Word: 29s
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...base in central Japan one day last week, a heavy spring rain swept across the runways and drummed on the roof of a large corrugated metal shed. Inside, the leather-jacketed crews for ten U.S. Air Force B-29s crowded into the briefing room. "Gentlemen," said the major, as he laid his pointer on a ten-foot map of Japan and Korea, "our target for tonight is the rail bridge at Sinhung." Said the captain: "You'll each be carrying forty 500-pound bombs with nose fuses . . . Flak is expected to be meager until the release point...
Dusk was fading as the radar operators and bombardiers mumbled over slide rules and fed a mass of specifications on target, course and weather into their mysterious banks of electronic panels. Then the B-29s coughed into life, wheeled ponderously down the feeder taxiways to thunder off into the rain at three-minute intervals...
...drop 100 tons of high explosives by radar through the clouds on a tiny bridge span. Yet, in Korea the U.S. Air Force was expending precious planes, crews, pilots and supplies in a war that was only a sideshow. And even in that sideshow war, the aging U.S. B-29s have been driven from the daytime sky, are forced to fly by night because they are relics of World War II within range of an enemy air force designed precisely for World...
Under present plans, U.S. air power will remain about where it is until next year. Then it will rise steadily as jet B-47s begin to replace the old piston-powered B-29s and B-50s. Defensively, the U.S. today probably has sufficient air defense to cut down a concentrated attack on the U.S. Strategic Air Command bases and atomic installations. But it cannot now defend the nation against raids on U.S. cities. The best estimate today, based on the sketchiest intelligence, is that the Russians have not a sufficient supply of atomic bombs to make a sustained atomic offensive...
Later in the week, when B-29s struck the Sunchon railway bridge, the MIG pilots followed the bombers almost down to the 38th parallel, and brought down one of the eight B-29s...