The Americans in wartime Britain

Boeing’s Model 299 first flew in July 1935, and a reporter’s description of the heavily armed prototype as a “flying fortress” stuck. The B-17 became the bomber with which the US Eighth Air Force set out to bomb Germany by day, in tight formations meant to protect each other with their guns.

A B-17G carried thirteen .50 calibre machine guns and a crew of ten.

IWM Duxford’s B-17G was built by Douglas at Long Beach and delivered in May 1945, too late for the war.

In 1938 the US Army Air Corps asked Consolidated of San Diego to build the Boeing B-17 under licence. Consolidated proposed a new design of its own instead, built round the long, narrow, high-lift wing devised by the engineer David R. Davis. The Model 32 put that wing high on a deep, slab-sided fuselage with a capacious bomb bay closed by roller-shutter doors, twin oval fins and a tricycle undercarriage, which no previous American heavy bomber had.

At its peak in 1944, Ford’s Willow Run factory was completing a Liberator about every hour.

KN751 was built by Ford at Willow Run in December 1944 as B-24L 44-50206.

The Mitchell grew out of a US Army Air Corps competition of 1939 for a twin-engined attack bomber. North American’s entry, the NA-40, flew in January 1939 and was lost in a crash that April, but the Army liked the design enough to order a larger, faster development straight off the drawing board in September 1939, without a prototype. The first B-25 flew on 19 August 1940.

Joseph Heller flew sixty missions as a B-25 bombardier with the 340th Bomb Group from Corsica, the experience behind his novel Catch-22.

44-31171 was built at Kansas City as a B-25J-30 and spent its post-war years as a trainer and test aircraft, converted in turn to TB-, EB- and JTB-25J standard.

The Mustang was designed for Britain. In April 1940 the British Purchasing Commission asked North American Aviation of Inglewood, California, to build Curtiss P-40s under licence; the company’s president, James “Dutch” Kindelberger, offered a better fighter of its own instead. Edgar Schmued’s team drew a clean low-winged monoplane with a laminar-flow wing and a radiator set far back under the fuselage, where a carefully shaped duct recovered much of its drag as thrust.

The RAF ordered the Mustang before the prototype had flown, and it was the RAF that named it: the US Army Air Forces adopted the British name.

44-74409 was built at Inglewood in 1945, too late for the war, and served with a USAAF training unit.

Republic Aviation of Farmingdale, Long Island, the former Seversky company, had built a line of radial-engined fighters to the designs of its chief engineer, Alexander Kartveli. In 1940 the US Army Air Corps, impressed by reports from the air war over Europe, asked for something much heavier and better armed. Kartveli designed the largest single-seat fighter yet built around the new Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp, with a General Electric turbo-supercharger in the rear fuselage and ducting running the length of the aircraft to feed it, and eight .50 in machine guns in an elliptical wing.

With 15,636 built, more Thunderbolts were made than any other American fighter, before or since.

45-49295 was built at Evansville, Indiana, in 1945 as a P-47D-40, one of the last Thunderbolts made.

The Dakota began as an airliner. In 1934 American Airlines asked Douglas for a wider sleeper version of its DC-2, and the Douglas Sleeper Transport flew at Santa Monica on 17 December 1935, 32 years to the day after the Wright brothers’ first flight. Its day-coach sister, the 21-seat DC-3, could cross the United States in about 15 hours with three stops and was the first airliner that could make a profit from passengers alone, without a mail contract.

David Lord’s Victoria Cross was the only one ever won by a member of Transport Command. Over Arnhem on 19 September 1944, with his starboard engine on fire, he held Dakota KG374 low over the drop zone for a second run to deliver the last of its supply panniers, and ordered his crew to jump moments before the wing gave way.

KN645 was built at Oklahoma City as a C-47B, USAAF serial 44-77003, and taken on RAF charge under Lend-Lease on 18 May 1945.

The Fairchild 24 began as a two-seat cabin monoplane for private owners, built by Fairchild’s Kreider-Reisner division at Hagerstown, Maryland, and first flown in 1932. It had a strut-braced high wing, a welded steel-tube fuselage covered in fabric, a fixed undercarriage and a roomy, well-glazed cabin, and over the decade it grew into a four-seater offered with either a Warner Scarab radial or a Ranger inverted inline engine. The radial-engined version was the Model 24W.

Air Transport Auxiliary ferry pilots spent much of their working day as passengers: an Argus would drop several of them at a factory to collect new aircraft, then fly to the airfields where they had delivered them to bring them home.

The Cosford Argus was built at Hagerstown in June 1943 as UC-61A c/n 565 and delivered to the US Army Air Forces as 43-14601.

North American Aviation’s NA-16 first flew on 1 April 1935 and became the pattern for a long line of advanced trainers. A low-wing monoplane with a Wasp radial, a framed greenhouse canopy over two tandem cockpits and a retractable undercarriage, it taught pupils the habits of a fast, heavy fighter before they ever flew one. The RAF ordered it as the Harvard and the first arrived in 1938.

The Harvard’s propeller tips can reach supersonic speed in a dive or at full power, which is what gives the aircraft its distinctive snarl.

FE905 was built by Noorduyn in Montreal in 1943 as a Harvard IIB for the Royal Canadian Air Force.