The B-17 Project Update

After about a year of fleshing out the idea and getting some interest, the WWII B-17 bomber sculpture concept reached a new point with UW lending me a small work/studio in the old metal shop to start building the large model for the sculpture, which will alone require some time to prepare: A nice leap of faith considering I am brand new to working with metal, let alone the elements of engineering.

For those new to this, the sculpture idea is to reproduce a WWII formation of 200-300 Boeing B-17 bombers "flying" four stories up over the somewhat neo-gothic School of Art building courtyard on the main campus at UW. The 3-4" planes will be designed to look they are being seen at altitude and at distance. Elements include using the original complex geometries of the aerial formation, towers which support the structure, sound, shadow and freestanding parts. If eventually approved and built it would be about 135 feet long, held up partly by the interlocking contrails, made of wire, exhausting from each bombers four engines.

It's taken a while to secure the necessary workspace, so in a few weeks its off to the studio to develop the model - I expect a lot of frustration and problems, but I've had a lot of offers of help. This model is the key to the project and I have a fairly clear idea of what I want it to look like, but lots of detailed fiddling remains. It has structural issues somewhat similar to aircraft or bridge design, and I plan to hit up the very UW aeronautical engineering school that helped with the design of the original bombers for ideas.

The project idea was reinforced by a chance meeting with a Czech man named Heinrich in his 70's who remembered his village being attacked in the war. We met because we were both admiring a flying B-17 at the Museum of Flight, its huge radial engines idling as we talked about what happened to him as a 12 year old during the war.

This was near the Czechoslovakian border with Lichtenstein, Germany, in 1944. The target was a munitions plant right over a hill in his village. He remembered two streams of silver bombers, winking in a perfect blue sky, hundreds of them, stretching from horizon to horizon, all headed essentially for him. He remembered the sound, a thundering, huge sound coming from every direction.

Suffering under the Nazi regime, which had murdered members of his family, and being 12, he was excited and cheered the Allied bombers on. He remembered his mother, who had also lost friends to Allied bombing raids, looking up at the vast streams of aircraft, each with 6000 lbs of bombs headed straight for her, looking up and saying:

"The Americans' planes are so much prettier than the Germans'."

When the bombs fell, "they sounded like logs rolling off a truck, again and again."

The effect I want in the piece is related to this image - the power, the salvation, the destruction, the intense moral complexity. And this thin, garrulous, jolly old gentleman provided me with an image of a fascist that I think will last forever: a huge, brutal Gestapo officer had collared him for finding a gallon of gas for the family car. He described watching the crew-cut officer, in the trademark high hat, sucking on a rotten tooth, the horrible smell unforgettable over 65 years.

It was a living metaphor of fascism, the rot inside the bully.

The construction and deployment of these bombers changed the world more than anything else Seattle has done- and the massive destruction and death they unleashed, and which their crews suffered, helped defeat the most evil regime in human history. Odd to think that Seattle, Washington flattened many of the major cities of both Europe and Asia.

It also set up a dangerous habit of technological, militarist solutions to political problems - a point the old Czech fellow, a former missile maker who had lived through Hitler and the Soviets and worked with a few unrepentant former Nazis making missles for the U.S. in Denver, emphasized.

I also learned from Henrich that my own obession with the B-17 was shared - its humanistic beauty as an object was not merely a romantic haze around a brutal war, but perceivable: the B-17 as a pure form is almost feminine in it's extensive, elegant, intersecting curves. It is a ship full of men with a shared, dark and difficult mission. It looks like righteous vengence, which I think, on balance, it was.

It's technologically brillant follower, the B-29, sleek and seamless, appears like a refined weapon of mass death. Which it was. The B-29 probably killed more human beings than anything else the United States ever produced, a very direct result of Seattle's ingenuity. The strategic bombing campaign of WWII is at once among the best and worst things America has ever done.

A side note: the Frye Art Museum in Seattle was a direct result of the fiery 1943 crash of a B-29 prototype into the Frye meat-packing plant- the resulting settlement and rebuild resulted eventually in the museum. This project might be the cap on the other end of time.