Restoration of Memphis Belle B-17F is nearly complete
Not since it was dropping bombs on Nazi-occupied Europe has the Memphis Belle looked so authentically war-ready.
After a nearly 13-year restoration project so detailed the exact typefaces of decals were duplicated, the famed B-17F bomber this month was moved from a work hangar to a World War II exhibition gallery of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Ohio.
It will be kept under wraps and off-limits to the public, however, until an extravagant threeday unveiling and ribbon-cutting celebration is held in May on the 75th anniversary of the Belle’s final mission.
“It’s probably a once-in-alifetime event,” said Rob Bardua, spokesman for the museum, which is located at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton.
The May 17-19 celebration will feature two other Flying Fortresses and other World War II aircraft. In addition, more than 130 re-enactors will perform wartime skits and showcase their memorabilia. Vintage vehicles and artifacts will be displayed, and visitors will hear music from the era. Also, both Memphis Belle films (1944 and 1990 versions) will be shown in the Air Force Museum Theatre.
Museum officials expect huge crowds, including international visitors, for the unveiling and ribbon-cutting. Bardua said a special effort will be made to attract Memphians to celebrate the plane carrying their city’s name, with a billboard on Interstate 240 near Lamar scheduled to advertise the event beginning April 2.
In the weeks before the unveiling, minor restoration work — most of it on the plane’s interior — will continue, Bardua said.
In a local event, the Memphis Belle Memorial Association will host a cocktail reception on April 14 for volunteers who spent hundreds of hours working on the plane. Guests from across the country and Great Britain are expected.
The Memphis Belle is considered one of the most iconic aircraft in U.S. history.
During the grim early years of World War II, when American heavy bombers suffered staggering losses conducting daytime raids against Axis targets, the Belle was one of the first B-17s to complete 25 missions.
It shot down at least eight German fighters and dropped 60 tons of bombs, and, despite having engines shot out and getting its tail nearly blown off, no crew member suffered serious injury.
Following its final mission on May 17, 1943, the Belle returned to the U.S. and attracted huge crowds as it made a triumphal, morale-boosting tour to sell war bonds.
After the war, the plane languished at an Oklahoma air base, ready to be scrapped, when the city of Memphis bought it from the government for $350.
In 1946, the Belle was flown back to what was then Municipal Airport, where the plane stayed for four years. It then was moved to a site at the armory on Central — now the location of the Children’s Museum of Memphis — where souvenir-hunters and vandals exacted a significant toll. The bomber was sent back to the airport area in 1977 to undergo repair and restoration work.
The city by then had turned the plane over to the Air Force museum, which loaned it to the newly chartered Memphis Belle Memorial Association under an agreement setting terms under which the bomber could stay in Memphis.
In 1987, a canopied exhibit site funded through public donations was dedicated on Mud Island, where the plane remained until being moved to a former Navy facility in Millington in 2003. Volunteer technicians and aircraft mechanics worked on the plane there.
But after efforts to raise funds for a permanent, climatecontrolled site failed, the MBMA contacted the Air Force museum to have the Belle moved to Dayton in 2005.
Since then, museum technicians and volunteers have worked to have every detail match the plane’s condition at the end of its service. That includes the painstaking hand-stitching of cotton onto the horizontal stabilizer and the reproduction of the specially designed metal fabric clips holding it to the frame.
The Belle, however, will never again be rated as airworthy, museum officials said.
Bardua said he didn’t have any figures on how much the restoration cost or on the number of hours devoted to the project.
Jerry Klein, spokesman for the MBMA, said members of the group visited the aircraft last fall.
“It’s a knockout,” Klein said. “The amount of time that they spent on the little details … is just amazing to me.”