Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force
Georgia
A few miles from here, just outside Savannah, sits the only museum in the world dedicated entirely to the Eighth Air Force, the American bomber command that flew out of England and carried the air war into Nazi Germany. The connection to Savannah is not incidental. The Eighth Air Force was organized right here, at what was then Hunter Field, on January twenty-eighth, nineteen forty-two, seven weeks after Pearl Harbor.
By the time the war in Europe ended in nineteen forty-five, the Eighth had become the largest single air command in American history. At its peak it comprised forty bomber groups and fifteen fighter groups. Its aircraft, primarily B-seventeen Flying Fortresses and B-twenty-four Liberators, flew tens of thousands of missions over occupied Europe, targeting oil refineries, rail yards, factories, and submarine pens. The losses were catastrophic.
The worst single day came on October fourteenth, nineteen forty-three, a mission to the ball-bearing factories at Schweinfurt, Germany that crews called Black Thursday. Two hundred and ninety-one B-seventeens took off. Sixty were shot down over Germany, seventeen more were so badly damaged they were scrapped when they landed, and another hundred and twenty-one returned with varying degrees of battle damage. Six hundred and fifty men were lost in a single afternoon. Only about thirteen planes came back undamaged, about four and a half percent of the attacking force. The Eighth Air Force suspended deep penetration raids into Germany for four months after that day.
Over the course of the war, roughly forty-seven thousand men from the Eighth Air Force were killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. More than twenty-six thousand died. The museum holds their stories: mission briefing rooms, nose art, leather flight jackets, letters home, and a B-seventeen named the City of Savannah, the five-thousandth aircraft processed through Hunter Field, now being painstakingly restored inside the museum's hangar. It is the only place that tells this story whole.
