National Museum Of The Mighty 8th Air Force, 1

It would hardly be Christmas without a visit to the local military/war museum, right? So Saturday, after packing up and taking Rachel to the airport, Vicki and I carried on to Savannah's National Museum of the Mighty 8th Air Force, I touring the museum and she waiting patiently in the car. We'd driven past the museum on I-95 numerous times, wondering why it was in Savannah and not in, say, the UK. Well, the 8th was formed in Savannah in 1942, and the rest is history. Great history. Great museum, too.

Entrance to the museum

Very ample interpretive stuff throughout

Click to enlarge and read about the early history of the 8th

Helpful model of a WWII airfield in Britain; we've visited quite a few
over the years, including Duxford, the greatest of them museum-wise

Aptly named...the Brits insisted on night-time bombing, wherein the bombs
often landed in the right county, although the planes and crews more often
returned; the 8th suffered horrendous losses, especially early on, but they
hit their strategically-important targets... 

Pride of the museum, the "City of Savannah," B-17G

This what they meant by "strategic"...the Schweinfurt ball-bearings
plant produced virtually all the ball-bearings used in the German war
effort; knocking it out was hugely costly in planes and crews...but it
was done

The American heavies in Europe...the B-17 and the B24...
were neither pressurized nor heated...so, despite what Hollywood
portrayed, crews had to wear every ounce of clothing they owned,
and keep connected to the oxygen supply every minute over 10,000
feet...which was most of the multi-hour flights

You can't go in the "City of Savannah"--the B-17 actually
was not a large airplane compared with its successors--but the
museum has created slices of the fuselage for closer views

Though the B-17 is the icon of the 8th Air Force, its show horse, the B-24
was its work horse, flying more combat missions than the B-17 and B-29
combined...JFYI 

Read Stephen Ambrose's Wild Blue Yonder to learn more of the B-24 and
its crews...not least, one George McGovern

At Duxford, in 2009, we got to see the Sallie B in flight and up close;
what a privilege! She may well be last flying B-17