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During World War II the Martin B-26 Marauder was considered a 'hot' ship - high-powered, unforgiving and risky to fly. But in spite of unflattering nicknames like 'Widowmaker' and 'Flying Coffin', the Marauder was not as dangerous as was widely believed. In fact, it was a potent warplane - a silvery sleek bullet of a medium bomber which could carry a respectable bombload and outrun the opposition.

The Martin Marauder went straight into production, the first aircraft to fly being a service model and not a prototype. It made an immediate impact, rumour giving the new medium bomber an (exaggerated) top speed of almost 600 km/h (370mph), faster than most fighters then in service. Its engines were in streamlined nacelles underslung from a shoulder-mounted wing, enhancing the image of the Marauder as a silvery 'Flying Torpedo'.

Although employed to good effect for conventional and torpedo bombing, the Marauder never made its mark in the Pacific theatre where the more conventional, less challenging B-25 Mitchell was preffered.

In Europe the story was very different, with B-26s joining US squadrons in 1942. The initial deployment by the 319th Bomb Group was trouble-plagued. The Marauder landed at 210 km/h (130 mph) and could betray an unskilled pilot. But the B-26 soon made its mark over the continent, proving to be a rugged, accurate and extremely hard-hitting tactical weapon.

Although the Marauder did not make its first flight until Nov. 25, 1940, its design showed such promise that the Air Corps ordered 1,131 B-26s in September 1940. The B-26 began flying combat missions in the Southwest Pacific in the spring of 1942, but most were subsequently assigned to Europe and the Mediterranean.

Bombing from medium altitudes of 10,000 to 15,000 feet, the Marauder had the lowest loss rate of any Allied bomber -- less than one-half of one percent. U.S., British, Free French, Australian, South African and Canadian aircrews all flew the B-26 in combat. By the end of World War II, B-26 crews had flown more than 110,000 sorties and had dropped 150,000 tons of bombs.

In 1945, when B-26 production was halted, 5,266 had been built. The Marauder on display was flown in combat by the Free French during the final months of WWII. It was obtained from the Air France airline's training school near Paris in June 1965. It is painted as a 9th Air Force B-26B assigned to the 387th Bomb Group in 1945.

Some of the twenty variants of this aircraft included the B-26A (increased added fuel capacity, externally mounted torpedo, system revisions and heavier armament, of which 139 were built); the B-26B (bigger engines, armament revisions and better armor protection, a 6-foot increase in wing span, taller vertical tail and more armament, of which 1,883 were built); the B26-F (improved take-off performance and equipment changes, of which 300 were built); and the JM-1 (one of several designations for US Navy models of the Marauder, used mainly for training of shipboard anti-air crews and photo-reconnaissance.)

Martin built 5,288 of them. First used in the Pacific in 1942, they also fought in the Mediterranean Theater and in Northern Europe. Powerplant was two Pratt & Whitney R-2800s of 2,000 horsepower each - on an aircraft with a reputation as a crew killer, one of the most reliable reciprocating engines ever built.

The reputation of the B-26 for crashing right and left was mostly a myth, but the aircraft could be demanding: Its 150 mile per hour speed on a short final approach was intimidating to pilots who were accustomed to slower speeds, and whenever they slowed down below what the approach speed the manual stated, the aircraft would stall and crash.

Vining, born in 1925, “had an ambition to fly the biggest thing available” and was told that at 135 pounds he didn’t weigh enough to pilot the B-17 Flying Fortress. “You have to wonder what they were thinking, because it took ten times as much muscle to handle the B-26,” he said.

Marauder Man
“I learned that in its early days the B-26 produced more than its share of problems, but the real reason for its poor reputation was inexperienced instructors. And, the B-26 may have gone to war prematurely. It did well in the Pacific. It had a few defects: the Curtiss Electric propeller would run away. They never changed the propeller. They just worked out the details. As for the instructors, they beefed up and expanded the training program - which was never as bad as people thought - and it improved.

“My first B-26 training base was Dodge City, Kan. I really was depressed going out to Dodge City. I got there and found the base closed for a week because of a blizzard. They were running low on aviation fuel. So we climbed aboard a Marauder and flew to Amarillo, Texas to pick up some fuel and that was my orientation flight in the B-26.

“The instructor showed me everything you’d heard the plane couldn’t do: You couldn’t stall it, you were doomed if you lost an engine (we landed on one engine with that load of gasoline). That experience was like a religious conversion.

“There were two transition bases: Dodge City and Del Rio (by then, MacDill Field in Tampa had transitioned to B-17 training). We practiced single-engine procedures while under the hood on an instrument flight; they didn’t do that at Del Rio.

“We got aboard the B-26 by climbing up through the nose wheel well. The guys in back climbed into waist windows. You had to be acrobatic: they didn’t have ladders for the waist openings. You could move back and forth inside the aircraft. The crew consisted of pilot, co-pilot, bombardier and three gunners, one a radioman, one an engineer, one an armorer.

“Starting engines we had a guy on the ground with a fire extinguisher staying on alert in case of fire. He would signal the pilot to start the prop. You started with the left engine, the no. 1 engine. We started each combat mission knowing exactly when we were expected to taxi out; you had to be in the right place at the right time because we took off in 20-second intervals. You got up and got into a formation and headed out.

“We had to fly with no heat because the heaters were built around the exhaust stacks and if those got hit you’d have carbon monoxide inside the plane. We were not pressurized. We did not have oxygen even though we sometimes flew at 12,000 or 13,000 feet. They simply figured we didn’t need it.

“We could fly a combat mission at around 315 miles per hour, which made us a difficult target for an enemy fighter. One name for the B-26 that wasn’t so derogatory was ‘The Flying Torpedo,’ based on its shape.”

Vining, who was wounded when shot down by a German jet, said that the interior of the Marauder “was a mix of ‘new car smell’ combined with ‘hot metal smell;’ it’s difficult to describe.”
Despite a superb war record, most Marauders were put out to pasture once the fighting ended. When the newly-independent Air Force changed some aircraft terms in June 1948, it took one step which has sown confusion ever since. With the last Marauder gone, the service re-assigned the B-26 appellation to a different plane, the Douglas A-26 Invader - which remained in service under the B-26 designation well into the 1960s. Both aircraft with the B-26 nomenclature enjoyed distinguished careers, but over the years the Marauder has become the less recognized of the two.

“The thing that’s easy to overlook is that we were relatively comfortable in an aircraft where we had enough room to turn around, stretch, and loosen up our bodies once in awhile. A full and robust crew was just what we needed in the challenging environment in Europe. And, yes, the Marauder was a grand old lady in another way. She could sustain damage and bring you home. The one time mine didn’t, it was shot to pieces from one end to the other.”