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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good account of the experiences of a B-29 pilot in WWII, November 1, 2006
Charles Phillips was the son of Christian missionaries to Korea who became a career USAAF pilot. He joined the USAAF in early 1941, well before Pearl Harbor, and spent most of WWII as a basic flight instructor. In January 1944, upon learning about the B-29 program, he volunteered to join the B-29 forces. He entered B-29 combat operations at about the halfway point, in February 1945, well after most of the most severe problems with the B-29 bombing campaign had been dealt with (the first missions from China had started in July 1944).
"Rain of Fire" is the book of his memoirs, and is mainly about his experiences as a B-29 pilot, flying some 28 combat missions from the island of Saipan. There is a brief account of his early life, and a longer section at the end about his post war experiences - including a recounting of how he later met up again with people from his B-29 days, even with some of the Japanese pilots who fought against the B-29s.
Phillips writes very calmly, crisply and cleanly, like the careful flight instructor that he was, avoiding all hyperbole. Phillips takes great care to not be judgmental, and most importantly he does not try to overreach. Unlike "Birds from Hell" (another B-29 memoir book), Phillips speaks only from his direct experiences, and he goes to great pains to document how he came about various parts of his historical account.
The book does not go much into the technical aspects of the B-29, nor does it try to cover the broad strategic overview of the B-29 bombing campaign. Other books do that much better.
What is interesting about reading this book is that despite the fact that Phillips gives glowing reviews of the B-29 throughout, his accounts of the combat operations of the B-29 only confirm the impression left by many others that flying the B-29 could be very treacherous.
By the time Phillips started his combat missions, the most severe of the early teething problems of the B-29s had been overcome. Again, other books give a more complete description of the long list of problems of the early B-29s. For example, the overheating problems of the early Wright R-3350 engines had been mostly solved (he only briefly flew one of the early B-29s in training and does describe the severe problems with engine heating that they encountered). Nevertheless, there were still many other problems to deal with. Engine oil leaks occurred frequently, and could become rapidly fatal, due to an almost farcical chain of bad engine design. The propeller feathering system used the same oil system to get the hydraulic pressure it needed, and so if an oil leak was not spotted early before engine oil pressure was lost, the propeller could not be feathered, and would continue to windmill even with the engine shut down - this would cause the now oil-less engine to melt/burn and seize and the entire propeller-engine complex could both catch fire and/or haphazardly fly off the airplane wing.
One of the really neat things I learned from this book was that one of the main jobs of the waist gunners in the back of the B-29 during those long 12-14 hour flights was to be constantly on the lookout for the first signs of an engine oil leak.
As a former flight instructor, Phillips emphasized attention to detail and competency from both himself and his crew, and his accounts of how he dealt with the several episodes of near disaster in the B-29s that he flew, as well as the precautionary steps that he took to avoid disaster, make for interesting reading. A number of tragic accidents that he describes of other B-29s clearly seem to have occurred only because the pilot or crew were not quite as sharp as he was.
His final combat flight, which took place on the same day as the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, was another example of the need for attention to detail in order to survive the B-29. On that day, Phillips flew his final combat mission as a senior pilot helping out with a relatively new crew. Their B-29 ended up running out of gas on their return from Japan, 45 miles short of their Saipan air base! It is clear from his discussion of how this could have happened, that Phillips thinks that the most likely cause was that the flight engineer had not manually checked (with a dipstick) that the fuel tanks had been topped off with enough gas prior to takeoff. However, typical of Phillips' style, he is very circumspect about placing blame, and you have to go back to the beginning of the story of this flight to find the name of the flight engineer on that flight.
The entire crew survived their ditching in the ocean, and this came about only because Phillips had previously researched the history of other B-29 ditchings to try to figure out, in advance, what the best way to ditch a B-29 in the ocean was, in the event that he might have to do so.
The book that I have is the 3rd edition, published by Paragon Agency in 2002. From the author's comments in the book about the earlier editions, it appears that this edition has been substantially revised and updated. The ISBN number for the third edition is 1891030329.
The ISBN number for the first edition is 0964757702, which was published by B-Nijuku Publishing. As explained in this book, "B-Nijuku" is simply the Japanese word for "B-29", but this is not a Japanese publisher. B-Nijuku Publishing has an address in Moreno Valley, California.
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