[Ed. note: Yesterday I was gushing enthusiastically about the futuristic concept of human spaceflight. Today I’m going to wax nostalgic about ancient airplanes. Hey, it’s these little contradictions and paradoxes that make people interesting, right?]

Among my assorted interests, enthusiasms and oddities is a love of old propeller-driven airplanes, especially the “warbirds,” the combat aircraft of World War II. People who are familiar at all with that term usually think of the fighter planes of the era, but in my usual non-conformist fashion, I prefer the bombers.

I can’t explain why the big, lumbering workhorses appeal to me more than the admittedly sexier fighters. I think partly it’s because the bombers don’t have a parallel in the modern world. Sure, we still have a few large bomb-carrying aircraft — the B-52, the B-1, and the B-2 — but the situation today is nothing like it was in the early 1940s, when the bombers were the primary strike tool of the United States and we had a mind-boggling variety of them. Back then, it was necessary to send huge armadas of these relatively primitive vehicles directly over the targets to deliver the same destructive power that we can now project with unmanned missiles lobbed from miles away. It was a low-tech solution to a problem that we now address in a much more sophisticated (and less hazardous) way, and I am always fascinated by the methods used by earlier generations to solve problems.

All that talk of “solving problems” and “delivering destructive power” sounds very clinical, I know, and I regret that terminology like that is the easiest to use when discussing this subject. I don’t mean to sanitize the fact that these planes were weapons and that millions died because of them. I also don’t want to romanticize them, for the same reason. Nevertheless, I find these airplanes, these weapons, fascinating from an engineering standpoint, a historical perspective (these planes were basically invented during the war years and they were largely outmoded and headed for the scrapheap as soon as the war was over), and, yes, from an aesthetic view as well. I think these old bombers are beautiful in a way that modern military aircraft — hell, modern aircraft in general — are not. They had, for lack of a better word, personality, in part because of the unique artwork that decorated each plane. The art personalized the planes, made them distinct, made it possible to think of each plane as a very specific entity, just like a naval ship. (I know the tradition of nose art continues in the modern military, but it seems to me like an affectation these days. Modern nose art is like a Disneyland replica of a frontier stockade. It looks the same, but something is missing. Maybe it’s because the idea of nose art was fresh and heartfelt back in the ’40s, and now it carries the dull obligation of “tradition.”) Perhaps the most famous of these “personalities,” the only one that’s had two movies made about it, was a B-17 Flying Fortress called the Memphis Belle.

The story of the Belle is relatively well-known even today, thanks to those movies. Named after the pilot’s girlfriend, the Belle brought her crew home from an astounding 25 missions over Germany, a near-miracle considering that most aircrews of the time were lucky if they survived ten missions. The Belle‘s pilot, the man who gave the plane her name, was Col. Robert Morgan.

I read on the ‘net today that Col. Morgan passed away on the 15th at the age of 85. The Washington Post has published a nice obituary about him. A good indication of the type of man he was comes from the fact that after the Belle’s final mission, he refused a discharge and went on to fly 25 missions over Japan in a B-29 Superfortress named Dauntless Dotty. That was either incredibly brave, unbelievably patriotic, or insane — maybe all three. But it makes for a good story, doesn’t it?

In case you’re wondering, Morgan’s romance with the Belle‘s namesake, Margaret Polk, didn’t last. He broke up with her before serving in the Pacific, and the Dotty was named after his subsequent girlfriend. Margaret died in 1990.

The Belle itself still exists (not many of her sister-ships do; most were broken up for scrap decades ago) and is currently undergoing restoration. If you’re interested, check out its official web site.

I believe the fictionalized 1990 film Memphis Belle, which starred Matthew Modine as a Morgan-like character named Dearborn, is currently available on DVD. According to The Digital Bits, William Wyler’s 1944 documentary, The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (a.k.a. Memphis Belle) is scheduled to be released in a two-disc special edition on June 30.