The plane didn't have a good start:
Quote:
The Yawata Mission
On June 5 (1944), the Superforts made their first bombing attack, against the rail yards at Bangkok. Balky engines and bad weather conspired to cripple the mission. Only eighteen bombs hit the target. Not a good start.
Washington continued to pressure General Wolfe, CO of XX Bomber Command, to attack Japan itself by the middle of the month. On the night of June 14-15, ninety-two B-29's took off from staging bases in China, to strike at the Imperial Iron and Steel Works at Yawata on Kyushu - a vital target that turned out a quarter of Japan's rolled steel. The diminishing number of bombers at each stage of the mission illustrates the problems inherent in Operation Matterhorn:
* 92 bombers left India.
* 79 reached the staging bases in China.
* 75 took off from the bases.
* 68 left China, the others aborted after take-off.
* 47 reached the target at Yawata.
* 15 bombed visually; 32 bombed by radar due to the weather.
* One bomb hit the target! |
http://www.acepilots.com/planes/b29.html