Respectable Floozie

Allied bombers were back again, plowing and harrowing the "secret-weapon," "rocket-gun," "special-military" coast of France. The most successful aircraft on the job was a plane that had just lived down an unjust but bad reputation: the U.S. Martin Marauder.

Marauder pilots swept in day after day, returned with astonishingly low losses. The operation was all so brisk, business like and efficient that it was hard to remember that the sleek, cigar-bodied B-26 had come close to being washed up as an unruly failure, not many months ago.

Good piloting and crack operations have changed all that. In the European Theater, the B-26's operations have been almost monotonously successful.

Its rate of loss on missions runs around 0.3%, lowest in the theater. Early this month it set a record of 1,500 sorties by individual planes, without a loss. The Air Forces top command, which had expected to taper off production, this week let the Glenn L. Martin Co. announce that B-26 contracts were being increased, instead.

Among Army airmen major credit for the Marauder's comeback goes to slim, youthful (38) Brigadier General Samuel E. Anderson, commander of the Marauder squadrons in Britain.* Within six months Anderson and his staff reshaped the Marauder outfit from a misused, ineffective stepchild into a high-stepping member of the Eighth Air Force.

The Bad Name. The Marauder never was a dog, but someone had given it a bad name. It bore the double onus of being a floozie, and from the right side of the tracks: the B-26 emerged in 1940 from the highly regarded Glenn Martin plant at Baltimore, Md., but its detractors thought it had been rushed along too fast.

Presently the B-26 was being called "The Flying Prostitute" (because some airmen thought that the 65-foot wingspread, for so much airplane, constituted "no visible means of support"). By derivation, it became "The Baltimore Whore."

Air Forces men gave it another sardonic tag, "The Widow-Maker." Student pilots started out joking about it. ended up by scaring themselves. Training-field crashes added to the legend of the ship's habits: she needed "all of Texas" for the takeoff; she came in to land like a cold flatiron ; she stalled like a Model-T Ford running on kerosene. All that and much more.

On the credit side, the B-26 did have a good combat record in the Pacific, where it pounded Jap ships and supplies. But the first squadrons to reach England last year ran into hard luck again.

The Conversion. Sam Anderson decided first that too much had been expected of the plane. Overzealous publicity had led the Air Forces to expect a miracle ship with fighter-plane speed and Fortress carrying capacity. Anderson scrapped all previous notions, treated the ship as a medium bomber for medium altitudes, got it moved from the Bomber Command to Air Support Command.

He installed a rigid daily training schedule for his crews, taught them to fly and fight a really "hot" aircraft. By midsummer the Marauders tackled the broad assignment of pounding the Luftwaffe's northwestern French airfields. By October Anderson could report that the enemy squadrons had been pushed inland 40 miles. He kept at it, developed new tactics for evading flak, trained his bombardiers to needlepoint precision.

Meanwhile, Martin engineers were carrying out recommendations for nearly 100 modifications in the original model. Today the ship is still a fast woman, but the men who take her around these days consider her thoroughly respectable.

One of the proudest boasts cocky Maraudermen now toss around is this:

"She's a man's airplane--separates the men from the boys."

In England recently some U.S. pilots, inordinately proud of their hot sweetheart, were enlarging on this theme while two B-26's planed in, landed and taxied back to the line. One airman gazed fondly at the sleek Widow-Maker. "Yep," he said, "it's a man's airplane."

On the flying line, the two newly arrived Marauder pilots climbed out. They were blue-uniformed girls of the British Air Transport Auxiliary.

*No kin to husky, youthful (38) Major General Frederick L. Anderson, boss of the Eighth Air Force Bomber Command.

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