Martin B-26 Marauder

The restoration at Udvar-Hazy is, in its quiet way, a monument to them as much as anyone.

The Martin B-26 Marauder never got the cultural recognition the B-17 Flying Fortress got.

The B-17 had the publicity machine.

It had Hollywood.

Attacks launched from Midway Island itself against the Japanese fleet accomplished essentially nothing and cost a significant number of aircraft.

B-26 Marauders, Brewster Buffaloes, older Vindicator dive bombers all pressed in against experienced fighter cover and heavy anti-aircraft fire.

They were brave attacks, they were ineffective, then the carrier-based torpedo bomber squadrons went in.

Three separate attacks staggered in time from different directions.

And when we say dangerous, we mean these women were essentially the guinea pigs for aviation tech.

They flew everything from B-26 Marauders to B-29 Superfortresses.

Planes the male pilots were literally refusing to fly because they thought they were widow makers.

So ironic and damn straight.

Check them out at AviationSoul.com. To understand why flak bait matters, you have to understand the airplane it flew in.

The Martin B-26 Marauder did not have an easy beginning.

The Glenn L. Martin Company designed it to an Army specification that valued speed above almost everything else.

What they produced was a medium bomber with serious horsepower, two Pratt and Whitney R-2800 engines, each putting out close to 2,000 horsepower, a cruise speed around 250 miles per hour, which made it one of the fastest medium bombers of the early war years.

More than 1,000 patches, each won the record of a mission where something hit this airplane, and this airplane refused to go down.

This is Flakbait, serial number 41-31773, a Martin B-26 Marauder, and it flew 202 combat missions over occupied Europe, more than any other American aircraft in the entire European theater of operations.

Not the most for a heavy bomber.

Not the most for a fighter.

The Smithsonian has made it a public-facing project.

Visitors stand at the viewing windows and watch professional restoration specialists work on artifacts that in some cases are the only surviving example of a type that once flew by the thousands.

Flak bait is one of only a handful of Martin B-26 Marauders to have survived to the present day.

Nearly 5,000 were built over the production run.

She sits there among other aircraft of her era.

a North American B-25 Mitchell, a Martin B-26 Marauder, fighters and transports and trainers from the period.

You can walk underneath her and look up at that swept wing and those four radials and understand physically what it meant to fly one of these things.

She is not small, she is formidable, and she is complete.

She has over 1,000 individual holes in her skin, patched and repatched by crew chiefs working by flashlight in French mud, in English rain, in the dark hours before the next morning's briefing.

Her name is Flack Bait, and she is a Martin B-26 Marauder, and she flew 202 combat missions, more than any other American aircraft in the Second World War.

I'm Tail Dragger, and this is The Hangar on Radio Hangar.

Before we get into this story, a quick word from today's sponsor.

The goal is not airworthiness but full structural integrity and historical fidelity.

When you look at her, you will be looking at a real airplane that was really there.

Now, the Martin B-26 Marauder is a rare bird in the surviving aircraft world.

Production of the B-26 ran from 1941 to 1945, and Martin built just over 5,000 of them.

There was serious talk of canceling the whole program and melting the airplanes down.

And Into That Reputation, in the spring of 1943, rolls a brand new B-26 off the Martin Line, serial number ending in 45357.

She gets assigned to the 449th Bomb Squadron of the 322nd Bomb Group.

Now there's a tradition in this business.

The mismatched paint, the places where the aluminum was beaten back into shape by a 19-year-old kid who just wanted his airplane to fly one more day.

If you strip all that off and make her shiny and new, you have erased the very thing that makes her flak bait.

You'd have a pretty B-26, you would not have her.

So the restoration became something more like archaeology.