323 - Hap Arnold and the B-29

When the United States entered the Second World War, American air power was still developing. Four years later, the United States was operating thousands of aircraft, supported by an enormous industrial and technological effort, and had produced the B-29 Superfortress, the most advanced bomber of the war.

At the centre of that transformation was General Henry "Hap" Arnold.

Arnold had been involved in American military aviation from its earliest days, and during the Second World War he became the driving force behind the expansion of the US Army Air Forces. The B-29 was perhaps his greatest gamble. It was enormously expensive and technologically ambitious, and Arnold was prepared to push American industry to build an aircraft that did not yet exist.

The result was the Superfortress, a bomber capable of flying farther, higher and carrying a heavier bomb load than anything that had come before it. Ultimately, B-29s would carry the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Today I'm joined by A. J. Baime, author of "Bird Men: The Rise of American Airpower and the Machine That Ended World War II", to look at Hap Arnold, the rise of American air power and the extraordinary story of the B-29 Superfortress.

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