In 1947 the United States Air Force
became an independent service, carved from the Army and placed under the
control of the newly created National Military Establishment. The new
service faced daunting challenges. There was the threat from a new
adversary, the Soviet Union. But there were challenges at home as well:
from the Navy, which viewed those in the new uniforms as rivals for
diminishing defense funds; and from within, as the Air Force struggled
to introduce jet-powered aircraft into operational service.
In the spring of 1949, the country got a new secretary of
defense: Louis Johnson, a wealthy lawyer, aspiring politician, and
former official with the Convair Corporation, which was a longtime
supplier of U.S. military aircraft. That last connection, which today
would seem a scandal worthy of a special prosecutor, was common at the
time. Who knew more about weapons than the men who built them?
When President Harry Truman ordered Johnson to economize, he
obliged in April by canceling the 65,000-ton super-carrier United
States, the keel of which had been laid only a week before. But the
carrier was the linchpin of the Navy's plan to equip itself for the
strategic nuclear mission. Carrying aircraft able to deliver atomic
bombs to a target 1,000 miles away, the United States would have
projected naval air power across the world's oceans, just the mission
the Air Force wanted for its land-based bombers. Johnson's order, though
only two sentences long, set off an interservice squabble the likes of
which the nation had rarely seen.
Relations between the Army and Navy had first soured in the 1920s
over which service should defend the U.S. coast, and World War II had
only sharpened their rivalry. Now the Navy viewed the postwar creation
of the Air Force and the Department of Defense as twin political threats
to its primacy as the defender of U.S. shores. The spat that followed
cancellation of the United States became known as "the revolt of the
admirals," and it pitted the Navy's aircraft carrier against the Air
Force's strategic bombing force--more specifically, Convair's monster
six-engine bomber, the B-36, which had entered service in the summer of
1948.
Now it was a year later, and matters
were coming to a head. The first shot in the battle was fired by Cedric
Worth, a civilian assistant to Navy Undersecretary Dan Kimball for
"special study and research," as he later described his duties under
oath. It came in the form of a nine-page memo for the Navy's internal
use (though he admitted giving copies to three members of Congress and
to aircraft manufacturer Glenn Martin). The document condemned the B-36
as "an obsolete and unsuccessful aircraft" and charged that the Air
Force had acquired it only after Convair had contributed $6.5 million to
various Democratic politicians. See
Revolt of the Admirals
The theme was picked up by the Navy League, which spent $500,000
trashing the mega-bomber. (That amount, at least, was the estimate of
the rival Air Force Association. If these sums don't seem exciting,
consider that in 1949, the minimum wage in the aircraft industry was 50
cents an hour.) The B-36 was described as a "lumbering cow" and a
"billion-dollar blunder," and the Navy claimed it had at least three jet
fighters that could leave the monster behind at 40,000 feet. The
admirals wanted a matchup, but they would never get one.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff told Johnson the test was a bad idea.
And the Air Force said it had already demonstrated that fighters
couldn't maneuver at that altitude. Simulated B-36 attacks on bases in
Florida and California were met by three front-line fighters: a North
American F-86A Sabre,
a Lockheed F-80C Shooting Star,
and a Republic
F-84 Thunderjet.
Radar picked up the intruder 30 minutes out; the
fighters took 26 minutes to climb to 40,000 feet and another two minutes
to find the B-36. The fighters were faster than the big bomber, but
their wing loading (the ratio of aircraft weight to area of the wings)
was so high that they couldn't turn with the bomber without stalling in
the thin air. Even if a B-36 were detected and Soviet fighters caught
it, the pilot could evade them by making S-turns, said the Air Force.
Of course, the Russians wouldn't have been flying USAF jets, as
British engineer Harold Saxon argued in an edition of Aviation Week that
appeared in mid-summer. While the Americans valued speed and therefore
reduced the span and area of their jets' wings, the British built
fighters that could maneuver at stratospheric heights, beginning with
the de Havilland Vampire, which had been designed for the first British
turbojet engine, and which by 1949 had done "a lot of development flying
since 1947 between 50,000 and 60,000 feet," according to Saxon.
By early June, the battle had moved into the halls of Congress
when James Van Zandt, a Republican Congressman from Pennsylvania and
captain in the Navy reserve, took up the charges leaked by Worth's memo.
On the House floor, Van Zandt demanded an investigation of the "ugly,
disturbing reports" that the bomber project would have been canceled a
year ago if not for wheeling and dealing by Louis Johnson, other Convair
officials, and Stuart Symington, the civilian head of the Air Force.
Symington, in a speech at Brookline, Massachusetts, had summed up
the final judgment on the B-36: The bomber could "take off from bases
on this continent, penetrate enemy defenses, destroy any major urban
industrial area in the world, and return non-stop to the point of
take-off." Symington's claim was preposterous, but it was widely
believed. So Congress did what it does best: It scheduled hearings. But
they were delayed until August, infuriating Van Zandt, and also
broadened into a debate about the strategic roles of the Air Force and
Navy. During the dramatic proceedings, a browbeaten Cedric Worth was
unmasked as the author of the memo that had incited the ruckus and
forced to recant everything. "I think I was wrong," he told the
committee.
"You made a grave error, did you not?" he was asked.
"Yes."
U.S. bombers had been getting steadily bigger, so the enormity of
the B-36 may have seemed part of an American pattern, but the bomber
actually owed its immense bulk to a succession of hostile dictators,
starting with Adolf Hitler. In the spring of 1941, German troops held
most of western Europe and seemed likely to conquer Britain next. The
U.S. Army asked airframe builders for an airplane that could take off
from American soil, bomb Germany, and fly home.
The most promising design came from Consolidated Aircraft in San
Diego, builder of the B-24 Liberator, which was just entering service
with U.S. and British air forces. Consolidated proposed a quantum leap
over the B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers as well as Boeing's next-generation
"very heavy" B-29 Superfortress. The B-36 was to be a mega-bomber,
spanning 230 feet from wingtip to wingtip. It would cross the Atlantic,
enter German airspace at 300 mph, and drop 10,000 pounds of bombs from
40,000 feet, too high for flak or fighters to trouble it. Impressed, the
Army ordered a pair of prototypes on November 15, 1941.
Three weeks later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and the
U.S. suddenly found itself fighting a two-ocean war. The B-36 went on
the back burner while Consolidated turned out thousands of its proven
Liberators. The B-36 suffered another setback when its facilities were
moved to Texas, and yet another when the designers were asked to build a
transport based on the bomber.
While Europe was pounded from bases in England, Japan was to be
targeted by the Boeing Superfortress flying from China. The Japanese set
out to capture the Chinese airfields--and thereby moved the B-36 back
to the front burner. From Hawaii, it could bomb Tokyo as it had once
been expected to bomb Berlin. In June 1943 the Army asked for 100 copies
of the mega-bomber, with the first to arrive in the summer of 1945.
The U.S. Marine Corps moved faster than Convair (Consolidated
merged with Vultee in 1943, and the new name was coined then). Shortly
after Guam, Saipan, and Tinian were in U.S. hands, the Superforts began
their terrible punishment of the Japanese home islands. The Pacific war
ended six months earlier than expected--and six days before the rollout
of the first B-36, its nose jacked up to lower its tail, which was too
tall for the hangar door. It debuted as the Peacemaker, but the name
never took, and even today it is better remembered simply as the B-36.
In a country celebrating peace, the prototype would have been the
last of the line, but the Soviet Union turned out to be as land-hungry
as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Nonetheless, the U.S. military
packed for home in a stand-down so thorough that it was "
Not a demobilization"," as General Leon Johnson noted in a 1954 interview, "it
was a rout." The spring of 1946 became a replay of 1941, with a hostile
dictator swallowing pieces of Europe and the Americans unable to do
anything about it. The "strategic" card--the threat of wholesale
destruction by nuclear weapons--seemed the only one that a demobilized,
budget-cutting United States could play. But which of the services would
play it?
When Congress had created the independent air force in 1947, the
new service had been organized around two combat arms: a Tactical Air
Command (TAC) to support the ground troops and a Strategic Air Command
(SAC) to take the war to the enemy. The Air Force would have a fleet
twice the size of the Navy's--24,000 aircraft to 11,500--and only the
Air Force would have heavy bombers.
Following the U.S. withdrawal to the continental United States
and the emergence of Joseph Stalin's ambitions, SAC's strategic mission
was in the ascendant and there was no longer any question who the
"enemy" was. By happenstance, the long-distance payload of the B-36
equalled the weight of one atomic bomb--roughly 10,000 pounds--and its
combat radius equalled the great-circle route from Maine to Leningrad.
Pending the arrival of its new $5.7-million-dollar baby, SAC made do
with 160 veteran B-29 Superforts, and it was these aircraft that
answered the call to deploy to European bases when the Russians shut off
ground access to Berlin in the summer of 1948.
It was a colossal bluff. In all of SAC, only 27 Superforts had
the "Silver Plate" modifications needed to carry an atomic bomb, and
these were all assigned to the 509th Bomb Group, which stayed home. As
for bombs, the U.S. "stockpile" contained exactly 13, controlled by the
Atomic Energy Commission, and President Harry Truman refused to say if
he'd ever release them to the military. Even if he had given the order
to launch an attack, the 509th would have needed five days to pack up,
fly to an AEC depot, load the nukes, and move overseas.
Perhaps the reality of the situation didn't matter to the
Soviets. As they demonstrated again and again during the cold war, their
pattern was to push until they met a determined response, then back off
and wait for the next opportunity. They could easily have prevented an
airlift by jamming U.S. radio beacons, but they didn't. And when General
Curtis LeMay, to everyone's astonishment, fed and heated Berlin by air,
the Russians quietly reopened land routes in the spring of 1949. The
blockade succeeded only in burnishing LeMay's reputation, heightening
American fear of Russia, and confirming the belief that the B-36 was
America's best hope to contain Communism.
In June 1948, Convair delivered the first operational B-36A to
SAC's 7th Bomb Group at Carswell Air Force Base, across the runway from
its Fort Worth plant. Big as the B-29 Superfort was, it could nearly fit
beneath one wing of a B-36. Despite the difference in size, the two
airplanes had similar vertical tails, and they had slim fuselages, like
cigarettes, round in cross-section, with two pressurized crew cabins
separated by two bomb bays and connected by a tunnel.
But the wings were different. The Superfort's were thin,
straight, and glider-like, while the B-36's wings were more than seven
feet thick at the root, enough for a crewman to crawl in and reach the
engines or the landing gear in flight. The wings were tapered, with the
leading edges swept back, and the effect of that, combined with the
wings' location so far back on the fuselage, made the airplane appear
out of balance. Strangest of all, the B-36's six Pratt & Whitney
Wasp Major engines were faired into the trailing edges, with the
propellers located aft in the pusher configuration. Although it was
supposed to reduce the propeller swirl's turbulence over the wing, the
pusher design was rarely used on U.S. aircraft. Apparently it worked,
though, because the B-36 had very low drag. The main drawback was that
air for cooling the engines was ducted from intakes in the leading edge
of the wing, and there was never enough of it, especially at high
altitude.
The propellers were 19 feet in diameter, and to keep the tips
from going supersonic they were geared to turn less than half as fast as
the engines. The engines and propellers produced an unforgettable
throbbing sound when the B-36 flew overhead. A friend of mine remembers
the sound from his boyhood as a "captivating drone. The noise went down
to your heels, it was so resonant. It just stopped you in your tracks.
You looked up into the sky to try to find this thing, and it was just a
tiny cross, it was so high." Others remember that it rattled windows on
the ground from 40,000 feet.
The airplane's most eye-catching feature was the Plexiglas canopy
that enclosed a flight deck, which, while ample for a crew of four,
seemed small on such a whale of a plane. A dome below the nose housed a
radar antenna, and two transparent blisters allowed the crew to aim the
guns and observe any mechanical breakdowns. The effect was a face like a
prairie dog's peering from a burrow, with the flight deck for eyes, the
scanning blisters for ears, and the radome for tucked-up paws.
The ailerons, flaps, rudder, and elevators had a combined total
surface area greater than both wings of a B-24. The pilot's control
input moved a trim tab in the opposite direction, forcing the control
surface in the desired direction.
Two flight engineers monitored the six
4,360-cubic-inch engines, each with four rows of seven cylinders, a
configuration that earned the nickname "corncob." The bombardier,
navigator, radioman, and gunners brought the population of the forward
cabin to 10.
You could visit the aft cabin by lying supine on a wheeled cart
and pulling yourself along an overhead rope through a tunnel 85 feet
long and two feet in diameter. The cart also served as a dumbwaiter,
sending hot entrees from the galley to the forward cabin. The aft
compartment accommodated five men and was equipped with bunks, an
electric range, and the world's smallest urinal, which had to be voided
to the outside at intervals. B-36 veterans like to tell the story of the
new captain who came aft to relieve himself but didn't ask for
instructions and, as a result, peed on his boots.
Later models had larger crews, up to 22 in reconnaissance
versions. And everyone had a job to do--two jobs, in the case of the
gunners. It took the ground crew six hours to prepare the bomber for a
mission, and the flight crew needed another hour for a preflight check
involving 600 steps, beginning with climbing the landing gear and
removing the clamps that kept the gear from folding accidentally.
The B-36A couldn't fight--the electrically operated cannon were
so trouble-prone they were simply eliminated--much less scramble to
retaliate, and it ended up becoming little more than a crew trainer.
Twenty-two were delivered, each virtually handmade, and "so flimsily
built," says Jim Little, who served on one after it was converted to an
RB-36E, "that the upper wing skin would actually pull loose from the
wing ribs." Sometimes, Little recalls in the book RB-36 Days at Rapid
City, "you would meet [the plane] with a crew of 30 or 40 sheet metal
men."
The propellers were reversible for braking on landing, but
sometimes they reversed in flight or while the airplane was straining to
take off--at least once with fatal consequences. The stainless steel
firewalls enclosing the engines cracked. The cylinders overheated. Lead
in the gasoline fouled the spark plugs at cruising speed. Each airplane
had 336 spark plugs, and after a flight lasting a day and a half, a
mechanic would have to haul a bucket of replacement plugs to the
airplane to service all six engines. The engines leaked oil, and
sometimes a flight engineer had to shut one down because it had
exhausted its allotment of 150 gallons.
Then there was the "wet wing." The outboard fuel tanks were
formed by the wing panels and sealed at the junctions, and after the
wing flexed for a few hundred hours the sealant was apt to fail. Jim
Little recalls that one airplane leaked so badly "the ground underneath
was just purple [from the dye in the high-octane gasoline]--it was
raining fuel under that airplane."
Pilot opinion of the B-36 tended to run to the extremes, but most
crew members loved it--"this big, wonderful old bird," Jim Edmundson
calls it. As a colonel in the early 1950s, Edmundson commanded a B-36
group at Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington. But even he
admitted that the airplane could be a chore for its pilot--"like sitting
on your front porch and flying your house around."
Of course most of the pilots were young and eager, and the older
men had flown worse contraptions during the war. "It was a noisy
airplane; it was big," former radioman/gunner Raleigh Watson recalled at
a B-36 reunion at the Castle Air Museum in Atwater, California last
September, "but it was comfortable, and I think we felt it was a safe
airplane, a very well-built airplane." Moxie Shirley, a pilot with more
than a thousand hours in the B-36, loved the airplane, declaring that it
"kept the Russians off our backs." But he went on to add, "Every crew
that ever flew that airplane had stories that would make your hair stand
on end."
Ed Griemsmann expressed another view in Thundering Peacemaker: "A
horrible, lazy beast to fly," he told the book's author. Griemsmann
survived a fiery crash in 1956. Most B-36 crashes were fiery because of
the magnesium used in its construction. Rather than fly another, he
said, he'd join the infantry.
If the B-36A was ineffective, the Strategic Air Command was
little better. Its first commander, General George Kenney, didn't
believe in the B-36, arguing in 1947 that the bomber was too slow to
survive over enemy territory, with engines and an airframe that couldn't
withstand an 8,000-mile flight. Kenney urged the Air Force to put its
money into bombers that could fly at the speed of sound, even if that
meant depending on overseas bases.
Kenney was right, of course. But at the time, his advice seemed
disloyal, and he compounded the offense by letting his deputy run SAC
while he himself campaigned for the top job in the Air Force. Not long
after the first B-36A arrived, Kenney was fired. SAC's new commander was
General Curtis LeMay, the pudgy, ferocious, cigar-smoking general famed
for his B-29 tactics in the Pacific and for the more recent and
successful Berlin airlift.
"We didn't have one crew, not one crew, in the entire command who
could do a professional job," LeMay wrote of the SAC he inherited. He
challenged his crews to stage a practice bomb raid on Dayton, Ohio, from
30,000 feet, using photographs taken in 1941--the best they'd have for
the Soviet Union. (All SAC had were captured photographs the Germans had
taken during the occupation of western Russia. Of the country beyond
Moscow, there were no photographs available at all.) After the fiasco
that ensued, LeMay whipped the crews into shape. He moved the best
people from other groups to make the nuclear-capable 509th combat-ready,
then did the same for the next most promising group.
By the fall of 1948 an improved B-36B had arrived, armed with
pairs of 20-millimeter guns in the nose and tail, and six turrets that
opened out like flowers in a slow-motion film; the gunners aimed from
remote blisters. On December 7, the seventh anniversary of the Japanese
raid on Pearl Harbor, Lieutenant Colonel John Bartlett took off in a
B-36 from Carswell Air Force Base in Texas, flew to Hawaii, dropped a
10,000-pound dummy bomb, and returned without being spotted on the
island's radar. LeMay must have bitten through his cigar when he got the
news. If he could reach Hawaii from Texas, he could hit the Soviet
Union from Maine. And if he could figure out how to operate the B-36 in
the cold of Alaska, all of Siberia would fall under its shadow.
The B model also had the "Grand Slam" modifications needed for
carrying a hydrogen bomb, which was 30 feet long and weighed 43,000
pounds and had been created in such secrecy that Convair didn't have the
dimensions in time for the A models.
The B-36B was the last true reciprocating-engine bomber in the
U.S. strategic bomber force. In hindsight, it seems obvious that the
mega-bomber should have been jet-powered from the start. But the
turbojet had been developed during World War II for fast-climbing,
high-flying interceptors, and they gulped fuel at a prodigious rate.
Nobody dreamed they could cross an ocean. Two developments changed
everything: a new generation of twin-spool turbojets with markedly
improved fuel consumption and, more significantly, the advent of
inflight refueling. By 1949, Boeing's B-47 Stratojet was entering
production, and the B-52 Stratofortress, an intercontinental giant, was
making progress on paper.
Even before the uproar started in Congress in the summer of '49,
the Air Force was apparently worried about the vulnerability of the
B-36, and as an interim measure asked Convair to hang a pair of jet pods
near the B-36's wingtips. By March, a B-36B had flown with four Allison
J35s installed. On the production versions that emerged in July, each
pod housed two General Electric J-47-GE-19s modified to run on
gasoline--tiny compared to the Wasp Majors, but effectively doubling the
airplane's installed horsepower. The jets were employed for takeoff,
climbing to extreme altitudes, and dashing across hostile territory.
With "six turning and four burning," as the saying went, a B-36 could
finally top 400 mph. But fighter jockeys were flirting with the sound
barrier in their North American F-86 Sabre jets, and whatever the
Americans deployed--nukes, missiles, supersonic jets--the Russians
matched, beginning with copies and sometimes ending with improved
weapons.
For the benefit of Congress, the Air Force then released what
Aviation Week described as "sensational new performance figures" on the
jet-assisted B-36D: 435-mph top speed, 50,000-foot ceiling, range of up
to 12,000 miles. LeMay added his personal pledge: "I believe we can get
the B-36 over a target and not have the enemy know it is there until the
bombs hit."
Even George Kenney came out of exile from his post as commander
of the officer training center, Air University, to praise the airplane.
"The B-36 went higher, faster, and farther than anybody thought it
would," he said, "and the pilots liked it. It was a lucky freak."
However, Kenney guessed that both the U.S. Navy Banshee and the Royal
Air Force Vampire could intercept the B-36 in daylight; he recommended
that it be used only on night raids.
On September 5, Aviation Week reported "Symington and Defense
Chiefs Exonerated," as the House Armed Services Committee gave a clean
bill of health to Johnson, Symington, the Air Force, and Convair. There
wasn't "one iota, not one scintilla, of evidence...that would support
charges or insinuations that collusion, fraud, corruption, influence, or
favoritism played any part whatsoever in the procurement of the B-36
bomber," the committee concluded. Even Congressman Van Zandt voted for
the absolving resolution.
At 4 a.m. local time on June 25, 1950, North Korean troops
stormed across the 38th parallel. In November they were joined by
Chinese "volunteers." These developments marked the end of President
Truman's defense economy drive. First Germany, then Japan, then Russia,
and now events in Korea had succeeded in advancing the cause of the
B-36. Suddenly plenty of money was available for mega-bombers, and for
super-carriers as well.
The Korean war produced another milestone for SAC: Truman
released nine atomic bombs to the military. They probably didn't leave
the country, but the B-36 did, flying from Texas to airfields in Britain
and Morocco in the spring and fall of 1951. Only six airplanes were
involved and their visits were short, but the message couldn't have
escaped Moscow's attention. However briefly, the capital and most of the
territory of the Soviet Union had come within the combat radius of the
B-36.
Altogether, 1951 was a good year for mega-bombers. Margaret
Bourke-White rhapsodized over the B-36 in a photo-essay for Life
magazine, with photographs taken at 41,000 feet, where the sky "was a
color such as I've never seen, the darkest blue imaginable, yet luminous
like the hottest cobalt, too brilliant for the eyes to bear." She
photographed fluffy white contrails streaming from the reciprocating
engines, a 55-foot scaffold used to repair the rudder, and (from both
ends) the marvelous flying boom that refueled bombers in flight.
An alert reader might have noted some oddities in Bourke-White's
essay. The bomber being refueled was a Superfort, not a B-36, none of
which was ever equipped for inflight refueling. She rode in a B-47, its
raked tail clearly visible in one photograph. And the accompanying map
depicted a Soviet Union surrounded by small bombers based in Alaska,
Canada, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Japan: the Peacemaker
hunkered at home.
But if Superforts were on the Russian border, and if midair
refueling allowed them to fly indefinitely, and with the Stratojet
coming on line, why bother with the B-36? The jet pods had added so much
weight and gobbled so much fuel that the combat radius had dropped
first to 3,525 miles, then to 3,110. What was LeMay planning? From
Maine, South Dakota, and Washington, the B-36 could barely scratch the
edges of the Soviet empire, and even at those bases it faced hard
sledding in the winter. At Rapid City, mechanics had to build a repair
dock with sliding doors and cutouts for the fuselage so they could work
on the engines while the tail stayed out in the snow. There were SAC
bases in Alaska and Greenland, but the climate was so forbidding that
LeMay never stationed any B-36s there. The Arctic airfields were used as
staging points, with the bombers returning to the south 48 after each
mission. Another ploy was the shuttle mission, with a takeoff from
Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane, Washington. After bombing
Irkutsk, in central Siberia, the bombers would have refueled at Okinawa
before returning home.
But to do any real damage, LeMay had to launch it from an
overseas base or order a one-way mission. He would have scoffed at this
latter-day quarterbacking, of course. "The B-36 was often called an
interim bomber," he wrote in his memoir, Mission With LeMay. "For my
dough, every bomber which ever has been or ever will be is an interim
bomber." He had a point: at the time, SAC even considered the B-52
nothing more than a fill-in for the supersonic B-70.
LeMay may have been loyal to his hardware, but there were signs
that General Kenney wasn't alone in his initial doubts about the B-36.
One scheme would have equipped it with a pilotless drone to fight off
enemy interceptors. Then the Air Force experimented with a manned
parasite--the XF-85 Goblin--which would ride to war in a bomb bay. Still
later, Republic adapted its F-84 to snuggle into the belly of the
beast. By 1953 this last concept had changed from one of defending the
B-36 to replacing it: The mother plane would linger offshore while the
Thunderjet dashed in to take photographs or drop a bomb.
Finally, in 1955, Convair took a different approach, stripping
the mega-bomber to the essentials. Just as LeMay had gambled his B-29s
in 1945, sending them low and fast over Tokyo armed only with tail guns,
SAC got a "featherweight" B-36 with only two guns, a smaller crew, no
stove or other luxuries, and, in the bargain, a longer range. Many of
the earlier models were modified to the new standard, especially the
reconnaissance versions. Indeed, it's possible that LeMay's fondness for
the B-36 may have had less to do with its potential as a bomber than
its value as a spyplane. SAC ended up with 369 of the jet-recip hybrids,
including modified versions, and more than a third were reconnaissance
bombers. The RB-36 could carry an atomic bomb, but its principal weapon
was a camera the size of a Geo Metro, set in a photo studio that
replaced the forward bomb bay. Loaded with a roll of film 18 inches wide
and 1,000 feet long, this great camera once photographed a golf course
from 40,000 feet, and in the contact print, on display at the Air Force
Museum in Dayton, an actual golf ball can be seen. If an RB-36 could see
a golf ball from eight miles up, it could see tanks, airplanes,
missiles, and factories. Surely this was the task that LeMay saw for the
Peacemaker: With its enormous wings and extra fuel, who knows how high
and how far it could fly? B-36 crews speak of 45-hour missions,
presumably with fuel cells instead of nukes in the rear bomb bays; at
cruise speed, a "featherweight" could travel almost 9,000 miles in that
period. The official ceiling was 41,300 feet, but again, crews say that
they routinely flew higher than 50,000 feet, and one man--John McCoy,
quoted in Thundering Peacemaker--boasted of soaring to 58,000 feet. On
missions over China, McCoy said, his RB-36 was chased by MiG fighters
that couldn't climb anywhere near it. U.S. fighter pilots of that period
also recall B-36s cruising comfortably well above their own maximum
altitude. Not until the advent of the "century series" fighters--the
F-100 and up--would the B-36 be challenged. Whether the RB-36 ever
overflew Russia is anyone's guess, but it was the U.S. altitude and
distance champ until the Lockheed U-2 came on line toward the end of the
decade.
In the end, the B-36 turned out to be a place holder for the B-52
Stratofortress. Convair attempted to stave off Boeing's
intercontinental jet bomber with the YB-60, which premiered as the
YB-36G, with eight jets, a five-man crew, completely redesigned swept
wings, a speed of 508 mph, and a 2,920-mile combat radius--in short, a
knock-off that was inferior in every respect to its competitor. Boeing's
bombers had the advantage of having been designed for jet power from
the start. The Air Force didn't even bother to supply engines for the
second YB-60 prototype.
Though obsolescent, the B-36 still had some momentum. Before
descending into retirement, it made its first overseas deployment with a
USAF unit in 1955, to Britain and Guam. In the same year, it starred in
a Hollywood epic, Strategic Air Command--though in Jimmy Stewart's
final scene with Frank Lovejoy, who played the LeMay-like general, a
model of an early B-52 can be seen on the general's desk. The B-36
remained in the inventory for four more years, while the new
Stratofortress was being tweaked to its full potential.
The B-36 was nowhere near as durable as the B-52 would prove to
be, but it did the work asked of it. And eventually, the inter-service
rivalry that led to the Congressional eruption over the big bomber's
strategic mission died down, with the Navy's missile-submarine fleet
garnering a permanent place in the strategic "triad" along with bombers
and land-based missiles. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about
the Peacemaker is that it lived up to its name. The B-36 never went to
war, never dropped a bomb in anger, nor (so far as we know) even fired
its cannon at an enemy airplane. Created at a time when the atomic bomb
redefined strategic air power and the turbojet redefined performance,
its career spanned the crossroads that divided two era