Restoration: The Memphis Belle
For this famous B-17, surviving 25 missions in World War II was the easy part.
- By Mark Bernstein
- Air & Space magazine, November 2008
Two years ago, Roger Deere traveled to an eastern Ohio coal town, where he visited a four-room Sears pre-fabricated house whose ceiling bowed down from the weight of all the stuff in the attic. The homeowner had died; a relative poking through the accumulation had run across something he thought might be of interest to Deere. Along with everything else, the attic contained the radio equipment for a B-17 bomber.
Deere did not ask how radio equipment got into the attic. He did not want an explanation; he wanted the equipment.
In time, it will be placed in the Memphis Belle, a Boeing B-17F Flying Fortress now being restored at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio, where Deere is the chief of the restoration division.
During World War II, the U.S. Army Air Forces required heavy-bomber crews to complete 25 missions before they could go home. In 1943, having flown over France, Belgium, and Germany, the Memphis Belle crew became one of the first to reach that goal. After returning to the States in June 1943, the bomber and many of its crew served as the centerpiece of a 31-city War Bonds tour. Academy Award-winning director William Wyler documented the Belle’s service in a 41-minute color film (Europe.
The bomber retains its fame today. Those too young to remember it from the war may know its story from the fictionalized 1990 movie Memphis Belle, or from the B-17 (used in that movie) that now tours airshows in Belle markings.
The real Belle owes its present-day survival to a combination of romance and civic pride. In 1946, it was sitting with hundreds of other B-17s in Altus, Oklahoma, ready to be chopped up for scrap. A newspaper reporter learned of its fate and told Memphis mayor Walter Chandler; Chandler bought the B-17, originally costing $314,000, for the $350 salvage price as a way to honor the city’s namesake (“Memphis Belle” is a tribute to resident Margaret Polk, the pilot’s girlfriend). But after six decades, local groups concluded they could not raise the funds to complete a needed restoration. In 2004, the Air Force announced plans to relocate the aircraft to its national museum and finish restoring it.
The next year, two convoys trucked the disassembled aircraft to the cluttered World War II-era hangars that now house the restoration effort. When, five or more years from now, the work is complete, the museum will permanently display the Belle to visitors.
In 25 missions the Memphis Belle had its tail splintered, five engines shot out, and its body pocked with hundreds of holes from German flak. The worst damage, however, came in peacetime: Vandals made off with almost everything not fastened down; “Sometimes they pried things off the walls,” says Deere. The Belle is now missing most of the interior: the pilot, copilot, and navigator seats, the control yokes, and much more.
Finding replacements is difficult. While the United States built 13,700 B-17s, fewer than 100 remain. “There are structural parts we’re never going to find unless somebody runs across a B-17 sitting out in a field somewhere,” Deere says.