Word: 29s
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...biggest trouble was the weather over Japan. At 30,000 feet the wind often blew 200 miles an hour. This meant that the B-29s had to drop their bombs while traveling upwind at a ground speed of 50 or 100 m.p.h. (making fat targets for fighters and ack-ack) or downwind at 500 m.p.h. with doubtful accuracy or no accuracy at all. Japanese fighters apparently could go as high as the B-29s could-and their suicidal pilots did not hesitate to ram the big planes...
...liked it. Somehow the grim General made hard work attractive. Mechanics learned to make certain small parts whose lack had grounded planes. The General never said much-for him, a nine-word sentence is a monologue -but his men gladly toiled around the clock. The availability record of B-29s (i.e., the daily number ready to fly) rose almost to 70%, double what it had been...
...made for safer as well as for more powerful operation. The morale of the air crews rose. Then the Marines (after 22,500 casualties) captured Iwo Jima, halfway between Saipan and Tokyo. Iwo had been intended primarily as a base for P-51 fighters which would accompany the B-29s over Japan. But Iwo turned out to be even more valuable as a rescue station where crippled or gas-shy B-29s could settle down on the way back from Japan...
...last week B-29s to the number of 2,000 had pulled up at Iwo. Some of them could have made it back to Saipan, but their pilots took no chances. Many more would have been lost on the way home. B-29 crews blessed the Marines, named some of their planes for Marine divisions...
From Iwo, too, air-sea rescue planes could go to the shores of Japan to pick up downed airmen, and that was good for LeMay's V.L.R.-men to know. Finally, B-29s used Iwo as a gasoline filling station on the way to Japan, thus increasing their bombloads. Among B-29 men time is divided "before Iwo'' and "after...