The pace of aircraft development was truly breathtaking on the eve of World War II. So many projects that appeared promising before the start of the war would be quickly cast aside once hostilities commenced.
The Boeing XYB-13 would be one of these utterly forgotten aircraft. It was a medium-bomber development of the Boeing 247 commercial transport.
The specification originally read Boeing XYB-13 With Bombardier Nose but a coffee stain blotted out the last part and the name Bombardier stuck.
Quickly overtaken by rapid developments in technology, the Bombardier's brief moment of notoriety was a bit part in Orson Welles' War of the Worlds broadcast on Devil's Night, 1938.
While Army bombing plane V-843 would become known as the aircraft that made a kamikaze attack on the Martians,
its sister ship Army bombing plane V-834 was forced to turn back due to engine trouble and survived to fly another day.
Boeing XYB-13 Bombardier V-834 of the 96th Bomb Sqn. stationed at Langham Field is shown here less than a year later wearing temporary War Scare Crisis camo which would eventually become permanent in 1940.
Only 14 Bombardiers were ever built and eight of them were lost battling the invading Martians. Of the remaining six, three would be cannibalized to keep the other three in the air.
By the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, only two XYB-13 Bombardiers remained in service and were used for anti-shipping/anti-submarine patrols off the west coast.
The last documentary evidence of the Boeing XYB-13 Bombardier is newsreel film of one transporting the commander of the 7th Infantry Div. to Dutch Harbor, Alaska in advance of the Attu landings. Little of the XYB-13 Bombardier survives today and much of what made it through the war was destroyed in a government records warehouse fire in 1972.
There is so little available proof of the medium bomber's existence that to this day most experts deny it ever was and most casual observers would have a devil of a time identifying the aircraft correctly.
However, those of us in the know understand the Bombardier's vital, if utterly forgotten, niche role in history.
Brian da Basher
