A WWII memorial site for one B-24 Liberator, its pilot and the ten men who flew her, told in the pilot’s own words.

Overview

The brief

In 1944, twenty-year-old Arnold Piskin flew 36 missions as pilot of the B-24J “Howling Banshee” with the 458th Bomb Group at Horsham St. Faith, England. He kept everything: a memoir, his pilot’s log, crew photos, his orders and the cablegram he sent his mother when his tour was over.

The family wanted a home for that archive that read like his story, not a folder of scans. Most of the material is long first-person writing and small 1940s photographs, so the design had to make small archival images look deliberate and keep long reading comfortable.

The look

Everything comes from the aircraft itself: brushed airframe metal, aged paper, and the red, white and blue of the U.S. star-and-bar insignia, used sparingly.

• Type: Oswald for stencil-style headings, Spectral for Arnold’s words, and JetBrains Mono for dates, serials and data.
• Hero: a large star-and-bar insignia draws itself, outline first, then fills, behind a nameplate panel showing 36 missions, 10 crew and 20 years old.
• Timeline rail: a blue rail runs down the side of every page, marking the way from 1942 to 1945: Enlist, Training, Missions, V-E Day.

The Pilot’s Story

Arnold’s memoir runs in 19 chapters, from enlisting in October 1942 to marching in the 50th anniversary VE Day parade in England in 1995.

• Chapters alternate down a timeline and reveal as you scroll, while the center line fills in behind you.
• Each card opens the full chapter in a large window, with its photo and caption. Previous and Next buttons, the arrow keys and a “4 / 19” counter move you through the story without leaving the page.
• A chapter can carry a photo, a video or neither, chosen in the editor.

The aircraft

The Aircraft page shows where each man sat and what he did when the flak came up.

• A navy blueprint of the B-24J draws itself with a scan-line wipe as it comes into view, then seven numbered crew stations pop in, from the nose turret to the tail gunner.
• Hovering over a station, or tabbing to it, shows who was there and what the job involved. A matching numbered list sits beside it, so it works the same on a phone.
• Below, “The Real Banshee” gallery collects period cutaways of the plane.

The crew and the archive

• Roll Call: all ten crewmen in a five-by-two grid, with the pilot’s card marked in red. Each card opens a shared window with that man’s photo and biography, and you can step through the whole crew from there.
• Original documents: the Pilot’s Log of every mission, practice flight and fuel run, plus the AZON special orders and the Knightshayes Court rest and recuperation orders, shown as the original pages.
• Search: a full-width search panel shows results as you type, including text stored in the story chapters and crew bios.

How it’s built

WordPress holds every chapter, crewman and spec as structured content, and each page hands its interactive parts the data they need up front, so nothing reloads as you browse.

• Theme: a custom WordPress theme on Bootstrap 5. The hero, crew, story chapters, aircraft specs and timeline waypoints are ACF Pro fields registered in code, so they ship with the theme.
• Windows: one Bootstrap modal per page serves every chapter or crewman. Each page carries its full chapter text and bios as data in the page, so rich text and images open instantly.
• Search: AJAX search waits until you pause typing, cancels out-of-date requests, and reaches into ACF fields, both in the panel and on the regular search page.
• Animation: SVG line drawing for the insignia, a CSS clip-path wipe for the blueprint, and scroll-driven reveals for the timeline.
• Accessibility: reduced-motion settings are respected everywhere, the windows work by keyboard, and every archival photo carries descriptive alt text.
• SEO: Yoast titles, meta descriptions and Organization details on every page, with an XML sitemap.