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Operation Matterhorn was a military operation of the United States Army Air Forces in World War II for strategic bombing by Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers based in India, Ceylon and China. Targets included industrial facilities in Japan, China and Southeast Asia. The B-29 was one of the largest aircraft of World War II and had state-of-the-art technology. The cumulative effect of many advanced features was more than the usual number of problems and defects associated with a new aircraft. This was compounded by efforts to fast track its introduction into service. The concept of basing them in China arose because no other sites within range of Japan were expected to be in Allied hands in 1944. The B-29s were based in India but staged through bases around Chengdu in China's Sichuan province. Since the Japanese had cut the Burma Road in 1942, the only line of communications with China was over "the Hump", as the air ferry route to China over the Himalayas was called. All the fuel, ammunition and supplies used American forces in China had flown in. To control the B29s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff created the Twentieth Air Force under the command of General Henry H. Arnold, the chief of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), in Washington, DC. The role of the China Burma India Theater (CBI) commander, Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell, was restricted to the provision of logistical support and the defense of the bases. The B-29s force in CBI was the XX Bomber Command, under the command of Brigadier General Kenneth B. Wolfe. The B-29s required airbases with runways that were longer and stronger than those of smaller bombers. Five airfields in Bengal in India were upgraded to take them. Supplying fuel by rail would have placed too much strain on the railways, so a fuel pipeline to the airfields was laid from the port of Calcutta. The four B-29 airbases around Chengdu, along with five airstrips for fighters to defend them, were built by tens of thousands of Chinese laborers with hand tools. The XX Bomber Command deployed to India between February and May 1944. On 5 June, Wolfe launched the first B–29 Superfortress combat mission, against the Japanese railroad facilities at Bangkok. Ten days later, sixty-eight Superfortresses took off from the bases around Chengdu to bomb Imperial Iron and Steel Works in Yawata on Kyūshū. The Bombing of Yawata was the first air raid on the Japanese home islands since the Doolittle raid of April 1942, and it marked the beginning of the strategic bombardment campaign against Japan. Other targets included Singapore and the oil refineries around Palembang in the Netherlands East Indies. In late 1944, the Japanese offensive Operation Ichi-Go in China threatened the bases. To slow the advance, the XX Bomber Command attacked the Japanese-held city of Hankou with incendiary bombs. The attack left Hankou burning for three days, proving the effectiveness of incendiaries against the predominantly wooden housing stock of the Far East. In November 1944, American bombers began raiding Japan from the Mariana Islands. The XX Bomber Command abandoned the logistically difficult and increasingly vulnerable bases in China in January 1945, and concentrated its resources on rail and port facilities in Indochina, Thailand, and Burma. in India. This signaled the end of Matterhorn. The 58th Bombardment Wing, the only operational wing of the XX Bomber Command, left India to join the XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas in March 1945. Background B-29 Superfortress On 29 January 1940, the United States Army Air Corps issued a request to five major aircraft manufacturers to submit designs for a four-engine bomber with a range of 2,000 miles (3,200 km). These designs were evaluated, and on 6 September orders were placed for two experimental models each from Boeing and Consolidated Aircraft, which became the Boeing B-29 Superfortress and the Consolidated B-32 Dominator. These were known as very long range (VLR) bombers. On 17 May 1941, Boeing was ordered to commence the manufacture of the B-29 when ready. Boeing devoted its plants in Renton, Washington and Wichita, Kansas to B-29 production; assemblies would later also be built by the Bell Aircraft Corporation in Marietta, Georgia, and the Glenn L. Martin Company in Omaha, Nebraska. A major recruiting and training program was required. Many of the workers were recruited from the surrounding areas, and had no experience in aircraft manufacturing. As they became more skilled, the man-hours required to build a B-29 was reduced from 150,000 to 20,000. The $3 billion cost of design and production (equivalent to $51 billion today), far exceeded the $1.9 billion cost of the Manhattan Project, made the B-29 program the most expensive of the war. With its 141-foot (43 m) wingspan, the B-29 was one of the largest aircraft of World War II. It sported state-of-the-art technology, which included a pressurized cabin, dual-wheel tricycle landing gear, and an analog electromechanical computer-controlled fire-control system that allowed the four gunners to direct five remote machine gun turrets, each with twin Browning .50 caliber machine guns; the rear turret also had a 20-mm cannon. It was powered by four 18-cylinder, 2,200-horsepower (1,600 kW) Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone radial engines, each with two turbochargers. The cumulative effect of so many advanced features was more than the usual number of problems and defects associated with a new aircraft. This was compounded by efforts to fast track its introduction into service. These included engine malfunctions, jammed gears and dead power plants. The engines in particular had a large number of defects. The front and rear rows of the engine cylinders were located too close together for efficient cooling; there was insufficient lubrication of the upper cylinders; the reduction drive was prone to failure; and the carburetor produced an inefficient fuel mixture distribution. All of these factors contributed to engine overheating, which sometimes resulted in fires owing to an extensive use of magnesium. In spite of 2,000 engineering changes, the engines remained susceptible to overheating. Strategy Ostensibly, the B-29 was intended to defend the Western Hemisphere against encroachment by a hostile foreign power, but as early as September 1939, Colonel Carl Spaatz had suggested that it might be used to bomb Japan from bases in Siberia, Luzon or the Aleutian Islands. The Air Corps' first war plan, AWPD-1, issued in September 1941, called for B-29s to bomb Germany from bases in Great Britain and Egypt by 1944. Early war plans did not contemplate bombing Japan until after the war against Germany was won. The idea of basing the Superfortresses in China first surfaced at the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. In March, the Assistant Chief of the Air Staff, Major General Laurence S. Kuter, initiated a detailed study of the possibility of using VLR bombers based in China. No .... Discover the Cate M Ruane popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Cate M Ruane books.