Posted on 08/08/2025 5:39:57 AM PDT by whyilovetexas111
Eighty years ago this week, the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, forcing the end of World War II. On August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the “Little Boy” uranium bomb on Hiroshima, killing up to 166,000 people. Three days later, on August 9, the B-29 Bockscar was diverted from its primary target of Kokura due to bad weather and instead dropped the more powerful “Fat Man” plutonium bomb on the secondary target of Nagasaki, killing up to 80,000 and compelling Japan’s surrender.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalsecurityjournal.org ...
Yeah no magnesium in Doc engines.
My understanding was weight was an issue and the Enola gay came back with half of the fuel they left with .
The flame coming out the rear of the engine was twice as long as the jet itself. The Doc crew thought that abnormal. Whatever happened he needed the arresting wire to stop.
Anyone who took sheer emotion out of the equation would see that it was necessary. Millions would have died in an invasion of the Mainlands.
The Consolidated B-32 Dominator (Consolidated Model 34) was an American heavy strategic bomber built for the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. A B-32 was involved in the last air combat engagement of the war, resulting in the war's last American air combat death. It was developed by Consolidated Aircraft in parallel with the Boeing B-29 Superfortress as a fallback design should the B-29 prove unsuccessful.[1] The B-32 reached units in the Pacific only in mid-May 1945, and subsequently saw only limited combat operations against Japanese targets before the end of the war on 2 September 1945. Most of the extant orders of the B-32 were canceled shortly thereafter and only 118 B-32 airframes of all types were built.
The intended target for the Hiroshima atomic bomb as the Aioi Bridge. The bomb detonated about 800 feet southeast of the bridge.
For the Nagasaki mission, Bockscar was running out of fuel so Major Sweeney was preparing to turn back towards Okinawa. At the last second a hole opened in the clouds and Bombardier Captain Beahan announced that he could see his target. The primary target Kokura was saved to due cloud cover. Nagasaki got the short straw due to a last second break in the clouds. The bomb exploded almost directly above the Mitsubishi factories.
Critically low on fuel, Bockscar barely made it to the runway at Yontan Airfield on Okinawa. The number two engine died from fuel starvation as Bockscar began its final approach.
Winter 1944 “Battle of Kansas” (B-29 manufacturing problems)
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0212b29/
At work I sat across the aisle from a man who was on a ship ready to invade Japan. They knew there was little chance for survival. He was devastated by the people who protested dropping the bombs which saved his life.
The military made 1M purple hearts for the invasion. They still are using that batch for all the wars since WW2.
Doc and FIFI both run engines that have been specifically configured for them, based on available parts. IIRC, the engines are assembled with the turbo-superchargers removed, only the mechanical supercharger components remain in use. Those two aircraft don’t need to reach the same altitudes as when in service, so it makes sense to ditch those heat sources. The Cavanaugh Flight Museum had info about it on the website, back when FiFi was being repowered (over ten years ago now). The museum was involved with raising the funds for the new engines.
Just this year there’s been a Japanese-produced documentary released titled, ‘Kamikaze: An Untold History’ which tries to make sense of the Japanese sending so many young men to die in what already was clear — even to them — would be a losing effort.
It’s very well done, completely avoids trying to excuse what they did, but the one thing I found almost shocking, something I had never heard before, is that there was a nation-wide movement called, “One Million Kamikaze.” They had sold the public on the idea that they were preparing to launch as many as ONE MILLION SUICIDE ATTACKS. As was, about 3800 young men killed themselves, along with about 7000 allied servicemen.
Which goes to the point that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was actually kinder TO BOTH SIDES of the war than a land invasion of the Japans would have been.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37731610/
Don’t forget the mass campaign inside Japan for women and children civilians to sharpen up broomsticks to use on our military as spears.
“…specifically configured for them…”
One of the crew mentioned that and I thought I heard wrong. It sounded expensive foe a few antique aircraft. My original question involved the circumstances in which boost was used.
My Great Uncle was on Iwo Jima late in the war being one of the guys who worked on 29’s that had to land there. He was 30, so naturally he was called “Grandpa”.
The Wright R-3350 variants continued to evolve and improve through the Vietnam era. The '60s engines used in the AC-119K Flying Boxcar gunship and the A-1 Skyraider are still available in reasonable numbers. Parts from those versions are combined to make an updated R-3350 that fits the B-29 engine nacelles and cowlings.
I forget exactly how much the Cavanaugh Museum people raised for the project, but it was *very* expensive.
IIRC, the crankcases on VW bugs were magnesium?
[CNAC = China National Aviation Corporation]
In a book, Yankee on the Yangtze by his daughter, Nancy Allison Wright.
Excerpts from the webpage:
1934:
1940 employed by CNAC as inspector/test pilot for rebuilding of five Condors, Glendale, California for use in freight. Purchased new DC-3 for CNAC.
January 25, 1941 became president of Harlow Aircraft Company of Glendale.
June 25, 1942 took temporary job organizing new company, Arizona Gliding Academy.
July 1942 Boeing production test pilot of B-17s in Seattle.
June 1943 - November 1945 Boeing chief test pilot for B-29 in Wichita.
February 1947 returned to China as CNAC operations manager.
I read an article once from the son of a man who was on one of those ships that was turned around mid-ocean. He knew he wouldn’t have been here except for those bombs being dropped which saved his father’s life.
He said there were mass celebrations on the ship b/c all of them knew when they left there was little to no chance of any of them surviving.
I was interested in his time as a Air Mail pilot...this is one of my favorite pictures of those days that seems to epitomize what those men were like (this fellow was a famous pilot, W.C. Hopson who flew 413,000 miles and made 13 forced landindings in 1926 alone, who was later killed in a crash carrying mail...on that flight, he was carrying $100,000 dollars in diamonds, and when the crash site was reached, there were $40,000 of those diamonds missing):
It was incredibly dangerous work, and Charles Lindbergh had to bail out at night in storms twice when he flew air mail. There were no navigational aids, and large stones placed in the form of arrows on the ground or roofs of barns were painted or shingled to show the name of a town to aid Air Mail pilots. My wife and I stayed at a house that had one of the biggest barns I had ever seen, built back in the Twenties that still had the town on the roof.
I have always been interested in the Air Mail Crisis that began in 1930 with the passage of the McNary-Watres Act that in my opinion introduced a degree of government sponsored favoritism and corruption and resulted in Roosevelt cancelling all contracts for civilian pilots and giving the task of flying airmail to Army pilots, who were wholly unsuited by training and temperament to fly in those kinds of horrible conditions. (When conditions were that bad, military pilots simply didn't fly, but the Air Mail pilots did all the time and had experience in it, even though many of them still died doing it)
But when the Army pilots took over, it resulted in many more accidents and deaths, causing Eddie Rickenbacker (who was working for the precursor to Eastern Airlines, Eastern Air Transport at the time) to label Roosevelt's actions as "legalized murder". Eventually, under political pressure from the likes of Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh, the issue was resolved by Congress with legislation.
For Lindbergh, it was just one of the drops of water in the grudge that Roosevelt held against him that caused Roosevelt to blackball Lindbergh from taking any part in the effort to defeat the axis at the beginning of the war, where he refused Lindbergh's desire to rejoin active service in the Army Air Corps, and the Roosevelt administration pressured aviation companies not to hire him under threat of economic retaliation from Roosevelt. It was petty behavior by Roosevelt, and a lot of people felt that way.
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