De Havilland Mosquito: The wooden fighter-bomber that could do it all

At the early part of the Second World War, 1939, 40, 41, a lot of brilliant British engineers and manufacturers were coming up with their own ideas to win the war. One of the ideas that was put forward was from Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. Now, a bomber, stereotypically, is a big aeroplane that carries bombs. Obviously it needs a defence, machine guns in the front or the back. But we were losing young lads in bomber command very, very fast indeed. Sir Geoffrey de Havilland had a very big blue sky think. He decided he was going to make a bomber, but he was going to make it completely unarmed. The defence of this bomber was going to be its speed. Mr de Havilland made some ideas, put some drawings down and sent them off to the government. The government had a look at him, but like so many other designs, at the time, Mosquito, as was going to be the name, was chosen to be discontinued. Mr de Havilland was not happy. He had his manufacturers, had his own factory, had his own workers and he wasn't short of a bobber too. So he decided to go ahead with his own project. He believed in his idea. Now everybody's handing in metal, pots, pans, railings and gateposts to get melted down to turn into aeroplanes like Spitfires. But Sir Geoffrey de Havilland had his idea that he would make his aeroplane out of wood. Construction was of wood and this was revolutionary for first class British aircraft. But wood was chosen for three main reasons. For quick production, to use fresh material supplies and to employ a new group of labour. Wood construction also gave this plane more buoyancy in the event of coming down on water and in place of the clang of metal is the sound of carpentry. In place of sparks there's sawdust. Nothing strange about a wooden aeroplane a long time ago, but this is the Second World War, we're in modern times. If this aeroplane is going to go up against a German fighter like the Messerschmitt 109, a lethal aeroplane, the wood is going to have to be very streamlined and very strong. He started experimenting with very thin layers of veneer, some balsa wood, pressing them down with some fish-based glue over some upside down jigs, books, looking like an upside down boat. He pressed them over and moulded them down, popped them off and he had two semicircles. Put the two semicircles together you have one long tube, or fuselage if you will. Just enough room for one pilot, his navigator and a lot of bombs. He'd got a fuselage, he decided to try the same with wings, but of course if this aeroplane is going to be fast you need powerful engines, it's going to be manoeuvrable to get away from the German fighters. Sticking to the wings, not one but two 27 litre V12 Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and two, as you can see, of the biggest propellers he could possibly fit on the little wooden aeroplane. If you follow the trajectory of the propellers down you can see it only just misses the nose of the aeroplane and the little wooden bomber ends up with 3,000 horsepower. It rapidly went into production and they rearranged the production shops to enable as many Mosquitoes to be built as possible and that resulted in there being four production lines and the various parts, the shells of the fuselage and the wing boxes were brought together from other sites, mostly from places where there had been furniture manufacturers and at the peak one aeroplane would emerge from each line each day. That was the scale of production that was was achieved because it was wartime and things were sort of desperate. Thousands of men whose peacetime job was making beds and chairs are now workers in aircraft production. Thousands of women too are working all out on the world's fastest warplane. Now if you were learning to fly in the wartime and you were moving on to Bomber Command you would need a twin rating, obviously flying an aeroplane with two engines. To get the twin rating you might learn to fly in the Airspeed Oxford, which we also have here at Imperial War Museum Duxford, or the Avro Anson down on the floor. Aeroplanes that are quite old-fashioned built, covered in Irish linen, room for two or three guys, perhaps a couple of machine guns and with total power output of less than 600 horsepower. The Mosquito had 3,000 horsepower, slick down the fuselage, no pop rivet, no screws, completely aerodynamic. A prototype was made W4050 and one or two other prototypes were sent here to Duxford to the air fighting development unit outside of the south side of Hangar 3. Nothing new about a new aeroplane showing up outside on the grass for Duxford for testing, a little twin engine bomber. But this aeroplane, no armament, the test pilots were scratching their head. Reading a few of the pilots notes as best they could, they took off to test the Mosquito as it became known. Not only did the test pilots come back with a wry smile because not only was it the fastest bomber they had ever flown, it was the fastest aeroplane they had ever known. And in fact I had the privilege of being asked by the chief of the air staff then to go and fly the prototype Mosquito in, I think it was February 1941, and I was in fact only the third pilot ever to fly a Mosquito. So I was happy to fly the aircraft and overjoyed at its high performance. Do you remember that occasion? Very well indeed because it was so much higher performance than the Beaufighters which was an outstanding war machine and the Mosquito was a real joy to fly and of course subsequently proved so to so many pilots. So eventually they said let's test this thing against our best, let's test it against a Spitfire. The contemporary Spitfire in 1941 was a Mark 5 Spitfire. A Mark 5 Spitfire was tested against the Mosquito to see if the Mosquito could keep up. It was the other way around, at no altitude could a Mark 5 Spitfire stay with a Mosquito. The Mosquito was put into service with flying colours. The first Mosquitos off the production line were going into bomber command and with a slightly extended bomb bay as you can see as has a slightly extended bomb bay, a little bit of a fat bit at the bottom of the fuselage, that Mosquito could carry the same average bomb load as a B-17 Flying Fortress. A B-17 obviously carrying 13 very heavily armed machine guns, 10 very brave young American lads. A Mosquito, little aeroplane made out of wood, was carrying its pilot, its navigator and could carry a 4,000 bomb load. Initially the Mosquito had the lowest loss rate of any aeroplane in bomber command, such was its performance even without armament. What was it about the Mosquito that lent itself particularly to it? Well it could do anything, it could carry a 4,000 pound bomb, we used to carry four 500 pound TRAs. We had drop tanks, we could fly for six and a half, nearly seven hours, so we had quite a good range and speed. If we wanted to put it on we could go faster than most of our fighters anyway, they'd have to come down from a height and in the dark they couldn't see us to that extent and being wood their radar detection didn't find us very easily because there was no reflection back from it. It was a sort of aircraft that you felt perfectly confident in and you thought you were master of all and nothing could touch you, you know. So Sir Geoffrey de Havilland and the design team decided to say, well if it's that fast let's try it with some guns in the nose, let's see if it doesn't slow it down much. So in the nose they placed four 303 British machine guns, Browning machine guns, but a 303 round is not as powerful as the American .50 calibre. A 303 bullet is about less than half the size of a .50 cal, about the size of the end of a little finger. So as well as that to give the Mosquito a little bit more sting, they also put four 20 millimetre Hispano cannons underneath its chin, a fair bit of firepower. That Mosquito became the fighter bomber, the FB6, and was found that it only actually slowed the Mosquito down by about 15 knots. So in effect even the slowest Mosquito was still doing 380 miles an hour with that amount of sting at the front. Now obviously not painted like ours is, I'll explain that in a minute. The Mosquitoes that went on to fighter command and fighter bombers and intruder units with the machine guns and the cannons in the nose were painted sort of blue grey underneath like a dolphin and with grey and green camouflage on the top. Painted and armed thus off to fighter bomber command and also into intruder units, Mosquitoes waged war on the Gestapo, attacking Gestapo HQs everywhere, all over Europe. In Copenhagen Mosquitoes attacked the Gestapo HQ flying literally as our Mosquito is portrayed about 30 feet from the ground, below the rooftops and down the streets, throwing bombs quite literally straight through the front door of the Gestapo HQs. Mosquito pilots loved their aeroplanes, nothing really could catch them. Unfortunately in late 1941 an aeroplane had come to fore called the Focke-Wulf 190, invented by a gentleman called Kurt Tank and at medium altitude a Focke-Wulf could catch a Mosquito and became its nemesis. But in fact even fitted with the 21 Merlin engines, the Mosquito at high level was still very fast, it was as fast as a Spitfire with comparable engines and therefore 190 interceptions were by no means inevitable but if they did take place you were pretty well for it. However Mosquitoes still were very very uncatchable aeroplanes until the advent of the Messerschmitt 262 jet. Mosquitoes were the first MRCA multi-role combat aircraft, they could be turned to anything and excelled at everything they did. Later on armed with a huge cannon underneath its chin, a six pound cannon firing a trajectory about that big against anti-shipping firing one round every other second. Also armed with rockets just underneath its wings also for anti-shipping. Mosquitoes without any armament at all and painted sky blue went into photo reconnaissance units flying up to 35,000 feet and well over 400 miles an hour. Obviously very uninterceptable at that height and speed. There were 7,781 Mosquitoes made between 1940 and 1950 but they ended their career painted like this, as a target tug from 1950 to 1962 dragging around a long windsock so early Cold War jets like F-86 Sabres, Meteors, Vampires and Hunters could fire at it for target practice. But I prefer to remember the painted like a dolphin, armed to the teeth, screaming down streets and scaring the life out of the Gestapo. 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