Wikimedia Commons/United States Army Air Forces
MacDill Field’s Transformation of the Deadly B-26 Widowmaker
Tampa’s MacDill Field had a big problem in 1942. The B-26 Marauder bomber kept crashing, killing crews so often it got nicknamed the “Widowmaker.”
In just one month, 15 planes went down. By year’s end, 56 men had died in 34 crashes.
Pilots feared the plane couldn’t fly on one engine, so Colonel Jimmy Doolittle showed them it could. The military even brought in 17 women pilots to shame the men…