At the Quadrant Conference at Quebec, Canada, in August 1943, U.S. Army Air Forces chief General Henry H. ‘Hap’ Arnold submitted a detailed plan under which the newly activated 58th Bomb Wing (Very Heavy) would reach the CBI Theater by the end of 1943 and shortly after begin offensive operations against the Japanese Home Islands. Brigadier General Kenneth Wolfe, whom Arnold appointed to command the new unit and plan the operations, had earlier been responsible for B-29 development and production at Wright Field, then the center for U.S. Army Air Forces aircraft testing and evaluation. Arnold’s plan originally envisioned that the B-29s would be permanently based in south-central China and be resupplied by air from India. Although Roosevelt liked the plan, General Stilwell contended that maintaining all B-29 operations within China would not be practical because the supply lines were too long. He suggested instead that the China bases be used only as a forward staging area, while complex base facilities would remain in eastern India. Even though the Joint Chiefs were skeptical about the value of staging any B-29 operations out of China, Stilwell’s recommendations were reluctantly approved, and the Chengdu area, 175 miles west of Chunking, was selected as the site for the forward bases. The plan as approved would be dubbed ‘Matterhorn,’ the Allied code name for the strategic air offensive against Japan. Arnold and his field commanders would soon find themselves faced with an uphill struggle to resolve huge operational challenges with the ambitious offensive.

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When it came to delineating who would control the B-29s, Arnold set up an unprecedented organizational structure that bypassed the operational authority of the theater commanders. The XX Bomber Command, to which the 58th Bomb Wing was attached, would take its combat orders from the Joint Chiefs, with executive control vested in Arnold himself — in effect, an independent air force within the Army Air Forces. Arnold had embraced the notion of an ‘independent strategic striking force’ as far back as the 1920s, when he worked with Brig. Gen. William L. ‘Billy’ Mitchell. But he was more immediately concerned with the rivalries within the CBI and also those between U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur and U.S. Navy Admiral Chester Nimitz in the southwest Pacific and Pacific theaters. Months later, this organization would evolve into the newly created Twentieth Air Force, which would direct B-29 combat operations throughout the war and serve as a template for the postwar independent U.S. Air Force.

In November 1943 the British agreed to provide operational bases around Calcutta, India, and Chiang Kai-shek started construction of five forward air bases around Chengdu. Incredibly, the runways on the Chinese bases would be built entirely with manual labor, with as many as 700,000 coolies working at a single site.

To further complicate matters, B-29 deliveries were falling drastically behind schedule due to production delays. While the 58th Bomb Wing existed on paper as consisting of five bomb groups allocated 30 planes apiece, in truth there weren’t even enough B-29s available to train the crews. By the end of 1943, of the 97 B-29s produced thus far, only 17 were actually airworthy. As a result, only 67 pilots had been checked out in the aircraft and virtually none of the combat crews had trained together as a team.

Arnold was being pressured by Roosevelt to start bombing Japan by January 1944, but production and training delays forced him to tell the president that the B-29s could not leave the States until mid-March, while combat operations would not start until mid-May at the earliest. Arnold’s decision at that juncture to take delivery of the planes ‘as is’ and modify them in the field was influenced in part by the urgency to get B-29s into the hands of aircrews for training. That move led to what became known as the ‘Battle of Kansas.’

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