Why B-29 gunners kept fighting after being rammed twice during WW2 — and scored 14 aerial victories in a single mission. This World War 2 story reveals how one Superfortress crew achieved the highest single-mission kill count in the Pacific theater.
January 27, 1945. B-29 Superfortress A-Square-52, 497th Bombardment Group, climbed through twenty-eight thousand feet over the Pacific toward Tokyo. Japanese fighters scrambled to intercept. Two Ki-44 interceptors deliberately rammed the bomber, destroying both right-side engines and the number one engine on the left. Standard doctrine said a B-29 with three engines destroyed should abort immediately — or wouldn't survive at all. Every commander expected the crippled bomber to fall. Intelligence officers called it a combat loss.
They were all wrong.
What A-Square-52's gunners discovered that morning wasn't about superior firepower. It was about coordinated fire control in a way that contradicted everything crews had been taught about defensive gunnery after catastrophic damage. By the end of what became known as the "fourteen-kill mission," other B-29 crews started understanding that proper turret coordination could deliver lethal de
