Memphis Belle

On the assembly floor of Boeing's Plant 2 in Seattle, on a hot June day in 1942, B-17F serial 41-24485 rolled out the door alongside hundreds of others on the line. The B-17F was the first truly mass-produced Fortress — a frameless plexiglas nose, paddle-blade propellers, racks for external bombs, and the same four Wright Cyclone engines that gave the airplane its growl. By the war's end, Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed-Vega together would produce 12,731 of them. This particular one was unremarkable. It became famous because of who flew her.

In September 1942 a young Asheville, North Carolina pilot named Robert K. Morgan accepted command of 41-24485 at Bangor, Maine, and named her for his fiancée, Margaret Polk of Memphis. The script lettering went onto both sides of the forward fuselage. The pin-up — a swimsuited brunette beside a yellow telephone, adapted from a George Petty gatefold in Esquire — followed. The crew flew her across the North Atlantic ferry route to England in October. Their assigned home was RAF Bassingbourn, a permanent prewar RAF station in Cambridgeshire — the most comfortable airfield in the 8th Air Force, with brick barracks and central heating, a small mercy that meant nothing once you were over the Channel at 25,000 feet in an unpressurized airplane at twenty below zero.

Morgan and his crew flew their first combat mission on November 7, 1942, against the U-boat pens at Brest, France. They were ten men strapped into a thin aluminum tube full of fuel and bombs. Pilot, copilot, bombardier in the nose, navigator at the chart table, flight engineer up in the top turret, radio operator in the radio room, ball turret gunner curled into a 38-inch sphere beneath the fuselage, two waist gunners shoulder to shoulder at the open windows, and a tail gunner crouched in the stinger at the back. They wore electrically heated suits that often failed. Frostbite was common. So were anoxia, flak, fighters, and fire.

Daylight precision bombing was an American doctrine the British had told them was impossible. The British had tried it at the start of the war, lost the bombers, and switched to night area bombing of cities. The Americans believed the Norden bombsight, the 11-gun Fortress, and tight defensive formations could put bombs on factories from four miles up in broad daylight. They were partly right and partly wrong. The bombs hit. So did the Luftwaffe. In the first eighteen months of the daylight campaign the 8th Air Force lost more men than the U.S. Marine Corps lost in the entire Pacific war.

The Belle's twenty-five missions ran from November 1942 to May 1943. Wilhelmshaven on January 27, 1943 — the first 8th Air Force raid on Germany itself, the moment the war came home. Bremen. Lorient. Saint-Nazaire — the U-boat base they called "Flak City," where the German antiaircraft guns were so heavy and so accurate that the standard joke was you could get out and walk on the bursts. Antwerp. Kiel. Lille. The Renault works at Le Havre. On most missions she came home with damage. Holes. Engines shot out. Hydraulics severed. The crew kept patching her, the ground crew kept welding her, and the Belle kept flying.

Twenty-five was the magic number. Crews who completed twenty-five combat missions were rotated home. Until somebody did it, statistically nobody was supposed to. The math was straightforward: average loss rate per mission times twenty-five equaled more than 100 percent. Twenty-five missions was the rotation point at which a heavy-bomber crewman, on paper, was already dead.

On May 17, 1943, after the run on Lorient, the Memphis Belle and Morgan's crew completed their twenty-five-mission tour. She was not the first B-17 to reach that number — Hell's Angels of the 303rd Bomb Group had done it four days earlier — but the Belle became the first heavy bomber returned to the United States after completing twenty-five combat missions over Europe. President Roosevelt had been watching. The crew, with the airplane, was sent home for a war-bond tour — thirty-two American cities, thousands of handshakes, paid speeches, parade routes, photographs in front of the nose art with mayors and movie stars and small children.

William Wyler, the Hollywood director who had volunteered for the Army Air Forces, had been filming the Belle and other 91st Bomb Group aircraft on combat missions through that spring with three handheld 16mm Technicolor cameras. Wyler flew the missions himself, twice losing cameramen to enemy fire. The film he edited together — *The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress*, released in April 1944 — was the first major American war documentary in color, narrated in plain straightforward English by an unseen voice. It is still in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. It made the Belle the most famous airplane of the war.

The Belle herself never went back to combat. After the bond tour she was used briefly for training, then sent into storage. After the war she was rescued from a salvage yard outside Memphis by city officials who recognized what she was, displayed outdoors for decades, slowly weathering, before being moved indoors in the late 1980s. The U.S. Air Force eventually took her back. After a thirteen-year restoration at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, she was unveiled to the public on May 17, 2018 — seventy-five years to the day after the twenty-fifth mission. She stands there now in a permanent climate-controlled display, the pin-up still on her nose, the twenty-five mission marks still stenciled below the cockpit, the Triangle-A still red on her tail.

Robert Morgan returned to combat in the Pacific in 1944, flying *Dauntless Dotty*, the lead B-29 on the first Tokyo raid of November 24, 1944. He flew commercial charter after the war, married four times, raised a family in Asheville, and remained close to the surviving members of his crew until his death in May 2004. He is buried in Asheville. The Memphis girl he had named the airplane for — Margaret Polk — never married him. The engagement ended quietly during the bond tour. He spoke about her warmly for the rest of his life.