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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . c h a p t e r t h i r t y - t w o ........................................................... how to win while losing, iv It was a real relief when the people on top decided there were better ways to use my special talent, and they assigned me to the B-29 program. The B-29 was a big, new bomber they were inventing with a pressurized cabin, remote control turrets, and a lot of other goodies that, we were told, would make her the queen of the skies. They were right, of course, but there was still a lot of inventing to do. The first B-29 unit was the 58th Wing, which consisted of four groups, each group with four squadrons. I found my place as one of the 16 squadron commanders. Each group trained on one of the four Kansas bases. We trained hard, but before we had trained enough to count for much and way before they were through inventing the airplanes, they shipped us off to war so they could start training the next wing. We were on our way to the China-Burma-India Theater (CBI), where General Arnold had made a commitment to The Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek. Our route out was interesting. It took us from Kansas to Goose Bay, Labrador; Marrakech, Morocco; Cairo, Egypt; Karachi, India; and then on to our final Indian bases about 150 miles west of Calcutta. Our group’s base was a place called Kharagpur. The B-29 had two huge bomb bays and could carry a respectable bomb load, but for our trip out, we were placed in a special configuration. There were 600-gallon fuel drop tanks that could be carried in the bomb bays, two tanks to a bay. In order to stretch our range, three of these 600-gallon tanks were installed in the front bomb bay, two side by side and the third tank flat across the bottom. The only problem was that this was a fixed installation and could not be jettisoned. In the rear bay, they installed loading platforms, on which were stowed a lot of spare parts and an extra 3350 engine, in case they were needed en route. The load in the rear bay could be jettisoned in the event we got into trouble. It all looked great to us, and in the spring of 1944, we said goodbye to Kansas and launched ourselves on the way to the CBI. It was quite a trip. Here were 240 B-29s still in the process of being invented, in the hands of a bunch of kids who averaged about 50 hours apiece in B-29s, on their way to a place most of them had never seen before. There were, indeed, a lot of unexpected and bone-jarring experiences along the way for a lot of the troops. My airplane was named O’Reilly ’s Daughter, in honor of the heroine of a rather bawdy song I had learned in the South Pacific and taught to my crew. My crew and I, in O’Reilly’s Daughter, had smooth sailing until we arrived at Karachi, India, which is now part of Pakistan. We got into Karachi in good shape. We were hung up there for a few days because there were reports that a take-off accident in Cairo had been caused by contaminated fuel. The powers that be eventually solved the problem, and the daisy chain of B-29s that stretched from Kansas to India was put in motion, again. Take-offs from Karachi were scheduled between midnight and 3:00 a.m. to permit arrival at our East Indian bases after daylight and before 10:00 a.m. The monsoon season was just beginning in that part of the world. The weather closed in, and the rains began as regular as clockwork at 10 in the morning. On the day before we were scheduled to take off, a sandstorm moved in on Karachi that was so thick, the birds were walking on solid ground at 1,000 feet. Visibility was less than 50 feet. We lost a B-29 coming in from Cairo that afternoon. There was a low-frequency radio station a couple of miles off the end of the Karachi runway, and this poor guy made half a dozen passes at the field, coming in over the radio station and trying to find the runway. The visibility was just too bad for him to see...

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