BIRD MEN

How the “flying battleship”—the B-29—was born.

Baime, author of The Accidental President: Harry S. Truman and the Four Months That Changed the World (2017), builds his story around Henry “Hap” Arnold (1886-1950), who was taught flying by the Wright brothers and rose to command the Army Air Force in 1938 as it greatly expanded. He writes, “Few of the eight billion people on earth today have any sense of the degree to which airpower—in peace and war—has shaped our modern geopolitical world and our quotidian lives, and the narrative of how this came to be can best be told through the story of one man and one airplane.” U.S. air power did not distinguish itself in World War I, and it suffered, along with all armed forces, during the interwar years. Many agreed that bombers were an unstoppable terror weapon that would decide future wars. Baime emphasizes the belief that precision bombing that could destroy an enemy’s industrial war-making capacity remained an American monopoly. Well before the World War II buildup began in 1934, Arnold supported development of the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and, in 1939, its successor, the B-29 Superfortress—a massive aircraft whose development cost more than the Manhattan Project. By the time the B-29 entered service in 1944, there were more than enough B-17s to deal with Germany, but the B-29’s longer range was essential for attacking Japan. High-altitude precision bombing never lived up to predictions, and the climate at high altitudes over Japan proved unsolvable from the beginning. Baine writes that the change to low-altitude firebombing in early 1945 was devastating, but it did not persuade Japan to surrender. By summer, Japan was helpless to fend off the B-29s, yet it took the atom bombs and the Soviet invasion to deliver the coup de grâce. Arnold died a few years after retiring in 1946, soon after achieving his life ambition of an independent U.S. Air Force equal to the Army and Navy.

A solid account of how the U.S. took command of the skies.