44-6838
B-17G-65-DL Flying Fortress. Assigned to the 335th Bomb Squadron, 95th Bombardment Group (H), Station 119, Horham, Suffolk.
The 95th Bomb Group database keeps an aircraft page for 44-6838 — fifty-three sorties under every pilot who sat left seat. It is a modern compilation, not a paper issued at Horham. 44-6838 — Spirit of Martinez. The book tells the mornings she flew, and the ones she sat out, in Borrowed Aircraft.
Martinez put up $855,000 toward its Sixth War Loan quota and doubled it, in one later account. The committee’s own letter to Frank gives the quota as $815,000, already overrun, and another $350,000 that would buy a B-17 named City of Martinez. The surplus was meant to buy a B-29. Ray S. Taylor wrote to him instead. The letter asked for City of Martinez. The crew painted Spirit. The Army’s ceremony came after they had already flown her nine times under it.
Dave Osborne’s B-17 Fortress Master Log lists the serial as CAL'S RASCALS aka THE SPIRIT OF MARTINEZ. The Imperial War Museums’ American Archive repeats it. Neither is a paper issued at Horham. The name on the nose, on the wallets, and in Frank’s letter to Ray Taylor is Spirit of Martinez. Cal’s Rascals is the log’s other name for the same tail number, not a second christening.
The committee was disappointed to learn the “name” was a small plaque under the instrument panel, not nose art “big enough for enemies to read without their glasses.” A surviving photograph shows the name painted across the nose in script a good deal larger than a plaque. Both may be true in sequence. Nothing dates the painting.
“We can brag about her, Ray,” Frank wrote. “In all those missions; not once did we or those others who were fortunate to fly her have to turn back; abort as we call it.” Not that she was lucky, or that the crew was — that the ship had never once failed to reach a target she was sent to.
On 2 March 1945 she flew to Ruhland with J.J. Getchius in the left seat and Victor Probst still in the right — Frank did not fly. On 10 March Probst flew Poof Proof with C.D. Crawford while Claude C. Greear sat right-hand in her, the reverse of the February trade. On 17 March she flew to Ruhland with John Bradley’s crew while Frank’s men stood down. On 5 April and 7 April, while she sat with her cowlings off for a third engine change, Frank’s crew flew The Red Fox and Belligerent Beauty. By 9 April they were back in her.
Special Orders 337 assigned the crew Ap. No. 44-6830 for the overseas movement — eight serials away, same production block. She went to the 92nd Bomb Group at Podington, was battle-damaged over Berlin on 18 March 1945, force-landed in Poland, and was written off on the 26th.
Joyce remembered him saying the saddest part was flying her back. “When he landed, before he got his stuff off, they had dismantled it and towed it away. He said if he had known, he would have gotten souvenirs.” She went on to South Plains, Texas, that summer, and to the Kingman scrap heap in December — not quite eleven months after assignment to his squadron.
Fate: Sold for scrap at Kingman, Arizona, 19 December 1945. Last flight 21 June 1945, Horham to Bradley Field, Connecticut.
