Flak Bait, the Martin B-26 Marauder, and the Smithsonian Restoration of the Last Surviving Medium Bomber from the European Air War

Flak Bait is the last complete Martin B-26 Marauder in existence - the only survivor of roughly 5,200 built during World War II - and holds the record for the highest mission count of any Allied aircraft in the European Theater of Operations: 202 combat sorties. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum is currently preserving her at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, with the deliberate goal of keeping every patch, scar, and repair visible rather than erasing them.

The Airplane That Nearly Never Flew in Combat

Martin Aircraft won the B-26 contract in 1940, competing against Boeing and Douglas with a design that delivered on its promises of speed, range, and bomb load. The tradeoffs were severe. The Marauder’s short, stubby wings produced extremely high wing loading, and her approach speed ran 125 to 130 miles per hour - roughly double what pilots transitioning from trainers were used to.

Training accidents mounted at Barksdale Field in Louisiana and MacDill Field in Florida. Crews named her the “Widow Maker” and the “Flying Prostitute” - because with those short wings, she had, as the joke went, no visible means of support. The accident rate triggered a Congressional investigation and a serious push to cancel the program entirely.

What saved it was Jimmy Doolittle. Already regarded as one of the finest pilots alive, Doolittle went to MacDill and spent weeks flying the Marauder - training in it, demonstrating it, and proving that proper airmanship turned a dangerous reputation into a demanding but manageable aircraft. The program survived. Training was reformed. The B-26 went to war.

What the B-26 Proved in Combat

In the European Theater, the Marauder’s critics were proved wrong. Her speed at medium altitude made interception difficult. Her bomb load was competitive with larger aircraft over shorter distances. And her airframe was rugged - able to absorb damage that would have broken other designs.

The powerplants - a pair of Pratt & Whitney R-2000 Double Wasps, eighteen cylinders each - earned a reputation for continuing to run under conditions that would have silenced lesser engines.

The 322nd Bomb Group, based in England and later operating from liberated France, became one of the most accomplished B-26 units in the theater. They flew tight formations for mutual defense and precision medium-altitude bombing runs. Within the 322nd, the 449th Bomb Squadron operated a particular aircraft whose crew gave her a name that was anything but metaphorical.

How Flak Bait Earned Her Name

“Flak Bait” was not irony. It was operational reality. Medium bombers flying at the altitudes the 322nd used were exactly what German 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns were designed to hit - accurate, radar-assisted weapons capable of filling a patch of sky with fast-moving steel fragments.

On a bomb run, the formation held steady. Evasive maneuvering meant a missed target and another mission over the same ground. So the crews held heading and altitude while black puffs appeared ahead, each burst producing a concussive crack and the sound of shrapnel hitting aluminum - described by those who survived it as gravel thrown against a tin roof.

Flak Bait came back from every mission with holes. Each time, the ground crew assessed the damage, cut a patch, and riveted it into place. Sometimes it was fuselage skin. Sometimes a control surface. Sometimes a fuel line that needed full replacement. By the next morning, she was ready again.

She flew her 200th mission on April 25, 1945. By the time Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, she had flown two more. Her final count: 202 missions - the highest of any Allied aircraft in the European Theater of Operations.

The Last Surviving Marauder

Of the approximately 5,200 Martin B-26 Marauders produced during the war, Flak Bait is the only complete airframe to have survived. A few engines, instrument panels, and components exist in various collections, but as a whole airplane, she is the last Marauder on earth. That fact gives the Smithsonian’s preservation work a weight unlike most aircraft conservation projects. There is no second example, no backup. Every decision made about Flak Bait shapes the B-26’s physical legacy indefinitely.

What the Smithsonian Is Doing - and Why It Matters

The restoration underway at the Udvar-Hazy Center is not a conventional warbird restoration. The goal is not to produce an aircraft that looks as it did rolling off the production floor in Baltimore. The goal is the opposite: preserve exactly what happened to her.

More than 1,000 individual patches remain on the airframe, each representing a specific moment of combat damage and repair. Conservators are treating corrosion at its source, stabilizing structural members stressed by decades of storage, and documenting every surface condition before anything is touched - but they are leaving the patches in place and visible. Reversibility is a core principle: future conservators with better materials and techniques should not be foreclosed by choices made today.

Inside the airframe, the restoration team found personal items from crew members - small objects that had worked their way into the structure over years of hard flying and never came out. Each has been documented and preserved.

The nose section is currently on display at Udvar-Hazy. Visitors can stand close enough to see individual rivets on each patch and examine more than 200 missions’ worth of accumulated combat wear. A Flak Bait restored to factory condition would document manufacturing. A Flak Bait shown as she actually survived tells you what the air war over occupied Europe looked like - and what it cost the men who flew it.

The full preservation of the complete airframe is a long-term, multi-year project. When complete, it will be the finest surviving artifact of Allied medium bombing in the Second World War. Not a reproduction. The real thing.

Why This Matters for Aviators

Flak Bait is a concrete answer to an abstract question: what did it take to keep an aircraft flying through sustained, serious combat? The answer is recorded in more than a thousand patches riveted by ground crews working before dawn, in the cold, under conditions no maintenance manual accounts for.

For anyone who has managed a squawk, worked through an AOG, or watched an aircraft return from a hard flight needing assessment before the next leg - the story of Flak Bait’s ground crew is recognizable. The mission was the same: keep the airplane ready. Keep the crew coming home.

The Udvar-Hazy Center is located in Chantilly, Virginia, near Washington Dulles International Airport. The nose section is on display now. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s documentation and the preserved records of the 322nd Bomb Group are the primary historical sources for the aircraft’s operational history.

Key Takeaways

• Flak Bait flew 202 combat missions with the 322nd Bomb Group’s 449th Bomb Squadron - the highest mission count of any Allied aircraft in the European Theater of Operations.
• She is the only surviving complete B-26 Marauder out of approximately 5,200 built; no other complete example exists anywhere in the world.
• The Smithsonian’s restoration deliberately preserves all combat damage, including more than 1,000 individual patches, rather than restoring the aircraft to factory appearance.
• Jimmy Doolittle personally flew and demonstrated the B-26 at MacDill Field, saving the program from Congressional cancellation and driving a reformation of pilot training for the type.
• The nose section is currently on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia; full airframe preservation is an ongoing multi-year effort.