|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Memphis Belle
| Article
# : |
20284 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
2,520 Words |
| Author
: |
John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
|
At first she was just "No. 485."
Fifty years ago, July 2,1942, she came off the Seattle Boeing assemble line. Full nomenclature: B-17-F-10B0-3170, serial number 41-24485. Cost: $314,109. Before the end of her two-year tour of duty in the skies over England, France, Holland, and Germany, the B-17 bomber would cover herself with glory and acquire a more romantic name: the Memphis Belle.
The B-17s were arguably the best planes of World War II. Some experts rate them higher than the B-24s, the P-38s, and the P-51 fighters. Dubbed "flying fortresses" by a news writer in 1937, these four-engine planes were the most maneuverable and heavily armed planes of their size ever built. Their seven .50-caliber machine-gun positions could deliver an awesome firepower. They could fly at an average speed of 265 miles per hour and at altitudes above 25,000 feet. Despite heavy punishment from flak batteries and attacking Messerschmidts and Focke Wulf 190s, the flying fortresses could hang on to deliver a bomb payload in excess of two tons.
This most famous B-17 of the war was named after a Memphis girl named Margaret Polk, a whose romance with the Belle's dashing pilot, Bob Morgan, became one of the most celebrated love stories of the war. The Belle was the first to safely complete twenty-five missions and the first to return safely to America. She shot down eight Nazi fighters without losing a single member of her ten-man crew. Neither flak nor shell holes nor the loss of nine engines and a tail could keep her down. And although nearly six thousand B-17s were shot down during the war, the Belle always came back. On her last mission, on May 17, 1943, the king and queen of England turned out to honor her safe return.
Movie audiences in America got to know the Belle through a highly successful documentary, The Memphis Belle, shot in Technicolor in 1943 by Hollywood filmmaker William Wyler. He took his 16mm cameras aboard the plane and gave viewers a never-before-seen pilot's eye view of aerial combat, and not without some cost to himself. His daughter Catherine remembers how flying in the B-17s affected her father during the shooting of the 1943 documentary. "My father suffered form something many of the crew had problems with--hearing loss. He flew those missions near the engines for hours at a time. He was forty when he worked on the documentary, and he went totally deaf about three weeks afterward. The haring never came back in one ear and only partially in the
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
