Anyhow, I thought you’d love it and many of your readers might too. It’s IndieGoGo’s Project of the Day today, so you should definitely check it out, watch its trailer and let the director know what you think! (You can leave a comment on his IndieGoGo page) I’m sure he’d love to get your feedback.

http://www.indiegogo.com/ProjectArbiter

Cheers,

Danae

My father was with the 497th and was also one of the original XB test pilots. This is a great site. Also my uncle was a tail gunner with the 497th. He flew on GonnaMaker II with Bob Wright. He has recently found a box full of pictures from the war that we are going to go through this summer. If I find anything interesting I will let you know

The B-29 was an inflection point in the history of aviation technology, war fighting…and program management. It certainly rivaled the A-Bomb program, and the fact that the two programs came together to end the war is – I think – instructive to all of us. I recently saw a program on the B-29 on History Channel and thought that I would reach out to this site to see if any “old timers” are out there who might be able to give accuracy to some impressions that I have carried for 50 years. I hold memories of stories told to me by a wonderful vet I knew as a youngster growing up in Ohio. Quentin Walker, of Lancaster, Ohio told me that he had served in the 509th Composite Wing as a flight engineer, having washed out as a pilot. He blew out a knee in a football game when his squadron went from Wendover to California for a football game. Because of that, he did not go to Tinian. Some of the stories he told were hard to believe, but I thought it would be fun to bounce them off of this group of readers to see what might be correct….so here goes:

Quent’s crew had flown out to Kansas (?) to pick up their Silverplate aircraft, arriving at the factory after dark. At that stage, he had never seen a B-29 in person, but when he saw it, he said it solidified his view that there simply was not enough wing to carry the aircraft! He said it looked like a shiny spacecraft to him, shimmering in the factory lights. Having trained in lesser aircraft, however, he said that once he sat in the engineer’s position, in a nice soft seat, he thought this would be an OK way to go to war! He said the rolled it out next day and flew to Wendover (I think).

He said that they when not carrying a payload, the aircraft could easily top 400 mph true airspeed. Possible??

He said that his crew got him some wire to replicate the War Emergency Power wire across the throttle quadrant, so they could “goose” the aircraft for fun. (Later, they would complain that the engines needed work, and get an overhaul!) During training, he described how they would practice taking on P-51s at high altitude. He said that by waiting until the P-51 was committed to its curving attack profile from behind, they would goose the plane with WEP and turn slight inside, causing the P-51 to stall out as he tightened his turn. Possible??

He said that taking each of the aircraft down into the Grand Canyon was a right of passage for the all crews in the group. His group did it. Heard about that? He said that Tibbetts threatened them by saying that the government was going to string cables across the canyon to discourage that kind of thing. ??

Finally, he told me that one day they decided to see how high their B-29s would fly, and with no payload he said they touched 50,000 feet. Possible?? I thought that might be a bit crazy, but I had another friend – younger than Quent – who had been a crew chief on an RB-36H. He flew many of the missions as part of the crew, and said they regularly topped 50,000 ft, in fact he said they topped 55,000 ft when lightly loaded. Yes, a very different wing, but I think I have heard others say that B-29s could “get up there.”

Those conversations left me with a strong view that the B-29 was pretty amazing. For sure, we can say that the B-29 was the point through which ALL aircraft designs passed, for the US, Europe and the Soviets, as well.

Feel free to write directly if you have supporting or conflicting data on these unique Silverplate aircraft.

Thanks,
Ed Hart

Check it out: tylere10oda.edublogs.org

And keep up the good work!

I would be very interested to have an opinion from your expertise.

thank you

In May 1943 units of the German Army were stationed in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, a community of 100,000 persons in a primarily agricultural district. Ukrainian officials in Vinnitsa told the Germans that five years earlier the NKVD — the Soviet secret police, very similar to our FBI — had buried the bodies of a number of executed political prisoners in a city park. The Germans investigated, and within a month they had dug up 9,439 corpses from a number of mass graves in the park and a nearby orchard.

Unlike the Poles murdered in the Katyn Forest, all of these bodies found at Vinnitsa were those of civilians, most of them Ukrainian farmers or workers. The bodies of the men all had their hands tied behind their backs, like the Polish officers at Katyn. Although the men’s bodies were clothed, the bodies of a number of young women were naked. All of the victims had been shot in the back of the neck with a .22 caliber pistol, the trademark of the NKVD executioners.

The Germans called in an international team of forensic pathologists to examine the bodies and the mass graves. The international team, which included pathologists from Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Sweden, as well as from several countries allied with Germany, examined 95 mass graves and conducted a number of autopsies.

Including the autopsies already performed by Ukrainian medical personnel in Vinnitsa, 1,670 of the corpses were examined in detail. The identities of 679 of them were established either through documents found in their clothes or through recognition by relatives, who flocked to Vinnitsa from the surrounding countryside when they heard that the graves had been uncovered.

The authorities estimated that in addition to the 9,439 bodies exhumed, there were another 3,000 still in unopened mass graves in the same area. The international team concluded that all of the victims had been killed about five years earlier — that is, in 1938. Relatives of the victims who were identified all testified that the victims had been arrested by the NKVD in 1937 and 1938. The relatives had been told that those arrested were “enemies of the people” and would be sent to Siberia for 10 years. None of the relatives had any idea what the reason was for the arrests and testified that those arrested had committed no crimes and were engaged in no political activity. As I said earlier, nearly all of the victims were farmers or workers, although there were a few priests and civil servants among them.

By interviewing a large number of people who had some knowledge of what had happened in Vinnitsa and the surrounding region in 1938, the Germans were able to piece together the following picture. In 1937 and 1938 gangs of the NKVD’s jackbooted thugs roamed the villages and towns of Ukraine, arresting people in a pattern that seemed almost random to observers. One victim’s wife reported that as the NKVD goons dragged her husband away they said only, “Hey, you dog! You’ve lived too long.” Other observers thought they saw a pattern. A Ukrainian who was renting a part of his house to a Jewish lawyer refused to sell the whole house to the Jew when he offered to buy it at an unreasonably low price. A few weeks later the Ukrainian homeowner was arrested by the NKVD. Another Ukrainian who had threatened to beat up a minor communist functionary who made a crude pass at his sister was arrested shortly thereafter. It seemed that many of the arrests were the settling of personal scores and that anyone who had crossed a Jew was especially likely to be arrested.

All of this was nothing new for Ukrainians. They had borne the brunt of the communization of the Soviet Union for nearly two decades. Ukraine was primarily an agricultural nation, a nation of farmers and villagers, and as such was regarded with suspicion by the Jews and the urban rabble who filled the ranks of the Communist Party. The communists championed the urban workers, but they wasted no love on farmers and villagers, who tended to be too independent and self-sufficient for communist tastes.

During the civil war which followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Ukrainians wanted to opt out. Ukrainian nationalists wanted no part of the Soviet Union. In 1921 and 1922 the Red Army occupied Vinnitsa, and Ukrainians were butchered wholesale by the Reds in order to kill the Ukrainian nationalist spirit. The craving for Ukrainian independence nevertheless kept flaring up, and further massacres followed, notably in 1928.

Ukraine was the stronghold of the kulaks, the independent farmers and small landowners, always regarded with special hatred by the communist bosses. Stalin gave the job of exterminating the kulaks to his right-hand man in the Kremlin, Lazar Moiseivich Kaganovich, known later as the “Butcher of Ukraine.” Kaganovich, the most powerful Jew in the Soviet Union, supervised the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, beginning in 1929. To break the spirit of the kulaks, Ukraine was subjected to an artificial famine. The NKVD and Red Army troops went from farm to farm, confiscating crops and livestock. The farmers were told that the food was needed for the workers in the cities. None was left for the farmers. And in 1933 and 1934 seven million Ukrainians died of starvation, while Kaganovich watched and gloated from the Kremlin.

Perhaps in 1937 and 1938 the bosses in the Kremlin simply thought that it was time to apply the lash to the Ukrainians again. In any event, the NKVD was given the task this time. The NKVD was even more Jewish than the rest of the Soviet communist apparatus. The commissar of the NKVD until September 1936 had been the Jew Genrikh Yagoda, and he had staffed his instrument of terror and repression with Jews at every level. And those who were not Jews were the worst sort of Russian and Ukrainian rabble, the resentful louts and ne’er-do-wells who saw in communism a way to get even with their betters. In any event, the Ukrainians were fully aware of the preponderance of Jews in the secret police, and they suspected that there was a Jewish angle to the pattern of arrests in 1937 and 1938. And indeed, it did seem as if the Talmudic injunction to “kill the best of the Gentiles” were being followed, for those who were arrested seemed to be the most solid, steadiest, reliable, and irreproachable of the Ukrainians.

Thirty thousand were arrested in the Vinnitsa region alone, and most of these eventually were sent to the NKVD prison in the city of Vinnitsa. This prison had a normal capacity of 2,000 prisoners, but during 1937 and 1938 it was packed most of the time with more than 18,000 prisoners. Throughout much of 1938 a few dozen prisoners were taken from the prison each night and driven to a nearby NKVD motor pool area. There their hands were tied behind their backs and they were led, one at a time, a few hundred feet to a concrete slab in front of a garage. The slab was used for washing vehicles, and it had a drain at one side with an iron grating over it. Just as the prisoners reached the edge of the slab they were shot in the back of the neck, so that when they fell onto the concrete their blood would run into the drain. This was what the NKVD men jokingly called “mokrii rabota” — “wet work” — and they had had plenty of experience at “wet work.” A truck parked next to the slab kept its engine racing so that the noise of the engine would cover the sound of the shots. While the next prisoner was being led up, a couple of NKVD men would throw the corpse of the previous prisoner into the truck. When the night’s quota of victims had been murdered the truck would drive off with its load of corpses to the fenced-in park or to the nearby orchard, where new graves already were waiting. And this “wet work” went on night after night, month after month.

Polish commanders didn’t miscalculate at the beginning of the war, only were misled by their allies who claimed that they kept attacking Germans, while in fact they withdrew and began their phoney war. Poles didn’t count on the Soviets’ help either. They were enemies, having had fought another war with them not much earlier. They counted on their allies with whom they had alliances signed. Polish cavalry never attacked German tanks. It’s one of German propaganda’s myths. Poles alone caused averagely more losses to Germans during the September Campaign than Brits and French together during the Battle of France. Polish Army is also the only one to have ever defeated Red Army. Just the Nazis and Soviets together, and no help from allies, was too much.

Read this about the continuous misinformation prior and during WWII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_betrayal

and this about the September Campaign myths: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_campaign#Myths

BTW Poles don’t celebrate the end of WWII on May 8 or 9. Today it’s been exactly 20 years since Poland regained its independence.

I’ve been reading more about history these past few years. I guess you could say I’m a bit of a history buff, it always interests me. I must have been in \WWII or something in my past life or something!
So I picked up a really great book that I read from cover to cover called “His Edge” by Wayne Harding. It’s exciting to read about a test pilot who actually experienced the high drama of the skies and lived to tell it. His close calls are vividly described!
It has a great history about it, sort of like the history with Titanic where there were few survivors and there was only one who told the story.

Keep up the great work, I think this is an excellent resource!

It was a wonderful surprise !

Happy Easter !

There are lots of books out there not to mention websites. Do you have any specific focus you are looking into? If you could narrow it down a little I could probably direct you to the most relevant information.

Some of my friends over at http://ww2chat.com are big into WWII aircraft, especially British. You might stop over there and ask around as well.

Let me know how I can help!

Thanks,
Steve
steve@wwarii.com