The Heroes We Needed
The B-29ers Who Ended World War II and My Fight to Save the Forgotten Stories of the Greatest Generation
by Trevor McIntyre
“If the mailman knew what he was delivering that day, he would have been much more careful with it. Don’t get me wrong, the box wasn’t totally destroyed during its journey across the country, but it was clearly kicked around without any concern for what was inside it. Why do they always do that? If they only knew what was passing through their hands, they all would have handled that box with the utmost care and respect.”
Intrigued? The author needed two days to muster the courage to open that box. The memory of its contents darkens his day even years later, writing this book. Intrigued?
The subtitle clues you in what this might be about. Early on in the book is a remark that speaks to the toll that writing the book takes, but also reading it: “It’s beyond us to understand the tragedies of war.” In fact, the Dedication page of the book ends with a link to the Veterans Crisis Line.
What makes the photos on this spread remarkable is that all of them were taken by the Japanese. On the left an aircraft carrier on top and the attack on Pearl Harbor on the bottom. McIntyre sifted through thousands of images in his own and the National Archives collection.
The fact that the book centers on the B-29 is almost immaterial except that it is no stretch of the imagination to think that the most advanced bomber in the world would also have seen the most harrowing action. That the B-29 imprinted itself on the author’s imagination is because as a child he discovered a book about it among his father’s aviation books. Now in his forties, Trevor McIntyre has some 20 years of collecting B-29 parts and B-29ers memorabilia under his belt, making his collection one of the largest in the world. Once you read to what lengths he goes to acquire such material—at the expense of, say, fixing his car—you appreciate how invested he is in the subject of not letting the memories of the ever thinning ranks of the Greatest Generation be forgotten.
Before you’ve turned the first page you will already realize that pain and sorrow lie ahead. After the first few chapters which recap the basic outline of history after 1939, McIntyre takes you into the story by injecting himself into it, in the first person, relating his interactions with B-29ers and, more often than not, their surviving family.
1939 means physicist Albert Einstein warning that the making of a viable nuclear bomb was all but inevitable in the “immediate future” and with that, the book shifts to a discussion of the role of the long-range heavy bomber. Japanese engagements feature prominently but not just the big headliners like Pearl Harbor but lesser known enemy actions on domestic soil, such as the Japanese submarines off the western coast of the US shelling inland targets and in one case launching a seaplane to set the Oregon forrest on fire to incite public fear and unrest.
The chapters are divided into themes, and within that advance chronologically with, inevitably, a good deal of overlap as one thing plays into another. By chapter 7 the story becomes intensely personal and the book takes on an entirely different character, the through line being “young men who had to grow up fast.” Many excerpts from transcribed letters and conversations add other voices.
If you are the arch technocrat who only wants to read about valve pressures and spark plug temperatures, this book doesn’t give you that but it will work on your valves—your heart valves. You will not forget reading it! The author writes, at the end, “From the bottom of my heart, I’d like to thank you for reading this book.” And you just know he means it. This is his first book, and a mighty fine effort it is, replete with extensive End Notes and Bibliography, and a really detailed Index which the author did himself, and he was clearly mindful what a researcher like himself would be wanting to find.
Copyright 2024, Sabu Advani (speedreaders.info).
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