Research Catalog
Who built the B-29?
- Title
- Who built the B-29? / Jacob Vander Meulen.
- Author
- Vander Meulen, Jacob A.
- Publication
- Washington, D.C. : Smithsonian Institution Press, [1995], ©1995.
Items in the Library & Off-site
Filter by
1 Item
Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
---|---|---|---|---|
Text | Request in advance | TL685.3 .V27 1995 | Off-site |
Details
- Description
- 104 pages : illustrations; 20 cm
- Summary
- The B-29 Superfortress bomber was the single most complicated and expensive weapon produced by the United States during World War II. Nearly 4,000 B-29s were built for combat in the Pacific theater, including the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima.
- Assembled on a rush basis by a vast manufacturing program that involved hundreds of thousands of workers, the B-29 boosted the Allies' wartime fortunes as it transformed the economies of cities and towns from Seattle, Washington, to Marietta, Georgia, and from Wichita, Kansas, to Woodridge, New Jersey.
- Well-illustrated with photographs of factories and diagrams of the plane's design, Building the B-29 presents the social and institutional history of this monumental industrial project. Envisioned in the late 1930s as a way of demolishing the military infrastructure behind enemy lines, the Superfortress was at first resisted by the reluctant, isolationist Congress of the late 1930s.
- Jacob Vander Meulen describes the efforts of Henry "Hap" Arnold and others to launch the project via a process now called "concurrency," in which production is set up while the product is still on the drawing boards.
- He describes the technical and financial gambles on the part of manufacturers and, using photographs and diagrams, he illustrates the far-reaching changes the B-29 plants brought to their communities, as Depression-era unemployment gave way to labor shortages and as farm workers and women entered U.S. factories for the first time.
- Subject
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references.
- ISBN
- 1560986093 (alk. paper)
- LCCN
- 95008548
- OCLC
- 503425783
- ocn503425783
- Owning Institutions
- Columbia University Libraries