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. There were problems from the very beginning. One of the most important things about this mission is it really is a harbinger of the cold war and stalins very strange behavior comes to the fore all the way throughout. Various people in russia said to stalin, how about doing this . Stalin, through molotov or himself, said no. We are not having americans on soviet soil. We will take the lend lease, we will take the planes, but not you guys. Marshall appoints Major General john dean to be the end of this new thing called the u. S. Military mission in moscow, which was supposed to promote new ties to the soviet union. This is becoming more and more important, not just the ambition in japan, but also in the european theater. By the fall of 1943, the usa was in a battle for survival in europe. Stalin had been pushing for the cross channel invasion for two years. But you had to have control of air supremacy over europe this is tremendously important. With stalin, setting up these bases might help to achieve that, not only by bombing synthetic fuel but going after the luftwaffe itself. The last rate, october 14, b17s were shut down and so on. It was a desperate situation. Dean, in moscow, was urged by the joint chiefs of staff to get in touch with some russians. He went doortodoor, knocking on doors in moscow and was rebuffed every time. Dean decided this was going nowhere. He decided, when roosevelt meets stalin in tehran, that he bring it up directly, which he did. Stalin agreed, thought it might be a good idea. But it took him until february 1944 to actually get his approval. The americans wanted 10 bases. Stalin gave them three. There were obstacles to overcome. I will just mention a few of them. They were endless. A lot of wrangling over radio communications. Stalin said, we want full control over radio communications. Arnold said, there is no way you can have a Shuttle Mission if americans do not control their own communication. Finally, there was a compromise that the americans could operate their own equipment if soviet officials were always in the room. On another thing, weather reports. The soviets refused to give information about whether to the weather to the americans but then they refused to let them set up weather stations. It is tricky flying planes somewhere if you dont know what the weather is like. Americans would give information about the weather all over the United States, the atlantic, and europe, and the soviets would share the weather from the soviet union. Equipment, setting them up before overlord was a mammoth task. The soviets were going to provide local supplies like food. The routes were very dangerous. Other supplies were flown in, came in through the middle east. I mentioned ralph crump, involved in the lend lease, transporting equipment and material from the middle east and, in this case, material was flown in from the airport, other shipping across the caspian sea, everything had to come in, from the steel mesh used in runways to the highoctane fuel. If russians did not produce this highoctane fuel, it had to be brought in. We were absolutely shocked. It was topsecret. They were not sure where they were going, what to expect. They arrived at these godforsaken places. In the background, the guys who set this base up were horrified because everything was in ruins because the germans had gone through ukraine and just done scorchedearth. Wells were poisoned, animals had been taken, crops had been destroyed. They get to the airbase, there is nothing there. It used to be a big functioning airbase. The germans had destroyed everything except for one building and they discovered why. In a basement, they found a bunch of bombs that had been set on a radio timer and probably would have been exploded by the germans. They managed to get rid of the problems. To get rid of the bombs and use that building. The crews got to work setting up tents. The women of the red army set up the mesh nets for runways. The bases finally were ready by the end of may. Then came another problem from stalin, choice of targets. Around riga, latvia, in the north, were not reachable. Stalin said, sorry, you are going to bucharest, budapest. It was either you agree with stalin or nothing is going to happen. He said, it made no sense. I can reach these targets from italy. Why all this difficulty if i could have just gone from italy anyways . They agreed. The First Mission was led by someone who was perfect for the mission. He was tough, experienced. He had no illusions about the russians. He said that stalin did not want them bombing targets in the north because he did not want americans to take any credit of those. The First Missions seemed to be fine. A huge sort of welcoming party had been set up for them. There with his daughter and various others from the u. S. Military mission in moscow. Various press. Pravda, red star, others. The americans put on a good show. 64 flying fortresss landing, than the same thing repeated in the other two bases. It was a positive experience. The Great Success also led to a very friendly and cooperative relationship. There were all sorts of cooperation and fraternization was allowed. There was a wonderful soviet Major General who worked handinhand with his american counterpart to create a great atmosphere. At that point in the war, this was slightly unusual. Roy hogg was popular because he had removed the ammunition and filled the ammunition boxes with contraceptives. Great optimistic start, everyone thought it was super wonderful. The Shuttle Mission was set for the 21st of june. At this time, the eighth air force was involved leaving the u. K. Near berlin, then carry on to the bases in ukraine. After passing over warsaw, a colonel noticed the engine flyer right behind them. He said, the plane would disappear and they could not catch it. The plane seemed to have disappeared when they landed. The plane had in fact not disappeared. The german pilot had managed to take photographs of the bases. Mission accomplished, he headed for a hidden german airfield at minsk. These pictures were handed over to a colonel in the luftwaffe, then a general, who ordered the planes to prepare immediately. So, the luftwaffe pilots could start their furlined overcoats, heavy boots, strapping on their parachutes. The general is having a huge party, celebrating the arrival of these troops from britain. They are all getting drunk and having fun. Halfanhour out of midnight, illumination flares start falling. Then, the bombs start falling. The germans just roamed the sky freely. The germans hit the fuel dump. Gasoline, which had been so painstakingly brought in, exploded. Those bombers have been flying overhead, where is the Red Air Force . Not a single Red Air Force fighter plane appeared. Really most of them were badly damaged. Planes at the other two bases were moved out of the line of fire. But the next night, the germans destroyed many of those and the fuel dumps and so on. It was a huge tragedy for all those involved. I went to the three airbases in the 1990s and interviewed a number of people who had been involved in one way or another. One very lovely lady who had an american boyfriend, wept when she described the attack on the base. Relations now between the soviet military and allies are going downhill very fast. The first example for this happened in may when colonel colin was returning from an agreedupon reconnaissance flight. He was fired upon by soviets. He thought this was a mistake but in this happened more and more frequently. Fortunately, the cruise survived after they were shut down. This was becoming a bit of a sticky wicket, as they say. Just to keep the project alive, the 15th air force shuttle, p 51 fighters of the soviet union back and forth. Really, because of the hostility of the soviets and the bombing raids just not working particularly well, it was obvious that this was going to wind down. Molotov blank told him, we want you americans out of the soviet union. In reality, there was really very little to carry on for. The marianas island had opened up to the americans. The soviet operation which we just heard about saw the red army sweeping in toward the polish border, so the ukrainian bases were now sort of so out of range that they were obsolete anyway. The soviet hostility, they were beating up americans, stealing things, no fraternization allowed. The guys who stayed were called themselves the forgotten bastards of ukraine. They were taken out just before the end of the war. When president roosevelt flew to yalta in february of 1945, the americans insisted on placing observers in all nearby antiaircraft sites. All in all in all, the operation was deemed a failure. One of the really interesting things is, why did stalin behave in this way . First against the bases, then for them, then against them again. All the research i have done, from sources available in the soviet union and ukraine itself, it seems that stalin was absolutely determined all the way through the war, the soviets have rejected the idea of Strategic Bombing. Stalin realizes that perhaps Strategic Bombing is quite important after all. This seems to be the primary reason that he allowed the bases. This was a wonderful opportunity to get a hold of a lot of american technology, skills, and knowhow. The americans notice to that the soviets were rotating personnel to work at the eastern command bases so that as many soviets as possible could develop heavy bomber skills. In short, the russians were learning Technical Skills from the american ground crews. Stalin was making requests to get planes through lend lease, but these were all turned down. Stalin actually pieced together american aircraft from these salvaged planes. It was also there a failure therefore a failure because it handed the soviets technology and equipment that would soon be used against americans in the cold war. It was also a failure in that the bases were not used for the two things that might have been decisive. The air supply of the army during the polish uprising, they were allowed one mission, but that was it. The second was the question about bombing of auschwitz. In the end, it led to bitterness and suspicion, particularly among asaf officers and others. It really was a harbinger of the cold war to come. My final picture shows sort of an indication of what stalin was up to. Marshall nabukov, who had been helpful to americans, was arrested and sent to the gulags. The man in the middle, who had been so helpful to americans on the base, seemed to be far too proamerican, he was arrested and murdered by stalin. Thanks very much. [applause] if you would like, you can ask the panel the first question. I just want to make a comment. One thing we have talked about is the tyranny of logistics. We do not have always that directly aimed at panels, but it is an element of all of these. You can see the problems logistically to maintain these bases in china and russia. It is an aspect of the war that we do not pay enough attention to. The first question in the center. Given the level of suspicion by the russians about supplies, the lend lease equipment, how much of it was really reaching the u. S. Bases and how much was maybe stolen, diverted . Were there any officers to make sure that supplies from the states arrived when they were supposed to . These supplies that were designated for these bases were separate from lend lease. The amount of fuel and equipment and so on was pretty much tallied up. Im sure there are some things for along the way. But it was accounted for by the time i got there. As far as i know, there was not a particular problem with that. With lend lease, talking about 17 million tons of supplies, 400,000 jeeps and whatever else it might be, you have obviously a High Percentage of those things might have disappeared along the way. I dont know the statistics. But in supplying these particular airbases, i have not come across any complaints about things being pilfered, stolen, diverted. My question, where the eighth air force and 15th air force using b17 aircraft exclusively for the Shuttle Mission, or were b24s used . From all i have read, the absolute majority were b17s. Next question is in the back to your left. Thank you for some outstanding presentations on relatively obscure subjects. In all the planning done for matterhorn, didnt anybody realize that the enemy had a vote . One result of matterhorn was that the japanese decided to go on the offensive in china to get rid of those bases. Yes, they were very unhappy about the presence of those bases and it did cause difficulty. I would say there were lots of people very concerned about matterhorn. On paper, it looks pretty crazy. There were many people who raised lots of objections. Whether this was just a pointless diversion of resources that could have done other things in the war. The quote i put up on one of the slides, where general lemay, i am not sure even hap arnold ever i am suspicious that maybe even hap arnold did not believe in this. The pressure to get bombers over japan was so great. A lot of this pressure was coming right from the top. Roosevelt wanted the airplanes to have an impact on japan. Whatever it was going to take, he was going to sign off on. It was partly because they wanted to support Chiang Kaishek at a moment when chiang was complaining about not being supported and roosevelt was feeling guilty about not having done it. Operation indigo was the operation that actually took out most of those bases. The enemy does have a vote. Real quick question. How did they finally solve the engine fire problems on the super fortress . They used a variety of expedients that got more air flowing over the engines. I am not an engineer so i dont know the exact details but they kept working and working to cool them adequately with airflow. There were some tricks that pilots used as well. I talked with a veteran. Somebody had rebuilt an old b29, they had set it up at an airbase in the far west somewhere. These rookies were getting ready to start it. He said, here are the things you need to do. They said, it is not in the manual. He said, ok. They took off and the engine caught fire. Pilots are very clever about keeping each other alive, so they developed schemes. Once somebody figured it out, they would try all the tricks. You needed to know a lot of tricks for these airplanes. Quick story, then a question. About 40 years ago, i was on a 747 from minneapolis to boston. I was sitting on the window, i turned to the person next to me, about a halfhour out of the airport, i said, i dont think we are going to get into boston on time. He said, why do you say that . I said, one of the engines is on fire. You can lose a few engines. During matterhorn, did we begin to become aware of the jetstream existence . I guess the extreme cloud cover that enveloped japan. In very early ways. There was overlap ultimately between the campaign out of the marianas and the campaign in the cbi. It was being learned simultaneously. The biggest effect was on the airplanes flying out of the marianas because they were over the pacific for so long and that made them really feel the jetstream. Anybody trying to fly into japan was flying into cloud cover a good of the time. We discovered there was cloud cover over japan far more often than we anticipated. Another thing we had been shocked by after discovering there was a lot of cloud cover over northern europe. As we started flying both campaigns, it is really very slow. The information is coming in very slowly, incrementally. With haywood hansens campaign, it becomes apparent that this is a big effect. The operations out of the marianas ran into it more. The problem with matterhorn, he could not reach many targets in japan. It really did not find the major problems over japan. Thank you for an interesting presentation. My father was in western china when all of this was going on so i probably know more about it now that anything he told me. Im sorry, my father was in western china when this was going on and i probably learned more about it today than what he told me. I wanted to comment on the idea of the russians stealing american technology. It is my understanding that some b29s that were damaged flew into russian territory and because russian was neutral, the planes taken over by the russians, they had all the problems we had only more because of their lower level of technology. This is all true. B29s did end up in russian hands. This was greatly distressing to hap arnold. They did reverse engineer them as you would imagine. We asked for them, they did not come back. Yes, they reproduced many of the problems that the original airplane had. The air force guys call it the b29ski. To your farright. To the best of your knowledge, did the soviets have a Strategic Bombing initiative of their own . If so, to what extent was that going at this time in the war . They had not. Stalin had always dismissed the idea of Strategic Bombing. It was very offensive and critical and insulting about the american effort that Strategic Bombing and british efforts at bombing cities. It was only toward the end of the war that he began to realize that these technologies and skills might prove useful after the war. It was very late in the day that he basically started stealing the equipment and skills to catch up. There were airpowered thinkers in russia in the interwar period that were very interested. They were actually quite forwardlooking and interesting. They were doing interesting work. But, it is very difficult to be in the military in the 1930s in russia. Sometimes, you would have major setbacks in terms of the work you could do. When barbarossa happens, the russians are on the defensive immediately and their first concerns are to fight ground battles. The aircraft they are interested in producing in large numbers have to be oriented in that direction. They cant really come back and recover. They do get very interested later on and start to think, perhaps this would be an interesting way to carry on a war. I think some of the thinking was there. Events overtook Everything Else for a while. Then they returned to thinking about it. By this point, they developed the pe8, and they had less than 100 of those. Even though russia was filled with incredibly interesting scientists, if it did not happen with stalin, it was not going to happen. They had developed a good plane, but it was not given the goahead by the guy who counted. We have a question from alan, on the far right in the very back. Can the moderators cancel this question . I never ask questions, i answer them. I could not figure out how to figure this into the session. I was at a Cocktail Party many years ago at ohio state. A metallurgical engineer came up to me and said, do you know about magnesium . He said, i am the guy who made the magnesium parts to the b29 engine work. I said, i understand they did not work. They caught fire. He said, there is a slight misunderstanding about the composition. The problem was that they used alloys for the first time in many parts to reduce weight. More gas, more bombs, good reasons. All through the b29 development program, there were startling experiments with metallurgical composition, most of which needed to be fixed. It turned out that the cooling surface of the b29 engine was about half that of the b17. The amount of horsepower and heat generated was far in excess of anything the b17 generated. I checked this with paul and he said, yes, that is exactly what happened. He made sure they replaced all the parts that had any kind of flammability at all. That is a wonderful insight. You raise and reinforce a point, that everything was new and everything was being experimented with. Everything was being tested as the campaign went forward. Things like alloys were new and we had a lot of young crews brave enough to climb into these things and try hard to make them fly and ache them to their make them do their missions and do the work they are supposed to do. Youve all heard the phrase, make the airplanes as you are flying them. Next question to your farright toward the front. How did fdr react to uncle joes unfriendly actions during this operation frantic . As you know, roosevelt had the idea that he was going to create a kind of endowment after the war. At this point, very little had happened to convince him otherwise. Even the disasters that frantic, some of them were explained away. They were making mistakes when shooting americans down. This had been a great tragedy, what a shame that germans had followed and destroyed the airfields. It did not make the kind of dent in the relationship between stalin and roosevelt as people with thought. As one would have thought. At yalta, roosevelt is very friendly and pleasant, in fact sidelining churchill. It did not have a huge impact. My father flew at the end of the war and im learning more my father flew the hump at the end of the war and im learning more today than i have ever known before. But he lost two airplanes in that process. At one point, i think he said he was one of the most expensive majors in the army air corps. One plane came down or he was able to land it. It was flying out of karachi. He had a flyaway prop and engine on fire, and brought it down. The other time, they changed the radio code, and he could not get his bearings by the time he was trying to get back to the base. His navigator took him down and it was a dead end, he was surrounded by mountains, so he had to do the tight turns to get out. So he ran out of fuel and had to ditch the plane on the way back. What i am wondering, what are the resources to read more and understand more about that aspect of the war . First, let me say that your father mustve been an extraordinarily talented pilot and an extraordinarily brave man. We are grateful for the work that he did, even if he was a little bit expensive. It is ok. [laughter] you know, there are many, many books that one can turn to. This operation does not get a great deal of attention. It is a little bit dry, but the official history of the u. S. Army air forces in world war ii, volume five, covers this in detail. I recommend lemays memoir, which is a fascinating book and quite well written. He had a coauthor who was a very talented writer. It is gripping. Truly, it reads like a thriller most of the time. That is a good resource. Anything written by Richard Frank on the Pacific Theater is absolutely worth reading. What else . There are a number of books flying over the hump. It reinforces the fact that we do crazy things in wartime. We really do. We are trying to do anything to win the war. But the sacrifices of your father and others. You think about it, how smart is it to run an operation where it basically takes seven gallons of fuel to provide one gallon of fuel to the front. That is what tami is working on with her mobilization work. It takes an immense amount of mobilization to have the logistical ability to do that. No other nation in the world at this time could have done it except the United States. I think it is partly true too that we do it because we are so optimistic. We have a lot of resources, but we have this unbelievable american optimism that we can make it work if we try hard enough. If you just simply go to a place like ave books and type in flying the hump, you will probably come up with a number of books. If you want to talk to me afterwards, i will take your name down and try to get some more specific resources for you. Before we get to this last question, i have an announcement. We will have pastries and coffee in the canteen during this break. But the last question goes to the panelists right. You mentioned auschwitz. I would like to know the considerations that went into not bombing auschwitz. Also, was it decided at the highest levels . Is there any reason to think that roosevelt was in on the decision . It is a very complicated question and a very interesting one. The decision was made at the very highest level. The whole concept behind not bombing auschwitz was that it was not seen as a strategic target. There is a great deal of debate as to whether or not the americans understood how serious or how terrible the situation was in auschwitz. At exactly this time, the hungarian jews were being moved into birkenau and there were 10,000 people being murdered a day. When the polish envoy went to talk to roosevelt and people in washington to explain what was happening to the jews, he was dismissed really by roosevelt. He went to talk to frankfurter, the chief justice. He had been in the warsaw ghetto and said, this is extermination, mass murder. Frankfurter set, you are a young man. It is not that i say you are lying, it is just that i do not believe you. There was this whole question about whether or not it was really understood what was happening. The answer was, if we win the war, this will all stop. They did not understand the urgency, particularly in the case of the hungarian jews being brought to birkenau. The number of survivors i have spoken to over the years have said, almost to a man or woman, that they would have preferred bombing, trying to bomb the crematorium or the tracks or whatever, even if they had been killed in the bombing rate, the bombing raid, first of all because it may have stopped the crematorium more gas chambers from working, but secondly, that it would have sent a message to the nazis that this place was on the radar and we would not let it be forgotten about. It is a complicated question. It is also i think important to realize what was going on in the war at this time. When we really knew about auschwitz was in the summer of 1944 because two escapees were providing information about what was going on. This was really concrete evidence. That time of the war, right in the aftermath of normandy, was incredibly fraud. Was incredibly fraud. Fraught. How resources were stretched to the limit. In 1944, v2s were landing and we were in a desperate effort to try to get those weapons cut off and destroyed so that they would not continue to do so much damage to the allied war effort. So, it is a time when resources are stretched terribly thin. That being said, we were flying right in that vicinity. In fact, we bombed an oil facility that was right on top of birkenau. There were issues about priorities, should this have become a priority target . I thought very hard and long about this. It is a painful and difficult subject because i know both sides of the story, the pressures to realize what was happening at these camps. Hungary was next. If we had maybe attacked, perhaps the jews in hungary would have been protected a little bit. It is hard to say for sure but it is possible. There is a wonderful book that was edited by Michael Barenbaum in the 1990s about this topic. One was written by weinberg, who is sitting here, who wrote very thoughtfully about this issue. I believe in january pbs is going to area documentary on to air a documentary on this very topic. It has already aired in britain on the bbc. It is very thoughtfully done. The director worked very hard to get it right. Keep an eye out. It should be on pbs in january. Thank you very much. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] watching American History tv, covering history cspanstyle with event coverage, eyewitness accounts, archival films, lectures in college kraus terms college visits. Ms and museam all weekend, every weekend, on cspan3. Good morning. Im one of the volunteers here at the Army Heritage and education center. This is one of the most prolific tanks of the second world war. M4a3is the