Talk:Tupolev Tu-4/Archive 1

The three B-29s
Russian Aviation Page: Soviet B-29, a Tupolev Tu-4 Story claims that three B-29s landed in USSR in 1944, not in 1945. In addition, it is not clear from Tupolev Tu-4 that USSR was not the one which forced the three bombers to land on its territory - they were in fact forced so by the Japanese. --romanm (talk) 10:10, 4 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * Neither the Japanese or the Russians forcibly caused the planes to land. What was meant is that the B-29s finished their missions, and then because of damage, weather, low fuel, etc. were forced to land in Russia, and then the planes were taken.  Jkonrath 22:35, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Duplicated damage
There were three planes that had to land in Russia. Two were used to discover their performance characteristics and one was completely dismantled for reverse engineering to build duplicates.

That one happened to have a patch from repair of earlier battle damage. Only the first Tu-4 had that repair duplicated. Russian aeronautical engineers weren't dumb. There were some differences between the B29 and Tu-4, most notably in the thickness of the outer skin. The B29's skin was all the same thickness. Due to aluminum being in shorter supply in Russia, the skin on the Tu-4 varied in thickness, only matching the B29 where it was riveted to structural members. It was thinner between the structural supports.

The History Channel did a good documentary on this. After the Tu-4 was in production, they were demonstrated at an international airshow. The USSR cleverly flew three planes past (unknown if any were the two B29's left intact), causing the American military people present to assume the Russians had simply repaired the three B29's. Then a fourth plane was flown past, an airliner version. That caused a bit of consternation amongst the american personnel, leaving no doubt the USSR now had the exact same bomber capability as the USA.

As for why the repaired damage was duplicated on the first Tu-4, I've heard that a likely reason was the men doing the project feared that any visible discrepancy could mean at best the loss of their jobs or at worst their lives. I also heard somewhere that it could've been a bit of a joke, to see if the project's government inspectors would notice what should obviously be seen as a patch. The idea of duplicating bullet holes is silly. The people doing the work would certainly have been familiar with such damage and would never mistake a bullet hole for a design element. - IP 67.136.145.224, 16 November 2005 
 * It is said that Stalin himself ordered an exact copy of the B-29 to be produced, and it was not up to the engineers to question the wisedom of "the great leader of the advanced world" so they probably copied even the bullet hole patches and according to Viktor Suvorov they even had a problem if they should paint a white or red star on the exact copy. Mieciu K 18:14, 10 August 2006 (UTC)


 * "To every detail" is a considerable exaggaration. In reality there were considerable redesign in fuel system, defensive armament, bomb bays etc. Viktor Suvorov is not a credible source. --Mikoyan21 19:19, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry but that is not quite true. Even though VS just retold some urban legends about Tu-4 (and there were plenty of them :P). Because a very credible source, in fact Tupolev's subordinate, claims that Russians initially cloned american FoF system and actually installed it in the first aircraft produced. Every minute alteration of the original design required massive bureaucracy and dare-devil executives to accept a decision.

Notable points which had to be altered in the Soviet replica per definition:
 * FoF system
 * Armament, obviously leading to everything else -- remote-controlled guns, electrics, scopes, etc
 * Thickness of the aluminium sheets -- since exact value of the original was 1.5875mm which no one wanted to take responsibility for.
 * Parachutes, as they were different and therefore different seats (apparently americans used parachute backpacks as a back of a chair, whilst soviet chutes could not be used like that).

Each of these decisions required a signature from a very high-ranking official, even though it was just common sense.

Egh0st (talk) 10:50, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

As I worked for a time as a product engineer in an Aluminum rolling plant, the story of the sheet thickness sounds really funny for me. There is no possibility to produce an exact thickness. Even by todays technology one can expect a tolerance which is dependant of the nominal thickness. For a sheet thickness of ~1,6mm this tolerance should be at about +/- 0,02mm using modern technology of thickness and band profile control. For this I see absolutely no reason, why the technical staff should have a problem with a nominal thickness. Even if the reachable tolerances for soviet rolling plants were higher than of rolling plants in the USA, they would have no need to inflate the sheet thickness signifantly. Also the production of a "special" thickness of cold rolled Aluminum is no matter- in this thickness area one just have to change the rolling gap tho achieve a different gauge. So why did the soviets change the thickness? Maybe they used a different alloy or another technology (different chain of casting, hot rolling, cold rolling and probably annealing processes) leading to different mechanical values of the material.

D.O. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.182.210.204 (talk) 12:00, 10 February 2012 (UTC)


 * The Soviet rolling mills would have been constructed to operate using metric measurements and so adjusting the mill controls to give a precise and consistent Imperial measure of thickness may have been difficulty if not impossible. It was therefore quicker and simpler to just adjust the design of the B-29/Tu 4 to use slightly different thickness of material to a metric measure, the slight difference in weight being of little or no importance on an aircraft the size of a large four-engined bomber. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.18.209 (talk) 08:22, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Order of Battle
Does anybody have data on the units that flew the Tu-4 and their deployment history. The CIA had 1,150 AC in units during 1953. This needs an update since only 847 were produced--Woogie10w 21:06, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

Neutrality faults
Some paragraphs of this article are not about the plane model, but the "american" point of view" only. "The development of the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949 gave the air defense program a new urgency, since the United States felt itself in danger of a nuclear attack with the Tu-4 as the delivery platform. This convinced the United States to develop an extremely costly air-interception capability involving ground radar installations, a Ground Observer Corps, radar picket planes, surface-to-air missiles, and fleets of jet interceptor fighters. Project Nike was founded by the US Army and delivered the world's first operational anti-aircraft missile system, which utilized Nike Hercules missiles against Soviet long range bombers. This eventually became NORAD in 1957." I think this should be rewritten -- rgawenda 17:36, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

POV
How do we know it was the Russians that copied the American design? Couldn't the Americans have just as easily copied the Russian design? This needs to be addressed. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 35.11.183.95 (talk • contribs).
 * Get real. &mdash;Joseph/N328KF (Talk) 07:11, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
 * No, of course it doesn't. The American B-29 was flying long before the Tu-4; I mean it was captured B-29s landing in Vladivostok that set the whole program in motion. Eleland 01:49, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Theft of Technology
The The Soviet Union stole the 3 US B-29's. "Reverse Engineer",  yes. Actually The Soviets were under orders to clone (not just copy, clone) the B-29 down to the smallest hardware. The Soviet goverment actually ordered Tupolev to build the Tu-4 as a dead-copy. This was an extreme betrayal by the Soviets who were supposedly a US ally at the time, and a country which had profited from huge amounts of US Aid during the current war, WW2. Anyone doubting the basic premise of this fact is in denial of World Aviation History, not "US History". Bwebb00 (talk) 19:18, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Whilst you are mostly correct, "stole" is not the right word. At the time the USSR was not formally at war with Japan, so in theory they required to intern the aircraft in question and the crew. The crew was returned though as the US was an ally. In fact, Japan could have considered the fact of return of B-29s as using the USSR as an ally in the war against Japan. That could be considered an act of war and sufficient enough to launch an offensive operation against (then weak) Soviet Far East.

Egh0st (talk) 18:50, 31 December 2009 (UTC)


 * It should be remembered that both the USSR and Japan took their mutual non-agression pact very seriously for most of the war, till Germany was defeated. The Japanese left the ships carrying aid from San Francisco to Vladivostok completely unharmed even as they sailed right past Japan. US aid formed a small part of the Soviet's war effort, but it was crucial in certain fields. Therefore the Soviets could not afford to risk angering Japan. Also, the alliance between Western democracies and Stalin's USSR was no ordinary alliance, it was one forced by the situation. Neither side trusted the other much and both no doubt were looking ahead to after the war when they would be in conflict again over Stalin's aims of spreading communism. Therefore "playing dirty", such as this copying, was not unexpected. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.72.129 (talk) 19:21, 9 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Theft is theft, no matter the excuse. No one "forced" Stalin to order the Tu-4's copied - he could have chosen to have them destroyed where they had crashed, just as no one forced him to kill over 20 million of his own "subjects" (far less more than Hitler killed). But you are right, it is expected behavior of Communists, and should not have been a surprise. - BilCat (talk) 19:30, 9 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The interned B-29's remained the property of the US and should have been preserved ready for return to the US after the war.


 * ... but then again, Stalin's government, like Hitler's, never was one for much in the way of obeying international law. As is to be expected from a government of crooks, who, if they couldn't buy it, stole what they wanted, and killed or imprisoned those they did not like. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 95.150.18.209 (talk) 08:13, 14 September 2017 (UTC)


 * This is hardly behaviour limited to Communists as the US has during numerous times stolen foreign technology - not least being the cotton gin, the Junker F.13 and Fokker D.VII, all of which were copied in the US. It is quite often how technology spreads.&#32;- NiD.29 (talk) 15:25, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Any US (also USSR) acquisition of German aircraft technology was taken as either war reparations or seized from a defeated enemy. Not by espionage from a supposed ally. During the period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the Soviets had a substantial espionage effort in Germany, and was attempting to licence German technology, yet was (unsurprisingly) rebuffed - some commercially valuable equipment, such as the BMW R71 motorcycle and sidecar combination, was licensed as the Germans needed foreign currency, but nothing of their technical innovations in aerospace. Unlike 1945 and the British naivety.
 * I know of nothing to support a claim of "the US stealing cotton gin technology". Andy Dingley (talk) 19:19, 10 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Development started in 1944 on the American V-1 copy (the Republic-Ford JB-2 Loon) well before Germany was defeated. The Fokker F.VII airliner was also copied (down to the airfoil sections used), albeit with an updated structure copied from Junkers - and the Fokker was originally developed in Holland, not Germany, while the Junkers F.13 was also a post-war aircraft. Eli's cotton gin was copied from the Chinese and may have had some slave origins - not that he made any money, as many folks just copied it illegally from him. Suffice to say, it isn't an unknown activity. FWIW, many German companies set up factories in Russia (Heinkel, Junkers etc) in the 20s and 30s when they couldn't do so in Germany, so no espionage was needed - the Germans willingly gave them access to most of their new technologies, hence why most of the Russian heavy aircraft of the 30s looked like Junkers products. Other companies provided prototypes to the Russians, although few such aircraft received contracts as Russian imports were mainly limited to machine tools, many of which came from either Germany or the US or items to build under licence. The Russians bought licenses for the Douglas DC-3 and for the Christie tank suspension, which was later used on the T-34. The Klimov M-100 was a Hispano-Suiza 12Y engine built under licence, and the Shvetsov M-25 began as an R-1820 built under licence. Both were redeveloped by the Russians and used widely. At the same time, BMW was building a licensed copy of the Pratt & Whitney Hornet, which was developed into the 801 as used on the Fw 190. A lot more technology was sold to the Russians than most westerners realize and only occasionally did they need to resort to reverse engineering or espionage. Russia was not at war with Japan until Germany had been defeated, and so American bombers (aka combatants) landing in their territory had to be detained to appease the Japanese while they were busy fighting off the Germans. They took advantage of that to build an aircraft the Americans wouldn't provide to them.&#32;- NiD.29 (talk) 05:19, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

RAF/USAF interception practice
this fear may have informed the manouvres and air combat practice conducted by US and British air forces in 1948, involving fleets of B-29s.

The RAF and USAF DID perform practice interceptions on USAF B-29s and RAF Washingtons using Meteors and Vampires to work out the best forms of attack against the Tu-4 in case of possible nuclear strikes by the Soviets using the bomber.


 * 1948 RAF training film "Fighter Tactics Against B-29" on YouTube here:  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.7.147.13 (talk) 11:22, 16 June 2012 (UTC)

Small rivet hole that was mistakenly copied
The article uses this source to reference for the sentence: "The dismantled B-29 had a small flaw in one wing - a small rivet hole that was drilled mistakenly by an unknown Boeing engineer. Given Stalin's order for preciseness, all Tu-4's had this same hole drilled in the same location on the wing." A google translate shows nothing even remotely close to that being mentioned in the source. Can someone with knowledge of Russian confirm this? If no such mention is found, and no other source for this claim exists, this needs to be deleted. Chocolate Horlicks (talk) 11:45, 27 August 2012 (UTC)
 * All recently published sources suggest this would have been impossible as the Russians were working from multiple airframes, and completely re-engineered the aircraft from the ground up to use metric materials. Just more cold war propaganda.&#32;- NiD.29 (talk) 08:10, 10 June 2017 (UTC)