Him to run this fascinating discussion about unknown air missions. Tom . Tom thank you. [applause] tom thank you. As pete said, the title is unknown air missions. Down they burn airfield, so we move to 1944, so we have got a couple of other debacles tobacco to talk about. The sometimes bizarre and ultimately abandoned attempt to employ in the china theater, and the other is an attempt to shuttle bomb that did much more to launch the cold war than it did in world war ii. Part here. Nasty got to setember i next to rich and rick, so they the forests, so i feel obligated to say today as i said then that we have to remind everybody here that we did eventually win the war. [laughter] now, we have two really distinguished panelists, terrific presenters. Biddle. Tammy davis ist of the curriculum, she also working on a project in the manpower and mobilization for world war ii that i guarantee is going to na pulitzer prize, just to set the bar where it should be for her. I appreciate it. Work on is the seminal the interplay of doctrine and practice in the air war in world war ii. Our other panelist is alex ritchie, who has graciously decided to take a pause from many tours to show up at this conference. How many of you have been out on a tour with alex . Raise your hands. Yes. [applause] tom you know, i was looking at the museum literature, and i have come to the conclusion that alex has become the intellectual pinup girl of the world were to museum. [laughter] tom possible lawsuit on that one, im trying to stay out of trouble so i tried to put the word intellectual in there to make it better. [laughter] tom now, she is also the convene or for the president ial counselors of the National World war ii museum. So she has had an awful lot to do with the structure and execution of this conference, and along with me, we are all proud of what we have done, so with that, let me give the floor to tami to talk about operation matterhorn. [applause] dr. Biddle well, im delighted to be here in a roomful of airplanes which makes me happy. , it is fun to be here to talk about an Unusual Campaign and to talk about, in particular, the airplane that was at the center of it. So grab this. This is very important to have. These super fortress is an extraordinary airplane in every possible regard. Basically, it was a leap forward into modernity. The air force, the u. S. Army air force, at that point, it would come become the u. S. Air force later, was thinking about needing a very longrange bomber. This is a 19391940, when theyre not sure what the situation in europe is going to be. So they start to think and being the air force and forward thinkers they are, they jump into the future and make demands that are quite extraordinary and at the helm of all of this is general henry arnold, the chief of the Army Air Forces at that point, but also a man who is very interested in technology and the future and in having the s ultimately become independent of the army. All those things are terribly important so he wants a platform that will make this happen. And what becomes the b29 is his vision for how to have this happen. And, of course, he is imagining the future of warfare is going to be heavily reliant on Strategic Bombing. And he gains a number of backers, because the president , particular is quite , interested in this. If youre the head of a democracy, youre always wearing about casualties and more and looking for ways to reduce them , if possible, and also, having a Large Standing Army is very expensive, and it can be politically and socially disruptive, so if theres a way to get around it and you happen to have wonderful moats on your west and east, you might look to technology. And that is what the americans did. The air force was really pushing this program. So if you just look at some of the texts you can see what was going on. Boeing took up this gamble in 19 40, and then, as you can see, 1. 5 million manhours and 2. 8 million to produce 10,000 drawings for prototypes. This airplane, because it was so accelerated basically, arnold wanted it in time for the campaign, wanted it in time for the war to be fought. He accelerated and telescoped everything about this airplane, which meant everything was a gamble, everything was a risk. All new technology. It was pushing the outer edge of technology in every conceivable realm. And, in fact, they built this airplane or they went forward with it and went forward with the production orders when it was really only a pile of blueprints and a wooden mockup to support it. And there were 1600 airplanes, b29s, ordered before the first ones actually took to the skies, so with so much riding on this, and so many new things occurring at the same time, it was truly the 3 million gamble, which was its nickname. But, as you can see, it is going to fly further and higher and faster and carry more bombs further than any airplane has ever done in the past. It had a pressurized cabin. It had the latest in navigational technology. It had guns that could be site converged on a single target, controlled by a computer. Basically, a fire control system that was very, very forwardlooking and beyond anything that had been conceived before, powered by six generators and an electrical system that would include more than 125 electric motors and 15,000 feet of wiring. So each plane required more than 40,000 parts and boeing had to keep track of all those subcontractors. So this was perhaps the most risky and most reckless, perhaps one would and many did say, reckless project, of the second world war. But it had a lot of backing by important people, including the president , including harry hopkins, including robert levitt. They were all close to the president. They all believed in airpower , and they all pushed this airplane. It was at the time, as you can imagine, the pride of boeing. Boeing was partnering in taking this great leap into the future. And, basically one of the heads , of this program was the famous and brilliant test pilot Edmund Turney allen who was fabless at fabulous at his job. He was an unusual man. He was m. I. T. Trains. He was an aerodynamic engineer. A practitioner of yoga, and a vegetarian. He was a very interesting guy. He was a very wiry, little wisp of a man but he flew immense airplanes. He flew, basically, the strata liner, the constellation, the coronado, the d. C. Line for boeing. He basically was in on the shakedown of all this airplanes. And, in fact, it was hard to get insurance for these new prototypes, big prototypes, if allen was not at these controls. There were other folks involved, george scher designed a whole new wing. Harland fowler designed the really revolutionary flaps. Alle controls. They are common now, but at the time, they were revolutionary, and so many people who were really the best in the world were involved in this project. Ok. But, as you can imagine, with this much new stuff happening all at once, and you are trying to stitch it all together, or weld it altogether into the same machine, youre going to have problems. And this was curtiss famous quote, the b29 had as many bugs as the Entomology Department at the smithsonian. It was full of problems, basically because it was being tested as it went into combat, literally. It was going so fast. And the biggest problem of the airplane it had many problems. It had many things that were very exciting, but all those things that were exciting were also risky and many of them were problems, including the landing gear, and a variety of other things, but the biggest problem was the engines. These were very complex, huge, wright r353 engines that were cooled, but, unfortunately, there was not coolh air going through to the engines, so they were prone to engine fires, and engine fires began to appear pretty much right away, but they were particular a problem in the early test flights in december and january of 1943. Has anyone been an airplane that was on fire . Ok. A few of us out there. You will recall, those who have done it, it is character building. [laughter] but you can hardly fly b29 without having an engine fire. Said, i got pilot the most to engine time i ever had in the b29. So here is the wright cyclone engine again. Again it is forward leaning but , problematic. Heres another quote, the sick this should never have been destined to power operational aircraft without a long pier to trial and investigation and trial again, but it was so ordered, and it was ordered because they were on such a compressed time schedule they had to move out. But, again this went back to the , power the president had in insisting on this program and in driving it forward, so lots of money, men, materiel, expertise was drawn to this program. And its strategy and Strategic Planning is about tradeoffs. So this plane has some interesting implications in terms of the tradeoffs we made in the second world war. This sucked in tremendous amount and money and expertise crew. And those crews might have been doing other things, particularly in the winter and early spring of 1944 and 1945, when where it when we were desperately in need of riflemen. So, if you look at the bottom quote here, you will have a sense of how exciting and how character building it could be to fly this airplane, particularly in its early days. Swallowing a valve was a major problem. And these engines would burn very hot. They had magnesium crank cases. This airplane burned quite hot. It was hard to put these fires out. And, of course, there were problems with the props. Losing your prop is an exciting thing to happen if you are a pilot, and having the engine actually fall out of the airplane is even more exciting. On the 18th of february 1943, eddie allen climbs into the second prototype and had with him the most senior people from boeing. Now they are trying to figure out what is going on. There on a tight time schedule. They cram the rest people into the second prototype. If you kind of know where i am going, yes. Brace yourself. It is a sad story. The engine number one catches fire. It quickly spreads to the wing. Then it goes to the fuselage of the airplane. Eddie allen, being a tremendously calm pilot, tries to make it to the Landing Strip at renton and cannot make it. They know they are in serious trouble. A couple of people, these fabulous boeing engineers, try to bail out, but they are too low. Eddie allen, they crash into the meatpacking plant in downtown seattle. All aboard are killed and about 19 people in the factory die as well. It is a huge, almost unfathomable loss to boeing and this program. He had just been on a long tour around the world, he gets the news of this crash and suffers the first of multiple heart attacks he would suffer in the course of the second world war. One thing that one realizes when you study these folks is that they are under tremendous pressure all the time. Those people heart attacks are not hard to fathom, especially in days without the kind of cardiac treatment we have today. General arnold absolutely pushed on. He was determined that this airplane was going to fly. Probably that it would hand i twould head principally to the far eastern theater. Roosevelt wanted this airplane there. He wanted the bombing of japan. And he wanted something that would help used Chiang Kaisheks morale. He was feeling that we had let down the chinese over and over again. There was a concern that chang was getting frustrated with us. I think he felt, if the b29 could fly from china, from an area that was safe in china, it would be prestigious for Chiang Kaishek. That is why they come up with this scheme that becomes matterhorn. Before that happens, the airplanes have to fly and have to get to the theater. Arnold looks at the situation in the winter and decides we have to get the airplanes going. He sends boeing engineers to the facility producing b29s in kansas and they fight a domestic battle called the battle of kansas. What they do is, when they roll the airplanes off the production line, they take them to the tarmac and make approximately 50 to 55 major changes to the airplane. This is in march, in kansas. Its freezing. Subfreezing temperatures, blizzards. Yet, these engineers, men are out there doing it to make this airplane fly. They disconnect about every electrical circuit in the airplane to put a new engine in. This is a bit of an eyechart so i will skip over it quickly. The 20th air force is going to be controlled by arnold and the joint chiefs. He did not want his prized b29s to go to the navy or macarthur and kenny. He probably could have made contributions but arnold was determined that this would be a longrange Strategic Bomber for japan. They leave from kansas and do this around the world trip to get to their ultimate destination, calcutta. It does not go well. As they go eastward into higher and higher temperatures, the airplanes have more and more problems overheating. Every time they lose airplane or multiple airplanes, they send more boeing engineers to try and solve the problem. Extraordinary effort taking place to get these plans where they need to go. This is the crazy scheme for matterhorn. Basically, the airplanes were going to be based in india but they were going to forward stage out of changdu. What you can see, if you look at the geography, they had to fly everything into the theater and they had to fly it over the himalayas. In order to get enough fuel for a b29 they could just reach the outer edges of japan and a number of other targets. In order to be able to do that, they had to fly over the himalayas seven times to bring in enough fuel for one raid on japan. Logistically, this was a crazy, crazy scheme. But, again, we were so anxious to start bombing japan that we went forward. That is basically the bottom line of the logistics and fuel. When this starts, under the control of Brigadier GeneralKenneth Wolfe come a did not last very long. The raids were difficult, the logistical situation was almost impossible. He was replaced fairly quickly, first by saunders, but then by the person increasingly becoming the star, curtis lome. Lome was a problem solver. He was instinctively very good at getting a lot out of airplanes and crews. Before he went out to the theater, he went up to omaha and got thoroughly familiar with the airplane. Of course, he faced the same problems that the first two commanders had faced, the same sorts of issues. Engine fires. The gunsight blisters had a nasty tendency to pop out. In pressurized airplanes, that is a big problem. It had tragic circumstances in some cases until they figured out how to solve that problem. Ok. A few typical missions. There were not a lot of raids. Typically, once a week was about the best they could do because they had to fly in all of their fuel. They started off very slowly. They were trying to hit airplane factories and steel in particular. When lemay comes in and replaces saunders in late august of 1944, and what he does at that point is basically the same thing the others had done. He works very hard to do as well as he possibly can, solve the problems. The key thing is he never complains. He sends letters back to arnold saying he has problems but the things he is trying to do to solve them, which wins arnolds confidence. In 1944, he uses 100 incendiaries. The air force likes the results from that raid. It produces more devastation than the other raids they have been flying, and it sets up a harbinger for the future. Just to end here basically on the operation itself, and i will continue on one other thing. This sums it up. Lemay basically says no one could have made this operation work. It was so difficult logistically. A couple of things happen. The main thing i would say, the important incendiary raid that lemay waged, but also, because lemay did so much good work in this theater, it set him up to ultimately replace heywood hensel when hensel was relieved of demand for flights out of the marianas. That campaign became the focal point of the air campaign in the far east. Lemay was instrumental in of course getting that underway and then turning to lowlevel nighttime incendiary raids against japanese cities. Here is a key point. Letters from arnold to lemay and back are fascinating. I have never seen so much pressure being placed on a theater commander as was placed on the shoulders of lemay from arnold. That was coming from the president through marshall through arnold to lemay. Huge pressure. Arnold switches from using the introduction dear lemay to dear curt. He says, we are watching very closely. Arnold has his eye very much on lemay. He is deciding this campaign with this key Weapon System is going to be put into the hands of curtis lemay, which happens in basically late december, but is formalized in january of 1945. So, i think i shall wrap up there lest i go way over my time. Again, thank you so much for letting me talk about this fascinating episode from world war ii. [applause] hello. On the second of june, 1944, and we are focusing on june and this Conference Although it will run a little bit before and a little bit after, airmen of the air force gathered in italy to year to hear their mission, thinking they were going to do one of those there and back missions to hungary or somewhere and back to italy. To their shock, they saw the line going all the way up into the soviet union. This was a secret mission. They had no idea about it they were going to be flying the first ever Shuttle Mission to russia, socalled operation frantic, originally called baseball. You have a base in u. K. , italy, then bases in the soviet union. Jeremy and i tried to find a better one. This comes off u. S. Film, kind of information film. The people who took the pictures to get a second too early. You get the idea. The sort of round shuttle bombing, stop in the soviet union, then you refuel, rearm, and go back. At the end, only seven shuttle Bombing Missions happened conducted by american aircraft, running between the very beginning to september of 1944. The piece opened earlier. The one base stayed open until after the end of the war, to try and deal with the american pows now trapped behind the soviet lines. The first reason was obvious. If you can get your airbases closer to a target in, for example, eastern germany or further east, central europe, you dont have these dangerous flights, and there are many targets that simply cannot be reached. But it was only sanctioned by roosevelt, and for exactly the same reasons were talking about with matterhorn, starting off with bases in ukraine, getting chummy with the soviets. With the sort of multilayer ambition. The idea was not new. The United States air force air had studied the idea even before pearl harbor. It became an important part of the strategy, ambition. Ther