Old bomber doors provide shade at Saguaro National Park

Aug 22, 2023

Ronald Beckwith, staff archaeologist at Saguaro National Park, stands near the bomb bay doors at Saguaro National Park East on July 29.

A B-29 Superfortress on Tinian, the Pacific island from which the missions were launched in August 1945 to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A Boeing B-29 Superfortress with its bomb bay doors open.

A Boeing B-29 Superfortress in flight with its bomb bay doors open.

You've heard of beating swords into plowshares, but what about turning bombers into picnic shelters?

The east side of Saguaro National Park is home to some unusual shade structures built in 1954 from the bomb bay doors of World War II-era military aircraft.

The shaded picnic area is covered by bomb bay doors at Saguaro National Park East on July 29.

Six ramadas at the Javelina Picnic Area in the park’s Rincon Mountain District are made from the aluminum doors, which once hung from the bellies of Boeing B-29 Superfortess bombers like the ones that dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

“You don’t expect to see bomber parts in a national park,” said Ronald Beckwith, staff archaeologist at Saguaro. “Someone had quite the imagination to turn these into roofs.”

There are four small shelters with three doors each, one longer structure with five doors and a large group site at the center of the picnic area with a gabled roof made from eight doors lashed to a metal frame.

The 25 doors — each roughly 14 feet long, 3 feet wide and still studded with rivets and mounting brackets — came from at least seven different B-29s, though their exact origin remains a mystery.

Beckwith has tried to trace the doors back to the aircraft they came from, but he doesn’t have a lot to go on. He’s found a few part numbers here and there, but no aircraft serial numbers.

A plate still mounted to one of the doors identifies it as a B-29 part made by Briggs Manufacturing Company, a Detroit-based company that switched from making car bodies for Ford and Chrysler to cranking out airplane parts during World War II.

Except for some paint and an occasional realignment, not much has been done to the bomber ramadas over the years. “We haven’t had any of them fall apart yet,” said Beckwith, who has worked at Saguaro for 13 years. “They’ve held up pretty well.”

He wrote a historical brief for the Park Service about the picnic shelters in 2016, but so far he has not been able to determine who decided to build them out of surplus airplane parts or why.

Scott Marchand, CEO of the Pima Air & Space Museum, said park employees in the 1950s were probably just being frugal.

The repurposing of military airplanes and their parts was “not that uncommon” in Arizona and elsewhere back then, he said. People built barns, horse corrals and other enclosures out of such surplus material, as equipment was taken out of service following World War II and other conflicts.

“It was cheaper than going and buying corrugated steel,” Marchand said.

Beckwith said there has been some grumbling over the years from a few park employees who think the bomb-bay-door shelters are unsightly and inappropriate for a national park. Luckily, he said, such criticism hasn’t caught on.

“I’m a history buff, of course. I would hate to see them disappear,” Beckwith said. “I would strongly argue against that.”

When it entered service in 1944, Boeing’s Superfortress was one of the most technologically advanced aircraft in the world, with a range of more than 3,250 miles, an operational ceiling of almost 32,000 feet, gun turrets that could be operated by remote control and a pressurized cabin for its 11-man crew.

Some 3,970 B-29s were built between 1943 and 1946, when production ended.

The Superfortress flew bombing missions over Europe, Asia and the Pacific during World War II, then saw action during the Korean War. The aircraft was also converted for use on anti-submarine patrols, weather reconnaissance flights and as an in-flight-refueling tanker.

The last Superfortress squadron was retired in 1960.

Only one or two B-29s still fly and fewer than two dozen have been preserved intact, including history’s two most famous Superfortresses, Enola Gay and Bockscar, which dropped the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945.

The collection at the Pima Air & Space Museum includes a B-29 nicknamed "Sentimental Journey,” which was assigned to the island of Guam in April 1945 and completed 30 combat missions during the last four months of the war in the Pacific.

Marchand isn’t surprised that Beckwith has struggled to trace the bomb bay doors at the Javelina Picnic Area back to their original airplanes. It’s “pretty unlikely” that a door would be stamped with the serial number of the bomber it came from, he said, and hundreds of B-29s ended up in Tucson for decommissioning after World War II and Korea.

“This is where things came for storage and disposition,” he said. “A lot of it was just sold as scrap to scrap dealers around the region. Nobody was super sentimental about this stuff.”

As far as Marchand is concerned, it’s “perfectly natural” for some of that surplus metal to have ended up at Saguaro National Park, where an idea born out of pragmatism and probably cheapness almost 70 years ago now stands as an unintended tribute to Tucson’s post-World-War II boom and its status as the world’s largest airplane boneyard.

Think of it as a 20th century spin on that well-known phrase from the Old Testament. “It’s swords into plowshares, right?” Marchand said.

Contact reporter Henry Brean at [email protected] or 573-4283. On Twitter: @RefriedBrean

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