They're the best in the business, individually and as a team, but they look up to you. You take a big deep breath. "Well, you may get moved out again, too," fumed the General, who then bowed to the realities. Please try again. "Black Jack" Pershing stoutly declared that the battleship, not the airplane, would remain the great bulwark of national defense. The final subjugation of Imperial Japan by nuclear explosion was two years away. I have watched the movie "The Memphis Belle" and finally, became curious enough to want more information on the B-17 bomber and its crew. Our commander, Col. Stanley Wray, took on the task of scouting out that replacement site, and when he beheld the baronial splendors of Bassingbourn he acted with dazzling dispatch. Your wheels are on the tarmac. For he was the first to do it. You've brought your crew back safe. Through that fall and winterthe bulk of the Belle's careera mission at peak force might amount to some 90 planes. Within another four years, American F-86 Sabrejets were battling it out against Russian-made MiG-15s over Korea. No such grandiose thoughts were on my mind as I left Interrogation after an hour or so of debriefing and headed thankfully to my quarters at Bassingbourn, the 91st Bomber Group's base fifty miles north of London. Even the missions we crewmen of the Eighth Air Force had been flying over Europe these past six months were but a prelude, an opening phase. The size and strength of the Eighth were still increasing in those months, and the great massed missions were still to comethe famous "Little Blitz Week" of July 1943, when it struck at sixteen industrial targets; the buildup to twenty-two bombardment groups in the British Isles by the end of that year; the 600-bomber run of January 1944; the formations of 1,000 and then 2,000 planes shortly afterward. You've heard of their Seattle-based companyBoeing. We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Gen. Henry C. Huglin, USAF, Ret. Morgan was a … Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. This was shocking heresy to the Army and Navy establishments. Over it all was the constant grim prospect of a sudden helpless spiraling descent to violent death that was simply beyond the range of experience available to most people who had ever lived. In military terms, America then was in the final stages of its ancient history. My thoughts were personal, and they clustered around a simple, yet gigantic fact: twenty-four missions down, one more mission to go. They say that most great works of science and music and literature get produced at the beginning of an epoch, before the rules have been set in stone and all the tricks and secrets of the process have been studied and analyzed and made apparent for any fool to see. Sure enough, by the advent of World War I a decade later, both sides had managed to throw several thousand machinegun-armed monoplanes, biplanes and triplanes, even some multi-engine bombers, into the European skiesGerman and British planes mostly with some French and Italian planes mixed in, Fokkers going up against Sopwith Camels. Unable to add item to List. Now the other planes come droning in, some of them shot up and wobbling over on one wing, their pilots fighting for control with their yokes and rudders. Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. The most influential was Billy Mitchell. But in May of 1943, to tell the truth, I was essentially a serial number, and proud of it. Within a few short years they perfected a prototype design that would soon help save Western civilization from Fascist tyranny. Strategists had started speculating about the combat uses of flying machines almost before Wilbur and Orville Wright had stripped off their goggles at Kitty Hawk in my home state in 1903. As a unit, thoughwell, that was something different. The Memphis Belle signifies the hope and inspriartions of many of the WW2 bomber crews. "Without the B-17," the General said, "we might have lost the war.". She was a Stradivarius of an airplane, a masterpiece of balance and range and response and survivability in combat. That's a British base! Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site. and thenif they were ableto watch those parachutes blossom through the smoke. Ratings and Reviews. Lots of details and history before the Belle and lots more history after including flying B29's over Tokyo. One more morning when you won't wake up dead. The book tells the story of the captain, Robert Morgan, and his adventures in life. As a unit I have to confess that we raised a little hell. And just what do you think you're doing flying a B-17 bomber in the middle of World War II? to various redfaced colonels and majors who wanted to chew me out about not bothering to wear my uniform cap, or about my incurable taste for buzzing airstrips and swanky beaches where the top brass were having their cocktail parties. Prime members enjoy FREE Delivery and exclusive access to music, movies, TV shows, original audio series, and Kindle books. My family and closest pals back in North Carolina used to call me Bobby, at least until I told them to stop. Yes it is, but not necessarily for the accounts of combat missions flown by Robert Morgan, pilot of the famed Memphis Belle, the first B-17 of the 8th Air Force to successfully complete 25 missions, and memoralized by William Wyler's photography and, in 1990, by a movie. You sit there. 60-0504) from 357th Tactical Fighter Squadron of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing based at Takhli Royal Thai Air Base during the Vietnam War was named Memphis Belle II in honor of the original B-17F. In those 25 harrowing missions, Morgan never lost a crew member. It had belonged to some members of the British aristocracy, but when the American Eighth Bomber Command began to spread itself across the English countryside in early 1942, the lines between British aristocracy and Allied military began to blur pretty quickly. What matters is that you're down out of the sky. Free shipping . The first of the Eighth's B-17s had touched down on British soil less than a year earlier, in July 1942. I mean it was something that took us over when we first came together as a bunch of young strangers and began our training, and that had us firmly in its spell by the time we took off on our first mission to Brest, France, on November 7, 1942, and that continued to grow in us on every new sortie afterward, something that melted down our individual personalities and differences of upbringing and education and temperament, something that flowed through us as surely as our voices flowed through our headphones, something that blended all our different skills and duties. There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Our gunners managed to shoot down at least eight of these banshees and probably five others, and damage about a dozen. He would have relished the words of Gen. Carl A. Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces in the British Isles, when the greatest conflagration in history was finally over. I kept asking myself, all that long afternoon and evening and into the nightBob Morgan, who are you anyhow? We’ve both been through a lot since we first met back in 1942, and I’m always amazed at how well she’s held up through it all. A few holes in the right wing, some damage to the underpart of the bomb bay over the targetluckily, Vince Evans, your ice-cool bombardier, had got the bombs away before the flak hit. They say DiMaggio liked to do that in the Yankee clubhouse before a game, just sit there by himself with his cup of coffee. Here we were, ten boys from an America that still relied on horse-drawn ploughs and buttermilk churns, thrust into a kind of warfare that ran on tachometers and super-turbochargers and Norden bombsights and ball-turrets and VHF transmissions. I was Dennis in a 1990 movie made about me and the crew. Audible audio edition in a 1990 movie made about me and the other landmarks of 91st. But it served pretty well as a team, but maybe it was starting... 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