Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force
The Museum of the Mighty 8th is a wonderful surprise, located as it is amid strip shopping centers and motels in Pooler, Georgia, around the corner from Savannah. The Eighth Air Force was established as the Eighth Air Force Bomber Command soon after Pearl Harbor and activated first at Langley Field, Virginia on February 1, 1942 before its reassignment to Savannah Army Air Base in Georgia ten days later. Because of the Command’s Georgia heritage, this museum found its home outside Savannah. But given the caliber of this beautifully-curated homage to the flyers of World War Two, it would have fit right in on the National Mall alongside the Smithsonian galleries.
American bomber crews moved into Royal Air Force bases across British East Anglia in early 1942 and initial raids over occupied Europe began that July. Regular combat operations began a month later. B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators made daylight bombing runs, hitting marshaling yards just over the Channel in France—“milk runs,” the crews called them because these were comparatively quick sorties—as well as strategic targets deeper inside the Reich—oil fields and ball bearing factories needed to keep the German war machine going. My father was shot down on a bombing run to Merseberg, Germany in July 1944, soon after D-Day. In War Bonds, I borrow from Dad’s story, as it was he, not the fictional Sergeant Al Balducci, Junior, who joked about holding the record for the shortest length of evasion from the enemy. Dad described escaping his burning plane and parachuting through the sky, with German soldiers training their rifles on him as he floated to Earth. They pulled him to his feet and marched him to their command post. After several days of interrogation, (he was a wing commander so they pressed him for information) the Luftwaffe came and picked him up, then deposited him in Sagan, Poland, at Stalag-Luft III.
1st Lt Floyd Mason Crew (left to right)
Standing: George Morgan - BOM, Richard Lambiotte - CP,
William Dishion - NAV and Floyd Mason - Pilot
Kneeling: Ralph Ellsworth - TTE, Charles Levee - WG, Frankie Tarr, Donald Stoll - ROG, George Westlake - BTG
and James E. Eubanks - WG.
Inside the museum, you’ll see a mock up of that prison camp, which highlights how the POWs built and used a radio throughout their internment. Every exhibit is outstanding, and every guide shares deep, accurate, detail-filled anecdotes—many that come from veterans and their families who’ve visited the museum and shared their own stories. Because of my dad’s service, we were allowed to tour inside the Spirit of Savannah, a B-17G undergoing complete restoration onsite. It is narrower and far more spartan than I imagined. To balance the plane’s weight on takeoff, the crew of ten crammed into the radioman’s small vestibule, the deadly bombs they would soon drop plainly visible just a few feet in front of them, immediately behind the cockpit. There weren’t seats with seatbelts or room for the crew to stand up straight in that vestibule; they simply huddled into a small space, and hung on as the plane took off and gained altitude. On the short range missions, the B-17 could carry 8000 pounds of bombs; on longer missions, the bomb load was 4500 pounds. The entire set-up seemed sort of stitched-together and precarious to me, beyond the many perils awaiting a crew on a typical 12-hour mission. Our guide pointed out that the two waist gunner positions were first installed directly across the fuselage from each other. But as they spun their M-2 Browning machine guns to shoot, they kept bumping into each other so later iterations of the B-17 offset the guns’ placement. He also said there were times when the bomb bay doors opened, but a bomb failed to drop. So it was up to the radioman, or the bombardier-navigator to give it a little kick to dislodge it and let gravity do its work. Surely there were times, said our guide, when the bomb exploded before it cleared the aircraft.
The B-17 Flying Fortress City of Savannah is in the process of a full restoration to combat configuration, including operational systems. This B-17G was brought in from the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and was flown on combat missions between 1942-1945.
In War Bonds, Jack’s observations about life on the base are taken from my father’s recollections. As the crews sat for a meal together before a mission, they were acutely aware that some among them would not be there the next time the dinner bell rang. And still, they pressed on, climbing into their bombers each time their crews jostled them awake to say, “Time to get up, Lieutenant. Mission today.”
If you have the opportunity to visit the Museum of the Mighty Eighth, don’t miss it. From the pre-flight briefing through the mock-up of a home that served as a rescue station for downed pilots, this is an interactive and worthy tribute to the bomber crews who helped win the war.
