This war, in which each side won and lost the advantage more than once, consumed hundreds of thousands of lives. Its replacement, the Convair B-36 Peacemaker, had a greater capacity, but it never dropped a bombįought mostly with the weapons of World War II, this Korean War would also debut a new kind of aerial combat, in which jets fought jets. The Superfortress could deliver 10 tons of bombs. Few took the prediction seriously, but on Sunday, June 25, North Korean ground and air forces poured into South Korea, beginning what might be called the First Korean War. The intelligence community, noting Soviet-equipped North Korean troops massed north of the 38th parallel, predicted an attack in June. The north inherited much of the infrastructure-bridges, railroads, hydroelectric complexes, and heavy industry-remaining from more than 30 years of Japanese occupation, less what the Soviets had taken home at the end of the war. The Soviet Union occupied Korean territory north of the 38th parallel the United States occupied the south. Like Germany, the country had emerged from World War II divided. intelligence analysts predicted trouble in Korea. Although underpowered and inclined to engine fires, the Superfortress remained America’s indispensable airplane-the only one in the world configured to deliver the enormous plutonium bombs of the day. As it turned out, the B-29’s retirement didn’t last. The airplane that had demonstrated that one bomber could destroy a city with one bomb would, it was assumed, hand the baton to a rising generation of bombers powered by jet engines. ![]() The following year, most of the thousands of Boeing Superfortresses that had served in the Pacific were stored at the vast Davis-Monthan airfield near Tucson, Arizona, to be mothballed or scrapped. Coming at the end of a long war, those mid-August 1945 missions should have been a curtain call for the world’s preeminent heavy bomber. Army Air Forces B-29s swarmed over Japan, severing the frayed threads of Japanese resistance. On the final night of World War II, hundreds of U.S.
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