Air Force Museum
French 'Forty and Eight' Railroad Car
These cars received their names because they could carry 40 men or eight horses, as was clearly painted on each boxcar. During World War II, the little-changed "forty and eight" boxcars still transported supplies and troops to the front, but they also returned to Germany with new cargoes. Many Allied prisoners of war rode to German POW camps in these boxcars -- sometimes with as many as 90 men forced into each boxcar.
In depth
History & service
During World War II, the little-changed "forty and eight" boxcars still transported supplies and troops to the front, but they also returned to Germany with new cargoes. Many Allied prisoners of war rode to German POW camps in these boxcars -- sometimes with as many as 90 men forced into each boxcar. Millions of Holocaust victims were herded into similar boxcars on their way to concentration camps.
Boxcars such as the one on display carried 168 Allied POWs from Paris to the Buchenwald concentration camp in August 1944. Many POWs endured harsh conditions during their trips to POW camps, which sometimes included attacks from Allied aircraft.
Constructed in France in 1943, this "forty and eight" railroad car operated in occupied France during WWII, and it most likely transported human cargoes from France to Germany. Withdrawn from service in the 1980s, the French Railroad Company (SNCF) used this railcar to store equipment at a railroad maintenance facility in Dijon, France.
SNCF personnel painstakingly restored it to a near-original condition in honor of those American POWs transferred by "forty and eights." Assisted by the French military, the U.S. Air Force airlifted the 13-ton railcar from Istres Air Base, France, to the museum in late July 2001.
Aircraft change the battlefield
In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.
The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.
Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.
