by Dennis R. Jenkins.
Warbird Tech series 24. Revised ed. 104 pp, 9 x 11 in, soft-cover. Notes.
B/W and color photos, line drawings.
Specialty, 2002. US $14.95
This is an attractive, readable book, beautifully printed and well-illustrated. In keeping with the approach adopted by other issues in this long-running series, it outlines the basic story of the B-36 somewhat superficially while focusing more on less well-known (and illustrated) aircraft systems and variants.
If we were to approach it as a general, single-source history of the B-36 program, Mr Jenkins' book would be seriously deficient. The B-36 was, above all, a politically contentious airplane. It never had a combat history and served operationally for at most a half-dozen years. The titanic struggle between the Navy and the Air Force for control of the nuclear-weapons delivery role that shaped the B-36's career is given only the briefest of mentions here. The aircraft's relative obsolescence and enormous cost are glossed over, as are its incessant technical problems. The degree to which political and corporate corruption and the personal ambitions of men like Gen Lemay influenced the decision to spend so much on so troubled and, arguably, so obsolete an aircraft are barely even alluded to, while Northrop's promising competitor, the famous flying wing, is dismissed in passing.
So, while the book is not a general history of the B-36, it is an extremely interesting and relatively inexpensive supplement to other sources. The book's strength is its concise but informative, extremely well-illustrated treatments of lesser known features of the aircraft's systems and history. We learn that development of the improbable looking XC-99 transport was justified on the grounds that it could serve as a simplified aerodynamic and propulsion testbed for the bomber. We see drawings and descriptions of supported bombloads, including relatively little known loading configurations for 12,000-, 22,000-, and 33,0000-lb conventional bombs. We get excellent illustrations of the complex gun turrets and sights that did so much to justify the bomber's adoption yet never functioned properly. We get an unusually well-detailed and well-llustrated treatment of the the FICON and Tom-Tom parasite aircraft installations.
In the volume's chosen subject area, I noted only one, somewhat surprising deficiency: scanty discussion of the Featherweight III modification of the B-36. These were stripped, ultra-light reconnaissance aircraft that could, for a few years in the 1950s, fly at such high altitudes that contemporary fighters had trouble atacking them. Featherweight IIIs were thus the only B-36s that could carry out their assigned roles. Yet Jenkins has little to say about them. He tells us that the gun armament was removed but little else about the modifications that contributed to their extaordinary high-altitude capability. Nor does he provide a convincing explanation for the inability of higher performance jet fighters to intercept such slow-moving aircraft at altitudes that, for the most part, lie below the latter's ultimate, theoretical ceiling. Other authors have explained this in no more than a few sentences, so the omission is a curious one.
At worst, however, such criticism only points out an improvement that could make an already useful text better. Convair B-36 "Peacemaker" is well worth having.
Highly recommended.