On 17 January 1944, 42-32076 rolled out of Boeing's
Seattle plant. In March 1944 it was assigned to the 91 Bomb Group, 401
Bomb Squadron based at Bassingbourn, England. It was named Shoo Shoo Baby
after the popular Andrews Sisters song and had nose art painted by Tony
Starcer. Her first mission was on 24 March 1944. The third Shoo was added
around the seventh mission to set her apart from other bombers with the
same name, but the plane continued to be referred to as Shoo Shoo Baby.
She flew 24 combat missions in WWII, receiving flak damage seven times.
On 29 May 1944, Shoo Shoo Baby limped back from Posen, Poland with two
engines out and a third failing, with enemy fighters on her tail most of
the way. Loosing altitude the whole way, pilot Bob Geunther got her to
neutral Sweden where plane and crew were interned for the duration of the
war.
The US. government sold her to Sweden in late
1944 and she was converted to an airliner for the Danish airline Det Danske
Luftfartsselskab and renamed Stig Viking. In April 1948 she was sold to
the Danish Air Force and renamed again to Store Bjorn or Great Bear. In
late 1949 she was sold again to the Danish Navy and fitted with cameras
and radar mapping gear, where she was used for a three year aerial mapping
of Greenland. In 1954 she was sold to a broker that refurbished her and
sold her to the Institute Geographique National. The Institute used her
for mapping of Lebanon and meteorological work for seven years until
July 1961. Too worn for flight she was cannibalized and set aside to await
scrapping.
Discovered in 1969 by aviation historian Steve
Birdsall, he made the world aware of the plane sitting in disrepair on
an airfield in France. The French government presented the plane to the
USAF on 22 April 1971. She was flown back to the US in a C-5 on 17 June
1972 and put in storage at the USAFM in Dayton, Ohio. In July 1978 volunteers
from the 512th Antique Restoration Group again loaded her aboard a C-5
for a 10 year restoration project at Dover AFB, Delaware. It took almost
60,000 hours of volunteer work and an estimated $150,000 in contributions
to restore Shoo Shoo Baby to flyable condition. 14 October 1988 was Shoo
Shoo Baby's last flight to Wright Field where she stands on permanent display
at the USAFM.
