Basil headed out first thing yesterday morning to check out some local history.

His first stop was the Mighty 8th Air Force Museum to check out some cool old planes. He said he learned a lot while he was there. As someone who spent time in Navy aviation I usually am pretty hard on the Air Force guys. But this museum is impressive and a must see for history buffs.

The Eighth Bomber Command was formed at Hunter Army Air Field, Savannah, GA in January 1942. Hunter is still a very active army airfield and is home to the Army Ranger units attached to the 3rd Infantry Division headquarted down the road a piece at Fort Stewart.

If you ever saw the movie Black Hawk Down you know how brave those rangers are, even when things go horribly wrong. (If that subject interests you check out this site for tons of information about the event that never made it into the movie.)

A month after the unit was formed the headquarters of the 8th was moved to England in preparation for combat operations against Germany. Eventually the 8th would become one of the largest aviation units in the world with over 200,000 people. The unit also suffered high casualties (over 47,000) and had over 28,000 members become prisoners of war.

When I asked Basil for his impression of the Museum he said, “The Holocaust stuff was hard to look at.”

The museum has a whole section dedicated to the 12 million plus victims of Nazi extermination programs that the 8th played a big part in ending.

Basil and I had talked about the Navy - Air Force rivalry so he took a photo for me of one of the coolest planes ever made, the F-4 Phantom, that was used for many years by both services.

He said, “That plane is aerodynamic proof that if you put enough thrust on a brick it will fly.”

I guess code-writing skills come with a fair dose of math so Basil apparently has a pretty good grasp of aerodynamics too.

Here are a couple other good links about the 8th Air Force: Here and Here.

After the Museum, I caught up with Basil out at Fort Pulaski.

Fort Pulaski is an impressive complex. The first assignment for Robert E. Lee upon graduation from West Point in 1829 was to conduct a survey of the sight and develop plans for a fort and coastal defenses there. The impressive work done from the foundations of the fort sunk 70 feet into the marsh mud to the system of tidal canals for flooding the approaches to the fort are a testament to Lee’s military genius.

The fort took 18 years to build and cost over $1 million before it was completed in 1847. The fact that the fort is still standing over 150 years later is proof of Lee’s engineering abilities.

The fort was designed to be impregnable. It was strategically situated on Cockspur Island which made it a commanding presence near the mouth of the Savannah River. It was surrounded by a deep moat and a system of canals with flood gates which could be opened to completely bog down an infantry assault. There was no ground suitable for artillery bombardment near enough to be affective against the fort. And placement of the fort meant that bombardment from the river would likely be prohibitively costly to any ships that decided to attempt to attack the fort from that direction.

Fort Pulaski was one of the primary reasons that Savannah stayed an open port for the Confederacy as long as it did. Savannah’s export of rice and cotton provided desperately needed hard currency to purchase war materials, especially after the Union effectively closed Charleston.

Unfortunately for the Confederacy, even Lee’s genius couldn’t foresee advances in technology. The Union Army deployed some batteries of new rifled cannons over on Tybee Island and bombarded the fort from over 2 miles away. Within 30 hours the fort’s walls were breached and shells started crossing inside the fort and exploding near the powder magazine.

The impregnable fort was forced to surrender in less than 36 hours.

The Union forces quickly repaired the breach and occupied the fort. One of the significant uses of the fort was as a POW prison where Confederate soldiers were kept in horrible conditions.

As you can see from the photos, there are still many shell holes in the outer walls of the fort. You can even see shells still embedded in the brick in places. You can also check out more photos from this Flickr group of Fort Pulaski.

To get some perspective on how different technology is today, check out this page with photos of nearby Fort Jackson. Look at how much the modern ship dwarfs the fort which used to command the river closer to Savannah.

Basil said, “Those blast holes in the wall make you think.”

I’m not sure what he was thinking about, but I know I never want to be on the receiving end of that much explosive power.

(Related Tags: savannah, travel, tourism, air force, fort pulaski)