Ramp Tramp first entered Soviet territory while returning from a raid in Manchuria. Jarrell’s crew experienced electrical system problems and were saddled with a radio that would receive but not transmit, so Jarrell headed toward Vladivostok, where he naively assumed that he and his crew would be allowed to fly home as soon as the bomber could be repaired and refueled. Like many U.S. airmen, he thought the Soviets, then allies in the war against Germany, would welcome him and his crew.

But Vladivostok proved to be hostile territory. Ever since Edward York landed his B-25 at Vladivostok after the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in April 1942, all U.S. aircraft penetrating Soviet airspace in the Far East had been confiscated. After landing in Vladivostok, Jarrell never saw the airplane again. He and his crew members joined other interned airmen in a camp in central Asia, where they remained for months, prior to being repatriated through Iran.

The Soviet decision to retain the American B-29s reflected one of Stalin’s wartime priorities: the maintenance of a tenuous peace with Japan. Moscow could ill afford a war on two fronts with Axis powers. When Jarrell’s crew landed at Vladivostok in the summer of 1944, the Red Army was still engaged in a titanic struggle with Nazi Germany. Stalin feared that any overt cooperation with the United States in the Pacific War would be viewed by Tokyo as a military provocation, and the poorly defended Soviet garrison at Vladivostok was in easy reach of Japanese armies in Korea and Manchuria. Stalin would not enter the war against Japan until he could do it on his own terms, and not until August 1945, after the defeat of Germany.

During 1944 and 1945 deep differences and conflicting interests began to surface among the Allies, and these would shape the character of the war. Washington quietly acquiesced to the confiscation of the B-29s and kept the matter under wraps. There was no concerted diplomatic effort to gain their return, as maintaining cordial relations with Moscow was a high priority for the United States throughout World War II. The War Department even asked returning interned airmen to keep silent about their sojourn in the Soviet Union. Ramp Tramp landed in Vladivostok at the very time in the war when friction between the Soviets and the Allies first emerged.

Also note that the fuselage width of the Tu-95, and later derivatives, is exactly the same as the B-29. Many other attributes and design details are either carried over or scaled up from Tu-4/B-29 heritage. The ultimate extrapolation of the B-29 was not the B-52 — that was a clean sheet of paper design — but the Bear.

Soviet internal security must have really sucked. That’s a long escape route. Losing one crew, maybe a coincidence. Losing three, that screams incompetence. Uncle Joe would not be pleased.

It couldn’t happen today. The escaping crews would be instantly spotted by a screaming Isegora, an unblinking eye that misses nothing.