History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 11 June 1940, the people of Malta looked up at a sky suddenly full of Italian bombers and saw, rising to meet them, a handful of fabric-and-wire biplanes that looked like relics from the last war. They were relics. And for ten desperate days, they were all the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a single dirt runway hacked out of a jungle, ringed by palm stumps and bomb craters, with a handful of battered fighters parked in the mud. Every day it was bombed. Some nights it was shelled by battleships. And from it, a scratch force of Marine, Navy and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
There was a stretch of sky between India and China so lethal that the men who flew it said you could navigate by the wrecks below. They called it the Hump — and for three years, an unbroken stream of transport planes crossed the highest mountains on Earth, in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Part 9 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Everything in this series converges here: the physics of Part 1, the exiles of Part 2, the bomb of Part 5, the aircraft of Part 7, the fire doctrine of Part 8. Two missions, four days, one surrender....
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Part 6 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Before one aircraft could destroy one city, the burning of cities had to become ordinary. This part tells how that happened over Germany — soberly, by the numbers, and through the people under the bombs and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell XP-67 is remembered for how it looked. Sleek, sculpted, every line flowing into the next, it was one of the most beautiful fighters of the Second World War — and one of the most tragic, because its...
Aviation World, History & Legends
On a clear summer morning in 1956, two airliners climbed out of Los Angeles minutes apart, each carrying dozens of people east across the desert. Somewhere over the Grand Canyon, in a sky so vast it should have held them both a thousand times over, they flew into each...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the winter of 1942, the odds facing an American bomber crew over Europe were close to a coin toss. The Eighth Air Force flew its heavy bombers by daylight, without enough fighter escort, straight into the teeth of German flak and fighters. Finishing a full tour of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By the summer of 1944, Charles Lindbergh was the most famous pilot alive and one of the most controversial men in America. He had crossed the Atlantic alone in 1927 and been adored for it. Then he had campaigned to keep the United States out of the war, clashed...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of December 8, 1941, the same Japanese offensive that had just shattered Pearl Harbor reached a speck of coral 2,000 miles to the west. Wake Island was barely three low islets around a lagoon — a refuelling stop with an airstrip, a few hundred...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On the morning of 4 June 1942, forty-one obsolete torpedo bombers lumbered off three American carriers toward the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft were too slow, their torpedoes barely worked, and most of them had no fighter escort. Within an hour, all but a handful had...
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