Research Catalog

Who built the B-29?

Title
Who built the B-29? / Jacob Vander Meulen.
Author
Vander Meulen, Jacob A.
Publication
Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Press, [1995], ©1995.

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Details

Description
104 pages : illustrations; 20 cm
Summary
  • The B-29 Superfortress bomber was the single most complicated and expensive weapon produced by the United States during World War II. Nearly 4,000 B-29s were built for combat in the Pacific theater, including the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima.
  • Assembled on a rush basis by a vast manufacturing program that involved hundreds of thousands of workers, the B-29 boosted the Allies' wartime fortunes as it transformed the economies of cities and towns from Seattle, Washington, to Marietta, Georgia, and from Wichita, Kansas, to Woodridge, New Jersey.
  • Well-illustrated with photographs of factories and diagrams of the plane's design, Building the B-29 presents the social and institutional history of this monumental industrial project. Envisioned in the late 1930s as a way of demolishing the military infrastructure behind enemy lines, the Superfortress was at first resisted by the reluctant, isolationist Congress of the late 1930s.
  • Jacob Vander Meulen describes the efforts of Henry "Hap" Arnold and others to launch the project via a process now called "concurrency," in which production is set up while the product is still on the drawing boards.
  • He describes the technical and financial gambles on the part of manufacturers and, using photographs and diagrams, he illustrates the far-reaching changes the B-29 plants brought to their communities, as Depression-era unemployment gave way to labor shortages and as farm workers and women entered U.S. factories for the first time.
Subjects
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
1560986093 (alk. paper)
LCCN
95008548
OCLC
  • 503425783
  • ocn503425783
Owning Institutions
Columbia University Libraries