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The wife was out with the girls Friday night, so I spent a portion of the evening channel-surfing on the HDTV. Somehow, one of those seemingly infinite WWII documentary shows seemed to have escaped from the television purgatory of The History Channel and was running on New Hampshire Public Television; since it wasn't going to be interrupted by commercials every six minutes, I decided to watch.
The show was about warplanes (in fact, I think the show itself was called "War Planes", originally enough) and I tuned in at the point where they were talking about World War II bombers: the Flying Fortress, the Super Fortress, the Lancaster, and the most versatile plane used in the Second World War, the De Havilland Mosquito. When I coincidentally spotted this post at "Damn Interesting" Saturday morning, I knew I needed to blog it.
As you'll find at those links, the Mosquito was constructed out of a sandwich of plywood and balsa wood, making it incredibly light, and thus highly maneuverable. In evaluations, they discovered that the design of the plane allowed it to carry a much heavier payload than originally estimated, making it possible for the plane to be used for the large-scale bombing missions the RAF flew over Germany, acting both as a pathfinder for the heavy bombers and a precision bomber itself. The Germans were unable to successfully counter the Mosquito with their own planes until late in the war, by which time the tide had been turned and Allied victory was imminent.
Damn interesting indeed. Thanks, guys!
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