Liberty Foundation offers a trip back in time
The engines belched and sputtered to life under the cloudless noon sky, oozing their boiling, black oil onto the runway, and veiling the aircraft in white smoke as the propellers stirred.
An electric energy pulsed from the cockpit back to the wings and into the air, drifting over to the edge of the Olive Branch airfield, where 20 onlookers waited for the Liberty Foundation (LF) weekend airshow to begin. A chaotic thwack, thud, bang orchestra of the four motors transformed into a robust, rhythmic buzz as the 69-year-old warbird known as the Movie Memphis Belle emerged from the curtain of exhaust and readied for another adventure.
For a moment, time moved in reverse, harkening back to scenes of another bomb run out of Bassingbourn, England, where the Eight Air Force and the crew of the original Memphis Belle B-17F “Flying Fortress” departed for many of their historic World War II missions.
For the slightest of seconds, you could feel the 10-man crew of Captain Robert Morgan’s Belle crawling around the belly of the beast, arming their .50-caliber machine guns, stowing their flak jackets, and double-checking their oxygen masks for what would become their 25th and final bomb run of May 17, 1943.
As the landing gear inched forward and the brakes screamed loose on the Mississippi runway, the airshow crowd was transported back to 2014. The mission set for this October morning carried nine paying customers, two volunteer pilots, and a crew chief on a 25-minute sightseeing expedition.
“That is about to be one hell of a ride for those guys,” said TSgt Daniel Shin, an Air Force veteran and military aircraft buff, who continues his service in the Air National Guard on modern cargo planes like the C-17. “That’s a piece of history they’re on right now.”
The LF tours 50 cities a year across the country with the plane “to honor our veterans and educate young and old on how the aviators of a past generation sacrificed everything for freedom,” said Dave Lyon, a volunteer pilot for the nonprofit organization. Lyon served in the Air Force as a pilot before moving on to civilian life in Georgia and getting the highly coveted offer to fly the Movie Memphis Belle.
“I try to make it to at least one city every month with the foundation,” he said, “but we have guys who volunteer from all over the place, including a guy serving as a fighter pilot in Afghanistan right now.”
Two histories collide
Much like Lyon, who never flew a combat mission, the Movie Memphis Belle never experienced the action of its namesake. Having been built in 1945 after the war ended, the B-17 served its country in other transport capacities in Germany during the Korean War, and later functioned as a fire suppression tanker in California during the 1970s.
In 1982, Dave Talichet, a veteran pilot-turned-entrepreneur, bought the plane and restored it to look exactly like the WWII bombers he had flown with the 100th Bomb Group.
Then, in 1989, Talichet loaned the plane to filmmaker Michael Caton-Jones for his movie portrayal of the original crew of the Memphis Belle and their story as the first airmen to complete 25 combat missions, earning them the right to go home.
The 1990 film – starring Matthew Modine, John Lithgow, and Eric Stoltz – offered audiences the story of an injured crew, often conflicted about the mission, and barely limping home on busted engines and failed landing gear.
Scott Maher, media relations and operations manager of the Liberty Foundation, relayed the reality of the last mission: “That was all Hollywood. It was pretty much a routine bomb run on a German submarine plant.”
“The plane was shot up a bit,” said Maher, “and Morgan and his boys landed back in England without a scratch…but that doesn’t make what they accomplished any less heroic or honorable.”
After returning to the U.S., the Belle and some of her crew worked the war bond effort before the mayor of Memphis, Walter Chandler, purchased the aircraft for $350 in 1946.
Exposed to the elements for decades at the National Guard armory and Mud Island, the plane deteriorated into a rusted home for pigeons and a dilapidated treasure-trove for vandals until the National Museum of the United States Air Force purchased it in 2004 and began its ongoing restoration efforts in Dayton, Ohio.
Talichet loaned his movie-star replica to the Liberty Foundation around this time, christening it with the current moniker, and keeping the same paint scheme of the original, all the way down to the color dress of the pin-up girl on either side of the nose. The girl represented Capt. Morgan’s sweetheart from Memphis, for whom he nicknamed the plane.
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“One side was blue to represent her angelic side,” Lyon conveyed to tourists as they lined up around the plane, “and the other dress was red to show her passionate, loving side.”
Lyon and his crew flew four excursions with nine passengers over the Olive Branch airport on Saturday morning. Each ticket cost $450, aiding the expenses of keeping the B-17 replica operational, which amount to $4,500 per flight-hour. In the afternoon, Maher and Lyon kept the mobile museum – one of only 13 airworthy Flying Fortresses in the world – grounded to allow free tours of the inside.
Over one hundred visitors climbed the ladder into the nose of the plane, ducking and navigating the narrow compartments of the cockpit and engineer bay, walking the plank of a six-inch-wide board through the bomb bay, and exiting past the radio and gunner sections in the middle.
“You have to be a tiny, tiny guy to not go crazy or get a concussion in that place,” TSgt Shin said, marveling at the cramped spaces airmen of WWII would have conducted their heroic missions in.
“I’ve been in some tight spots, but how they did it in those conditions…is beyond me.”
Outside the aircraft, groups huddled for pictures and gathered around the pilots and volunteers narrating their experiences and sharing their knowledge of the bomber. A handful circled around one man in particular. Dick Eiseman, a 90-year-old combat veteran and former B-17 crewmember, recounted his experiences mid-flight to the media earlier in the week, but came back for another visit on Saturday.
As much younger tourists stumbled cautiously like toddlers with uncertain legs beneath them, Eiseman weaved through the twists and turns of the tail section and radio compartment with the grace of a seasoned pro, knowing exactly where to step and grab and balance as if it were 1943 again and he had a job to do. “I love talking about the memories,” Eiseman told his small audience, “because it’s important to keep the history alive.”
The Liberty Foundation continues that tradition in Columbus and Albany, Georgia, before the replica of the Memphis Belle is put to bed for the winter, resting up for the next opportunity to take America back in time.
Stock photo of "The Movie Memphis Belle," courtesy of the Liberty Foundation.
