WASHINGTON — After bombing missions against Japanese targets in 1944, three
troubled American B-29s made emergency landings at the Soviet town of
Vladivostok in southeastern Russia. The U.S. pilots assumed that as allies, they
would be in friendly Russian hands. But they were wrong.
"They didn't realize what was going to happen to the airplanes. But when
you're on fire, you look for a place to land," said George Larson, the
editor of "Air and Space/Smithsonian Magazine."
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin eventually released the crews, but he ordered the
B-29 Superfortresses seized and copied. He put his security chief Lavrenty Beria
in charge of thousands of engineers and workers — using fear and patriotism to
drive the project. Failure could land workers in exile in Siberia.
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The crews dismantled one of the planes into 105,000 parts, created blueprints
and then reproduced the bomber in just two years.
"What he wanted to do was close a vulnerability to the West; to have an
intercontinental, long-range bomber equal to the B-29, which became even more
crucial after 1949 with the first Soviet atomic weapon," explained Von
Hardesty, a museum curator and specialist in Soviet air power at the Smithsonian
Museum.
It was a B-29 Superfortress, the Enola Gay, that dropped the first American
atomic bomb on Japan.
'Phenomenal feat of human engineering'
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