The B-36 bomber ordered

On 23 July 1943 the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) sent the Consolidated Vultee works in San Diego a letter of intent for the construction of the first 100 examples of the B-36 heavy bomber. The world had never seen an aircraft like it: six radial engines driving pusher propellers, a wingspan of more than 70 metres and a range that would allow it to fly from America over Europe or Asia and back without landing. The order was placed outside the usual procedures, before even one of the two prototypes had been built and flown. Conceived in 1941 for the war against Germany, the bomber came too late for the war, but in the 1950s it became one of the pillars of American nuclear deterrence.

A bomber in case Britain fell

The story of the B-36 began in the spring of 1941, when the United States was not yet at war and Britain, although it had won the Battle of Britain, was still being bombed and was cut off from the Continent. American planners had to reckon with the worst case: that the British Isles would fall or could no longer serve as an air base. If that happened, the only way to strike Germany would be with bombers taking off from North America. What was needed was an aircraft able to fly some 9,200 km – roughly the distance from Gander in Newfoundland to Berlin and back.

On 11 April 1941 the Army Air Corps issued its requirements: a top speed of 720 km/h, a ceiling of 13,000–14,000 metres and a range of 19,000 kilometres. These were beyond the technology of the day, so in August they were relaxed to a range of about 16,000 kilometres and a combat radius of 6,400 km with 4.5 tonnes of bombs. The ceiling was to be above the effective reach of German anti-aircraft artillery. In the autumn of 1941 the competition was won by Consolidated, maker of the B-24 Liberator, which in November received a contract for two XB-36 prototypes. Its rival was the Northrop YB-35 “flying wing”.

Similar ideas were circulating on the other side of the ocean. From the spring of 1942 the German Air Ministry was considering the Amerikabomber project, an aircraft capable of bombing the United States from Europe. The German plans, however, never got beyond a handful of prototypes, whereas the American programme, despite delays, moved forward.

Delays and the decision of July 1943

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor priorities changed. Consolidated was told to slow down work on the B-36 and concentrate on mass-producing Liberators, which the front needed at once. The mock-up was not inspected until 20 July 1942, and a month later the project was moved from San Diego to a new factory in Fort Worth, Texas, which cost further months. The switch from a twin tail to a single fin, new radios, radar and redesigned engines all prolonged the work. In March 1943 Consolidated merged with Vultee; the new company, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, was universally known as Convair, and it is under that name that the B-36 went down in history.

In the summer of 1943 a new argument emerged. The war against Japan was being fought over vast distances: the air force needed a bomber that could reach the Japanese home islands from bases in Hawaii, without depending on islands that had yet to be captured. After consultations with the air force leadership, headed by General Henry H. Arnold, Secretary of War Henry Stimson agreed to depart from the normal procurement procedure, which required prototype trials to be completed first. On 23 July 1943 the USAAF issued a letter of intent for the production of 100 aircraft. The first was to be delivered in August 1945, the last in October 1946.

It is often said that the first 100 aircraft were “ordered” that day. This is a simplification: what was issued on 23 July was a letter of intent – a binding announcement of an order that allowed the manufacturer to start preparing for production before the full contract was signed.

The B-29: the bomber that arrived in time

At the same time the Americans were building a smaller but equally revolutionary bomber: the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. The prototype first flew on 21 September 1942, and the programme – in which the pressurised crew compartments, remotely controlled gun positions and new engines caused enormous difficulties – is often estimated to have cost more than the programme to build the atomic bomb. On 18 February 1943 the second prototype crashed in Seattle after an engine fire, killing Boeing’s test pilot Edmund Allen and his entire crew. Even so, Arnold backed the B-29 as the main weapon against Japan. In the summer of 1943, therefore, the high command saw the B-36 more as insurance in case the B-29 failed and as a long-term plan for the future than as a weapon that would decide this war.

The B-29s went into action in June 1944 from bases in India and China. Once the Marianas were captured in the summer of 1944, Japan lay within their reach without any need for an intercontinental aircraft, and the B-36’s priority fell still further. It was the B-29s that carried out the mass raids on Japanese cities from November 1944, and they that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

Its place in the war and after

The first B-36 was rolled out of the hangar at Fort Worth on 20 August 1945, a few days after Japan’s surrender, and first flew on 8 August 1946, five years after the project began. An aircraft conceived as an answer to a hypothetical fall of Britain found a new role in the Cold War. From 1948 it served with Strategic Air Command (SAC) of what was by then the independent US Air Force. Until the B-52 entered service in the mid-1950s, it was the only American bomber able to carry the heavy first-generation nuclear bombs from bases in the United States to targets in the USSR. Later versions were also fitted with four jet engines. In all, 384 were built; the name “Peacemaker”, by which it is known, was never an official air force designation.

The B-36 never dropped a bomb in anger. The last aircraft were retired in 1959. The decision of 23 July 1943 nevertheless shows what the American war economy looked like in the middle of the war: alongside thousands of B-17s, B-24s and B-29s, it could afford to fund an aircraft that had no chance of reaching the front in time, yet which prepared the air force for the conflict that was to follow this war. When in January 1943 the first American bombers attacked Germany from bases in England, Britain proved to be an aircraft carrier that did not need replacing with intercontinental aircraft. The need for such a bomber returned when the adversary became a state lying far from American bases.