Skip to main content

So, about that B-26


Historical museums can be many things. In some instances, they're collections of great stuff. Artifacts, I guess, would be the more appropriate term. Historical museums can also be more deliberate in teaching about an event, which sometimes compromises the sheer amount of stuff that they can exhibit. We're seeing examples of both types of museums on our trip. Yesterday, there was a particular artifact that I found quite fascinating. 

What first drew me to World War II was the aircraft of that war. I've moved on to find other aspects of the war more fascinating (for me now, the most interesting involves the diplomacy of the war), but aviation remains the old passion that every once in a while reignites. This happens when I get to see an aircraft I've read about but never saw before. Yesterday I saw just such a plane, the B-26 Marauder on display at the Utah Beach Museum. 

If you ask nicely, sometimes you don't have to settle for a selfie. 

The tail gun position. A student with me speculated that it was an electrical gunnery port. 

A full view from the front, left corner. 

The waist gun positions. I'm trying to figure out if these were anti-aircraft guns or for land use. 
The B-26 strikes me as a gorgeous plane. It looks somewhat modern to me, more so than the boxier B-25. The B-25 gets a lot more attention as a plane from World War II even though the B-26 flew many, many more sorties in the war. B-26s played an enormous role in the Normandy landings, handling much of the pre-landing bombardments near Utah Beach. It was a somewhat hard plane to handle on take-offs and landings, but its performance in the air was more nimble than most medium bombers. 

A trip like this affords me the chance to linger around an artifact like this, and I lingered for quite a while. I anticipated that much of the other artifacts in the museum would be artifacts I had seen before (I was largely correct). I also had the chance to be near this aircraft with one of the students on the trip, Dylan, who knew a great deal about the aircraft. Dylan's fallen hero is an airman who served as a tail gunner on a downed B-26. He died several weeks after D-Day. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Those whom we honored (the final eulogies)

The chapel interior at Luxembourg American Cemetery. Most of us on the trip completed research for soldiers buried at Luxembourg American Cemetery. It's situated right outside of Luxembourg City and it receives a good number of visitors every year. The fact that General George Patton is buried there has something to do with their high visitorship. In fact, the initial attempt to bury him along with the soldiers failed when the foot traffic to his grave wore out the grass. Patton's grave now sits by itself near the top of the hill at the cemetery, near the chapel and tablets of the missing. Suzy's soldier. Six of us delivered eulogies that day: five teachers and Kaat. When I had the chance to listen to students' eulogies back in 2017, I was struck by how something of each student's character worked itself into the story they told. I still get a bit of a sense of that with eulogies delivered by teachers. However, the element that works itself more powerfull

Some Thoughts on Liberation

One of the markers placed by the French and Belgian governments to mark the path of the liberators.  My greatest takeaway from this most recent trip involves some refined feelings about liberation. I'm writing this post in a time of high cynicism. And the were matters of which one could be cynical back in 1944, the year in which Charlie fought and died. This trip, however, left me with renewed appreciation for what our country did back in that war, helping me refocus on what I've had the chance to see and do the past few years. Christopher is the military historian who accompanied us on this voyage. In one of our webinars this spring, he made an offhand reference to a piece of scholarship about the Holocaust he said was worth reading. It's entitled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It's heavy. I can't say I read every chapter. But I read most of it on our bus rides this summer. And I'm glad I did. My unassigned reading. Saying that Bloo

Eulogizing Charlie

By Charlie's graveside in Luxembourg.  You may find the eulogy I wrote for Charlie interesting. I have it copied here. The marker by which we stand today identifies Staff Sergeant Charles F. Simcox, Jr., as a hero who gave his life in service to our nation. Before entering the service, his family knew him as Charlie. To this day they keep the memory of Charlie, or Uncle Charlie, alive. Many of the members of this closely-knit group still live near West Chester, Pennsylvania, where Simcox grew up. They have not grown apart in the decades of peace and prosperity that Simcox’s service and sacrifice made possible.    Something that I wanted to convey, but that seemed very difficult to convey, was the joyous and warm sense of his family. When I reached out to them this winter, they were more than happy to meet with me. I felt like something of a guest of honor. And so many of them came out to meet me that I lost track of who was who. A warmly receptive family isn't a