De Havilland Mosquito: The RAF’s Wooden Wonder
Dawn breaks over the French coast as six wooden aircraft skim so low over the hedgerows that the pilots bank around the treetops. Ahead lies Amiens prison, and a plan so precise it only works if every aircraft holds its line to within a few feet of the target.
This episode matters because the de Havilland Mosquito was never supposed to exist: an unarmed wooden bomber the Air Ministry doubted from the start, built on the gamble that speed alone could keep a crew alive where guns and armour usually did the job, and then sent to do almost every job the RAF had.
In this episode:
- How Geoffrey de Havilland’s unarmed wooden bomber went from “Freeman’s Folly” to one of the fastest aircraft in the world
- The furniture workshops and joinery firms pulled into building a frontline combat aircraft
- Daylight raids on Berlin, the Oboe system that guided Bomber Command’s Main Force to its targets, and the night fighter crews who hunted the Luftwaffe over its own airfields
- The Amiens prison raid and the Shellhus raid on Copenhagen, and the very different outcomes speed and precision produced in each
- How a Nobel Prize winning physicist crossed occupied Scandinavia folded into a Mosquito’s bomb bay
Listen if you’re interested in: RAF aircraft development, the air war over occupied Europe, precision bombing and special operations, or the human cost behind even the most successful weapons programmes.
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