Blog #1: 1/10/23: The Douglas B-18 Bolo: The Forgotten Disaster
Welcome to the first Brooke in the Air blog! Hopefully the first of many. I’m Brooke from Brooke in the Air and we’re going to talk about all sorts of travel and aviation related topics, but especially one of my favorites, historical aviation, notably historical military aviation.
See, when I was in grad school a couple years ago, I fell deeper in love with military history and married this love with a passion for aviation. Granted, this limits the timeframe of historiography a bit, but I hope I can instill a love of aviation in you all too, or if you already have this love, I hope I can deepen that passion beyond mere travel.
World travel is important, it truly is. It broadens our minds, expands and enhances our perspectives with different and varied cultures, enhances a sense of progressive thought, and can help us appreciate what we already have. Experiencing different cultures, societies, and people is vastly underrated and helps provide perspective to our lives.
A340 (airborne) and A330 (on the ground), two of the most commonly utilized passenger airliners in the industry.
But understanding history is critical to comprehending our own world and where we’ve come from and possibly where we’re going as a people and a society. As the famed Virginian, Patrick Henry in 1774 said, “I know of no way by which to judge the future except by the past.” This isn’t his most famous quote, not by a long run, “give me liberty or give me death” has a sure lock on the “Most Famous Patrick Henry Quotes of All Time.” But importantly, judging the future by the past does not mean predicting the future, that’s impossible by all rights and reason. Rather it means utilizing contemporary historiography to evaluate where a given historical subject might cause us or any other given nation-state or a people might possibly end up in modern times or the future, depending, again, on ongoing and evolving circumstances.
Douglas B-18A Bolo, first production run
Before I delve too far down the rabbit hole of historiography and sociopolitics, let us instead return to the world of military aviation and, for this episode, the legacy and history of the Douglas Aircraft Company’s B-18 Bolo. In 1934, the United States Army Air Corps (the predecessor to the US Air Force) put out a request for proposals for a twin-engine heavy bomber. While inferior to the Boeing Model 299, the immediate prototypical predecessor to the B-17 Flying Fortress, being in the midst of the Great Depression, and the Model 299 having four engines thus a far steeper price tag, the DB-1 (as the Douglas prototype was referred to) was a no-brainer for the War Department - the early 20th century version of the US Department of Defense. In 1934, the Bolo was considered the height of military technology, insofar as bombers were concerned.
Unfortunately, by the height of major hostilities in Europe by 1940, often denoted by the start of the infamous Battle of Britain, the B-18 was poorly equipped and poorly armed for a bomber of its equivalent overseas, such as the Third Reich’s Junkers Ju-88 medium bomber which had extremely high performance by comparison, again, for a bomber. Though it is important to remember that Junkers Aircraft & Motor Works had designed the Ju-88 to appear as a civilian aircraft to fool the Allies under stipulations of the Treaty of Versailles. I must reiterate, despite the B-18 Bolo being designated a heavy bomber, the Luftwaffe’s Ju-88, which started production a year later than the B-18 in 1935, was a medium bomber, and was comparably far superior by 1940, despite the latter’s heavy losses by the end of the battle of Britain. Over 18,000 examples of the Ju-88 were built by the war’s end in 1945, making the Ju-88 more comparable in overall service and combat usage to the B-17 Flying Fortress, though the latter was, again, much more effective. The B-18 was developed by Douglas Aircraft Corporation from their civilian DC-2 14-passenger mid-range airliner. It was designed to replace the aging and archaic Martin Corporation B-10 bomber, the first all-metal monoplane bomber.
The passenger-variant DC-2 by Douglas who converted the DC-2 into the B-18A
Martin B-10, the USAAC’s very first all-metal mono-wing bomber.
While the B-18 was a significant improvement over the B-10, that is really all it was. The B-18’s high water mark and otherwise all-around high-point of the Bolo’s operational history was in anti-submarine warfare, a task which it held throughout the Second World War, where it became the first United States combat aircraft to sink a German U-boat which happened to be in the Caribbean. The B-18’s defensive armament was considered highly inadequate, consisting only of dorsal, ventral, and nose manually-operated 30-caliber gun turrets. For a bomber, the B-18 was painfully slow, especially when compared to its immediate contemporaries, such as the Soviet Ilyushin TSkB-30 (or DB-3) and the Imperial Japanese Army’s Mitsubishi G3M-2, the early non-militarized version of the IJA trademark medium bomber, Allied reporting name “Nell” which both flew around the world, or close to it, eclipsing the Bolo's maximum range. In the case of the G3M-2, the plane flew from Hokkaido, Japan to Anchorage, Alaska at a distance of just over 2,500 miles, far beyond not just the operational range, but the maximum range of the B-18. Eventually, the US Army Air Corps fully acknowledged that the B-18 was outdated, outmatched, outgunned, and frankly, useless in the face of advanced and technologically sophisticated enemy (and allied) aircraft.
Mitsubishi G3M-37 medium bomber, the Japanese equivalent to the B-18A
Martin B-26B Marauder, commonly used in the pacific theatre in conjunction with the B-17 Flying Fortress; Nicknamed "Dee-Feater" (X2-A) of the 596th BS (bomb squadron), 397th BG (bombardment group) 9th AF (air force) with D-Day invasion stripes.
Restoration photo: Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress
In the Pacific Theater, most B-18s were destroyed on the ground, while those that remained were pulled back to the continental United States. They contributed nothing noteworthy for the duration of the war. Ultimately, it was decided that, in the pacific theater, the B-18 Bolo would be used as a stopgap measure until the more sophisticated and technologically advanced Boeing B-17 came online and entered service en masse.
The ultimate bomber evolution of WWII, the Boeing B-29 Super Fortress, used extensively in the Pacific Theatre and used to drop the atom bombs on Japan
By 1943, two years until the end of the war, the B-18 was removed from anything remotely resembling frontline service and kept for coastal defense of the US mainland, in particular submarine hunting and chiefly, as a bomber crew trainer aircraft for crews going onto actual bombers such as the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber, the Martin Aircraft Corporation B-26 Marauder medium bomber, the Consolidated B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, and eventually, as the Pacific Theater escalated towards it's inevitable conclusion, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bomber. In the end, the B-18 Bolo was the bomber equivalent of Brewster Aeronautical Corporation’s F2-A Buffalo fighter; completely outdated and utterly useless in battle against more nimble, agile, and frankly, advanced adversaries; the B-18 Bolo was too slow, carried too small a bombload, and packed an inadequate defensive armament. The bomber represented an age of flight where peacetime reigned supreme and complacence was at the forefront of United States military strategy, great depression or no.
