Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 7 told the engineering story of the B-29 — the pressurised cabin, the burning engines, the Battle of Kansas. This piece asks the question that story leaves hanging: how did America...
Share this story Picture a single dirt runway hacked out of a jungle, ringed by palm stumps and bomb craters, with a handful of battered fighters parked in the mud. Every day it was bombed. Some nights it was shelled by battleships. And from it, a scratch force of...
Share this story It had a propeller at the back, a nose that tilted up to lob its cannon shells, and a seat that dropped its pilot out through the belly in an emergency so he would not be chopped to pieces by his own engine. It was nearly as long as a DC-3. And it was...
Share this story There was a stretch of sky between India and China so lethal that the men who flew it said you could navigate by the wrecks below. They called it the Hump — and for three years, an unbroken stream of transport planes crossed the highest...
Share this story On paper, it should have worked. Take the superb Douglas Skyraider, replace its thundering piston engine with a modern turboprop of more than 5,000 horsepower, and the U.S. Navy would have a carrier attack aircraft faster and harder-hitting than...
Share this story Somewhere above your head, right now, there is a small robotic spaceplane that the United States has been flying for more than fifteen years — and the government will not tell you what it does. It looks like a Space Shuttle that shrank in the...
Share this story The finale of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Nine parts brought the bomb from a London traffic light to Nagasaki. The last part answers the question Washington asked in September 1949: how did Stalin get it so fast? Somewhere...
Share this story Part 9 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Everything in this series converges here: the physics of Part 1, the exiles of Part 2, the bomb of Part 5, the aircraft of Part 7, the fire doctrine of Part 8. Two missions, four days, one...
Share this story Part 8 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 7 left the three-billion-dollar B-29 failing at high altitude. This part is about the man who turned it around, the night that followed, and the sixty-plus cities after that. It is not...
Share this story Part 7 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. The Manhattan Project cost 1.9 billion dollars. The aircraft built to deliver its product cost three billion. This is the engineering story of the B-29 Superfortress — bought off the...
Share this story Part 6 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Before one aircraft could destroy one city, the burning of cities had to become ordinary. This part tells how that happened over Germany — soberly, by the numbers, and through the people...
Share this story Part 5 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. While Germany’s program starved (Part 4), America built an industry the size of its automobile sector — in secret. This is the Manhattan Project, from a squash court in Chicago to a...
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