National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force

Just outside Savannah in Pooler, Georgia, a museum honors the Eighth Air Force, the unit that flew heavy bombers from England against Nazi Germany beginning in nineteen forty-two. The Eighth suffered catastrophic losses: more than twenty-six thousand airmen killed in action and nearly twenty-eight thousand taken prisoner, more casualties than any other numbered American military unit. On a single disastrous mission to Schweinfurt in October nineteen forty-three, sixty bombers and six hundred men were lost in one afternoon.

The museum holds restored B-Seventeen and B-Twenty-Four bombers, a chapel of remembrance, and a research library. It opened in nineteen ninety-six near Savannah, where the Eighth Air Force was first organized in January of nineteen forty-two.