Flak-Bait, the B Twenty-Six Marauder That Flew Two Hundred Seven Missions and Is Being Put Back Together Piece by Piece at the Smithsonian

Flak-Bait is a Martin B-26 Marauder that flew 207 combat missions over occupied Europe in World War II - more than any other American bomber in the European theater. Once part of an aircraft nicknamed the “Widowmaker,” this single Marauder became the toughest, luckiest airplane in the U.S. Army Air Forces. Today she is being conserved, not restored to flight, by specialists at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, who are preserving every wartime scar rather than erasing it.

Why Was the B-26 Marauder Called the “Widowmaker”?

The B-26 was designed to be fast. In the late 1930s, the Army Air Corps put out a requirement for a fast medium bomber, and the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore handed the job to a young engineer named Peyton Magruder.

Magruder delivered exactly what the Army wanted: a fuselage shaped like an artillery shell, smooth and round, mounted on a deliberately small, short wing to cut drag and boost speed. The Army was so impressed by the design on paper that it ordered 1,100 aircraft straight off the drawing board - no prototype, no shakedown period, before anyone had ever flown one.

That small wing came at a cost. The Marauder had to be flown fast and precisely, “by the numbers.” She approached at far higher speeds than the trainers young pilots had learned on, and if a crew got slow, got sloppy, or lost an engine on takeoff without doing everything exactly right, she could roll over and go into the ground.

So many crews were lost during training at MacDill Field near Tampa that a grim rhyme took hold: “One a day in Tampa Bay.” Pilots called her the Widowmaker and the Baltimore Whore - the latter because, with such a small wing, she “had no visible means of support.” Congress even discussed canceling the program and scrapping the aircraft.

How Did Flak-Bait Get Her Name?

In the spring of 1943, a brand-new B-26 rolled off the Martin line with a serial number ending in 45357. She was assigned to the 449th Bomb Squadron of the 322nd Bomb Group.

By tradition, crews named their aircraft. A crew chief named James Farrell had a scrappy little dog back home whose family nickname was “Flak Bait.” Farrell painted that name on the nose - a joke, and a dare to the sky to do its worst.

What Was It Like to Fly a Marauder in Combat?

Medium bombers like the Marauder flew at middle altitudes, not up high with the heavy bombers - which put them squarely in the heaviest German antiaircraft fire, known as flak.

Inside the fuselage, two big Pratt & Whitney radial engines, each with 18 cylinders, hammered away on either side of the crew, filling the airframe with a vibration that lingered for hours after landing. It was cold, cramped, and thick with the smell of oil, hot metal, and rubber. Outside the windows, black puffs bloomed constantly - each one a shell that had just thrown red-hot steel in every direction.

Flak-Bait flew into that again and again. She came home with her hydraulics shot out, on one engine, with her electrical system dead, with her propellers hit, and once with a hole in the tail large enough to nearly climb through. Over her career she took more than 1,000 holes in her skin. Ground crews patched her overnight and sent her back out.

What Made Flak-Bait’s Record So Remarkable?

She flew on D-Day, June 6, 1944, hitting German positions behind the Normandy beaches - twice that day - while troops came ashore below.

By the end of the war in Europe, Flak-Bait had flown 207 combat missions, more than any other American bomber in the European theater, including the famous heavy bombers. The airplane the country had wanted to scrap turned out to be its most durable survivor.

Why Did the Smithsonian Save Flak-Bait?

When the war ended, warplanes became scrap almost overnight. Thousands were bulldozed into pits, burned, or melted down. But someone recognized what Flak-Bait’s record meant and set her aside.

She was cut into sections to fit for shipping and sent back to the United States, where she was handed to the Smithsonian Institution. For decades, her battered green nose - marked with a small painted bomb for each mission, more than 200 of them - was displayed in Washington, while her wings, tail, and internal structure sat boxed in storage, slowly deteriorating.

Why Is Flak-Bait Being Conserved Instead of Restored to Fly?

A few years ago, the National Air and Space Museum decided to bring Flak-Bait back - but not to flying condition, and not to look new.

Their reasoning: the airplane’s wounds are the point. Every patch, mismatched paint job, and hand-beaten repair was made by young ground crews determined to keep her flying one more day. Strip that away for a shiny finish, and you erase the very thing that makes her Flak-Bait.

So the work became closer to archaeology or surgery than restoration. The goal is to stabilize the aircraft - to stop the clock and conserve every original piece.

Conservators, including specialist Lauren Horelick and a team of others, go over the aircraft inch by inch. They ask whether dirt in a seam is 1944 English mud and part of the story before they remove it. They have found original grease still in the mechanisms, pencil marks, and even the fingerprints of Martin plant workers pressed into 80-year-old sealant. They have also found crew graffiti and handwritten notes in places only a mechanic would look - messages from young men in 1944 to the present.

The hands-on work is painstaking: cleaning eight decades of grime with cotton swabs and dental-style tools, stabilizing corrosion without grinding away good metal, and documenting everything before touching it. The team is reuniting the famous nose with the rest of the airframe for the first time since the 1940s, aligning the sections so she appears to be flying. A productive day might mean conserving a single small panel.

Why This Matters

The men who flew the B-26 are nearly all gone now. When the last of that generation passes, the aircraft and the records will be all that remain. Flak-Bait - made whole again, scars and all - will stand in the museum as the genuine article: the real, physical truth of what those crews did, preserved by the people who chose to keep faith with them.

Key Takeaways

• Flak-Bait, a Martin B-26 Marauder, flew 207 combat missions in WWII - the most of any American bomber in the European theater.
• The B-26 earned the nickname “Widowmaker” for its demanding, high-speed handling, and was ordered off the drawing board with 1,100 aircraft before a single test flight.
• She was named after crew chief James Farrell’s dog and flew twice on D-Day, June 6, 1944, surviving more than 1,000 holes across her career.
• The National Air and Space Museum is conserving, not restoring, Flak-Bait - preserving every wartime patch, fingerprint, and scar rather than making her look new.
• Conservators are reuniting her nose with the full airframe for the first time since the 1940s, using cotton swabs and dental tools to stabilize the aircraft while keeping its history intact.