Giants Land in Salem

(SALEM) - Ever heard of the Memphis Belle? How about the Lady Be Good? They sound like girls who have exemplary manners.

But you might not think so if you ever heard them roar at full pitch, and you definitely don't want them to come gunning for you.

The Memphis Belle is a Boeing B-17 that along with her crew was the first `Flying Fortress" to complete her required 25 bombing missions in Europe. The crew and plane were featured in a documentary during the war and again in recent years in a movie of the same name.

The Lady be Good was a B-24 `Liberator" bomber that crashed in the Libyan Desert on the way back from a bombing mission in Italy in 1943. The crew became lost and survived a crash landing, but they weren't found for 16-years. The story inspired the 1970 movie `Sole Survivor"

It is no wonder that these planes and the men who flew them, as well as the women who made them, a.k.a. `Rosy the Riveter," have been the subject of dozens of movies, and hundreds of books and stories.

Now local residents have a unique chance to see a B-17 and a B-24 up close this week at Salem`s McNary Field. They hail from the Collins Foundation and these classic flying pieces of history are available to tour and even take a flight in depending on your taste and pocketbook.

During World War II, the United States was tasked with numerous missions involving long-range airplanes that could drop a whole lot of bombs on a precise target. Believe it or not, these early bomber aircraft were actually equipped with an onboard computer.

It certainly wasn`t a computer like you might imagine today. No Internet, no speakers, not even a liquid display screen. It was called the Norden Bombsight, and without them calculating or "computing" the correct information such as distance, speed, elevation and wind direction, the accuracy of the deadly bombs sailing out of plane`s bomb bay doors would have been off, way off.

When the U.S. entered the war, the British shared their concept of how heavy bomber operations should be conducted; the first rule was that they did it at night. The Germans were no strangers to this logic either.

But the Americans disagreed. They knew daylight would allow more accurate ground fire and flack, from below, but they questioned the ability of an aircrew to effectively drop their bombs on specific military targets when flying at night. It was hard enough to find targets in the daylight for other reasons, the biggest being fog and cloud cover that prevented the bombardiers from gaining any visual sense of where they were.

The Yanks reasoned that flying at 20,000 feet and doing their work in the light of day was the only way to go. It would be bloody, and it was.

The sheer number of Army Air Force men lost in bomber operations is almost unimaginable. Each time a B-17 or a B-24 went down with no parachutes, ten men went with it. Veterans who survived the bombing raids talked about hearing the men screaming across the radio as they plunged to the earth.

The big bombers had a pilot and co-pilot, a navigator and a bombardier. Those were the officers in the plane, usually lieutenants and captains.

A flight engineer kept an eye on the instruments and a lot of other things at the same time. The radio operator maintained contact over the air with other planes.

Other men manned the guns; one in the tail section, two `waist" gunners firing out each side, and the infamous `ball turret" gunner who hung beneath the airplane with the ability to swivel 360 degrees as he followed moving targets, usually German fighter airplanes intent on firing at them simultaneously.

The enlisted crew in American WWII bombers were almost always Sergeants and above in rank, even if they had been in the service for a relatively short time. The reason for this I learned, is that the treatment the Germans were likely to give a sergeant, who is a non-commissioned officer was much better than it was for privates and lower ranks.

The consequences for daylight bombing were severe. Crews would watch planes drop from their formations, often on fire.

German Messerschmidt BF and ME 109 fighters were agile and possessed deadly gunfire as did the German Focke Wulf 190 planes. These were often the hunters, flying in packs to attack the bomber formations, often head to head.

The later arrival of the North American P-51 Mustang fighter turned the tables on the German Air Force or Luftwaffe, as the Mustangs could escort the B-17's and B-24's all the way to where they dropped their bombs, and all the way back.

I became interested in B-17`s during production of the documentary, `Fallen Fortress at Cape Lookout", which aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting in the early 1990`s. Assisted by my wife and Co-Producer Bonnie King, and Director of Photography Dave Pastor of Cannon Beach, three years were devoted to bringing the `sole survivor" of that crash back to the site to talk about his memories of the 200 m.p.h. collision into Cape Lookout that killed nine of his crewmen.

For me, the documentary set into motion a permanent interest in these planes and the men who flew them. Many died; many children and grandchildren were never born. But the sacrifice of these airmen along with the rest of the allied war effort, allowed the destruction of the Third Reich, and the nazi losers who fought ferociously for their fatherland, for all of the wrong reasons.

Now I hear they landed in Salem, and I think I know what I`m doing tomorrow. If nothing else, seeing these WWII `giants" is a rare experience. There are several flying B-17`s in existence, but far less B-24`s. To see them together is indeed a unique historical experience.