History & Legends, Military Aviation
The photographs are almost hard to believe: Wellingtons limping home with whole sections of fuselage burned or shot away, the fabric skin hanging in ribbons and the aircraft’s metal skeleton showing through like the bones of a fish. And still they flew. That,...
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...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 7 told the engineering story of the B-29 — the pressurised cabin, the burning engines, the Battle of Kansas. This piece asks the question that story leaves hanging: how did America build nearly...
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
It had a propeller at the back, a nose that tilted up to lob its cannon shells, and a seat that dropped its pilot out through the belly in an emergency so he would not be chopped to pieces by his own engine. It was nearly as long as a DC-3. And it was a fighter. Meet...
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...
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