Less than 20 miles up the road from Five Points in downtown Atlanta stands a most unique landmark, a partially-restored Boeing B-29 Superfortress nicknamed Sweet Eloise. Although this particular WWII bomber was built in Wichita, Kansas, it was preserved and put on display here at what is today Dobbins Air Reserve Base just outside of Marietta, as a tribute to the men and women of the WWII-era Bell Plant at that location.
In 1941, before the U.S. entry into WWII, civilian aviation was still in the midst of a resurgent golden age, which had only been partly dampened by the ongoing Great Depression. Cobb County had begun construction of an airport to rival Atlanta’s Candler Field (later Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport), and had named it after the WWI fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker. In a successful and probably completely deliberate attempted to woo one of the major airlines away from Atlanta, Rickenbacker Field was scheduled to begun the home base for the new Eastern Air Lines, of which Rickenbacker was the then-president. Instead, following Pearl Harbor and the American entry into the war a few months later, it was repurposed to help the war effort. Fearing enemy attacks on industrial centers along the coastlines, the War Department looked for sites further inland to build up the new industrial production facilities needed, and Marietta and Cobb County officials had an easy sell with the new airfield.
Bell Aircraft built a massive plant alongside Rickenbacker Field to produce the equally-new B-29, a four-engine long-range heavy bomber, under contract from the Boeing corporation. With bad news from the various war fronts in 1942 and 1943 spurring them along, workers took just 12 months to construct the main production line building, 3.2 million square feet under a single roof, with another 1 million feet of other buildings soon finished on the same site. This was, and still is today, the largest single industrial facility ever constructed in the southeastern U.S.. 28,158 workers at the Bell plant produced 663 of the massive bombers between 1943 and 1945, with over a third of the workers being women, an unusually high percentage even for those war years. The plant shut down shortly after the war ended, then was sold to and reopened as the Lockheed (now Lockheed-Martin) – Air Force Plant Number in 1951. It is still in operation today, producing the famous C-130J Hercules, and the world’s most advanced fighter, the F-22 Raptor.
Sweet Eloise today stands beside the front gate of Dobbins ARB, one of only 24 surviving examples out of the 3,970 built during the war. Bearing the tail number 44-70113, it was a B-29-80BW completed in late 1944, and immediately flown to Saipan and assigned as Z-58 in the 883rd Bomb Squadron (500th Bomb Group, 73rd Bomb Wing, 20th Air Force). It flew 27 missions during the war, including one on August 15, 1945, the very last official day of the war. It stayed in service in the new Air Force until finally being retired in 1957. Lockheed-Martin and Air Force volunteers restored it to a displayable condition, before being dedicated as a permanent memorial to both the Bell workers that build the B-29 and air crewmen that flew them in 1994.
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