Flak-Bait, the Martin B Twenty-Six Marauder That Flew Two Hundred Seven Missions and Refused to Die, and the Smithsonian Restoration Piecing Her Back Together One Riveted Panel at a Time

Flak-Bait is a Martin B-26 Marauder that flew 207 completed combat missions in World War II - more than any other American aircraft of the war - and survived every one of them. Today her surviving airframe is undergoing a meticulous conservation at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where specialists are preserving her more than 1,000 battle patches exactly as they are rather than restoring her to look new. The result will be one of only a handful of surviving Marauders on Earth, kept as a witness to what the air war actually did to the men who flew her.

What Was the B-26 Marauder - and Why Was It So Dangerous?

The Marauder was born from a late-1930s U.S. Army call for a fast medium bomber. A young engineer at the Glenn L. Martin Company, Peyton Magruder, answered it with a fat, cigar-shaped fuselage, two enormous Pratt & Whitney R-2800 “Double Wasp” engines - 18 cylinders and 2,000 horsepower apiece - and a deliberately small, efficient wing built for speed.

That tiny wing was the problem. It was superb at high speed and unforgiving at low speed, and every flight ends with a slow, low approach. The B-26 had to be flown onto final at roughly 140 mph; drop below that and she would stop flying and fall out from under the crew.

For pilots who had trained on light aircraft that floated onto the grass at 40 knots, this was a brutal transition. Early accidents were severe enough that crews coined the grim phrase “One a day in Tampa Bay,” referring to losses at the training base at MacDill Field in Tampa. The airplane collected nicknames to match: the Widowmaker, the Baltimore Whore (for a wing with “no visible means of support”), and the Martin Murderer. Congress seriously debated canceling the program.

How Did the Marauder Go From “Widowmaker” to Safest Bomber?

The Army chose to fix the training rather than kill the airplane, and it sent Jimmy Doolittle to prove the point. Doolittle flew a B-26 on a single engine - feathering one propeller and performing rolls - to demonstrate that the aircraft was sound and that the losses came from technique, not design.

Engineers also refined the aircraft: later models had a slightly longer wing and a raised tail. Most importantly, crews were taught to respect the numbers and keep their speed up. Once that happened, the reputation reversed completely. By the end of the fighting in Europe, the B-26 had the lowest combat loss rate of any American bomber - the airplane everyone had wanted to scrap was bringing crews home more reliably than anything else in the sky.

The Story of Flak-Bait: 207 Missions and More Than 1,000 Holes

One particular Marauder rolled out of the Martin plant in Middle River, Maryland, in the spring of 1943, carrying serial number 41-31773. She was assigned to the 449th Bomb Squadron of the 322nd Bomb Group and sent to England to join the Ninth Air Force. There a crewman - the story goes, thinking of his dog back home, named for the flypaper used to catch flies - painted “Flak-Bait” on her nose. It was half a joke and half a dare aimed at German gunners.

The reality behind that dare was harsh. A B-26 carried a crew of seven - pilot, copilot, bombardier, navigator, radio operator, and gunners - and flew at medium altitude, around 10,000 to 12,000 feet, low enough that anti-aircraft flak was thick and accurate. The aircraft was unpressurized, unheated, and deafeningly loud, and crossing into occupied France meant flying straight through that steel.

Flak-Bait flew into it 207 times. By the end her crews counted more than 1,000 holes in her skin. She came home with her hydraulics shot out, with the electrical system dead, and on one engine more than once. She had her tail nearly blown off, a propeller shot up, and on one mission a fuel line severed by flak that should have set her ablaze. She kept coming home, and crews came to believe in her. She flew on D-Day, supported the Battle of the Bulge, and was over Germany itself in the final week of the war.

Why Is the Smithsonian Conserving Flak-Bait Instead of Restoring Her?

Most of the roughly 5,000 Marauders Martin built went to the smelter after the war, and today only a handful of complete airframes survive anywhere in the world. Flak-Bait was saved: her nose section was removed and shipped home, where it sat on display for decades - still wearing its mission tally and flak patches - while the rest of the aircraft remained crated in storage.

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum decided to bring the whole aircraft back, and it chose a different path from the typical warbird rebuild. At the museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia, conservators are preserving Flak-Bait exactly as she came home, not making her pretty. Every one of the thousand-plus patches over her flak holes stays. The rough field repairs made by ground crews stay. The grime, the wear, and the hand-lettered marks all stay.

This is conservation, not restoration - painstaking work in which specialists spend hours on a single panel, cleaning 80 years of corrosion one pass at a time, stabilizing original paint, and documenting every rivet and scar because each is a piece of history that cannot be recovered once lost. As of 2026, that work is ongoing, and eventually visitors will be able to stand with the aircraft whole again.

Why This Matters

A polished restoration shows what an aircraft looked like. Flak-Bait, kept as she came home, shows what the war did to her and to her crews. Standing before her nose, a visitor can put an eye to a patch and understand that on some freezing morning over France, a chunk of German steel came through exactly there - close to the pilot - and the airplane flew home anyway.

That is the argument for saving these machines. Not because they are beautiful, but because they carried real, frightened, brave young people who climbed into an aircraft everyone said would kill them and kept faith with each other. The lesson also endures for pilots today: an airplane’s reputation is often a story about training, not about the machine itself.

Key Takeaways

• Flak-Bait, a Martin B-26 Marauder (serial 41-31773), flew 207 combat missions - the most of any American aircraft in World War II - and survived them all.
• The B-26 was first nicknamed the “Widowmaker” for its high landing speed and small wing, but with better training it finished the war with the lowest combat loss rate of any American bomber.
• Flak-Bait served with the 449th Bomb Squadron, 322nd Bomb Group, Ninth Air Force, flying on D-Day and during the Battle of the Bulge, and came home with more than 1,000 holes in her skin.
• The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is conserving, not restoring, the aircraft at the Udvar-Hazy Center, preserving every patch and repair rather than making her look new.
• Of roughly 5,000 Marauders built, only a handful of complete airframes survive today, making Flak-Bait’s preservation historically significant.