A typical B-29 aircrew comprised eleven men ranging in age from nineteen to thirty. On many planes, the captain and oldest member of the crew was a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who had learned to fly in a single-engine trainer about eighteen months earlier. Not even youth or peak physical condition spared them the fatigue of long flights at high altitude. After a fifteen-hour mission, one pilot wrote in a letter home, “my legs and back were stiff and I can still feel it! We took off at dawn and landed several hours after dark. That’s a point lots of folks miss. Bombing the target takes only
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