History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In August 1944, 168 Allied airmen — American, British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealander — arrived at Buchenwald concentration camp. They were not spies or saboteurs. They were downed aircrew, men who should by every law of war have...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On a June day in 1945, Muscovites watched a giant four-engined bomber bank over a restricted airfield in the city’s northeast. Red stars marked the wings, but sharp eyes could still read two English words on the nose: “Ramp Tramp.”...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It had three engines, a great ugly hump on its back, and a name its own crews spat out with grim affection: il gobbo maledetto — the damned hunchback. Yet the Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 Sparviero was, for a time, one of the finest torpedo bombers of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Germany went into the Second World War without a modern four-engine heavy bomber, and it spent much of the war failing to build one. The aircraft meant to fix that — the Heinkel He 177 Greif — had four engines but only two propellers, a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1947 a German with a false passport stepped off a ship in Buenos Aires. The name on the document read Pedro Matthies. The man was Kurt Tank — former technical director of Focke-Wulf, the designer of the Fw 190, and the head of the team behind...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It was nearly 27 metres of gleaming Soviet ambition — a needle-nosed, missile-armed interceptor built to swat American bombers out of the stratosphere. On 16 July 1956 the Lavochkin La-250 lifted off for the first time, rolled uncontrollably,...
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