Repost From Commments; The Front on the B-17

Under the Wing of a B-17G at Boeing Field, June 2008.

The Front put a lot of effort into this comment on the post - also it contains praise for my project, which is yet in the FIMO stage- so I'm reposting it proper with some additional commentary.


"The effect I want in the piece is related to this image - the power, the salvation, the destruction, the intense moral complexity."

Here are some reflections on the perfect formulation quoted above:

1) It was beautiful, especially when contrasted with the insectoid German aircraft. I suggest you depict the B-17G (introduced in January 1944) which was delivered with a natural silver finish.

2) It killed a lot of people.

3) Its killing was neither random nor precise - it discriminated, but only to a limited degree, between people who were keeping the German war machine in high gear and everyone else. It had a great bombsight, the best of its day, yet bombs still landed on churches, schools, and hospitals.

- I wanted to note here that in my limited reading, this is I think true, and much to the credit of the American commanders as opposed the the British. For the early part of the campaign, the commanders and crews tried to avoid civilian targets. But late in the war, as radar became available, as Curtis LeMay gained sway, the Norden bombsight skills were left behind, and by the time the B-29 hit Japan, precision bombing was replaced by mass destruction. Note the points below.

4) The terror was not asymmetrical (this is a critical contrast with the B-29, which slaughtered with impunity). A lot of people died in the B-17, and the crews lived in fear. Gregory Peck explains ("you're already dead") here.

5) It came by day. It was not widely used in night raids. Again, a sharp contrast with the RAF's less-accurate, less-dangerous (to be in) night bombers.

6) As impressive as a single B-17 might be, it was a member of a horde - late in the war, an endless stream of angel-monsters originating over the horizon. The B-17 is best seen not as a discrete entity, any more than a single ant is a discrete entity. Their interlocking defensive fields of fire made them profoundly interdependent, especially in the gory pre-P-51 days.

It is these interlocking fields of fire - the fascinating 3-d geometry of arranging the formations, comparable to line of battle arrangements in the naval wars of sail, that provide much of the aesthetic for what I have in mind. A common loss rate for the B-17 was 6% to 10% per raid at one point , and if one fell out of formation, it was curtains. This is more or less what happened to my uncle's plane.

The Front for Dr X is absolutely right - the B-17 cannot be understood as a single entity any more than a sloop of war during Trafalgar. And 95% of the work of the sculpture, if approved, would be making these formations work in metal wire across a 150 foot span.

As the war went on, the horde got bigger, sort of like a Necromancer's horde in Heroes of Might & Magic. As the Wikipedia article on the 8th Air Force points out: "On 7 April, Eighth Air Force dispatched thirty-two B-17 and B-24 groups and fourteen Mustang groups (the sheer numbers of attacking Allied aircraft were so large in 1945 that they were now counted by the group) to targets in the small area of Germany still controlled by the Nazis..."

Stalin reputedly said: "quantity has a quality all its own."

And nothing the Germans could do, no matter how heroic or insane (and the German operations were often richly imbued with both characteristics), could stop them. From the Wikipedia article:

"The next day [March 3, 1945], the largest formation of German jets ever seen made attacks on Eighth Air Force bomber formations over Dresden and the oil targets at Essen, shooting down a total of three bombers."

7) Some planes are strongly identified with the victory phase of the war (the P-51, the Hellcat), and others are strongly identified with the ugly early years (the Devastator torpedo bomber, the Brewster Buffalo). The B-17 was in service through the entire conflict, and as such participated both in unequivocal victories, and horrific defeats.

8) From the German perspective, the B-17 can be seen as a severe ideological challenge. The Germans spent an inordinate amount of time trying to look scary ("have you looked at our caps recently? ...they have skulls on them..."). They put a siren on the Stuka to scare the people it didn't kill.

(B-17 G Boeing Field, June 2008.)

Very nice, but the B-17 wasn't designed to look scary, it was designed to work. It was really good at carrying a bunch of bombs to an oil refinery and dropping them on it. This was sort of a kneecapping for the "my vision is reality" delusions of the Nazi leadership.

(As I wrote that last sentence I thought of "shock and awe" and "the reality-based community". Hmmm.)

The B-17 made bullshit walk. It was radically materialistic and annihilated ideology. It was a big, shiny, loud, clumsy, deadly fact. And the Germans had no answer for it.

Kudos for the phrase "annihilated ideology." This is the nut of the American form of anti-fascism.

This picture of scrapped B-17s awaiting salvage also seems relevant.

My Dad, stationed as a meterologist in Frankfurt in early 1946, remembered seeing the B-17s lined up like this, for sale at $100 each. People bought them and drained the remaining gas to supply the gray market.

Good luck with this project. It is awesome.