Road Trip, National Air Force Museum Part IV, The Memphis Belle

       When I was a very young man I watched "Twelve O'Clock High" with the precise reliability of the sunrise. It was a TV show about B-17 bombers crews flying missions over Germany during WW2. To my young mind it was live footage shot over enemy territory. My father had to explain that it was actors and only some of the flying scenes were real. He found the movie by the same name one Saturday afternoon and we watched it together. He explained that the "Twenty-Five missions" meant that crews could go home afterwards because the job was so dangerous that very few survived to take that twenty-fifth trip. 

         Some time later we watched the Memphis Belle documentary about the first crew to make it a full tour. My young mind was overawed at the bravery of men who could face that sort of danger; there no place to hide in those big slow-moving birds, you simply had to fight and win, or go down in flames. So, when I came face to face with this legendary aircraft, I was humbled and awed. This was the vessel that faithfully carried those unassuming heroes safely through the chaos and hazards of war.

 

the aircraft has been lovingly restored, 

I doubt that she ever looked this good while in service!

 

the aircraft is absolutely festooned with machine guns

 

the aircraft is surrounded with informational displays,

 but my battery was already fading so I didn't get to take photos of them all 

I will return

 

the point of it all , getting those doors open over the target

 

to me this is absolutely terrifying, 

crawl into this glass bubble and dangle below a bomber with a massive machine gun on either side of your head, with no protection beyond a quarter inch of plexiglass and a sky full of enemy fighters gunning for you, escape in the event of getting shot down nearly zero, where did they find heroes like that?"

 

bomb bay interior

 

the top turret, only slightly less claustrophobic than the belly turret

             The sobering thought that this was the first B-17 to complete twenty-five missions took a fair bit of the excitement out of seeing it in person. Each of the hundreds of planes that went down before making it to twenty-five missions carried a crew of ten young men, most of them not even in their twenties. A terrible price to pay for complacently allowing Hitler to rise to power. Many more would also fall before the war ended.