Free Freedom's Forge by Arthur Herman

pounds of gross weight and 10,000 pounds of bombs. They gave it enough range to patrol both coasts of the United States, as well as reach Hawaii and Alaska.
    The Army called it the XB-17, but when Wells and Egtvedt unveiled the prototype on July 28, 1935, the local Seattle newspaper dubbed it “the Flying Fortress” and the nickname stuck. It would go on to be the mainstay of the Army Air Forces in World War II and pass into legend. All in all, 12,731 would be built. Laid wing tip to wing tip, that was enough Flying Fortresses to cover the distance from Washington, DC, to New York City.
    That still lay in the future in the summer of 1939, however, when both Wells and Egtvedt were invited down to Wright Field for a chat. Waiting for them were General Arnold, Colonel Oliver Echols of Materiel Command, and Major Donald Putt, head of Materiel Command’s experimental engineering division.
    The Air Corps officers put the question straight. Could Boeing come up with an even bigger bomber than the Flying Fortress, one with almost double the bomb load capacity and with a range of say, four thousand to five thousand miles?
    Egtvedt and Wells must have looked at each other. It was in fact a problem they had been contemplating almost from the day the B-17 was finished. After all, once you built one four-engine airplane, it was only a matter of pitting the power and lift of bigger engines against the drag of larger wings and fuselage.
    Colonel Echols added there was one catch. The Air Corps would want no sacrifice of speed or defensive armament for this kind of superbomber.
    Wells said, “Well, we can put in a lot of armament and cut down on performance, or we can keep performance up and stay out of range of fighter planes. Which do you prefer?”
    Echols fixed him with a look, and said, “We’ve got to have both.” 21
    Wells and Egtvedt had a lot to think about on their flight back to Seattle. This was going to require an entirely new concept than the one they had originally doodled up on their drafting boards. It would haveto be a plane built around aeronautical principles no one had applied before—certainly one aerodynamically cleaner than any ever built before.
    Its projected bomb load capacity meant a plane almost
twice
the size of the Flying Fortress, closer to 60,000 pounds empty versus 30,000 for the Fort. It would have four engines, of course, but would need almost a thousand more horsepower per power plant, and a wing area of at least 1,700 square feet in order to get a fully loaded, seventy-ton plane into the air up to 30,000 feet—well beyond the reach of any fighter—and a pressurized cabin, so that the crew wouldn’t pass out climbing to such high altitudes or suffer the bends coming back down.
    And so Wells and his engineers worked at their drafting tables, so intensely that by the time the Army sent out a formal request for a larger four-engined bomber, on January 29, 1940, nearly every feature had been worked out at Boeing a year beforehand, only months after Lindbergh’s secretive monologue in the bleachers at West Point. 22
    When Wells and his team were finished, there was no plane anywhere remotely like it. Wells had told his engineers to start from the bomb bay doors, knowing that their size, allowing for sufficient clearance to get bombs into the plane and then out again at 20,000 or even 30,000 feet, would dictate the shape of the rest of the plane—and those bomb bays would have to carry ten tons of ordnance, almost twice that of the B-17.
    Boeing also knew that conventional bomb bay doors, which swung wide and open like the doors of a saloon, had become telltale visual invitations to fighter attack. A savvy fighter pilot knew that opening bomb bays meant a bomber had to slow down and hold course in order to hit its target. So Wells created a new, pneumatically driven bomb bay door that snapped open and shut in less than four seconds. 23
    From there Boeing engineers laid out the plane section by