![]() ![]() The result was a crippling web of constraints on the people fighting the air war. Analysts, generals, and politicians in Washington and Tokyo, determined to keep the war little, nervously pondered what might provoke Soviet or Chinese intervention. What forced the B-29s into exclusive night missions was the arrival of Soviet-built MiG-15s, but in the early days of the air war, the greatest enemy was less the North Koreans than strategic dithering by competing staffs. By the time we crossed into North Korea, we were up to 29 or 30,000 feet.” We’d test-fire the guns about halfway between Japan and Korea. We’d usually take off about dusk, fly south to the ocean, cross Japan. We’d load the aircraft about 1900.” After the preflight checks, he says, the “chaplain came out and wished us luck. Most mission days had a briefing at six in the evening outlining the target, weather, and, as Allan says, “what to expect. He remembers the routine followed by the B-29 crews who flew night missions from Yokota. For Korea, the guns were restored.ĭean Allan was a left gunner who signed up for a four-year tour in January 1951, seven months after the war had started. Over Japan in World War II, B-29s had encountered so little opposition that all but their tail guns had been removed, saving weight for bombs and fuel. Initially at least, there was not much to fear from flak or from North Korea’s prop-driven Yaks and Sturmoviks, which were easy targets for the North American P-51s and Lockheed P-80 jet fighters that escorted the bombers. Back in the United States, mothballed B-29s were refurbished and aircrews recalled. Under the aegis of FEAF Bomber Command, the Superforts began chipping away at the advancing North Koreans. The 98th Bombardment Group deployed its B-29s to Yokota Air Base, some 20 miles west of downtown Tokyo, and about 720 miles from the fight. Two days later, 15 Superforts attacked North Korean forces massing along the north bank of the Han River in preparation for moving on Seoul. The bombers had been stationed at Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam, then moved to Kadena Air Base, on Okinawa, which put them within 800 miles of the battle zone. Three days after the invasion, four B-29s from the 19th Bombardment Group struck what military targets they could find in the narrow band between Seoul, the capital of South Korea, and the 38th parallel, just to the north of the city. far east air force (FEAF) quickly mobilized its modest post-World War II resources. It consisted of a series of threats, feints, and practice runs, and it very nearly made it to the Korean battlefield. There was a second Korean war, one that has been studied and discussed even less than the first, which some have called “the forgotten war.” The second one was nuclear. This war, in which each side won and lost the advantage more than once, consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. Its replacement, the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, had a greater capacity, but it never dropped a bombįought mostly with the weapons of World War II, this Korean War would also debut a new kind of aerial combat, in which jets fought jets. ![]() The Superfortress could deliver 10 tons of bombs. Few took the prediction seriously, but on Sunday, June 25, North Korean ground and air forces poured into South Korea, beginning what might be called the First Korean War. The intelligence community, noting Soviet-equipped North Korean troops massed north of the 38th parallel, predicted an attack in June. ![]() The north inherited much of the infrastructure-bridges, railroads, hydroelectric complexes, and heavy industry-remaining from more than 30 years of Japanese occupation, less what the Soviets had taken home at the end of the war. The Soviet Union occupied Korean territory north of the 38th parallel the United States occupied the south. Like Germany, the country had emerged from World War II divided. intelligence analysts predicted trouble in Korea. Although underpowered and inclined to engine fires, the Superfortress remained America’s indispensable airplane-the only one in the world configured to deliver the enormous plutonium bombs of the day. As it turned out, the B-29’s retirement didn’t last. The airplane that had demonstrated that one bomber could destroy a city with one bomb would, it was assumed, hand the baton to a rising generation of bombers powered by jet engines. The following year, most of the thousands of Boeing Superfortresses that had served in the Pacific were stored at the vast Davis-Monthan airfield near Tucson, Arizona, to be mothballed or scrapped. Coming at the end of a long war, those mid-August 1945 missions should have been a curtain call for the world’s preeminent heavy bomber. Army Air Forces B-29s swarmed over Japan, severing the frayed threads of Japanese resistance. On the final night of World War II, hundreds of U.S. ![]()
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