I was just reading a blog post about the National Air and Space Museum's restoration of its V-1 missile and it included the following section:
Michael J. Neufeld wrote:
Since we had no information as to what German paint might originally have been on the components, Chris Reddersen advocated a mismatched camouflage scheme, as is seen in some historic photos. Since the major fuselage and engine sections were often made by different manufacturers and only put together during final assembly, the Luftwaffe green and sky-blue patterns sometimes did not match up at the join lines. I was fine with this idea, as was my successor as curator of early rockets and missiles, Colleen Anderson. After painting the components in a dark red primer, he applied the blue all over the missile, as was German practice, and then added the dark green patterns on top.
(Source:
National Air and Space Museum)
I find the decision particularly interesting as an example of how a decision on how an object is restored influences the way people will interpret it. In the case of the V-1, it's a visceral reminder of the harried state of the late-war German aviation industry as well as, as mentioned at the end of the blog post, the role that slave labor played in its production. Its imperfect nature also implicitly subverts the
myth of German wonder weapons, by illustrating how - even if the claimed technological superiority of Nazi weapons was true - it was still undercut by conditions of their manufacture.
Perhaps the subject is on my mind because just yesterday I wrote a wrote something to explain to visitors why our museum's B-25 looks so beat up. While the short answer is because it had exaggerated fake wear and exhaust streaks applied for its part in
Catch-22 to metaphorically represent the war weariness of the main character, the larger importance is that it now provides a starting point to explain to visitors that aircraft did not look pristine. From there, the subject can be expanded to illustrate how the tempo of operations and exigencies of wartime meant that certain tasks were deprioritized. The last step is to then connect it what life was like for the airmen and mechanics. How the last thing on the crews' minds when they returned from a mission was the condition of the paint on the aircraft. How instead they would have been looking forward to some warm food, maybe a good night's sleep and, if they were lucky, a slight bit of downtime before going out and doing it again the next day. How the mechanics were busy patching flak holes, towing belly-landed airplanes off of the runway and overhauling run out engines. (I have in the back of my head the last-minute-fix-before-takeoff scene in
Masters of the Air or the hangar deck in
Battlestar Galactica for those who have seen it.) To take the concept to its logical extreme, one could even choose to represent where one aircraft was built from two, as in the cases of the B-17G
Little Miss Mischief or the F9F,
The Blue Tail FlyThe author of the V-1 piece acknowledges this aspect in a previous article about the restoration of NASM's V-2, when he wrote:
Michael J. Neufeld wrote:
They also removed a lot of body filler applied in 1976 to disguise the dings and dents in the fuselage. I decided that only the largest of the holes would be refilled, both to keep out dust and to improve its appearance. But the many remaining imperfections preserve the reality of an artifact that was dimpled by spot welding during manufacturing, but also roughly handled after capture by the United States. The perennial question of Museum visitors, "Why does it look so dented?", will return in force after the rocket is reinstalled.
(Source:
National Air and Space Museum)
To take another example, using the museum's Corsair's wings as a visual aid, it is interesting to relate that Corsairs were sometimes seen with what appeared to be "abstract art" on the wing. To explain how, as described by a
HyperScale post, this was a scrambled roundel that was the result of ammunition boxes being pre-loaded for combat operations. How three factors - the interchangeability of five of the six the boxes, the fact that the top of the boxes is the upper surface of the wing and the positioning of the roundel on the wing - came together to allow this unusual situation to take place. Then, by analogizing that its the aviation equivalent of sewer lids that are reinstalled at an incorrect angle so that the road striping that has been painted over them no longer lines up with the markings on the adjacent asphalt, the visitor can connect it to their own experience in the modern day and understand for themselves why the past is not as idealized as we often think of it.
Depicting a B-17 with a mismatched vertical stabilizer, as the National Museum of the United States Air Force did with the Memphis Belle, offers an opportunity to touch on the difficulties of organizing a nationwide logistics chain and, by extension the sheer scale of the "Arsenal of Democracy". It can demonstrate how the difference, in part the result of subcontracting, is illustrative of the need for standards, for instance the
AN system of technical orders, so that mistakes of this type don't slow down production.*
Doing things "correctly incorrect" is not just about being authentic for authenticities' sake, but also accurately representing the times and conditions in which the aircraft operated. (For more examples, see the
Accurate Markings Matter thread.)
* I'm seeing conflicting information as to why the vertical stabilizer was a different color. One comment claims it was because they were painted by the subcontractor before delivery, while NMUSAF's video about the markings seems to imply that it was due to the paint fading at different rates.
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