Lunchtime Lecture (Midlands): The Mighty Eighth in Memory: The World War II US 8th Air Force on Screen and in Memorials
20 September 2024
On Friday 20th September at 12pm, Dr Sam Edwards will consider representations of the United States 8th Air Force and how they are remembered. This talk will be hosted in-person at the RAF Museum’s Midlands site and virtually via Crowdcast.
Talk Outline
Based on a popular history by Donald L. Miller, and involving both Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks as producers, Apple TV’s widely anticipated new series, Masters of the Air, tells the story of the 100th Bomb Group, a constituent of the World War II United States 8th Air Force (8th AF) the organisation responsible for the American contribution to the Allied Strategic Bombing Campaign. It is by no means the first time the ‘Mighty Eighth’ – as the 8th AF was famously popularised by aviation historian Roger Freeman – has drawn such interest. In fact, the young Americans who flew and fought in the frozen skies of Europe have been the subject of recurrent cultural attention, and their memory has been lovingly guarded among the villages of East Anglia, the region within which the vast majority of them were based. This lecture explores this fascinating history. It examines some of the numerous films and television shows that have told the story of the 8th AF (from the 1940s to the present), and it considers some of the many poignant memorials which record this important chapter in the history of World War II, and indeed in the history of the US-UK relationship. In doing so, the lecture will identify some of the peaks and troughs in the cultural memory of the 8thAF, and it will ponder what this can tell us about how views of the American bombing campaign have changed in accordance with shifting views of the war, and in line with the ups and downs of the post-1945 ‘special relationship’.
Location
This hybrid lecture will be hosted in-person at the RAF Museum’s Midlands Site in the Lecture Theatre. Attendance in-person is free but registration is required via Digitickets.
Livestream
To attend virtually, register via Crowdcast.
About Dr Sam Edwards
Dr Sam Edwards is Reader in Modern Political History at Loughborough University. A born and bred East Anglian, he has been fascinated by the history of the US 8th Air force since his teenage cycling expeditions to the old airfields back in the 1990s, and he has been researching the memory of this momentous moment in the US-UK relationship ever since. He has published a number of academic articles on this subject, and it also features at the very centre of his 2015 book Allies in Memory: World War II and the Politics of Transatlantic Commemoration, c.1941-2001 (Cambridge University Press, shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize). Sam is an experienced public speaker and has previously delivered talks for the National Army Museum and Tate London. A Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Sam is also a Trustee of Sulgrave Manor and a Governor of The American Library (a memorial to the 2nd Air Division of the US 8th Air Force located in Norwich).
