt.

Charles N. Montieth was engineer in charge of the project to produce the Boeing Model 200, which emerged as the Monomail and flew for the first time in May 1930. The Monomail, called the first modern air transport, was a cleanly designed low-wing monoplane with quite innovational features such as a retractable landing gear, the bridge-like interior structure of the wing, the employment of drag-ring cowling to lessen the wind resistance of the Pratt & Whitney Hornet engine. The pilot, however, was provided with an open cock-pit.

A second Monomail (Model 221), was constructed along similar lines but with provision for six passengers in addition to cargo space. Subsequent models (the 221 A) were modified for transcontinental mail and passenger service. The one major obstacle to a full exploitation of the inherent performance of the Monomail was the fact that it had appeared before the advent of the controllable pitch propeller. Since take-off and climb required low pitch and cruising high pitch, the Monomail with its single pitch propeller was never able to show what it could do. By the time the new propeller had been developed the Monomail was rendered obsolescent by multiengine designs. Despite this, the ideas in aircraft design and structure introduced by the plane were to have far-reaching effects.

The Monomail, the first modern air transport.

In the foreground: the Y1B-9A and, behind

it, the first modern pursuit, the Y1P-26.

Boeing 247.

One of the first was a military adaptation of the design. Even before the Monomail had flown, drawings for the Boeing Model 214, a bomber, were prepared by John Sanders in January 1930. By April of 1931 the B-9, as the Army Air Corps designated it, was ready for its test flight. Though Boeing’s concept had been encouraged by the Air Corps, financing the design and construction devolved upon the Boeing Company. The test flights in June proved that the B-9 could fly 85 miles an hour faster than the Army’s Keystone bomber, then much in use, and could, in fact, overtake the most modem pursuit planes of the day. The B-9 not only revolutionized bomber design but also that of the fighter plane. Tests on the wing at Wright Field proved that it was one of the finest ever designed, but some bugs remained. The engines vibrated excessively and the long slender fuselage of the plane had a tendency to twist in flight. These could easily be fixed, but the Glenn L. Martin Company, whose earlier design lost out to the B-9 in the competitions, had submitted yet another plane. The Martin B-10 was the result and would become the backbone of the Air Corps’ bombardment arm for the ensuing decade.

Disappointed in the loss of what might have been a good contract, Boeing turned to yet another plane inspired by its Monomail concept. A return to the commercial design, the Model 247 was designed to carry ten passengers, including a crew consisting of pilot, co-pilot, and stewardess. Project engineer was Frank Canney and Robert Minshall served as co-ordinator; their efforts, plus those of greater anonymity, resulted in a plane which revolutionized the design of commercial aircraft. For William Boeing it won the coveted Guggenheim Medal for successful pioneering and achievement in aircraft manufacture and air transportation.

Like the original Monomail, the performance of the Boeing 247 was restricted until the introduction of hydraulically controlled Hamilton-Standard propellers. Such improvements, which included also rubber de-icer boots, were worked into the Boeing 247D, converted into a racer for Roscoe Turner, who flew it in the MacRobertson Race from England to Australia in 1934. The earlier drag rings were replaced by more efficient NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) cowlings. With such refinements the 247D was capable of a top speed of 200 mph and a cruising speed of 189 mph. Practically overnight it made all other contemporary airliners obsolete.

The stage was set for the next evolutionary step. Clairmont Egtvedt was sub-consciously searching for a flying dreadnought; the Monomail, the B-9 and the Model 247 had each contributed a giant step toward a yet not clearly defined goal. Boeing had within its reach the ability to produce an aircraft which was dynamically beautiful, efficient, capable of outperforming all other planes in its class, it could carry great loads at high altitudes over long distances and it was structurally rugged.

In 1934, Boeing was fully ready for the next step; it remained only for the Air Corps to initiate it.

THE FLYING FORTRESSES

Declared to be the largest land plane

ever built in America, this 15-ton

flying fortress, built by the Boeing

Airplane Company under Army specifications

today was ready to test its wings …

RICHARD L. WILLIAMS

Seattle Times

July 17, 1935

I.Project 299

The standard attitude toward bombardment aviation during the latter 1920s and well into the ’30s was as stated in Captain Rowan A. Greers paper, International Aerial Regulations. Published as Air Service Information Circular 566, the paper reflected both the military and civilian point of view especially when it said that such a thing as aerial bombardment merely for the purpose of indiscriminate terrorizing of a civilian population or wantonly destroying private property not of a military character could not be countenanced by any of the civilized nations of the world. This was, of course, a commendable attitude, provided the other civilized nations of the world subscribed to it also. At present, Greer pointed out, there are really no rules or laws as to aerial bombardment other than those that a consideration of humanity itself would dictate. Thus, even conceding that war is a merciless thing that knows only force [its] object always is to destroy the enemy’s army or resources . . .

With all the benefits of hindsight (World War I hardly scratched the surface of air power) we now have, it would be unfair to criticize this honestly, even naively, held point of view. That wars could be fought according to rules, when the very function of war—to take, and to kill while taking—canceled out all need for rules, seems now an antiquated idea. Modern war, with World War II, became total war without neutral civilians. If the object of war is to destroy the enemy’s army and resources, then the blindness of the War Department at the time to the employment of strategic bombardment aircraft is obvious. If the army of the enemy is denied resources, whether it be ammunition, fuel, lubrication, weapons, or tools—which it will be if the resources are destroyed by aircraft which are neither confined to water nor by national boundaries—then the function of strategic bombardment is a most important one.

This was the doctrine preached by many of the younger airmen at the time, among them Henry H. Arnold, Carl A. Spaatz, George C. Kenney, Hugh J. Knerr, and others. They were not intent on killing helpless civilians or destroying cities, but they did advocate the use of large, high performance (fast, heavy load), high flying aircraft which could knock out an enemy’s will to fight. Of course, in theory at least, both the ground and navy forces would seem to be relegated to lesser roles in the nation’s defense. Actually this was not the purpose of the Air Corps’ hopes for a heavy bombardment program. There were those who advocated an independent air force, in agreement with the doctrines of General William Mitchell, but even more were interested in exploiting the full impact of air power in the nation’s defense. It was the inability of the War Department, the General Staff, the Army, and even Air Corps senior officers, to grasp the importance of the concept of strategic air power that disgruntled the more imaginative and more progressive airmen.

In the late spring of 1933 the Air Corps held command and staff exercises to test the efficacy of a General Headquarters Air Force under simulated wartime conditions. Under the command of Brigadier General Oscar Westover the GHQ Air Force (Provisional) concentrated the bulk of the Army Air Corps on the west coast. The problem was to repel an enemy overseas invasion. Apparently successful, the maneuvers elicited several valuable observations in Westovers report. The concept of a GHQ Air Force to control combat aviation was regarded as sound, although reconnaissance and bombardment were to be the major functions. In his report Westover said, During these exercises, observation aviation appeared woefully obsolete in performance, as did pursuit aviation in speed characteristics. The new bombers outperformed both. Bombardment aviation has defensive fire power of such quantity and effectiveness as to warrant the belief that with its modem speeds it may be capable of effectively accomplishing its assigned mission without support, he noted. What with modem devices, formation flying and other means of defense, General Westover concluded that no known agency can frustrate the accomplishment of a bombardment mission.

Thus was the thinking of the General Staff turned toward the encouragement of bombardment aircraft that might also be employed in reconnaissance.

By July 1933 the Matériel Division at Wright Field undertook an engineering study to determine whether or not an aircraft capable of carrying a bomb load of a ton over a distance of 5000 miles could be built. Such a plane would reinforce Hawaii, Panama and Alaska without the use of intermediate servicing facilities and its tactical mission was to destroy distant land and naval targets. Thus was initiated the Air Corps’ Project A, which was submitted to the General Staff for approval. By Lincoln’s Birthday, 1934, a budget for the development of a long-range bomber was approved and on May 12 negotiations with Martin and Boeing were authorized for preliminary designs and engineering data.

Clairmont Egtvedt’s dream of a flying dreadnought was beginning to come true. By June of the same year the Air Corps awarded Boeing preliminary contracts under the terms of Project A. Because the undertaking was experimental only one plane was to be built (with the possibility of future orders if it proved worthy) and was designated the XBLR-i (Experimental Bomber, Long Range Model 1), later simply XB-15.

First page of the original booklet containing the Type Specification which initiated the B-17 design.

As visualized by Boeing designers the bomber would be the largest aircraft built in the United States with a wingspan of 149 feet and a fuselage measuring 87 feet 7 inches. When finally completed late in 1937, the XB-15 proved to be conceived on a scale too ambitious for the power plants then available. Under-powered as it was, it could not attain a speed of more than 190 mph and high fuel consumption greatly limited its range. The XB-15 appeared before its time.

Even while Boeing concentrated on the problems posed by Project A, a circular from Wright Field arrived at the Engineering Department on August 8, 1934. In it were specifications for the hoped for next production (as differentiated from the experimental) bomber. Boeing, along with several other manufacturers, was invited to submit bids for such a plane. The approved design—a multiengined aircraft capable of carrying a ton of bombs at more than 200 miles an hour over a distance of two thousand miles—would win the firm an order for as many as 220 planes. The prototype for such a plane was to be ready for tests within a year.

When the U. S. Army specification came in twenty-four-year-old engineer Edward Curtis Wells was just three years out of Stanford University. He had worked on the design of the tail section of the 247. Boeing, having decided to risk its own capital on the new plane, voted the sum of $275,000 to be used to design and construct the bomber. Assigned as project engineer was E. G. Emery with Wells as his assistant; the plane would be Model 299.

I happened to be placed on Project 299, Wells recalls, just about the time I planned to be married. We had the ceremony on Saturday; I took Sunday and Monday off. On Tuesday, Wells was deep in preliminary work on the project—within three weeks the basic design was complete. By December when the bulk of the blueprints was ready, young Wells had been promoted to project engineer. Details of the 299 were assigned to several designer-engineers; Wells chose the fuselage as his special job.

Around this time all the concepts were combined: Egtvedt’s flying dread-nought, the ideas which had resulted in the all-metal monoplane 247 and the final touch from the still aborning XB-15: the multi-engines of the Army specification were interpreted as four, not the traditional two. The 299, though smaller, bore a striking family resemblance to the XB-15.

With all its facilities, practically, devoted to the 299, Boeing was able to complete the plane by July 1935. Word had already appeared in the newspapers of a mystery ship at Boeing Field in Seattle. Keeping the giant plane (at this time the 299 was the largest landplane ever built in the United States) under wraps, Boeing prepared the plane for the Air Corps tests. The field had by this time narrowed down to Boeing, Douglas, and Martin.

The 299 flew for the first time, with test pilot Leslie Tower at the controls, on July 28, 1935. Legend has it that one Seattle newspaperman, on seeing the plane for the first time, exclaimed, Why it’s a flying fortress!

It was a beautifully designed, streamlined, gleaming giant of a plane. The wings spread to more than a hundred and three feet; the cylindrical fuselage stretched almost sixty-nine feet from turret to tail. Immediately striking was the array of four giant Pratt & Whitney

[kidsisyphus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Time has afforded us some perspective since Californians rejected then Governor Schwarzenegger's special election pet propositions in 2005. Since they said no to surrendering control of the state budget to the whimsy of the executive branch; no to unaccountable gerrymandering; no to silencing the voice of the working class; no to making it even more difficult for our best and brightest to choose teaching as a profession.

The swaggering, accented, tough-talking machismo disappeared, remade overnight, not unlike the application of a Hollywood tan, into a coalition-building, olive branch-extending, centrist who only had the best interests of the state and its people at heart. A people that turned out in low numbers, typically an advantage for Republicans, to vote in the most expensive election, special or otherwise, in the state's history.

Soon gone, too, was the lofty 65% approval rating enjoyed by the governor, which right-wing pundits dismissed as not maintainable, yet which in its time served as the impetus for corporate and far-right elements to pen the aforementioned cynical legislation under that banner of all things just and good in governance, mandate. It echoes still in the Wisconsins and the Minnesotas of 2011.

Still, California is on the margin of national politics, where President Bush's agenda was, likewise, suffering setbacks. We heard of rumors that the simple, plain-talking Texan had grown sullen; that he was more likely to direct frustrated anger rather than the good-natured slap on the back to any number of nicknamed underlings. And he, too, attempted, in the wake of failed policies, to remake himself.

The Bush 43 administration repackaged Manifest Destiny v2.0, proposing that they weren't the only ones that thought Iraq was out to get us. We could finally embrace France, Russia, and the United Nations in this: that Saddam Hussein was going to send anthrax through the mail and shower various biological agents on us from converted crop dusters and fly nuclear-tipped remote controlled airplanes into our bedrooms unless we acted quickly, no matter preemptively. No matter the foreign powers mentioned refrained from invasion themselves. No matter nothing resembling weapons of mass destruction were ever found. No matter innocents suffered and died for a lie.

Neither George W. Bush nor Arnold Schwarzenegger ever went to war, yet both owe their careers to its application: Dubya springboarded into public service from a few passes over parades during the greatest conflict of his young life, and Arnold, perhaps working through the neuroses of his father's fascism, or perhaps exploiting our own watered down and distinctive stripe, dispatched assorted villains of the celluloid variety in his prime.

My great-uncle, however, did go to war, though I doubt very much he would think he benefited from it. He was a captain in the 8th Air Force and piloted numerous missions in a B-17 over Nazi-occupied Europe. He dropped lots of bombs. He saw friends lose their lives. He feared for his own. He was shot down and spirited back to England only to be put back in a plane and made to drop more bombs. Towards the end of the war, after the skies had been wiped clean of the Luftwaffe, he carried the no less lethal payload of military intelligence officers on his flights as they would survey the damage wrought on Germany by ceaseless formations of bombers. It was then that he learned of the bombs that missed their targets. Bombs that landed on schools and churches instead of factories and military positions. He was never worth a damn after he came back home, or so I'm told. I do know that he never had a job in all the years I knew him and he made his way, for the most part, through the kindness of family. All the same, I marveled at him during holiday gatherings and surrendered to his tales of adventure. He died from complications arising from an automobile accident in 2005, shortly after Veteran's Day.

Men like Bush and Schwarzenegger exhibit traits not altogether different than those of your run of the mill psychopath. They are men that don't, or won't, consider consequences when making a decision. They are 'big picture' types that can't be bothered with details or outcomes because, like greedy two-year-olds with unlimited resources, they must act. This is honored in our society as "decisiveness." And indeed, why should they be bothered? Their reality is made for them. Men like my great-uncle were rendered perpetually indecisive as a result of shaping that reality.

About the same time my great uncle was ferrying the brass over what had been Germany, in Japan, a whole city called Hiroshima was wiped from existence by one bomb. As Emperor Hirohito witnessed his reality collapsing, he retreated into the fantasy of ego, turning his attentions to preserving the cultural and religious icons that justified his monarchy -- assorted trinkets which supposedly dated from time immemorial and were scattered about his island kingdom in various temples -- rather than consider the terms of surrender put forth by the Allies. Another city would have to be sacrificed upon the altar of industrial warfare before he would convince his ministers to concede defeat.

And so we come to George Bush on November 11, 2005, when he chose to forego the tradition of placing a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on the one day of the year dedicated to the men and women that would shape his reality, if only they could, for the sake of a poll-boosting pledge to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban the burning of the flag, that tangible icon of this American experience that binds our nation together, and, more precisely, to its figurehead, the president. He wrapped himself in the shroud of Old Glory and waited for political resurrection while my great-uncle withered and died, unknown to all but his family.


My great-uncle was piloting the B-17 you see in the upper left corner of this picture. It can be found on page 140, introducing the chapter titled 'Impious War.'

[b117dave · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Probably the best history of B-17s with the least blather.