This is a book intended for military aircraft buffs, offering the information about, and, especially, the photos of, the B-36 that buffs crave, but much more besides. In some cases, perhaps more than they wanted. Graham Simons, one of the founders of the RAF museum in Duxford, UK, has written 38 airplane books, ranging from the first biplanes to today’s jetliners.

Simons brings his vast knowledge of aviation history to bear on the B-36, a strategic bomber that was not only the largest mass-produced piston-powered plane ever built, but one of the very few modern warplanes that never saw combat.

Convair B-36 traces the entire history of the plane from its beginnings in 1941, when the USA first realized it might need a bomber able to carry a large bombload all the way to Europe and back, to February 1959, when the last B-36 was scrapped. With side looks at other proposed giant transoceanic prop planes, Simons carefully, and ponderously, tracks every step along the way, including countless design changes, corporate changes at what would eventually be the Convair company, and the many decisions and changes made by Congress, presidents, and Air Force commanders that affected its development.

Each of these changes is, when possible, illustrated with one or more photographs, some of them in color. There are not only hundreds of photos of the planes, instrument panels, powerplants, crew compartments and paint jobs, there are pictures of presidents and generals, not to mention pilots and maintenance crews.

Several chapters cover the production history of the B-36, and its use by the Air Force, including years of missions with deployments to the UK and Africa, as the USA practice missions against the USSR during the Cold War.

Convair B-36 also details the other uses to which the aircraft was put, including photo reconnaissance missions and, at some length, the project to carry a nuclear reactor. This involved greatly modifying the plane’s structure to protect the crew from radiation.

There are also chapters on two experimental projects that utilized the B-36 airframe. As jet engines became increasingly powerful in the 1950s, Convair created the YB-60, a sweptwing airplane using the B-36 fuselage, and the same powerplants as the Boeing B-52. Alas, while the B-52 proved so good that it’s still flying, the YB-60 was a turkey. The other one-off was the XC-99, an enormous double-decked transport plane based on the bomber’s airframe and powerplants. It flew, but the Air Force had no use for it. Simons pads this history with several long sections that are only marginally related to the B-36 story: he has an entire chapter on the Northrop flying wings, which were competitors, while another chapter provides a history of the Strategic Air Command. Readers interested in the flying wings ought to read Simons’ book on them instead, and there are better books on SAC and the Cold War. There is also a chapter on the planes’ demise.

This reviewer, as an eleven-year-old, participated in this episode of the Peacemaker story. I grew up a mile from the end of the main runway of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, and our house shook as B-36s, for days on end, landed at the base to be scrapped. As for Convair B-36 Peacemaker, it ends with the story of Strategic Air Command, the 1955 Jimmy Stewart-June Allyson film made with the full cooperation of the Air Force, and featuring the B-36.

I enjoyed it.

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Our Reviewer: Jonathan Beard is a retired freelance journalist who has devoted most of his life to reading military history. When he worked, he wrote and did research for British, American and Danish science magazines, and translated for an American news magazine. The first book he owned was Fletcher Pratt’s The Monitor and the Merrimac. Jonathan reviews regularly for the Michigan War Studies Review. His previous reviews include Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution, The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944, Prevail Until the Bitter End: Germans in the Waning Days of World War II, Enemies Among Us, Battle of the Bulge, Then and Now, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy From Triumph to Collapse, Engineering in the Confederate Heartland, The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Armada, Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, The Collaborators, The Enigma Traitors, When Men Fell from the Sky, Midway: The Pacific War’s Most Famous Battle, When Men Fell from The Sky, The Lost Scientists of World War II, U.S. Battleships 1939–45, The Last Emperor of Mexico, and Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan.

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Note: Convair B-36 Peacemaker is also available in e-editions.

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