Published by Coward-McCann, Inc, New York, hardcover with dustjacket, illustrated.
Journey of the Giants, the story of the B-29 Superfort, the weapon that won the war in the pacafic.

This is the story of an historic American effort -an effort that involved millions of people and cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives. It is the true story of the creation of the largest bombing plane of its time and it is the story, too, of the incredible drama that began on the drawing board of aircraft engineers in 1939 and which increased toward those awesome days in 1945 when the B-29 dropped the first atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
-Although the chiefs of staff realized as early as 1937 that the United States would all too soon require a high altitude, very long-range precision bomber-and although in that year, the design and development of an engine for such a plane was ordered and begun by Wright-it was not until the outbreak of World War II that its planning was accelerated and then by necessity became a top priority program.
By 1942, the prototype was, tested, but by that time, our needs were so desperate that the B-29 was forced into mass production before the first aircraft came off the assembly lines. To climax all the difficulties (conversion problems, materiel shortages, transportation snarls, organizational snafus-plus lack of skilled labor), the first completed craft crashed, killing test pilot Eddie Allen.
With the additional difficulties that dogged the plane during its proving days and which continued even after successive modifications and delays, many of the flight crews of the B-29s tended to look on this monster of the air as something of a "jinx ship" and to distrust its performance possibilities. When at last, in 1944, the first group of B-29s was finally assembled to fly to the China-Burma-India theatre, the malfunctions en route and the endless difficulties with advance base runways and installations inadequate to the needs of the plane did little to reassure the crews in their fearful convictions that only trouble lay ahead.
The 29s first experiences in India were indeed disappointing, if not disastrous. The move to China-where hundred of thousands of coolies labored by hand to construct special runways-though actually bringing the planes closer to the striking range of Japan were still fraught with the logistical nightmare of flying six supply missions back over the Hump to India to provide enough bombs and gasoline to fly one combat mission over Japan. And the results of the combat missions themselves were unsatisfactory.
As the island war progressed, the B-29s were moved down to the Marianas and launched their long, dangerous, over-water missions from the islands' bases. And still the bombing missions were vast disappointments. Japanese cities would be "plastered" and yet aerial reconnaissance the next day would inevitably show that these "billion dollar ships" had not really damaged heavy industry and that most of the damaged plants were back in operation almost immediately. Yet the losses from anti-aircraft fire and the horrendous 3,000mile over-water round trip mounted and the B-29 Superfort appeared by early 1945 to be one of the major and tragic disappointments of the war in the Pacific.
How at this juncture General Curtis LeMay made the momentous and "suicidal" decision that sent all 339 planes of his command into the air at once, aimed at Tokyo, stripped of armor and guns, provisioned only with the deadly fire-bomb and with instructions to fly over the city'- not at 25,000 feet but at "chimney" level-is one of the truly incredible and great stories of the war.
How Tokyo "caught it," how other Japanese cities met the same dread fate - ten cities in ten days-and how the B-29 as a weapon of war became overnight the new scourge of the Pacific provides one of the truly brilliant chapters in this saga of the JOURNEY OF THE GIANTS.
But no matter what the achievements of the ship itself, the legendary feats of machines cannot possibly outstrip the heroism and achievements of the men who fly them and it is in the telling of a wealth of firsthand eyewitness accounts of men who manned the B-29s that JOURNEY OF THE GIANTS becomes truly a breath-taking book-to be long remembered, a part of American history never to be forgotten.