Seeing Stars...
Both sides of the nose carried a row of stars.
What were they? Are they accurate? Are they important?
Both sides of the nose of the Memphis Belle carried a ‘scoreboard’ - in the shape of a row of bomb symbols - that denoted the number of missions flown. Above the bomb symbols were a series of yellow and yellow-outlined red stars. Popular belief has it that they were there, supposedly, to show when the aircraft was either the lead ship of the 91st Bomb Group or the lead ship of the entire bombing force on that particular day and certainly was being talked about in that manner during the war bond tour.
But, like everything else associated with the story, it is not quite that simple, for there is the matter of whether they relate to the aircraft, the pilot, or the War Department propaganda booklet, as we shall see!
In theory, the first bomb symbol relates to the first mission it flew - therefore, that date is November 7 1942. Also, from the photograph below, showing the port, or pilot’s side of the aircraft, one is led to believe from the ‘unfinished’ last bomb symbol on the right, that the bombing scoreboard should be read from left to right - or from nose glazing to wing-root. This photograph is dated May 19 and thus can be considered to relate to the successful completion of the last mission the aircraft flew that day. It follows from this evidence, therefore, that the scoreboard refers to the aircraft and not its primary pilot or subsequent Army Air Force propaganda.
The ‘port’ or pilots side ‘scoreboard’ on the nose area of the Memphis Belle, from a photograph that is known to have been taken on May 19th 1943 - the date of the aircraft’s last mission. The stars and their sequence are clearly visible.
Thus the yellow stars, for missions 7, 8, 10, 16, 17, and 19 appear to show that the aircraft was the lead ship for the 91st BG on those raids. The red stars, for missions 11, 12, 13, 15, 18 and 21 should show when the Memphis Belle was the lead ship for the entire force.
Above: The date here is after Mission 23 by the Memphis Belle, the occasion is the visit by Sir Stafford Cripps, the British Leader of the House of Commons in Parliament, seen here with Colonel Wray.
Of more importance is the starboard or copilots side of the aircraft, an enlargement and exposure correction of which shows the ‘scoreboard’ in clear detail. This puts yellows stars at missions 3, 4, 6 , 12, 13 and 15. Red stars appear at 7, 8, 9 , 11, 14 and 17 Compare this with the pictures opposite, taken after the return to the USA - clearly from the position of the ‘stars’, the additional two mission symbols for missions 24 and 25 have been added on the left hand side meaning that it is to be read from right to left.
That immediately takes us into the first of a series of contradictions, for the markings on the pilot's side of the aircraft's nose differ from that on the starboard or co-pilot's side - no matter which way the 'stars' are read! The first thing to do then was to establish which direction this 'scoreboard' should be read.
Photographs here were taken at known dates - one after the 23rd mission and one after the 25th clearly suggest that, by comparing the positions of the additional symbols, the starboard side 'scoreboard' should also be read from nose-glazing to wing-root. The next contradiction is why, by the time the aircraft appeared at Bovingdon, there were now fifteen stars on at least one side of the nose - namely those above missions 23, 24 and 25.
Move forward in time about a month then look at
the picture on the above, taken when the aircraft and
crew were in Memphis TN. It shows Bob Morgan
showing Margaret Polk the mission tally on the
starboard side - there are yellow stars on missions
3, 4, 6, 12, 13 and 15 - no change there at all.
But then there appears to be yellow stars on
missions 23, 24 and 25, even though the propeller
tip almost gets in the way of the last star,
suggesting that for the last three missions the
aircraft was Group Leader.
Now, it could be said that Joe Giambrone, the aircraft Crew Chief was 'late' in painting the stars on the aircraft, but as the picture of the port side shows, he was very up-to-date in painting the bomb symbols on, so why not do the stars at the same time as he already had a wet paintbrush in his hand?
The picture below, taken at Bovingdon, is not the
normal one that gets used, for Bob Morgan has his
back to the camera. Again, the twenty-fifth star is
almost obscured, this time by the shadow of the
propeller blade, but it does show clearly that there
was a star there at this time.
Both these pictures show that the line of swastikas
were applied to the nose area after the the missions
were flown.
There was also the mystery of why the markings were different port and starboard - we decided to investigate the matter further.
One of a series of Mission Summaries for the 91st BG we have in our possession gives the name of the Group Leader for each mission and the tail number of the aircraft he was aboard. Here was a way we could verify the dates and missions to which the Memphis Belle was either Group or formation leader and then see how the stars on the aircraft matched. Within five minutes we realised that we had opened yet another can of worms - not only were the stars different on each side of the aircraft, they certainly did not appear to bear any relationship with the contemporary records!
On the pilots side, the first eight missions all appear correct. The Memphis Belle never led the first six, and on the seventh and eighth, the change of co-pilot's name to that of the Group Leader is consistent with the Mission Summary. This also suggests that it was standard practice at the time for the Group Leader to replace the normal co-pilot aboard the aircraft he was flying in. Mission nine shows a break in the line of stars indicating that the Memphis Belle was not a leader, yet both the Mission Summary and the co-pilot listing suggests that Col Lawrence was Group Leader in the aircraft.
The Mission Summary shows that on January 27 1943 Colonel Stanley Wray was Group Leader aboard the Memphis Belle. Every other record we have suggests that the Mission Summary is in error in this, for according to the 324th BS log and his own flight records, Bob Morgan flew an abortive mission aboard The Great Speckled Bird and the Memphis Belle itself was still undergoing repair at Bassingbourn following the January 23rd mission. One possible solution to this was that the clerk, knowing that Col Wray was flying with Morgan, typed in 41-24485 as being Morgan's regular aircraft, not realising that he was flying a replacement machine.
Missions ten, eleven and twelve show stars, suggesting that the Memphis Belle was at least Group Leader, yet the Mission Summary shows other aircraft in that role. Then on March 8, the 91st BG Mission Summary shows Colonel Wray again as Group Leader aboard the Memphis Belle. That day Bob Morgan was not flying. In the pilot's seat was Captain Gaitley, but after two hours and ten minutes, the aircraft and crew returned to Bassingbourn with #1 engine out - an abortive mission.
From May 12 onwards, the Memphis Belle is mentioned in the 91st BG Mission Summary as being Group Leader's aircraft three more times, but on no occasion was the Group Leader himself sitting in the co-pilot's seat. Had procedures changed by this point and the Leader was effectively flying as an additional crew member?
So, we have photographic evidence showing that on the pilot's side of the aircraft, out of the twenty-five missions that the Memphis Belle flew, the aircraft carried twelve stars on its twenty-fifth mission on May 19 1943. Of those twelve stars, we can find a direct correlation with just four out of a total of eight missions when the Memphis Belle is listed as having the Group Leader on board. However, by the time the aircraft departed for the USA, there appeared to be a further two yellow and one red star painted above the last three missions.
In some respects, the co-pilot's side 'scoreboard' appears to be more accurate; 15 stars, nine yellow, six red.
Of the six red, we directly correlate with five showing the aircraft having the Group Commander on board. However, it was still impossible to make any sense of the yellow stars.
We began to look for other possibilities. We noticed in Morgan's War Department AAF Form 5 Individual Flight Record there is a column marked 'duty' that has space for two letters and then, in the lower left-hand side of the form a 'decode' of what these letters mean. 'P' stood for pilot. 'CP' meant Co-pilot and 'C' was Command Pilot. Could this have any influence on the stars?
Now, the conventional 'difference' between Command Pilot and Pilot is a requirement for the number of hours/missions flown to reach Command Pilot status.This does not match here though, for sometimes he is listed as 'P' and the very next flight he is recorded as 'C', then it's back to 'P' again!
Could the difference be that he had an inexperienced co-pilot on board, and thus warrant the promotion to 'Command Pilot'? That theory did not match with the known facts, for sometime, when Morgan had Jim Verinis in the co-pilot's seat Morgan was a 'P' and on others a 'C'!
We then considered if it could be 'the other way around' in that instead of having an inexperienced member in the co-pilot seat, was there a Squadron, Group or Air Formation Commander on board? This happened in the RAF where a senior officer was on board and was thus ranking officer but nevertheless, the pilot was still in overall charge of the aircraft - or to use a Naval analogy, you could have the Admiral of the Fleet aboard, but the Captain was still Captain of the ship! Thus in these instances did 'Command Pilot' in this usage means that he was 'Aircraft Commander' despite, for example, him having the Group Commander sitting in the right-hand seat directing the overall mission?
Group Commanders were all pilots anyway, but usually not assigned a particular crew - on a mission they were 'in charge' of a larger thing than just a single B-17. This was the Aircraft Commanders' duty. The Group Commander would sit in the right-hand seat and be able to assist with take-off and landing or any emergency. But this did not match with known data either.
All of these details have been compiled into the 'Analyis of Stars' table above. How is it possible to go from eight recorded in the Mission Summary - nine if the 'unknown' leader and aircraft on April 17 turned out to be 41-24485 - to twelve painted on the aircraft, albeit with most in the wrong positions or colors by May 19, and then a month later have a further three painted on?
I use this picture here, because it clearly shows a change in the
‘star status’ to the enlargement we have reproduced from the May
19th picture at the start of this chapter - there are now stars over
mission 23 and 24. There is also a strange mark - what appears to be
a bomb-shaped ‘smudge’ after mission 25.
Giambrone painted in both directions from his start point, thus making is almost certain that the bombs are stars are not ‘connected’!
So are the stars wrong - or is it wrong to link the stars to a particular mission as painted on the side of the aircraft? Is the Mission Summary in error? We looked again at the two scoreboards. It seemed that there were two phases to this - the period at Bassingbourn when the aircraft actually flew the twenty-five missions and the period leading up to the aircraft's return to the USA. The more we researched, the more we thought that the last three stars were added as part of the entire 'cleaning up and preparation exercise' that the aircraft went through in preparation for the US Tour. This possibility was to provide the key to unlock one of the mysteries. From photographic evidence, we charted out the placement as seen in the table below.
This revealed a pattern that suggests a two-stage process as to what happened. Firstly, the last three stars were painted on the aircraft sometime after it flew the 25th mission, for they are the only items common to both sides. If those stars are then removed from the chart, another pattern is revealed. The stars on both sides of the aircraft are now the same - just four missions out of sync with each other! If then we 'disconnect' the stars from the bomb symbols and re-align, they now match! So what caused that?
It was back to the photographs again. A look again at the picture of Chuck Leighton above we used to illustrate mission three held the answer. Joe Giambrone started painting the symbols on the pilots side roughly under the 'R' of the 'Crew Weight' stencil. Yet by the time of the May 19 photo, that symbol has become number 5! He must have started to run out of room, so 'adjusted' the line of symbols by adding four at the front of the line!
Also, if those last three stars were fake, this would go a long way to explaining a certain reticence on the part of Bob Morgan in discussing anything other than the 'official line' as trotted out in the War Department booklet. An indication as to this can be discovered in a December 30 1986 letter from Bob Morgan to Menno Duerksen: '... I really feel you are getting yourself into a no win situation by trying to cross reference all the logs, papers, people's memories (some bad like mine) to try and establish the exact missions everyone flew on and if we flew on other planes at times etc.
Take the Air Corps book "25 Missions" and accept it, quote it etc. Then take your interviews with each crew member as to his experiences in combat, tour life etc etc. NOT that each flew on each and every mission on the Belle. Pass over that, except for the "25 Mission Book" quotes etc. As an expert writer, you can handle that. This is my opinion, but it is up to you.'
Even by 1986, everyone knew that the '25 Mission' booklet was wildly in error, so why was Bob Morgan still sticking religiously to the 'official' line as pumped out by the War Department?
We realise that it is an outrageous allegation to make that some of those stars are fake, so is there any further proof that things are not what they first seem? Well, look the the picture below right of Joe Giambrone painting the last bomb symbol on the pilot's side of the nose of the Memphis Belle. It's a still from the 1943 William Wyler movie filmed sometime after the 25th mission was flown. Now look at the photograph on the first page of this piece - notice anything odd? No? Look again. See that double line of vertical rivet-heads?
Those heads are straddled by bomb symbols and 'contain' another. On the picture on the first page of this piece, it is clearly the symbol for mission twenty-three sits in between the two rows. So using that double row of rivet-heads to lock mission twenty-three in place, we move and count to the right. 24.... 25... Joe Giambrone is painting a 26th bomb symbol on the side of the aircraft! It seems that you just cannot trust what you see - and that also explains the mysterious 'smudge' on the previous picture where that symbol was later removed! Also, the two pictures below show three stars - two yellow, one red - appear and dissapear out of 'timeline' to the smudge created after Joe painted the spurious 26th bomb mission symbol. Just what WAS going on? There are many ways of looking at it, and we could come up with any number of theories but, other than thinking that much of this was done for public relations and the movie - we have no idea.
The stars survive...
Whatever the truth - and whatever the true amount - the stars remained on either side of the fuselage to this day. Even with all our photographic evidence, we have been unable to prove things one way or another conclusively. - the best we can do is put together a good theory. The stars remain an enigma where they are because once they were painted in place, along with the perky Petty Girl, the swastikas and the bomb symbols, successive over-paints and restorations have slavishly followed what went before, religiously recreating the markings in the same manner.
Taken from Chapter 11 of Graham M Simons' and Dr Harry Friedman's book 'Memphis Belle - Dispelling the Myths
