An historic artifact of the Memphis Belle once pried out of the cockpit and made part of a cocktail table is now back where it originally began: A part of the iconic World War II B-17F bomber under restoration at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.
At a ceremony in a restoration hangar Friday, the pilot’s control panel was reattached to a cockpit instrument panel, a donation from the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force near Savannah, Ga.
“I never had a doubt that the panel belonged on this airplane and we had no intention of keeping that panel at our museum,” said Henry Skipper, president and CEO of the Mighty Eighth museum. “An historic artifact like that and a great airplane like that belong together.”
The restoration of the Memphis Belle started in 2005 at Wright-Patterson with nearly 60 Air Force museum staff members and volunteers meticulously working by hand to rebuild the plane.
The Memphis Belle gained fame when the Army Air Forces bomber crew flew on a nationwide war bond tour in 1943 to mark the Boeing-built four-engine plane’s survival of 25 combat missions over Europe without losing a single crewman. The bomber’s iconic status flew to loftier heights in a 1944 wartime documentary and a 1990 Hollywood production named after the plane.
“It is a symbol of something that is larger than the engines and metal that make up the aircraft, and it’s important as a symbol that is much larger than the individuals who served in the aircraft during World War II,” said Jeff Duford, an Air Force museum curator and project manager of the restoration.
“ … It was a symbol of the promise of eventual victory to the American public,” he said, “… and remains an ever-lasting symbol of those thousands of airmen who served in Europe and the Mediterranean and the 30,000 who did not come back.”
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