Home » Politics & Society » Cold War » The Soviet Tu-4: Russia's Stolen Superfortress

The Soviet Tu-4: Russia's Stolen Superfortress

© Dane Mitchell Donato

Like much of the Cold War, the story of the Soviet Union’s long range bomber, the Tu-4, is full of strange twists and turns that seem more fiction than fact. This is the tale of stolen technology and the unique internal machinations of a Soviet system built largely upon fear and paranoia. And, although the Cold War was just getting started, we have, in the Tu-4 program, a fine preview of the Cold War saga of the end justifying the means in "acquiring" new or improved technology in the ever-present quest to get the edge over the other guy.

Even while World War II was still being fought, Joseph Stalin had already recognized that the American B-29 Superfortress was the ideal bomber for a Soviet Air Force that would certainly face his temporary American allies as soon as the shooting stopped. Even then, before the Germans and Japanese surrendered, the Cold War was beginning, and Stalin didn’t want to be caught without a means of striking North America.

The only real hitch to his plan was that the Americans refused to give him any Superfortresses, let alone the blueprints to build one.

But, gravity and emergency landings being what they are, fate brought Stalin the perfect 3-D plans in the form of three B-29s under duress. Once the crews had landed on Soviet soil, they quickly found out why they had been warned not to do just that. After a brief stay with our Soviet allies, the fliers were returned to the U.S. The planes, however, stayed right where they were. Quickly, the Soviets began copying, part by part, three essentially stolen aircraft.

The Soviets, to be sure, were working on their own homegrown design for a long-range bomber (the Samolet 64), but Stalin decided that it would be better to copy a tried and true plane rather than wait for his own people to come up with an original design -- the Soviets badly needed nuclear parity, and Stalin certainly didn‘t mind foreign ideas and innovations being introduced into the Soviet system.

And so it began. The Tu-4, as the “new” bomber would be called, was built by what you might want to think of as retrograde engineering. Every component of the Tu-4 came from the dissembled bomber named the “General H.H. Arnold Special.” “Ramp Tramp,” the first of the three bombers the Soviets had acquired in 1943, was left intact to be used for training and as a part of the Soviet Air Force, and the third aircraft, “Ding How,” was kept whole to serve as a ready reference.

The copyright of the article The Soviet Tu-4: Russia's Stolen Superfortress in Cold War is owned by Dane Mitchell Donato. Permission to republish The Soviet Tu-4: Russia's Stolen Superfortress in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.