- 3 months ago
- #history
- #war
- #documentary
- #air
The Boeing B-29 Superfortress was a revolutionary, four-engine heavy bomber. In 1945, the B-29 became famous for its decisive role in the Pacific Theater, most notably as the aircraft that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing World War II to a close.
#history #war #documentary #air force
#history #war #documentary #air force
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Short filmTranscript
00:00THE END
00:54Out of just such an eruption of the earth a million or more years ago was born.
01:00Japan, land of the little people who grew to believe that in blood and iron lay the shortcuts of greatness.
01:09Land of philosophies and religions stranger than their names, like Bushido, the medieval code of slicing a victim with a
01:18samurai sword.
01:22Hako Ichiu, which means the four corners of the world under a Japanese roof.
01:35And Shinto, which assures its people that the answer to all things comes from the skies.
01:42The truth of that one they were to discover.
01:47Old Japan was primitive.
01:49The history of the new Japan is a story of successful copying.
01:52On a tradition of peace and love of the soil, the new Japan suddenly turned its back and copied our
02:00locomotives, our planes, our great ocean-going liners.
02:06Even Tokyo might have been transplanted bodily from the Western world.
02:18Japan's plans for world conquest were financed by the fine thread of an industrious caterpillar, woven into silk and stamped,
02:29made in Japan for its English-speaking customers.
02:37Soft silk sent away a hard scrap iron to be forged into weapons and returned to us, eventually, in hate.
02:56Made in Japan became a sentence of death.
03:05How will it end for the little people who wanted to enslave the world?
03:10The answer to that was to come, like the answer to all things, from the skies.
03:15Only when it came, it was to be stamped, Made in America.
03:20As it was, for instance, on Doolittle Day.
03:25When the hornet, the first Shangri-La, pointed her prowl right at the heart of Tokyo.
03:43This was the first brief answer to Japan that came from the skies.
03:48It was not to be the last.
03:50General Doolittle vowed,
03:52We're going back to Tokyo, and we shall go in full array and with mighty allies.
03:59A weapon was ready.
04:14Through these forbidding doors, ceaselessly, day and night, come trains bearing the materials that skill, weld, forge, and rivet into
04:24an instrument dedicated to the destruction of the enemy.
04:28This is only one of many plants that one day appeared, where just the day before it seemed, was pasture
04:34lands, or the place where they were building washing machines.
04:39When the workers reported for the first time, few of them guessed the exact nature of what they were building.
04:44They knew that a giant plane would result, but beyond that, it was largely conjecture.
04:50But then the day came, inevitably, when the pieces of their jigsaw began to fit together.
04:56The day when the mountains of material and the millions of man-hours all combined to confirm the assembly line
05:04rumor, the washroom gossip, and their honest-to-God American curiosity.
05:09They were building the mightiest aircraft in history.
05:14They were building a plane for the Army Air Forces that would reduce the huge fortresses and liberators to medium
05:21bombers.
05:23They were building the Boeing-designed B-29 Super Fortress.
05:30And this is how they built it.
05:32Enough aluminum is stored here to lay a silver carpet over every street in Tokyo.
05:39Aluminum sheet to be brought to life by these machines and the workers who operate them.
05:44They give it shape and personality.
05:47Their stamping machines, their presses, lathes and drills, coax it and pound it and pierce it into the multiple patterns
05:55prescribed in fifty tons of blueprints.
06:00It was bauxite a month ago, dead in the ground.
06:03Miners dug it out of the Arkansas hills.
06:06And then at some distant factory, bauxite came in at one end and aluminum sheet rolled out the other.
06:13One day from now, in the stratosphere above the clouds, it will mirror the sun.
06:20In a month, out of the ground and into the sky.
06:26These will be the wings to take it there.
06:29From the confusion of manpower and equipment within this massive jig will emerge the fabulous 117.
06:36A wing of completely new design, which will carry more weight, faster and higher than any other wing.
06:43The jigs themselves, the fixtures and the tools were designed so that unskilled workers could be expert with them in
06:50a week.
06:50Whether they were farmers or clerks, cotton pickers or housewives, salesmen or ex-soldiers.
06:58The wing is of awesome weight and dimension.
07:01Yet a girl can lift it.
07:03With about the same effort that she would need to adjust the flower in her hair.
07:10Space and the handling of bulky parts have always been problems in assembly production.
07:16The engineers who designed this plant solved both problems at once with a few strokes on their drafting boards.
07:22They moved traffic to the ceiling.
07:25Thus they allowed workers more time at machines, and machines more time at work.
07:41Here is the wing in a more advanced stage.
07:44If the workers imagined for a moment that they were in a shipyard, it would be understandable.
07:49The mayflower was shorter from stem to stern than each of these wings from tip to tip.
07:55All the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock could curl up within the gasoline compartments in the wing and sleep
08:02no less comfortably than on their long Atlantic crossing.
08:07Each of these nacelles will encase an engine of 2200 horsepower.
08:12Four of them harnessed to one super fortress.
08:158800 horsepower.
08:17What does that mean?
08:19Horsepower means more than 300 miles an hour.
08:22Horsepower means flying high enough to see all the New England states at once.
08:28Horsepower means victory in the air.
08:32When these skeleton nose sections are enclosed in aluminum and glass, they will be the most comfortable cockpits a bomber
08:39ever had.
08:40The windows cannot cloud or frost.
08:42The pilot's instrument panel is less complex than the dashboard of an automobile.
08:48Soundproofing allows torque without the interphone.
08:52And because the entire compartment is a pressurized tank, the air remains practically constant from prairie level to the rarefied
09:00atmosphere over the Himalayas.
09:04Back of the control cabin is the huge center section.
09:08Here the wings will be set.
09:10Here the bomb bays will hold the greatest weight of death ever lifted into the skies.
09:17Toward the tail, another big pressurized chamber will house the rest of the crew, except the rear gunner who has
09:24a cabin to himself.
09:26If in some stratospheric emergency a crew member must travel between front and rear pressurized compartments, he can slither through
09:34this connecting tunnel.
09:38An armor glass observation blister.
09:42Durable, crystal clear, eyes of every super fortress.
09:55The pre-fabricated sub-assemblies are manufactured by other contractors and shipped to this plant by the carload.
10:09What has been shown here is being duplicated in plants all across the country.
10:13Identical miracles of modern machinery, nursed and tended and made productive by people who look and think like these people.
10:21The fair, the fair, the dark, people with deft hands and unblinking eyes, the strong with their willing muscles and
10:33those less strong but as willing.
10:36The braided school girls, the white haired grandmothers, the old young, the young old, the little ones and the less
10:48little ones working together in intimate harmony.
10:52Their product, death.
10:55Their goal, peace.
10:59These workers are the lucky ones who see the finished product of their labor roll off the line.
11:05Every hour of every day, they are witness to this awe-inspiring ceremony.
11:11This tremendous wedding of material and man-hours.
11:15This climax in the history of man's conquest of the air.
11:42But what of the others who helped, however remotely, to create an aerial weapon they have never seen?
11:48The lumberjack who felled the trees that became the blueprints of the B-29.
11:53The bauxite miner in the Arkansas hills.
11:55And the miner of iron and coal.
11:58The builder of guns and engines and propellers.
12:02The grimy, sweating men who cast the cylinders and forged the crankshaft.
12:07The maker of tires, electrical equipment, instruments and safety wires.
12:12The citizens who paid for the super fortress with their purchases of war bombs.
12:18Theirs are isolated lines of effort.
12:21Initiated all across the land.
12:23And converging eventually beneath this vaulted roof.
12:29Here, the sum of their energies assumes shape and stature and meaning.
12:35Here is the final meeting of every effort and every part.
12:45A bold insignia will proclaim to the enemy that this is the proud new weapon of the United States Army
12:51Air Forces.
12:52But it is our plane, too.
12:54Because we, the people, built it.
12:57We conceived it, denounced it, gave it wings.
13:01We powered it and armed it.
13:03And our sons and brothers fly it.
13:07The function of the people's super fortress is to break the race who turned their backs on reason.
13:13To spin them around to face the peaceful way of living.
13:17It is the people's answer to all the sneak raids, all the death marches, all the stabs in the back.
13:25It is our memorial to the fighting men who were not afraid to die.
13:30Who bought with their lives at the time we needed to make the weapons to win the war.
13:35Like this weapon, which 50 hours after its tests will be landing in India or China or some other far
13:44away Shangri-Lao.
13:45To regain its breath before the final assault for which the people destined it.
13:51Within the plant, work proceeds.
13:55But the workers cock their ears for a sound that regularly drowns the clatter of their tools.
14:01It is more than a sound.
14:03It is a song.
14:06This is the song they hear.
14:27Tip 2 to 8 a year Paul Ye
14:29This is the song they heard that work in the war.
14:32It is a song he merrily that when they hear the trdemouchatt and a grandchild.
14:53The story begins in 1939
14:56when the far-sighted Army Air Forces said,
15:00We want a plane for our defense
15:02that can fly a bomb load
15:04thousands of miles out to sea and return.
15:08After six months' work,
15:10there was a tiny model
15:11which spent the next six months in a wind tunnel.
15:15Then there was a full-scale model
15:17which was subjected to every punishment
15:19man could devise for it.
15:21Only after a year of such tests
15:23did the Air Forces let contracts for planes
15:26that would be built to fight.
15:29The B-25 Mitchell is a big strapping bomber.
15:33Sixty-seven feet across the wings,
15:35but it could reach Japan
15:36only if it took off from an aircraft carrier.
15:40Much bigger is the famed B-17 Fortress.
15:44One hundred and four feet from wingtip to wingtip,
15:47it has ranged fourteen hundred miles
15:49over Japan's island conquests,
15:51but it cannot reach Japan itself
15:54from any base we now hold.
15:57The Super Fortress.
16:00Wingspan, one hundred and forty-one feet.
16:04Longer than the Wright's first flight
16:06through the air at Kitty Hawk.
16:08Range, altitude, and bomb load?
16:10Secret.
16:12Though the Air Forces do save them,
16:14laconically.
16:16Very long,
16:17very high,
16:18and very large.
16:21Because it is a global bomber,
16:23around it has been built
16:25an entire new Air Force,
16:27the 20th.
16:28The 20th War Theater
16:30is the world itself.
16:33Its operations room
16:34is the war room
16:35of the chiefs of staff in Washington.
16:38Its planes will be treated
16:39as a major task force,
16:41in the same manner
16:42as a naval task force
16:43is directed against
16:44a specific objective.
16:48Watch it come in for a landing.
16:50A revolutionary set of flaps
16:52that constitutes
16:53nearly one-fifth
16:54of the wing area
16:55gives the ship
16:56a low landing speed
16:57and a shorter landing run
16:59than many a plane
17:00half its size.
17:02All this great weight
17:03of super fortress
17:04is supported
17:05by a tricycle gear
17:06whose tires require
17:07less pressure
17:08than a child's bicycle.
17:36Somewhere in western China,
17:38half a million nameless people
17:40wrote their magnificent chapter
17:42in the saga
17:42of the super fortress.
17:44Two thousand years
17:46after their ancestors
17:47built the Great Wall
17:48for the defense of China,
17:49these farmers
17:50transformed saturated
17:52rice paddies
17:53into airfields
17:54for offense
17:55against a new invader.
17:59They had no machinery
18:01as we know it.
18:02Only their million hands
18:04and a searing memory
18:06of anguished years
18:07since Japan
18:08set out to annihilate them.
18:10Stone by stone,
18:12layer after layer,
18:13bound together
18:14not just with muddy water,
18:15but with the blood
18:16of their brothers
18:17who died
18:17under the samurai sword.
18:20And soon there were runways
18:22to bear the weight
18:23of a whole fleet
18:24of super fortresses.
18:27Revenge for the nameless people
18:28was close at hand.
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