Late War Color B-32 Flight Manual

[superkeith1872]

This is a beautiful highly illustrated color manual. This aircraft was developed as an alternate in case the B-29 didn't work out. Roughly 130 of these aircraft were built at the end of the war but they quit building them as soon as the war was over. It was a high tech long range heavy bomber and looked much like the B-24 but was much larger. I found this manual on HathiTrust Home | www.hathitrust.org. Unless your a student at certain colleges you can't download a pdf of the whole book but can view the pages one at a time and save the pictures of the pages individually and then make a pdf book from them, I can't tell you how time consuming it was to download the files but there are some other good WW2 pilot training manuals on there that I would love to have, just don't have the time to do each page by page. Send me a msg if you want to help on some of these flight manuals, they are the late war more colorful type. I learned a few tricks to get a good quality picture download, so ask me before you waste your time. Enjoy!View attachment B-32 Flight Manual Part 1.pdfView attachment B-32 Flight Manual Part 2.pdf

 

[ozhawk40]

Brilliant -thanks Keith, that a great site. I'll post up the P-47N training manual from there too.

Cheers

Peter

 

[superkeith1872]

Brilliant -thanks Keith, that a great site. I'll post up the P-47N training manual from there too.

Cheers

Peter

Peter, The easiest way to download it page by page is to engage the scroll function in their toolbar, then hit the zoom button til the page is full width plus one more time. Save a page after you have zoomed, see how crisp the illustrations are and how big the file is, to know if you have to zoom in again, the picture files should be 300k to 500k each, if you don't zoom in that deep the pictures will be small and of bad quality.

 

[syscom3]

Good find!

 

[stonecold]

Luvin your work...many thanks!

 

[vikingBerserker]

Nice find!

 

[MIflyer]

Very interesting! Thanks!

You don't hear much about the B-32 but a friend of mine who was trained as a gunner late in WW2 told me something quite interesting about the way the Dominator was going to be used.

He trained by shooting at RP-63 "Pinball" targets but was told that rather than shooting air-to-air he would be a gunner in B-32's, which would go in at low altitude during the invasion of Japan and shoot up ground targets. I had no idea that in WWII we were thinking of using "gunships." Needless to say this did not happen, since the invasion of Japan consisted of our troops stepping off the boat.

 

[superkeith1872]

That is very interesting about the strafing use of the B-32. Maybe because we had such good success with aircraft like the B-25 in the pacific, being used as a strafing weapon, they came up with that. They tried something similar in europe with the b-17 by adding more guns and extra ammo thinking it could help protect the other bombers but after the others dropped their bombs, the heavy gunship b-17's couldn't keep up because they still had all the extra weight. I think the B-32 idea would have been much better, the destructive power of the Browning .50 caliber machine guns is quite awesome and with 12 or more blazing in different directions, I gotta think they could do serious damage in every direction and start many fires with tracers or incediary rounds.

 

[MIflyer]

I think the idea behind the B-32 Gunship was close air support. I guess something like the B-32, maybe even with extra guns, would have been used to help deal with the kind of "human wave" attacks we would have faced in an invasion of Japan. A B-32 flying low, loitering long, and maybe with some napalm bombs on board as well might have looked pretty nice to the infantry. I suppose they could have dropped flares as well for night attacks, just like the AC-47 did 20 years later.

The B-17 gunship was the YB-40 and its enphasis was more on guns above, with two top turrets and the first chin turret, as you say, as an escort. I think I read somewhere that the YB-40 would have been built with V-1710's like the B-38 version of the Fortress if it had gone into production to try to improve performance. Not practical, but with those sleek nacelles and all those guns - man, what a cool looking airplane!

 

[superkeith1872]

I can see the B-32 doing some AC-130 type work, without the circular flight path though. That would be a pretty damn good idea, originally I hadn't thought about the antipersonnel mission but more of anti-material and just setting the whole country on fire with the AP ammo. After dismal bombing results with general purpose bombs and the B-29, Lemay had them use fire type bombs and due to japanese structures being built of flammable woods and other products, it created hellish fire storms and burned cities to the ground. It was very efficient and many times more effective than the general purpose bombs. I really wish they would have made more of the B-32's, I've always been interested in them and would have loved to seen how they stacked up against the B-29, since they looked very equal on paper. Besides, I love the B-24, even with it's short comings and the B-32 seems to me like a much larger version of the B-24 or their single tail Navy version. Apparently they didn't figure out til late in the war that the single tail gave the B-24 much better control and I think the manufacturing was simpler if I recall, so they navy version PBY4-2 got the single tail, round cowlings due to turbo delete, not needed due to low altitude flying of the navy and other cool changes. In short, I love the Consolidated Heavies!

 

[MIflyer]

They have a painting on display in the Pentagon showing the last air combat of WWII. It is of a B-32 against some Japanese fighters.

The PB4Y-2 is an awesome airplane. A friend of mine flew as a radio operator in those during WWII and I wrote an article about his unit and specifically about an encounter two of the Privateers had with 12 Shiden fighters. On one head on pass the throttle for one engine got shot away, the top blown off the nose turret, the top forward turret put out of action, and everyone on the flight deck except my friend either wounded or stunned - and he was only Okay because the Japanese blew up his radio and not him! They had to feather one engine but they shot down two of the enemy and made it home.

He said they actually removed some of the armor from the flight deck. Experience was that with head on passes the rounds tended to enter and then bounce around due to the armor. The crewman hurt the worst was due to a 20MM round coming in and exploding against the inside armored back of his chair, between his back and the armor plate. If it had not been armored it probably would have just gone right through and not hurt anyone.

After the Japanese broke off my friend took a look at the top turret to see why it was jammed. Turned out that a Japanese round had jammed in the gears. He pulled out that round and kept it; has it to this day.

For my article Jack Fellows did fantastic artwork that just blew me away when I opened the magazine for the first time. Wish I could get a larger version to hang on the wall.