The Boeing B-17

Creating a legend and building a mystique

The B-17 was for years my favorite aircraft—before ever I saw the movie Twelve O'Clock High, I was hooked by the lumbering grace of the big, awkward bird in flight. The film was written by Bernie Lay and Sy Bartlett, who served as B-17 squadron officers during World War II; both achieved Hollywood success as Academy Award-winning screenwriters.

Visually, the aircraft was imposing. It was the largest plane flying when hostilities began in Europe. It was ear-shattering to a generation not familiar with massive piston engines or their noises. It bristled with guns. It was, historically, a "BIG" deal—the first four-engine ever purchased by the military. It had a rudder/vertical stabilizer (tail) unlike anything I'd ever seen. To a boy growing up with narrow-winged swept-back commercial jetliners, the B-17's very stable airfoil (the wing) was not only massive but intimidating.

On of the few remaining Flying Fortresses, a B-17g, taxis at air show.

Boeing's heavy bomber, nicknamed the Flying Fortress, was conceived privately and its designers embarked on a long, rough sales process. They essentially gambled the company's future against the lone prototype, at a time when the American public wanted to end the Monroe Doctrine's concept of defending the world against aggressors.

When the only model crashed and burned at Patterson Field in Ohio, through a human error, the XB-17 was almost rejected by short-sighted Army leaders. Still, the aircraft became the single most widely produced aircraft ever. It was "born" in a time of extreme need—both for Boeing and the United States. And it justified itself in ways even its staunchest supporters could never imagine.

One theory of war-making suggests that winning international conflicts requires thoroughly demoralizing the hostile's civilian population in hopes they will rise and demand peace of their own leaders. If so, the B-17 was the most effective weapon ever conceived. It brought thunder and destruction to the most impenetrable places in the German war machine, in 100-mile-long streams of massed aircraft at altitudes as high as 35,000 feet, and forced such widespread evacuation of the populous that life simply became unliveable in its wake.

These altitudes were also nearly unliveable for the crews in the unpressured cabins and fuselages. Traveling at up to 250 miles per hour with wind-chills in excess of  -150º, the crews were forced to take extreme measures for survival, including electrically heated flight suits (yes, there were injuries from short circuits), and oxygen systems—which were shot to pieces at inopportune moments, or which caused hypoxia and led crew members to behave strangely. For the most part, the B-17s were fitted with untried, constantly evolving technology and, surprisingly, it usually worked very well.

I recently learned something about the Flying Fortress—though it could absorb considerable punishment and keep flying, it scared other pilots. The NACA 0012 airfoil, which provided amazing stability even at the normal bombing altitudes of 30,000 to 35,000 feet, was an airborne hog; it consumed lift much needed by other nearby aircraft. Add those four 1,000 horsepower Wright "Cyclone" radial piston engines turning 17-foot-diameter variable-pitch propellers, and the B-17 became an aerial menace to its own defenders.

In The Mighty Eighth, Gerald Astor's history of the B-17-equipped 8th Air Force, he cites several instances where other pilots complained of the turbulence—or "prop wash"—caused by Forts. Pilots of the smaller attack fighters were wary of grouped B-17s even though they flew for the specific purpose of protecting the heavy bombers. Bombs were blown off target after being released from the bombers. And even other B-17 pilots recognized their compatriots ahead would cause later arrivers a bumpy ride through the target zones.

Another war-weary B-17 survivor flies past the reviewing stand at an air show.

As Luftwaffe aces slashed entire bomber groups to staggered remnants, more new American-made aircraft were always ready to be flung into the battle against Nazi fascism and the horror of Hitler's master race vision. Yet, every B-17 lost meant 10 highly trained air crew lost as well—killed-in-action (KIA) or captured by the Germans after bailing out at the last possible moment.

American Army high command generals were keenly aware of this, as they used the massed bombers (and their massive losses) to conduct not only military but concentrated public relations campaigns against the enemy.

And gradually the skies over occupied Europe were won back, through sheer numbers, by the long-range B-17s and their cousins, the almost equal Consolidated B-24 Liberator (slightly faster at high altitude but not as sure-footed or reliable).

Although not as well known, as the Forts, there were also B-25 and B-26 medium-range bombers flying sorties in Europe, as well as the P-47 and P-51 fighter escorts (which were the best kept secrets of the war—fighter pilots were not allowed to crashland their Thunderbolts or Mustangs for fear the Germans would capture one and find out its weak points).

The Luftwaffe was never a match for Allied air superiority, though in 1942 and 1943, it wasn't immediately obvious. By late 1944, there was no longer any doubt—even once critical Winston Churchill was convinced that hundreds of American B-17s, doing daylight precision bombing against select industrial and military targets and nearby civilian populations, were the workhorses that propelled England, the United States, and the French, Belgian, and Dutch undergrounds to victory in the trenches and towns.

The B-17 went through nine major model changes and countless lessor revisions—primarily in response to what the air crews learned in savage air-to-air combat with German Messerschmitt 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s. The B-17G, shown at top, with its remotely operated chin turret and plexiglass sealed waistgun ports, was finally designed to withstand the vicious frontal attacks which cost the Eighth Air Force so many earlier Forts. Other models were hurriedly retrofitted with these innovations, as the Eighth struck repeatedly with daily (and sometimes twice daily) raids into the Reich's heartland.

The US Army Air Corp, having admirably acquited itself in the line of duty during World War II, was designated a separate branch of the military—the "official" United States Air Force in 1948. Though the B-17 was at the time being decommissioned in huge batches, its Boeing-built successor, the B-29 "Superfortress" filled a national defense readiness role developed, tested in combat, and perfected by the B-17 crews of the Eighth and Ninth Air Forces.

When in the mid-1950s, Life Magazine photographed nearly 3,000 decommissioned B-17s stored still ready-to-use in the Arizona desert at Kingman, they captured on film just 2/5ths of the total 1942-45 output of Flying Fortresses built directly by overextended Boeing plants in Seattle and Wichita or under government mandated license by Lockheed and Vega. To the camera lens, they all looked identical, shimmering silver in the summer sun.

The Flying Fortresses at Kingman, in row after even row from foot to horizon, comprised a snapshot of American industrial prosperity and a mass production "machine" capable of meeting the demands of the sudden and massive war materiel effort.

Less than 10 years later, on the eve of the Beatles-led musical "invasion" of the United States, there were fewer than 200 B-17s left. Now there are but a handful, lovingly restored or carefully preserved unrestored. They became quickly extinct by the same hand that dealt destruction to the railroad steam locomotive—mass air transit fostered by the onset of the commercial jet liner developed by the very company which escaped ruin through the success of its B-17.

In other words, the Flying Fortresses, by their very success, sowed the seeds of not only their own demise but also that of an entire transportation ecosystem which flourished at their "birth."

There's another fine bit of irony in the B-17 story. Lt. Colonel Frank Kurtz piloted a B-17a in the Phillipines. It was a model with an abruptly squared-off rudder, not the gently curved fin of the d through g models. His crew thought the plane was so seriously deficient in appearance they named it "Alexander the Swoose"—ungainly ugly goose on the ground and magnificent swan in flight. There was no denying the aircraft's ability to take combat punishment and yet fly back to base—Kurtz stated in his autobiography that Alexander saved his life a number of times.

At war's end, Kurtz named his newborn daughter Swoozie, after the B-17 (preserved at the Smithsonian Institution). Swoozie Kurtz, like Lay and Bartlett, went on to a successful screen, stage, and television career, starring in such films as Dangerous Liaisons, Bright Lights, Big City, The World According to Garp, and The Rules of Attraction, and the soap opera Sisters. She earned a Tony award in 1986 for The House of Blue Leaves.

Once again, all those threads in my life have neatly crossed.

Bibliography:

Book

Ambrose, Stephen. 2001. The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster; Touchstone edition.

Astor, Gerald. 1997. The Mighty Eighth: The Air War in Europe As Told by the Men Who Fought It. New York, N.Y: Dutton Books.

Bowman, Martin. 1998. B-17 Flying Fortress. Marlborough, Wiltshire, England: Crowood Press.

Bowman, Martin. 1984. Castles in the air: The story of the B-17 Flying Fortress crews of the US 8th Air Force. Wellingborough, England: Patrick Stephens.

Bowman, Martin. 1998. Consolidated B-24 Liberator. Marlborough, Wiltshire, England: Crowood Press Ltd.

Brownstein, Herbert S. 1993. The Swoose: Odyssey of a B-17. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Caidin, Martin. 2001. The B-17: The Flying Forts. New York, NY: I Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Jablonski, Edward. 1965. Flying Fortress. Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday.

Lay, Bernie & Bartlett, Sy (Seymour). 1947. Twelve O'Clock High. Out of print.

Perret, Geoffrey. 1997 (Reprint). Winged Victory: The Army Air Forces in World War II. Garden City, N.Y: Random House.

White, William Lindsay. 1943. Queens Die Proudly. New York: Harcourt Brace and CO.

Periodical

Life Magazine. Undated 1950s. New York, NY: Time-Life, Inc.

Motion picture/Television

King, Henry, Director, Lay, Bernie & Bartlett, Sy, Screenwriters, Zanuck, Darryl, Producer. Twelve O'Clock High. 1949. Los Angeles, CA: Twentieth Century-Fox.

Martin, Quinn, Producer. 1964-1967. Twelve O'Clock High. Los Angeles, CA: QM Productions.

Website

B-17 Flying Fortress. 2003.

Welcome to the Official Home of Sisters. 2004.