1. Briefing for a Death Trap

They were already tired when the briefing started.

Captain Jack “Hawk” Ellison rubbed the grit from his eyes and squinted at the big wall map in the Quonset hut on Tinian. Red strings marked the familiar arc: takeoff, assembly, long haul over open ocean, then Japan.

“Target is an aircraft engine plant near Hamamatsu,” the intelligence officer droned, tapping a pointer. “Expect heavy flak and fighter opposition. Weather’s forecasted clear at altitude.”

Clear.

Hawk didn’t like the sound of that.

Clouds were cover. No clouds meant every set of eyes and every gunsight pointed at them would have a clean view.

“At least the Japs are running out of pilots,” someone muttered at the back of the room.

The intelligence officer heard him.

“Don’t count on that,” he said. “Recent reports indicate increased use of tai-atari tactics—intentional ramming attacks. They’re not just kamikazes against ships anymore. Some fighters are going after bombers directly.”

The room went quiet.

Ramming a bomber?

Everyone knew what a plane-to-plane collision looked like. They’d seen the mangled wreckage, heard stories of wings sheared off, fuel tanks erupting.

Somewhere in the back, Sergeant Lou Garber, Lady Providence’s right waist gunner, shifted in his chair.

“Sir,” he called, “how do you defend against someone who’s willing to turn himself into shrapnel?”

“You keep firing,” the intel officer said. “You make them get through as much lead as possible before impact. And you make their sacrifice cost them more than it costs you.”

He changed the slide.

“Remember,” he added, “your B‑29s are faster and higher than anything they can put up consistently. Your guns are radar-directed. You have range. Use it. Don’t wait to bring them in close like some B‑17 hero from ’43. Kill them as far out as you can.”

Hawk looked around at his crew.

Lieutenant Sam “Preacher” Doyle, the bombardier, fingering a small cross under his shirt.
Lieutenant Clyde Mason, the flight engineer, already mentally balancing turbos and fuel.
Sergeant Eddie Varga, central fire control gunner, thin and sharp-eyed, sitting forward like he was already at his sighting station.
Lou at the back, big hands restless on his knees.

“Questions?” the intel officer asked.

No one had any.

They had all the questions in the world.

Just no answers.

 

 

2. Climbing Into Thin Air

From the ground, Lady Providence looked ungainly.

From the left seat, she felt like a living thing.

Hawk eased the throttles forward, the four Wright R‑3350 engines rising to a roar. The B‑29’s long wings flexed as she gathered speed, heavy with bombs and fuel.

“Tails up,” Mason called, monitoring the gauges. “All temps in the green.”

“Airborne,” Hawk said as the runway fell away. He tucked the gear and started the long, slow climb to operational altitude.

At 25,000 feet, the world thinned.

The sky darkened.

They leveled off above a cotton field of clouds that spread to every horizon.

“Pressurization’s holding,” Mason reported. “Cabin at 8,000 feet equivalent.”

Hawk listened to the voices on the interphone:

Preacher in the nose, calm and precise.
Eddie at central fire control, checking turrets.
Lou and the other gunners—tail, left waist, top—calling out test bursts.

The B‑29’s defensive system was unlike anything that had flown before. Five remotely controlled turrets, each with twin .50‑caliber machine guns, could be slaved to different stations. Eddie, in the central blister, had the job of coordinating fire, switching control between gunners as targets approached.

“Everything’s talking,” Eddie said. “Forward upper and lower turrets responsive. Tail’s a little sticky on traverse, but workable.”

“Don’t let it be my side that’s sticky,” Lou said. “I’m pretty attached to this big tin can.”

“Keep your eyes open and your hands loose,” Hawk said. “The more we see them first, the less we see them up close.”

Hours dripped by.

Japan rose ahead, a smear of land under their paths.

The weather forecast had been right.

No clouds.

No cover.

Hawk felt his jaw tighten.

“Flak guns will love this,” Preacher murmured.

“Flak we can dance with,” Hawk said. “It’s the fighters I worry about.”

3. First Shadows

They were on the bomb run when the first black puffs appeared.

“Flak, two o’clock low, range increasing,” called the navigator, Lieutenant Harris.

The bursts were scarce at first, probing. Then they thickened.

“She’s tracking us,” Mason said, watching the flak pattern rise. “They’ve got us pegged.”

“Hold steady,” Preacher said, eye glued to the Norden bombsight. “I need a stable platform.”

Hawk gritted his teeth as the B‑29 vibrated with each near-miss. A sharp crack sounded under the floor.

“Hit?” he asked.

“Stray fragment through the rear bomb bay door,” Mason said. “Nothing critical. We’re fine.”

“Fine,” Lou muttered into the interphone. “He says from the front of the plane.”

“Knock it off, Garber,” Eddie said. “Eyes out. I’ve got chatter from the other ships—fighters forming up.”

That word—fighters—tightened everyone’s focus.

“Where?” Hawk asked.

“Eleven o’clock high,” Eddie said. “Range out of effective yet. Looks like… Zekes or Tonys. Hard to tell at this angle. Maybe mixed.”

Hawk glanced up through the cockpit canopy.

He saw them as specks at first.

Then as glints.

A line of them, maybe a dozen, starting to swing in toward the bomber formation.

“Here they come,” Lou said softly.

4. The First Pass

Japanese pilots had learned that making a leisurely, turning-fight pass at a B‑29 was suicide.

These weren’t rookies diving in to spray from a distance.

They were coming in fast, head-on and high, where their silhouettes would be smallest and their closing speed greatest.

Eddie snapped into action.

“Forward upper turret to me,” he said. “Lower to nose. Tail, cover our six. Waist, watch for stragglers.”

“Roger,” came the replies.

Six fighters peeled off, angling toward Lady Providence’s quadrant of the formation.

“Pick your man,” Eddie breathed.

The first fighter rolled and dove, its nose flashing as its cannons spat.

“Opening up,” Preacher called, his nose guns rattling. Eddie’s twin .50s joined in a second later, tracers reaching out like white-hot beads on a string.

The fighter flashed through the stream.

Its wing exploded in a puff of smoke and metal.

It cartwheeled and vanished below.

“Splash one,” Lou yelled.

But the others were still coming.

One sliced right through the formation, riddling a B‑29 two ships over. The bomber’s left wing caught fire.

“Number Two’s hit bad,” Harris said, voice tight. “She’s dropping out.”

Hawk forced himself not to look.

His job was this airplane.

Three more fighters bore in on Lady Providence directly, one slightly above, two low.

“Target three low, I’ve got him,” Eddie said. He raked the sky, a long, controlled burst.

The low fighter’s engine erupted, smoke streaming.

He banked away, then suddenly plunged straight under the bomber.

“Watch for a climb!” Eddie shouted.

He never climbed.

The pilot rode the dead dive into the ground.

“Aim for the deflection, not the man,” Hawk murmured to no one in particular. “It’s just physics.”

He wished physics made him feel any better.

The high fighter was the problem.

He came in shallow, almost level, boring straight in like a train on a track.

Preacher and Eddie hammered at him.

Bits flew off his cowling.

He didn’t break.

At the last instant, he rolled slightly, lining up with Lady Providence’s left wing root.

And then he kept going.

“He’s ramming!” Lou screamed.

5. Impact

The Japanese fighter hit like God’s own hammer.

There was no giant Hollywood fireball.

Just a sickening crunch and a shudder that ran through the whole airframe.

Alarm lights flickered.

Something heavy slammed down the fuselage.

“Left wing hit!” Mason shouted. “Fuel pressure dropping on Number One! We’ve lost some skin here—hold on—pressure stabilizing, Number Two still good. Fire warning on One—yes, no—remote extinguisher engaged.”

In the left blister, the left waist gunner, Sergeant “Red” Mallory, screamed once and went silent.

“Red?” Lou yelled. “Red!”

No answer.

“Report!” Hawk barked, fighting the controls as the B‑29 sagged on the left side.

“Left outboard engine’s damaged,” Mason said, forced calm. “We’re feathering One. Three and Four picking up load. Left wing… we’ve lost some area, but she’s holding. Red’s station… I’m not getting anything.”

Lou craned around, heart pounding.

Where Red had been, there was a twisted mess of metal, smoke, and a ragged hole in the fuselage. Through it, Lou saw fragments of the fighter—a shredded tail, part of a wing—falling away.

“Red’s gone,” he said hoarsely. “His whole position’s… gone.”

There was a beat of silence on the interphone.

Then Hawk said, voice flat, “We’ll say his name later. Right now, we fly.”

Eddie swore under his breath.

“Fighters breaking off,” he reported. “They’re regrouping. They saw that ram. They’ll think we’re crippled.”

“We are crippled,” Harris said.

“Crippled and flying,” Mason said. “If we baby the engines, we can keep her up. But she’s draggy on the left now. Burning more fuel.”

“We’ll worry about fuel after we survive the next five minutes,” Hawk said. “Gunners, stay sharp. They’re not done.”

6. The Second Sacrifice

The Japanese fighters had seen something important:

Lady Providence was still in formation, but she was wounded.

To them, she was blood in the water.

“They’re circling,” Eddie said. “Looks like they’re talking to each other. We’re… special today.”

“Always wanted to be popular,” Lou muttered.

The next attack didn’t come from ahead.

It came from behind and below.

“Six o’clock low, multiple bandits!” the tail gunner, Sergeant Ray “Tex” Hollis, shouted. “Three… no, five… eight—hell, there’s a swarm back here!”

Eddie switched control.

“Tail, you lead. Upper rear turret to me. Waist, eyes on the sides.”

The fighters were trying a coordinated move: some would climb and dive; others would make distracting passes, forcing the gunners to split their fire.

“What are they doing?” Preacher asked, watching the dance in his side sight.

“Learning,” Hawk said. “They think we’re worth a lesson.”

The first fighter screamed up from low six, firing.

Tex met him with a straight burst.

The fighter wobbled, flamed, and arced away.

Two more slid in from four and eight o’clock, using the dead one as a momentary shield.

Tex shifted, but there were too many.

Lou swung his right waist guns, the world outside a blur of sky and metal. He squeezed, the vibration traveling up his arms.

He saw one fighter shudder, canopy popping off as the pilot bailed out too late. The plane tumbled, wing torn.

“Got one!” Lou shouted.

But another was still coming.

This one didn’t wobble.

Didn’t try to evade.

He came on like a spear.

Tex hit him, tracers walking up the nose, cracking the windshield, stitching the wing… but the Zeke didn’t break.

At the last nearness, Tex realized what was happening.

“He’s coming straight in—” he started.

The impact took the tail clean off.

To Lou, it was a violent snapping sensation, a jerk in the gut. The interphone exploded into noise.

“Tail’s gone! Tail is gone!” Eddie yelled.

The rear end of the bomber, from the gunner’s compartment back, was suddenly just… not there.

“Tex?” Lou shouted, throat raw.

Static.

Then nothing.

“Stabilizer’s damaged,” Mason said, voice thinner now. “We’ve lost the tail gunner, elevators are stiff—Jack, we’re in real trouble.”

Hawk’s hands were full.

The B‑29 wanted to pitch and yaw in ugly ways, like a wounded bird trying to flap a missing wing.

He countered with rudder, careful on the yoke.

“Talk to me, Clyde,” he said. “Can I keep her level?”

“You can try,” Mason said. “You’re fighting asymmetric thrust, deformed wing, and missing empennage. But the main spar’s intact. For now.”

“Preacher,” Hawk said, “how far to target?”

“Thirty seconds to release point,” Preacher said. His voice didn’t waver. “Then another few minutes of straight and level for the cameras.”

Bomb runs were always done straight and steady, so the bombers could aim. It made them sitting ducks.

Hawk laughed once, short and humorless.

“Hell with the cameras,” he said. “We’re not flying a textbook today.”

7. Bombs Away—Barely

They reached the release point in something like formation.

The bomber two slots over was gone, a trail of smoke marking where it had fallen. Another had dropped out crippled, trying to limp home alone.

“On target,” Preacher said. “Doors open.”

The bomb bay doors clanked and whooshed.

Flak bursts bracketed them, black flowers in the thin air.

“Bombs away,” Preacher said, pulling the toggle.

Lady Providence leaped a little lighter as the bomb load fell, tumbling toward the engine works below. Far ahead, other bombs blossomed into fire and smoke.

“Close doors,” Hawk ordered. “Navigator, plot us a way out that doesn’t get us killed in the next ninety seconds.”

“Short of teleportation, sir, I’m fresh out of miracles,” Harris said. “But I’ll swing us off the expected egress route. Maybe we’ll dodge some of their intercept pattern.”

“Gunners, what’s our picture?” Hawk asked.

“Fighters are… stunned,” Eddie said. “They rammed us twice and we’re still up here. It’s thrown them off. But they’re not leaving.”

“Count?” Hawk asked.

“I make… at least ten still airborne near us,” Eddie said. “More harassing other ships. We might have been the main attraction.”

“Then let’s give them a show,” Hawk said.

8. Turning a Wounded Fortress into a Wolf

A B‑29 was not designed for dogfighting.

It was big, heavy, and built for high-altitude cruising.

But Hawk wasn’t thinking about dogfighting.

He was thinking about fields of fire.

“Our biggest strength right now isn’t our bombs or our speed,” he said over the interphone. “It’s our guns. Eddie, I want you coordinating like we’re a floating machine-gun nest. I’m going to give you angles. You call them.”

“What?” Eddie said, startled. “You want to… steer for firing arcs?”

“Exactly,” Hawk said. “We can’t outrun them. We can’t outclimb them. But we can make every approach a kill box. You see a vector, you tell me: left, right, up, down. I’ll put metal in your line of sight.”

There was a pause.

Then Eddie said, “Copy. Let’s see if I can turn this cow into a porcupine.”

“Lady Porcupine,” Lou said. “Doesn’t have the same ring.”

The next fighter came in from high two o’clock, angling for a quartering head-on pass.

“High two, closing fast,” Eddie said. “Jack, slip left two degrees, nose down a hair. Upper front and lower front, both can bear if you do.”

Hawk nudged the yoke.

The Superfortress shifted, just enough.

Preacher and Eddie’s turret intersected.

“Now,” Eddie said.

They fired in unison.

The streams crossed right where the fighter flew through.

It disintegrated, a puff of fire and spinning pieces.

“Splash,” Eddie said.

Another fighter dove from high six, aiming for the fuselage.

“Bank left,” Eddie snapped. “Give Lou and upper rear a wider field.”

Hawk rolled as much as he dared.

The wounded wing protested, but held.

Lou saw the fighter slide into his sight ring.

He didn’t bother leading much.

The closing speed was insane.

He just filled the space with tracers.

The fighter exploded.

“Got you, you son of a—!” Lou started, then swallowed the rest.

Six more fighters orbited, probing.

Hawk and Eddie fell into a strange, terrible dance.

It was backwards from everything they’d been taught.

Instead of keeping the bomber on the most efficient track, Hawk was constantly tweaking heading and pitch, making micro-maneuvers to bring as many guns as possible to bear on each attacker.

“Roll right—no, level—give me three degrees nose up—beautiful, there!”

Each time, the intercepting fighters found themselves flying into overlapping sheets of .50‑caliber fire.

9. Numbers in the Sky

Time warped.

Minutes stretched into lives.

Lou lost track of how many fighters he’d seen hurt, burning, or breaking off.

Harris tried, out of some need for order, to keep count.

“One… three… five…”

At one point, a fighter streaked alongside them, close enough that Lou could see the pilot’s scarf flutter in the slipstream.

Their eyes met.

The Japanese pilot jerked his stick, trying to roll in.

Lou’s burst hit the wing root.

The fighter simply came apart.

“Another down,” Eddie said. “That’s… I’ve lost count. Harris?”

“Twelve down that I’ve seen fall,” Harris said, almost disbelieving. “Maybe more if you count the ones we crippled.”

The air around them, once thick with eager attackers, started to thin.

The remaining fighters were cautious now.

They darted in, fired short, and peeled away before the B‑29’s guns could chew them.

“Ammo check,” Eddie said. “We’ve been pouring it.”

Lou looked at his belt.

Long coils of brass had turned into a puddle of spent casings at his feet.

“Sixty percent gone,” he said. “I’ve got maybe a few bursts left before I’m dry.”

“Similar here,” Tex would have said.

Tex wasn’t there.

The empty tail haunted them.

“Jack,” Mason said quietly, “we’ve chewed through more fuel than we wanted with these maneuvers. And with that wing damage… I don’t know if we’re making it all the way back to Tinian.”

Hawk didn’t answer right away.

He was watching the last two fighters make a tentative pass, more out of duty than bloodlust.

Eddie vectored the guns.

One got clipped, trailing smoke.

The other lost courage and spiraled away.

They were, for the first time in an hour, alone in their immediate patch of sky.

“We’ll worry about ‘back’ after ‘alive,’” Hawk said.

10. The Long Way Home

The formation was ragged.

Of the original group, several B‑29s were missing.

Others limped, damaged, engines feathered, soot streaks on their fuselages.

Lady Providence looked worse than most.

Her tail was jagged metal.

One engine was out cold.

Her left wing looked like someone had taken a bite out of it.

And yet, she flew.

“Course set for home,” Harris said. “We’ll be a little slower, but with the winds aloft…”

“With the winds aloft and a miracle,” Mason said, “we can maybe limp to Iwo Jima. From there, we see if we can patch her enough to get the rest of the way.”

“Iwo’s close enough,” Hawk said. “Closer than the bottom of the ocean.”

“Jack,” Preacher said quietly, “you realize they’ll ask when we land. How many?”

“Fighters?” Hawk asked.

“Men,” Preacher said.

Hawk stared straight ahead.

“I saw ships burning,” he said. “I saw wings tear, parachutes late, bodies… falling. If you want a number…”

He shook his head.

“Somebody else can count,” he said. “We shot till they stopped. That’s what I’ll tell them.”

11. Iwo and Aftermath

They landed at Iwo Jima on a runway still scarred from recent fighting.

As Lady Providence rolled to a stop, ground crews and other airmen stared.

“She’s missing her tail,” someone said, awed.

“To be fair,” Lou said, climbing down the ladder on shaky legs, “the tail’s missing us too.”

Medics took stock.

Red and Tex’s names were written on a clipboard.

Two fewer men in the crew.

The rest were bruised, shaken, ears ringing, eyes red.

But alive.

A debriefing officer sat them down in a tent and took notes.

“How many enemy fighters did you see destroyed?” he asked.

He got different answers:

“Ten.”

“Twelve.”

“More.”

The intelligence later used conservative cross-checks with other crews’ reports, gun camera footage, and radio logs.

The number they settled on was staggering:

Fourteen Japanese fighters destroyed or so badly damaged they didn’t make it home.

Two of those by ramming impacts that should have killed Lady Providence outright.

“Fourteen,” the officer said, almost disbelieving. “That’s… a squadron and then some.”

“It wasn’t like in the movies,” Lou said. “No cheering. Just… you shoot one and another’s there. You don’t think ‘score.’ You think, ‘Is there anyone left to kill us?’”

Preacher leaned back, exhausted.

“One of them looked right at us,” he said. “Right before he lit us up. I wonder what they told him in his briefing.”

“They probably told him we were monsters,” Eddie said softly. “Flying over their homes, dropping fire. Maybe they were right, from where he sat.”

The officer cleared his throat.

“Regardless of perspective,” he said, “the fact remains: your crew’s actions today are extraordinary. There will be commendations.”

Hawk looked at his hands.

They still felt the vibration of the yoke.

“Put Red and Tex’s names first,” he said.

12. What the History Books Didn’t Write

In official records, the mission became one of those footnotes that military historians love:

“On [date redacted], a single B‑29, heavily damaged by two ramming attacks, successfully defended itself and its formation, with gunners claiming fourteen enemy fighters destroyed. The aircraft, though missing its tail and sustaining major structural damage, returned safely to base.”

It sat in a table, a statistic in a war of statistics.

The story behind it—of a wounded bomber turned into a deliberate gun platform by a captain willing to fly for fields of fire instead of fuel efficiency—didn’t make it into many books.

But word spread among crews.

On Tinian, in mess tents and around makeshift bars, a phrase started making the rounds:

“Fly her like Lady Providence.”

It meant:

Trust your gunners.
Turn your weaknesses into bait.
Use your aircraft’s strengths in ways the manual never imagined.

Lou went home after the war.

He worked in a factory, then as a mechanic.

He had kids, grandkids.

Sometimes, when a B‑29 appeared in a documentary on TV, he’d look at the shimmering metal and think:

You’re not seeing her how I did.

He stayed in touch with some of the crew.

Others drifted away.

When he was old, a young journalist came to interview him, working on a piece about air combat in the Pacific.

“Is it true,” the journalist asked, “that your crew shot down fourteen fighters in one mission? And that two planes rammed you and you still came home?”

Lou considered.

“That’s what the paperwork says,” he replied.

“But what do you say?” the journalist pressed.

Lou stared out the window for a long moment.

“I say we were in a sky where everyone was trying to kill everyone, and our pilot decided we weren’t just meat in a metal tube,” he said. “He turned that plane into… into a kind of angry porcupine, I guess. We did what we had to so we could see another sunrise.”

The journalist scribbled.

“Was it heroic?” he asked.

Lou shrugged.

“It was loud,” he said. “It was terrifying. It was ugly. If you want heroism, look at the two guys who rammed us. They climbed into those fighters knowing there was a decent chance they weren’t coming back. I don’t like what they were fighting for. But I know what it means to aim yourself at something and not flinch.”

The journalist frowned.

“So your story isn’t about victory?” he asked.

Lou smiled a little.

“It’s about a plane that should’ve fallen out of the sky and didn’t,” he said. “It’s about the fact that sometimes, when the math says you’re done, you can still throw the numbers off.”

He paused.

“And yeah,” he said. “It’s about fourteen fighters that went down while a bomber with no tail and a hole in its side kept flying. If that doesn’t make you wonder what the hell happened up there, I don’t know what will.”

Somewhere in a hangar museum, a polished B‑29 sits behind ropes, spotless and silent. Tour guides talk about Hiroshima, long-range bombing, pressurized cabins.

They don’t mention a specific day over Hamamatsu when one battered Superfortress clawed its way through a hurricane of metal, slammed by two suicidal attackers, and still turned the sky around her into a graveyard for fourteen fighters.

But if you stand there long enough, looking at the long wings and the glass nose, you might start to imagine:

The shudder of impact.

The roar of guns.

The impossible, stubborn decision to keep flying when every sane equation said fall.

That’s the real story of Lady Providence—

The bomber the enemy tried to kill by throwing airplanes at her, and the crew that answered by throwing everything they had right back.