These were not flaws. They were tradeoffs. They could have increased the service ceiling simply by reducing the bomb load, but they chose to deliver more bombs or to deliver them further or both. As for sustaining battle damage, the more you over-build an airplane the heavier it is and the less payload/range you have. Do you design it to fly or to get shot up? In the overall scheme of things, as an airforce you will hit the enemy harder if the majority of the aircraft deliver more bombs. The b24 was a successful design. Every airplane design is the product of many tradeoffs. In most cases these are not “flaws”. There are no perfect airplanes.
Came here to say exactly this. Every machine is a set of compromises designed to perform to a set of specific goals. Consolidated understood very well that they were trading durability, altitude, and maneuverability for range and bomb load. Who needs maneuverability in a bomber in that era? Keep in mind the mindset of the day: Lose a bomber, build 3 more, lose an aircrew, train 5 more and send the family a gold star. Tragic, but our fore fathers were made of sterner stuff. The B-24 performed to its design goals extremely well. That's why they built 18,000 of them. Click-bait title from an OP who apparently knows very little about the subject.
I just wish this muppet would learn to speak properly. Its so bad I found it unwatchable. I also found it maybe overstated - He says 'Crews prefered the Fort' My Dad flew both. Reconed the Liberator was a lot more comfortable. That said, the Fort was the one he talked about most. Go figure.
I've been inside both. I'm a heavy guy and I could get through the B-24. The fortress was too small all over. You are correct about the design filling a required mission. The fortress was designed around a two engine requirement. With the four motors, they could carry the same load farther and faster. Adding the large wings and lots of controlling surface, the bomber could take a huge amount of damage and still fly. It survived mid-air collisions that almost cut the plane in two. One landed in England without a crew. A B-17 had another B-17 land on it and they flew. Both were needed. Both performed their jobs perfectly. It is true that escort fighters helped the bombers perform even better.
My great uncle flew in these in WW2 he was an Observer with RAF Coastal Command and part of 224sqn. He used to descibe this aircraft as 'very luxurious' and prefered these to the Hudsons they had been using. His squadron was one of the first to use them and his plane was fitted with the then top secret ASV radar. Tragically he lost his life in a flying accident when his B24D hit a barrage balloon whilst attempting an emergency landing on 30 October 1942. The Aircraft was FK242 and the sqn letter was 'K' call sign K - King. Let us all remember all these brave aircrews and the sacrafice they made for us.
What a true 🇬🇧 hero your great uncle is. I am so disappointed that today we don't remember and commemorate our fallen heroes who defeated the most evil regime to walk this planet.
@@anandmorris thanks for the reply, you are correct we should remember the sacrafice made by these airmen. Many of them said nothing and just got on with their lives when they got home. So it's up to us to research and share their stories. My great uncle Flying Officer Victor Crowther was only 24yrs old when he died, he trained in Canada and actually become the Squadron bombing leader. But, they wrre all so young, Flying Officer Gavin Sellar the pilot of his aircraft was only 21yrs, the oldest crew member was 26yrs and the youngest and only survivor of the crash was 19yrs, sgt Dennis Pass he was the tail gunner. When i look back now my only regret is not asking my Grandad more questions about WW2 before he passed away. We will remember them.
Before the US entered the war my wife's Uncle drove from Texas to Canada and joined the RCAF. He flew Spitfires from England until the US entered the war. He transferred to the US Army Air Corp as a B-24 co-pilot. His plane was shot down in the raid on the Ploesti oil refineries. All of the crew perished. Back in 2000 some of his family went to Germany and met the German pilot who shot down the bomber.
@@txdave2 I've read about that meeting, it must have been hard for everyone involved. One thing that struck me about my great uncles flight was how many other people nowadays have been affected by the accident. His crash was featured in a book 'Dartmoor Air Crashes' by Bob Jones. Through his research he managed to get hold of the living relatives of the crew and we all petitioned Dartmoor National Parks into letting us erect a new memorial for them. Over 100 relatives were at the crash site for the dedication ceremony. I couldn't make it because I'm in NZ but the RNZAF sent a representative for us. But it's very important for us to remember them all and all the other aircrews that served during any war. I would have loved to of found out what your uncle thought about the B24 after flying in Spitfires? Best wishes to you and yours from NZ.😉
Both the B-17 and B-24 had their advantages and disadvantages. The Liberator had greater range, speed and bomb load, the Flying Fortress was more durable, could fly higher and was better defended. In Europe the B-17 probably was the superior bomber, but in the Pacific it was definitely the B-24. They both served their role admirably.
Funny how B-17 fanboys don't want to talk about how the B-17 was retired from the Pacific in mid-1943 because of not only range issues but because it was a terrible anti-ship/submarines bomber! It couldn't bomb ships or submarines very well. B-24s served in all theaters throughout the whole war and was never retired anywhere like the B-17! B-24s won the Battle of the Atlantic and helped win the war in the Pacific! Also the sorties to losses ratio for B-24s (226,775 sorties with 3,626 shot down) was 1.60% vs 1.61% for B-17s (291,508 sorties with 4,688) in Europe! B-17s weren't able to bomb Romanian oil refineries in 1942-43. You know what bomber was able to do so? B-24s!!! B-17s could only do one thing which was short range strategic bombing runs from England to Germany. Btw, 3,626 lost B-24s and 4,688 lost B-17s in Europe alone in WWII is INSANE!!! We treat it today like it was not a big deal at all. Like that is normal. The British lost 57,000 KIA/MIA and 9,000 POWs on bomber crews alone in Europe also! How good were those German flak and fighters?
@@nogoodnameleft I knew a guy who was a mechanic on both the B-17 and B-24 in the European theater. He much preferred the B-17 to work on because it was far easier to service engines and do any airframe work. The B-24 was a great bomber, but it was more difficult to service.
@@pimpompoom93726 I know the B-24 is ugly and very tough to work with unlike the beautiful and easy to fly B-17. But the B-24 still was the truly rugged plane that lost less planes in ETO than the B-17 and had a less sorties to losses ratio than the B-17. The B-17 was a non-factor in the Atlantic, Pacific (where it was actually withdrawn for poor performance in mid-1943), North Africa, Italy, and Romania until air bases were established in central Italy in spring 1944, unlike the B-24. The B-24 was truly an awesome Swiss Army knife. The Ford Assembly Plant for swift construction of 8,500 B-24s was one of the greatest feats of engineering and manufacturing in history also! The B-17 was not able to be built fast and efficiently like the B-24. The B-24 truly looks like a can of spam with wings. 🤣
My brother was crew chief on a B24 that took off from a base in Italy and bombed Germany. German artillery was shelling our troops and the artillery piece was so disguised, they couldn't tell where it was coming from. An observer spotted it located in a large cathedral. B-24s took off from Italy and my brother said they flattened that building. They didn't have any more trouble with artillery after that. He survived 2 crash landings in B24s. In the last one the fuel lines were all shot up and leaking. My brother wrapped some rags tightly around the fuel line and had to hold it. He held it until they slid in and got all the wounded and everybody off. Then at the last he barely got off before the fuel ignited and the plane blew up. He got a medal for that.
Don't Apologize to him. You're Dad was Awesome for what he did my Patriot American brother. My Dad was a Marine in the Pacific campaign. I get it!🇺🇸✝️❤️💪👍
It’s no comment on your dad or the accomplishments of units who flew the B-24. It’s range closed the gap in the mid-Atlantic so that the U-boats no longer had a sanctuary for hunting the convoys vital to the war effort, including our own, in the UK and then on the Western Front. It’s higher speed reduced the time German fighters had to attack them. The bomb load was higher than the B-17’s. Crews died in legion on both European Theater bombers. Nonetheless the B-17 had a reputation for ruggedness that the B-24 did not. How much that assertion is backed up by actual numbers is not stated here. The stats have to be out there as the USAAF documented the hell out of every mission.
My dad was in China. 308th. Radio man and gunner. Flew the hump many times. He also argued in favor of the 24. On best of the web check out Miss Conduct.
I would say it's durability was very underestimated. My Father's Ship a B24 H Ford Willow Run had the Hydraulics shot out, flak damage to both wings & one stabilizer, and lost an engine, it went in to a spiral. The Pilot gave the Order to bailout my Father and 5 others went down the catwalk and out through the Bombay Doors. MACR 2398. After dropping about 5000 feet the Pilot and Co Pilot regained control of the Ship and using manual controls limped it back to base. The Plane part of the 449th Bombardment Group Original Cadre was patched up and replacements were put into the crew and it completed it's 25 Missions. It was then turn over to a New Pilot and crew and flew 21 more Missions until being shot down in June of 44 MACR 6443 and had flown 46 missions without full escort. I think it was a pretty durable Aircraft. You also have to keep in mind that the 15th Air Force received no P51s. The 17s mostly flying out of England with the 8th Air Force were first in line to have full escort to and from the target and got them in late 43. My Father was in a Stalag Luft 1. They, heard about the P51s listening to crystal radios they built in the Camp. To the best To the best of my knowledge they never received P51s and only had P38s & 47 for full escorts in the early Part of the War when they were hitting Northern Italy. Once they went any further, they were on their own and the Escorts would drop them off and pick them up @ the Italian border. Funny thing that was actually a travesty and a big FUP by the Brass, it turned out the P47 could handled larger drop tanks and could have been used for long range escort well before the P51 was deployed. A lot of Ships could have been saved had the Brass not been so adamant about not experimenting with the P47 that was by far the most underrated Fighter in the Inventory.
Man I've done all kind of research on that raid. Absolute balls of steel by men like your dad...I wouldn't have been able to crap for about a week after being puckered for hours.
My neighbor Dan was a B-24 pilot in WWII. He always wore a hat that said “Liberator” on it. He talked about this one time when a German plane was tearing his Liberator up, when all of a sudden the shooting stopped. He said a P-51 with a red tail pulled up next to him, and in his own words “there was a black man flying it!” The Tuskegee airman had a big grin, shot Dan a salute, and then peeled off to regroup.
Until long range fighters came to theater, the strategic daytime bomber campaign was a failure. If the fighters hadn't shown up the 8th Airforce would have ceased to exist.
My dad was nose gunner and second radioman on a B-24 in the Pacific. Most of his missions were anti-submarine. He brought back dozens of plane pics and most of them were of the unique “Nose Art” on many aircraft. There are some beautifully painted noses on planes of that era.
Reading a story about a B24 that was out on patrol around the Aleutian Islands during WWII. The plane took some flak from the Japanese on either Attu or Kiska, dropped their bombs and headed back to base. On the way back and in addition to their flak damage, the plane started icing up big time. Their base in sight, the pilot orders the landing gear down and everything locks into place... EXCEPT the nose wheel that had caught the most of the flak damage! Pilot and copilot have read about two wheel landings in a B24 and had heard stories from other pilots. Though not impossible, you need some piloting magic and some, ok, lots of luck! The pilot orders EVERYONE to the rear of the airplane, needing that extra weight to keep that nose up as long as possible while he stamps on those breaks to slow the ship down. Pilot lines up on the runway where it is snowing and freezing raining out. He sets her down on those two wheels, hits the breaks for all that they are worth and just off to the side of the runway end, the plane stops completely... WHILE STILL BALANCING ON THOSE TWO WHEELS! The pilot is like WTF as well as the crew members. They all get safely out of the damaged B24, throw their flight gear over their shoulders and head to the nearest warm building... though they do occasionally turn around and look back at their B24 that is STILL BALANCING ON THOSE TWO WHEELS!
*The B-24 loss rate in the ETO was actually slightly better than that of the B-17.* *The B-24 flew 226,775 sorties with 3,626 losses or 1.60% while the B-17 flew 291,508 sorties with 4,688 losses or 1.61%.*
My father was a mechanic originally assigned to Pueblo, CO airfield. He went to B24 school at the Ford facility in Ypsilanti, MI, and there was no assignment for him, so he was asked if he'd like to go through the program again! He did so, and despite later assignments to B29 and other aircraft, my Dad always liked the B24 over other planes. I have a picture of him in the copilot's seat in a B24 that was visiting a local airport. Of all the photos I have, that one is my favorite.
Yeah, video titles like this one, "major design errors", always piss me off. Many, like this one, border on, or are, complete lies. The B-24 was built here at the Consolidated factory in SoCali where it still stands today and currently houses the HQ for Naval Information Warfare Command, earlier the Space & Naval Warfare Systems Command. Unknowledgeable people posting videos like this seize upon a few tidbits of information and build "major design errors" around it.
Dad was a B-24 bottom turret gunner flying out of Italy, got 17 missions in before engine failure forced them to parachute out. He was captured and spent over a year in a German POW.
When I was a cadet in the Ait Training Corps (13-18 year-olds), one of the instructors was an RAF navigator in B24 Liberators. He was proud to have served in the aircraft. He donated a prize, which was a plaque of a Liberator, to be awarded to the cadet who passed the navigation exam the best, which was me the first year.
All I know is I’m very thankful I wasn’t born yet and didn’t have to fly in one of those things B-24… B-17… doesn’t matter, both were loud, cramped, cold, dangerous…
I remember reading the book written by the commander of JG400, the Luftwaffe unit that flew captured allied aircraft for evaluation and training. He hated the B-24. Said it handled terrible and was an unpleasant aircraft to fly. He said no German aircraft would have been put in service with the B-24's weaknesses. However, he said it could not be denied that regardless of the drawbacks B-24s were being built by the thousands and were bombing German targets daily. An uncle of mine was a navigator in the South Pacific in WWII. He flew a mix of combat and cargo flights across the South Pacific late '42 to his death in combat in July '43. He flew cargo runs in LB-30s (the cargo variant of the B-24) between the major US bases like Henderson Field and Esprito Santo. He hated them compared to the B-17. I have his logs and letters and he called the '24 noisy, drafty, and cold. He was lost on a bombing mission in a B-17E at the end of the B-17's use in the South Pacific. All heavy units using them transitioned to B-24s by late '43. The '24's range and bomb load advantage made them more effective in the South Pacific than the B-17.
I didn't even know that plane existed until I saw one on final approach to KBLI in 2002. It had been converted into a fire bomber. They retired them a few months later after one overstressed its wing and crashed. It was just a few weeks after a Hercules crashed on camera fighting a fire.
@@frankmoreau8847 I remember that. Grandad was very proud of his plane he said it was superior to the standard PB4Y (B24) because its big single vertical stabilizer made it much easier to fly at lower speed and altitude.
My father in law was also trained on a PB4Y-2 out of Florida preparing to go overseas for the invasion of mainland Japan when the war ended. They trained heavily at low altitudes. They used to drop dummy bombs on whales they spotted. He always wondered how he would have performed his job had they seen combat.
@@justme8340 Wow! Do you know what squadron he was in? My granddad did two tours in the pacific. After his first tour he was sent to Texas and was an instructor for a short time before he volunteered for a second tour and went back to the pacific with VPB118.
I’ve got his log book around here somewhere. I’ll have to dig it up and look. I know he was based out of the old Master Field near Miami, Opa-Locka. He once did time in the “Brig” for being late for duty. The supposed Brig was a hotel on the beach and his punishment was handing out beach towels to pretty girls sunbathing.
Had the B-24 been used by RAF coastal command at the start of the battle of the Atlantic,U-boat kills would have gone through the roof.The Davis wing on the Liberator wasn't suited to high altitude flight with a heay bomb load,but at medium and low levels it would have excelled,as mentioned previously as a maritime patrol aircraft.
absolutely correct. Coast Command could not wrangle many long range bombers from Bomber Command for maritime duty. since payloads could be smaller, depth changes and smaller contact bombs could be used, additional fuel cells could be mounted to extend flying time even more.
@@BigSkyCurmudgeon; depth charges. Sometimes the top army brass do not think logically . Applied to both the sides in the WW2. If Hitler had listened to his top Generals, there would be no Russian front and the Germans would have conquered Europe.
That is great! Were they English crews, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, American? What craft was used for the flyover? My Dad recently went on an Honor Flight to DC and was pretty lukewarm on going. But he was so swept away and caught up in the ceremonies, the effort mostly by volunteers, the honor and praise from adults and children everywhere, and the recognition from his friends back home who saw him on TV, moved him to tears and serious introspection. I haven’t seen him this happy and humbled in a very long time, and it was one of the few times I’ve seen him so proud to have served. It’s not that he wasn’t always patriotic nor had pride for our country, he just never talked about it much or wear it on his sleeve. Suffice it to say, we unboxed his 8mm films from Korea (he was drafted for the war, but the ceasefire was implemented before he got there) and watched him and his buddies do there thing in the Signal Corp, but mainly of all the building he ran work for, for both the base and the Korean communities surrounding. He’s a mason by trade, and had 12-16 brick layers working for him in his late 20s, but can pretty much build anything…so, that’s what he did. Even in his mid-70s he was building homes because he said he was bored. He’s approaching 88 now and, I swear, he has more energy and motivation than I do. He even still downhill skis, for pete’s sake! I wouldn’t have thought it’d have affected him like it did, but it was pretty amazing seeing it. I learned these tributes are a big deal to these warriors and rebuilders from our past, and won’t ever underestimate the impact and importance people like you bring to folks like my Dad. You’ve done a great thing. Thanks for that.
Heard a conversation between a B-17 Veteran and a B-24 Veteran. The Liberator Vet said; "The B-24 carried more bombs further." The Fortress Vet replied; "Yeah, but the B-17 carried more aircrew further."
@@fawnlliebowitz1772 Considering that the B24 was taped for deeper penetration bombing attacks, the similar loss rates is miss leading. The average B24 bombing run required more air time, and thus exposure to enemy attack than what the normal B17 was tasked to do. My father was also a B24 pilot in the 8th Air Force. A member of the original 492nd Bomb Group. When that Group was disbanded, his crew was assigned to radar/radio jamming missions. Frequently, their missions had no end time or destination assigned to them, as the planes being used were expected not to return. He had told me that they flew jamming missions that kept them in the air for 12 plus hours at a time, all in range of Germany attack. He was in the air doing radio jamming on the second day of the Battle of the Bulge when all of western Europe was socked in. They never heard another allied radio air transmission that day and he always suspected they may have been the only plane in the air for those hours they were aloft. The design flaw missed in this story is how difficult it was for airmen to escape from a stricken B24. The procedure was to leave out the open bomb bay doors. Getting opened manually was time consuming. Trying to leave by way of the waist gunner openings risked being hit by the horizontal stabilizer. The sole dedicated exit door in the nose could only be accessed by three crewmen easily. A wounded B24 too frequently took most of its crew to their deaths. My father, and his crew were lucky. No one in my dad's crew earned a purple heart in service. This is remarkable considering he was assigned to a group (the 492nd) that only had six of the original 36 crews complete their tours of duty.
@@fawnlliebowitz1772 The number of mission flown to complete your tour of duty changed: the original 492nd 'only' needed to fly 25 missions and be done. My dad, one of the last replacement crews, need to fly 50. Your dad in Italy had to make 35. Some of the guys in the South Pacific needed 100 missions for a tour of duty. Those had to be hard count downs to fly that many missions.
I talked to a Pearl Harbor and 15th AF vet a few years ago at the Mid Atlantic Air Museum WW2 weekend. I was mostly asking him about his experiences in the B-17. He mentioned on one mission while they were forming up over the Adriatic that the B-24 groups had to swing their formation wide so that they could fly with the 17's and it was because the 24 couldn't fly as slow. I did mention to him that the 24 guys would have said they had to swing wide bc the 17's couldn't not fly as fast and he laughed. They were both great bombers that were no frills designed with minimal safety engineered into them. My pap would go toe to toe with anyone who dissed his Lib. This is a link to an interview with the vet I talked to. He was a facinating guy. ua-cam.com/video/3faXf5UtU0c/v-deo.html
My father, a Ploesti 1 survivor, said that if the 24 got hit either in the wing root, or in the landing gear well, that the wing would snap off. Many of the people in his outfit (the Pyramiders) really did not like the airplane (mostly A models), but they were stuck with it.
I talked to one of the workers who flew on the Collings Foundation B-24 bomber and he told me that the B-24 drifted up and down a lot in the higher altitudes that it was a full workout for the pilots to correct it and keep in formation. One wrong move could send the plane drifting up and away from the formation and force them to fly back alone without escort fighters.
The wing root is the weakest spot on all large aircraft. The 24 could also take more damage than the 17 because of it's shape and design. The 24 also had an auxiliary flight control system the 17 didn't including hydraulics for the flaps.
@@riproar11 I too have worked with the Collings Foundation and flew in the Witchcraft many times. The up and down drift is due to no pay load. In combat with a high wing the dihedral would be left to right with a full load. That is compensated with the twin tail, though more dihedral is present on the 24 at higher altitudes with a 3/4 bomb payload still higher than that of the 17, it would maneuver just fine without the drift to the left and it's performance was better.
My father flew 33 combat missions as flight mechanic in B-24's in the 735 sq/461bg/15AF. The Liberators had their issues but he was able to keep a badly damaged aircraft flying to get back to base. There were many 24's that suffered extreme damage and still flew. It was not so much the aircraft as where they took battle damage. Flak and enemy fighters were able to down just as many 17's as 24's.
Another issue with the Davis wing was that it was vulnerable in icing conditions. Some designs would tolerate a fair bit of ice before losing control but the Liberator with the Davis wing was not one. A relatively small amount of ice could disturb the airflow around the airfoil to the extent that the aircraft would depart controlled flight. This is mentioned in Ernest K. Gann’s classic of aviation literature ‘Fate is the Hunter’. Gann flew C-87’s, the transport and cargo variant of the B-24, during WWII.
History's verdict on the rightness of the B-24 shape, boxy fuselage and high aspect wing? Look how Boeing built the B-52: boxy fuselage and long flexible wing. Imitation is the most sincere praise.
They were exhausting to fly because they simply could not be neutrally trimmed. The pilot could not take his hands off the controls even for a second or it would jaw and pitch to port. No amount to aileron adjustment could fix it. The Davis wing was basically unstable. The B17 was better but neither could achieve the stability of the Lancaster which could fly itself once trimmed and only ever needed one pilot. There were many instances of Lancaster pilots being shot hot in combat and the plane flying all the way back from Germany on its own. Even a radio operator could get one back on the ground.
Last year I had the privilege to fly on the Diamond Lil a B-24. It had been on the top of my bucket list for years. My one Aunt was engaged to a bombardier on #42-109814 ( Jive Bomber ) ( 392nd Bomb Group out of Wendling, Norfolk , England ) that had its right wing blown off by flak near St. Pol , France on 26 Mar 1944 killing all ten on board. It was the only aircraft in that flight that was shot down . The German Report said all were buried in the British Cemetery at St. Pol. In 1951 his body was laid to rest in Ottawa Hills Cemetery near Toledo, Ohio. It was their 11th mission. When my Aunt died I got all her pictures of him in uniform. I also have a picture of the nose art of the Jive Bomber. I have also had the privilege of flying on a B-25 ( Berlin Express ) and a B-17 ( Liberty Bell ) . In the USAF I caught rides On a C-47, C-135, and a KC-135. I worked on B-52E and Kc135A aircraft.
There were other things. The B-24 was difficult to bail out of in an emergency. It also lacked armor for the pilot and co-pilot. Some pilots and co-pilots used to carry a plate of 1/4" steel with handles which they would hold up in front of their lower bodies when fighters were coming at them head on.
@@None-zc5vg That was only used on special long range missions when they removed half the Bomb racking and replaced it with the extra fuel tank. The H Model my Father Flew in had self sealing tanks, which prevented fires. My Father's Ship had the Hydraulics shot out, flak damage to both wings & one stabilizer, and lost an engine, in went in to a spiral. The Pilot gave the Order to bailout my Father and 5 others went down the catwalk and out through the Bombay Doors. MACR 2398. After dropping about 5000 feet the Pilot and Co Pilot regained control of the Ship and using manual controls limped it back to base. The Ship, part of the Group Original Cadre was patched up and replacements were put into the crew and it completed it's 25 Missions. It was then turn over to a New Pilot and crew and flew 21 more Missions until being shot down in June of 44 MACR 6443 and had flown 46 missions without full escort. I think it was a pretty durable Aircraft. You also have to keep in mind that the 15th Air Force was did not get P51s and did not have them the entire time that Ships were Flying. The 17s mostly flying out of England with the 8th Air Force were first in line to have full escort to and from the target and got them in late 43. My Father was in a Stalag Luft 1 for a long time before his Group received P51s. They, heard about the P51s listening to crystal radios they built in the Camp.
@@user-qy9tf2im7f That's got to be bitter-sweet seeing the crate you were just ORDERED to bail out of, recover and fly on home almost like nothing ever happened. Then again from the pilots perspective they would have been doing all they could to right the machine anyway and wouldn't want the rest of the crew to die should the attempt fail.
@@ToreDL87 They probably never saw it as they were in free fall counting down to pull their shutes. They were looking at the ground from that point on. The Pilot tried to communicate that he was regaining manual control, but they had already removed headsets scrambling toward the Bombay doors along the catwalk. You got to remember that when a Pilot gives an Order he is the Captain of the Ship. You don't question, you follow Orders. It was only took a minute to drop 5000 ft in a spiral and all hell is breaking loose. The Pilot said "BAIL OUT". They went.
My dad was a B17 and. B24 co pilot,(age of 20) during WWII B24 during the war. He had to fly a B25 for awhile after Casselbury (sp), most of the men and planes did not make it back. Horrible. Read about the Casselbury or Castlebury mission. He stayed in the Air Force as a lifer and they called him in to fly and instructor on the B47. McConnell A.FB. After take off ,only a few minutes the fuselage exploded and the lost a wing then the tail dad got the plane to a field away from the houses before it crashed. 1956 March 28th in Wichita,Kansas. It happened a lot with the B47s, that was the first jet engine bomber. The Squadron dad was in during the war was the 445th eighth A.F. Jimmy Stewart was too; at the same time. Jimmy Stewart’s plane was named “3or 4❓yanks and a jerk”. I was a baby when dad was killed, and I miss him, but oh so proud of him. I’m Tim’s wife maiden name Craggs dad was William (Bill). God Bless them all for keeping us safe and America free‼️
"It didn't fly as high, so it was easier to hit with flak" They had a larger maximum bomb weight, so they didn't fly as high and were easier to hit with flak. That's a decision, not a design flaw. As for "hard to manuever"... my grandfather (B-24 ball turret gunner, Flak Happy, Flak Happy Too, Kontagious Katy) told me a few stories about experiences on the 24 before he passed. He never expressed a wish they would move around better. ...a few times he wished people would stop throwing out toolboxes and parachutes while lightening the craft.. but nothing about the 24 itself.
2 great Liberator pilots. Jimmy Stewart and George McGovern ( who later became Senator ) George McGovern was considered by many to be one of the finest 24 pilots in the war.
@@robertthegrape2192 Stewart started out WWII by training pilots in both the B-17 and the B-24. He later led squadrons and flew missions out of England in B-24's.
Great aircraft my father was chief tooling engineer for DOUGLAS aircraft he was sent to Tulsa Oklahoma to build these aircraft along with the dauntless
The B-17 had a major flaw too, and to this day no one can say how many were lost due to that flaw, as no air crews were known to survive the catastrophic fire that flaw would cause until the one that led to it's discovery. The design flaw was discovered very late in the war, so it is highly probable that losses were attributed to combat when they were in fact due to the flaw.
@@augustdenger8231 Apparently, an oxygen feed to the cockpit was close enough to the upper turret ring as to rub against it and wear a hole in the pipe, this resulted in oxygen flowing under pressure over the turret electric drive wiring panel, resulting in a spark igniting the oxy and flooding the cockpit with a ball of flame, often killing the flight crew. after it was discovered, literally hundreds of aircraft had to be refitted to fix the flaw, which had been there since the B-17 was designed.
Britain thinks highly of the B24 because of it closing the mid-atlantic gap, and I guess the 'flaws' were unimportant there. I believe Harris had to be forced to concede them to Coastal Command, despite their usefulness.
I think they were designed for US requirements (long range high altitude day bombing) but at that time flying over Germany in daylight was suicide and US took a very long time to learn that when they came in and used the B-24 themselves. The Lancaster could carry 14,000 pounds of bombs to the B-24s 8,000 so Harris would need two B 24s and two crews to do the same damage as one Lanc. As Berlin is only 600 miles from London we did not need a plane with a 3,000 mile range bombing Germany. Also, the US way is to just make lots and win with numbers. UK had limited resources and limited money and so fought the war in a way to retain and use its resources as best it could. So B-24 was used in the best way to utilise its assets and limit any flaws.
If Jimmy Stewart flew this beast, it must have worked for the job it was designed to do. I loved the B-17, but the B-24 was more versatile in different roles.
B-24s would fly over my house everyday of the war from Willow Run. I live in White Pigeon in SW Michigan and wish I could’ve seen them like my grandparents could have.
That slewing 24 gives insight how the Lady Be Good came down under auto control on Libyan sand plain near Egyptian boarder. She after crew bailed out landed very similarly as evidence of wreckage. Landing in very dark conditions crew was unsure of terrain below . Discovered 16 years later she was amazingly intact just as that fateful mission had left her. Had she been retrieved and displayed in museum setting what an incredible tribute to the sacrifices of our aircrew service’s. Her gages, radio, guns etc. still in working order. A time capsule epic.
I remember when they found the Lady Be Good. Not long after, Armstrong Circle Theater presented a dramatization of the airplane and it's fate. The video is available on YT. My father was a navy CB in the Aleutian Islands during WWII. After the war ended he was waiting for a ship to take him back to the U.S. A B-24 pilot said he was leaving the next day and could give him a hop. My father turned down the offer. He later learned that aircraft crashed due to bad weather with all crew killed. He went back to San Francisco via the ocean.
There was also a highly fictionalized show based on Lady Be Good. Richard Basehart and Vince Edward played in it. Can’t recall if it was a show like Twilight Zone or not. The wreckage was haunted by the crash victims that only Richard Basehart could see. He had been the lone survivor but had been the navigator who the others blamed for the crash. Again, it was a fictionalized account and the LBG was not called out by name.
@@geodes6722 The Twilight Zone had an episode inspired by the Lady Be Good called "King 9 Will Not Return" starring Robert Cummings. His B-25 crashes in the desert and when he comes to after the crash he is alone with no sign of his crew. In the episodes climax, it is revealed that Cummings was in a hospital bed and dreaming about his crash. In the end, the doctors realize his visions were triggered by the headline in a newspaper about a crashed WWII bomber found intact in the desert.
The B24 gets criticized for the tendency of its wing to fold up if hit in the main spar at the wing root, there is actually a very dramatic if short video of this happening to a B24 available on UA-cam. The thing is, all aircraft are vulnerable at this point, and if a B17 gets hit in the same place its wing is likely to fold up too. Plus the B17 had been designed and built several years earlier and had built up a reputation among the press and the public as being invulnerable, the name Flying Fortress says all you need to know about the legend it had built up before it flew a single mission against Germany. the reality was different of course, B17's were being shot out of the sky in frighteningly large numbers, raids to places like Regensburg and Schweinfurt were disastrous and the vulnerability of any heavy bomber without fighter escort was obvious to all. Ultimately an aircraft succeeds if it fulfils the purpose it was designed for, and the B24 did perfectly well in this regard, its losses were overall no greater than the B17 and succeeded in roles that the B17 failed in, such as a maritime patrol aircraft and U Boat destroyer. It's a shame it gets an undeserved bad rep next to the B17, it was a great war-winning aircraft and deserves to be remembered.
Every WW2 bomber had its Achilles heel...some times more than one.. Proportionately the Wellington was incredibly tough as it was built on a Geodesic framework . The Lancaster carried the heaviest bomb load of any but it was vunerable from attacks from below. The liberators gift was to coastal command because its range closed the Iceland gap against the u boats... allowing thousands of troops to get through and supplies to let everyone else to take the war to the Nazis.
The film I know of showing the left wing folding and bursting into flame was shot from above, and it appears it was bombs released from that plane hit the wing. Either mistimed release, or the B-24 in question was too close and directly underneath. It was blamed on a direct flak burst, but look closely...there was an attempt to airbrush the falling bombs out of each frame.
My Dad flew combat in the southwest Pacific in B-24s as a pilot until a catastrophic takeoff crash due to a blown tire on takeoff from a crushed coral runway on the island of Morotai. He was one of three badly burned survivors. He said that B-24 pilots called the airplane the "Agony Wagon", among other things, due to the high control effort required to fly good formation. OTOH, he LOVED the Pratt and Whitney R-1830 engine to the end of his days. He spoke of the fire issues with the APU in the bomb bay that others have mentioned, an issue that resulted in another nickname, "Consolidated Incinerator", mentioned it as a perceived feature of Willow Run (Ford) built airplanes - and refused to buy Ford vehicles for most of his life! (He did finally relent on that with a 1988 diesel pickup, rationalizing that it didn't have any spark plugs or gasoline to create the type of fire hazard that had killed crews in his bomb group!). He appreciated the B-24 for its long range and the efficiency of the Davis airfoil, noting that in the Pacific, "Range was God", but he much preferred flying C-47s, A-20s and B-25s.
When Davis, the inventor of the wing, was taken to the factory as the first planes were being made he walked around one and said "You have the wing on at the wrong angle." The pilots had to fly with the tail up 10 degrees to get all of the fuel out of the tanks.
Author Ernest Gann flew the C-87 cargo version of the 'Liberator' in the Far East campaign: he wrote that 'the much-vaunted Davis wing couldn't hold enough ice to chill a highball'.
@@givenfirstnamefamilyfirstn3935 The Davis aerofoil was a laminar flow aerofoil. That was shown by the Caltech wind tunnel tests. It wasn’t as good as the later properly engineered laminar flow aerofoils but it was one none the less.
At an airshow with a B-24 met a guy who would not believe they built more of them than the B-17 - said I must be mistaken guess because he’d never seen any in movies before.
My grandfather flew as flight engineer over the South Pacific, ie, top turret gunner & radio opperator. And told me the crews referred to the B-24 as flying coffins. Once hit with enemy weapons the plane would go into a flat spin, trapping the crew to interior walls while the plane would spin in and crash. Killing most everyone onboard. The B-24 was large enough that you could park a B-17 under the wing...
Kelly you know nothing, b24 wingspan 110 ft, length 68 ft, b 17 wingspan 103 ft, (just 6ft less) length 76 ft, and the b17 was to tall to fit under the liberators wing despite it been shoulder mounted
@@jukeseyable Obviously this is your exact condition. When visiting the Pima air museum in Tucson Arizona, they have each plane displayed in the position described. I was even able to walk into the bomb bays of each plane. So I've seen this with my own eyes! Have you even seen either of these two planes in person?
@@jukeseyable I never said it dwarfed the B-17, I just said, "you can park it under the wing of a B-24"! Both planes I saw were in polished aluminum with a mirror like finish. The B-17 being a tail dragger is the obvious explanation. So I guess I do know something about these aircraft.
Despite a few small problems, the B24 was an excellent aircraft and hold up pretty good under ground fire also it was one of the best gun platform in the air Force, one version carried 13, 50cals and a 75mm cannon, simply a beast.
Is there an alternative to the robot voice narration? It's very irritating. Side note - my father-in-law (Canadian) flew in B-24s out of India against the Japanese. They were doing things like skipping bombs into the sides of ships from 50 feet - pretty hairy stuff.
Had a patient who was in the CBI theater during the war. He was a camera man and his CO said he wanted pictures of bombs dropping out of a plane from the bomb bay. He went up on a 24 and w one leg wrapped around a part of the plane he leaned over the bomb bay he got his shot. He also said he almost fell out of the plane. When the bombs drop their load, the plane jolts up and not being prepared for that, scared the crap out of him.
Ben was a family friend who was a B-24 flight instructor stationed in Kansas in WWII. One clear, 95F day he and his students took the plane up to see how high they could get. One, two, then three engines cut out on due to oil freezing. And inside, even with an electrically heated suit it was colllld. The students did not rank heated suits. I wonder if the followup instruction was how to avoid a spin. And Ben told the story of flying so low over his hometown in NW central Missouri that the B-24 blew the laundry off the clothes lines.
These flew over my family’s house every day when they were made back in the 40’s. They’d fly from the plant in Willow Run to airports on the East Coast. I wish I was alive back then to see them.
My dad flew both the B-24 and B-17 out of Mendelsham, England during WW2. He preferred the B-17 describing the B-24 as "drafty", while the B-17 was "snug". Interesting that the B-17 soldiered on with the Air Force for years after the war while the B-24 was quickly deleted from inventory. Telling that.
Yeah the unarmored cockpits, draughty design, and lower service ceiling would have been strong minus points for sure! Almost nobody who flew the B-24 liked the B-24 and I chalk that up to failure in doctrine rather than failure in design, not softening up the airwaffle enough with B-17's that the B-24 could be used with a higher margin for safety. Would have been a more effective use of it, and would have saved the many B-24 crews that needlessly went down.
Respect to your father for his service at Mendlesham. I live just a few miles away from the now disused airfield and where ever you travel in Suffolk,Norfolk or Cambridgeshire you are never far from a Usaaf air station. Unfortunately the Mendlesham memorial is all but what remains of the huge airfield.
@@stuartbuxton4316 Thanks for your acknowledgement of my dad's service. On 10/7/44, just after bombs away at Meresberg, flak blew off the tail of his B-17. Five of the nine onboard survived. He ended up in Stalag Luft One and was eventually liberated by the Russians.
I'd put my chips on the line in WW2 Germany with the B-24 Liberator instead of the B-17. Pratt and Whitney R-2800 twin wasp radial engines were a better engine than the Wright Cyclone's on the B-17. It was almost bullit proof, still operating sometimes even with a few cylinders shot up, and the high aspect ratio Davis wing made the most of a large 12,000 pound payload bomber. The comparison here reminds me somewhat of the Mustang vs. the P-47 Thunderbolt. -- Mustang, sleek, sexy, but somewhat delicate .Thunderbolt tough, hard hitting, heavier armament/larger payload, fast, almost as manuverable, usually got you back to base in 1 piece. The unsung U.S. fighter and bombers here...Robert at 66.
The P47 shot down more German fighter's than any other Allied fighter in the western ETO, and it was the fighter responsible for breaking the back of the Luftwaffe in the crucial first 3 months of 1944, 570 out of 873 German fighter's shot down during those first 3 months were shot down by P47's, it also shot down 900 of the 1,983 during the first 6 months of 1944, it's tally would undoubtedly been the bulk of them but after those first 3 months most P47 units were switched to ground attack, however in that roll it destroyed over 9,000 locomotives, and countless other targets on the ground. P47's flew 423,435 sorities during the war, that's more than all the P51's, P38's and P40's combined. Also the 56th Fighter Group that flew P47's exclusively had more aces in it than any other Allied fighter group of the ETO. And contrary to what most people believe P47's were escorting bombers over Berlin before P51's were, the fact is every single P47 that saw service in the ETO had the ability to escort bombers all the way to their target even on the early unescorted missions to Schweinfert and Regensburg, it's a myth that they lacked the range to do it early on, the reason that they couldn't early on is because they were forbidden to use drop tanks on escort missions at that point because the "Bomber Mafia" Generals who ran the USAAF wanted to prove their concept that the bombers could fight their way to the targets and back unescorted, starting with the P47C-2 they had the shackles to mount drop tanks, no P47's that saw service in the ETO were earlier than the P47C-2, even then 3 months before the Schweinfert/Regensburg missions the 56th Fighter Group was already receiving the P47D-15 which had the ability to mount the all metal pressurized drop tanks, it was that very configuration that was used by P47's to escort bombers over Berlin weeks before P51's were doing it. The narrative that the P51 was the first fighter that could escort bombers deep into Germany was a lie concocted by the Bomber Mafia Generals and fed to the Press Corps to cover their asses for sending those bombers unescorted on those early raids because they were trying to prove their concept. The P47 was the true rock star fighter of the ETO, it was a hockey player in a figure skating contest and I giggle myself silly every time I think about one of those figure skaters getting slammed into the boards.
@@davidkallewaard750 That's right but he was correct concerning the name of the engine, it was called the Twin Wasp, the R2800 was called the Double Wasp.
We should remember that is was the Liberator that was used to bomb the Ploesti oil fields because they had the range. This was extremely because it, of course cut the German fuel supplies.
The chief characteristic of the Davis Wing was not the fact that it was a high aspect ratio wing. Other bombers had high aspect ratio wings. A high aspect ratio wing is simply a long, thin wing. (Aspect ratio is determined by Span divided by Chord.) It was the AIRFOIL shape that made the Davis Wing. The Davis airfoil was taller, as seen in cross section, which allowed for a taller wing spar. The strength of a wing spar is largely determined by how far apart the top cap strip and bottom cap strip are. This is a basic I Beam principle. They were very far apart in the B-24, which gave the Davis spar great strength, allowing for heavier loads. The weakness was that there was no room for turbulent air flow going over the top of the wing and, consequently, the B-24 could not carry ice loads! Suggested reading: Fate is the Hunter, by Earnest Gann. He flew the cargo version of the B-24. I believe it was called the C-87. He did not like it.
I think Gann also said either the C87 (or DC4 or DC6) flew like a fighter when he was spiraling tightly down a steep hole in the clouds into a San Francisco or Iceland airport.
@@fredferd965 I think the chapter in "Fate is the Hunter" may have had the word "HOLE" in the title. I think there was a hydraulic fire, smoke in the cabin, and some scared passengers. He saw the hole, knew it could close, but chopped power to almost not running, I think put down the gear to slow the dive, and did a tight spiral following the hole all the way down to the center of the runway. It was night, clouds, fog, no visibility, and apparently no modern instruments in that day. He also had a chapter that was titled with one word, "Ice". That was a nail biter. I read years later in the 1990s I think, in the New York Times, that aviation was doing research on "super cooled drizzle drops" that explained more why ice could be so dangerous to planes.
About 15 years ago while flying for Delta Airlines, I flew with an F/O that had been at an airshow in Memphis (I think), and luckily met the right person. This person called him later and asked if he would like to be his co-pilot and help him ferry his B-17 from Memphis to California. The F/O jumped at the opportunity got to fly the B-17. A few weeks later, the guy called the F/O and asked him if he would like to help fly his B-24 out to California. Again, he jumped at the chance. He told me that flying the B-17 was a pleasure; it had very light controls and you could trim it up and fly it with your fingertips. The B-24 was a different story. The controls were extremely heavy; it felt like you were driving a dump truck. He said it felt like you were trying to balance a ball on the head of a pin.
I have heard that from a former B-24 pilot from WWII, Sherman Beard, of Hillsboro, WV, now deceased. He told me you could easily tell a B-24 pilot as one arm was more muscled than the other. He flew his required missions over Italy and Germany and got to go home, flying his crew into Bradley Field, CT, as their final destination.
@@UncaDave Same thing I'd heard: a B17 was easy to keep in formation, or as one guy said, 'once it's trimmed, it can fly itself'; but the B24 was rather harder to fly in tight formation (and it could not quite go as high nor could it absorb the same amount of damage the 'Fort' could). As a result German fighters would often be vectored to the 'Libs' because they were lower altitude and looser formation--right in the 'heart' of the FW190's 'peak' performance envelope.
@@nickmitsialis Probably so. Sherman Beard told me he was hit with lots of flak and everyone of his crew was wounded at one time or another. His co-pilot got hit badly and he told me the cockpit was covered in blood. What these men lived through, survived and died in is impossible for us to imagine. Thanks for your comments.
My college friend's father (who was a lot older than our fathers) had flown both the B-17 and B-24 and he said that he preferred the B-24 because it was a lot more maneuverable than the B-17, outperformed the B-17, and was more modern. Maybe it was a matter of positive stability versus neutral stability... or maybe just a matter of preference.
the payload factor alone enabled the starving Netherlanders to survive after the Germans flooded most of the country. the B-24s dropped food and other necessities to the distaught people for months on end, until the flooding was stopped and humanitarian aid could be trucked in.
Do not forget that the Germans agreed not to shoot down the bombers in order to let them bring much needed food nor that also the B-17 and the British bombers contributed as well....
I spoke to a WW II veteran Army Air Force pilot who flew the B-24 with the 8th Air Force over Germany. He told me that the Davis wing had excellent lift characteristics and efficiency at lower and medium altitudes, but at high altitudes at about 20,000 feet or higher, the Davis wing is ineffective and useless in the thin air and made the bomber was notoriously difficult to handle. He said it handled like a “fat lady trying to do a ballet dance.” He said you had to “fight it with all your might just to keep it in formation” and it took great skill and experience to be an accomplished B-24 pilot.
That's also what my father in law told me. He was a B-24 pilot/aircrew commander in his early 20s, and when asked about it would just shake his head and say "It was like trying to fly a dump truck". Especially when heavily loaded and in thin air, he felt like the biggest challenge and danger was trying to stay in formation and not run into the aircraft around him, or vice versa. It was exhausting, mentally and physically, and took a certain kind of pilot to be physically able to wrestle with that beast for hours and perform the necessary large, unassisted control inputs. Because of the challenges of flying them in close formation, the 24's tended to fly looser formations than the B-17s, which of course the Germans noticed and tried to use to their advantage.
Very true, but it was calculated tradeoff for more speed range & bomb load. My Dad was a 24 Navigator and like the Bombardier had basic Flight Training so they could jump in should either Pilot or Co-Pilot be disabled. He said it handled well in flight, but he never wanted to have to land one because it landed at a very high speed and took tremendous skill to get one back on the ground safely. They often flew above 20,000 ft and unless they started icing up it remained fairly stable. The icing was a know fact about the Davis Wing.
Also nicknamed the "Porcupine" by the Canadians flying for the RAF in India because of the number of gun turrets visible to the enemy. Japanese fighters avoided the Liberator Squadrons when they were flying shipping recon missions according to my late uncle who flew the B24 in India.
My dad (Air Force) told me that the nickname for the B24 was "Shithouse". He said that since the missions were long, if someone had to "go", they'd toss it out the window, where it'd coat the aircraft behind it in the formation.
Strange I never heard about the Bomb bays being half open because The B-24 Had a gasoline fuel vapor problem and suddenly some of them would blow up in mid air due to the fumes!
The liberator was a very dangerous aircraft in a role that honestly it was not designed for, transport. Looking at the airplane you would think it would convert well to a transport but it did not. This was experienced flying the Hump, from India to China over the Himalayas. In one of my books regarding b-29 operations during World War II, the initial deployment of the b-29 was in China. There was no road or rail to get supplies to the b-29s forward air bases. Everything had to be flown in including fuel and bombs. The b-24 for some reason being loaded as a transport had a negative effect on the center of gravity. The plane was very unstable in this role. I have never read anything about a B-17 being converted to transport duties having these kinds of issues.
My Dad made 52 trips over Europe in a B 24, first a 24 D then a 24 J. He said when he picked up his new J model the first take off he almost looped it because of new controlls.
I fly historic aircraft. I was ready to get out of the B-24 before the engine was started on my first flight. The design problems were immediately evident. However, my grandfather, who was a B-24 mechanic in 1944 loved them. I honor the brave boys who used these beasts.
The problem was the unit-construction method of building the B-24. You can see, in the wing framework drawing, at 3:05 to 3:13 in this video, that the wing was manufactured in one unit, and joined completed to the mostly completed fuselage assemblies. I don't remember the details, but it was another UA-cam video. A lucky hit with a cannon shell from the Germans(who found that they caused more damage than regular bullets, even bigger ones, like 50 cal.) could cause a fiery explosion(from the main gas tanks being in the middle of the main wing section, right over the wing spar for superb load-carrying ability) that would shuck the wings from the unlucky Liberator and kill most of the crew by not letting them bail out. There's a widely-seen film-clip - seen in many videos - showing a lucky hit to the center of a B-24's wing section and you can see the fatal flaw in it's entirety; the plane bursts into fire and the wings fold back almost instantly and burning aviation fuel floods into the fuselage. My father flew B-17s in the war and was shot down and became a POW. He also flew B-24s after WW2 and said that the B-24 was more comfortable to fly(he was taller) and very reliable if well maintained. I also spoke to some German pilots who fought against us and were glad to talk to us US servicemen stationed in Germany in the Cold War; they told me that B-24s were popular as a target for that first high-speed pass through the bomber formation, because a lucky 20mm cannon-shell could burst the plane apart like a clay pigeon in skeet-shooting, except that the plane exploded into flame. They said that ALL the USAAF bomber formations were hard work to attack from anywhere besides the front because of the hundreds of 50 cal gunners trying to kill you, some of them quite skilled - many Luftwaffe planes came home with at least SOME kind of damage from machine-gun fire.
I read they didn't usually survive a ditching in the ocean, as the nose would usually break off and the whole plane somersault. I think the roll-up bomb door set-up made a weak area in the fuselage
My mom was a Rosie the riveter and used to help assemble the b24s built by consolidated in fort Worth Texas. She was 18 years old then and got a job doing that through a government training program that was going on. I never knew about the Navy's version bb4y with the single tail. Now I have something new to research, lol. Thanks for the information, and good video.
My old man at 19 piloted "The Flying Truck" out of Maxwell Field Alabama and I have all of his manuals. I have no friggin' idea how they did it. Neither did the young F-35 pilots who looked them over when I was able and proud to show. Both generations with nerves of steel. Wild Blue Yonder Boys!
A coousin who flew B-24s told me that the ones built by Consolidated were a dream to fly and would easily fly hands-off, but the ones built by Ford required constant attention as they tended to wander all over the sky and had to be manhandled to fly straight. Very tiring.
The Liberator, unlike the B17, did not have armoured fuel lines and hydraulic pipes, so that when attacked these pipes would turn into flame throwers, dousing everything in burning fuel. US airmen said that if you looked around you in a POW camp, you could tell the B24 crewmen because they were the ones who were burned. The Lancaster was also guilty of burning like a Roman candle, made worse by an escape hatch that was too small for a crewman to exit wearing a parachute. Good examples of how expendable lives were.
I heard the survivability in water landings was far worse in b-24 than the b-17 Ironically this was contributed by the high wings The forward section would break off, often killing the pilots
It's Naval Variant, the PB4Y Privateer, had one of the Strangest Air-to-Air kills, by flying alongside a Japanese H8K Flying-Boat bomber, then, using it's many turrets (and Starboard waist-gunner), ripped into the 'Flying Porcupine, taking out it's Port-side Engines, downing that large plane in, perhaps, the only time two 4-engined Patrol Bombers ever directly fought each other! It's also notable, that as early as Early '43, the USAAC in Alaska was using 'Orbital Strafing' putting up-to 9 .50-cal machine guns onto One Land-target, very much as 'Spectre' Gunships do today.
My Grandfather was a flight engineer in a US Navy PB4Y squadron and his aircraft hunted down and destroyed a G4M Betty. He told me that they removed armor on the aircraft and added extra 50 cals to fly escort missions.
I saw a documentary on these once and it was considered slightly superior to the B17. The only serious flaw was the it was difficult more difficult to escape if the plane was shot down.🇦🇺
At least the crew in either the B 17 or B 24 as a whole had their parachutes harnessed to them ( with obvious exceptions ) , the British 4 engined bombers , Short Stirling , Handley Page Halifax ,and of course the Avro Lancaster , had crew positions that as a rule didn't allow for harnessed parachutes , and consequently mortality rates amongst those crews was ( noticeably ) higher when compared to USAAF crews on ( similar ) missions
These were not flaws. They were tradeoffs. They could have increased the service ceiling simply by reducing the bomb load, but they chose to deliver more bombs or to deliver them further or both. As for sustaining battle damage, the more you over-build an airplane the heavier it is and the less payload/range you have. Do you design it to fly or to get shot up? In the overall scheme of things, as an airforce you will hit the enemy harder if the majority of the aircraft deliver more bombs. The b24 was a successful design. Every airplane design is the product of many tradeoffs. In most cases these are not “flaws”. There are no perfect airplanes.
Came here to say exactly this. Every machine is a set of compromises designed to perform to a set of specific goals. Consolidated understood very well that they were trading durability, altitude, and maneuverability for range and bomb load. Who needs maneuverability in a bomber in that era? Keep in mind the mindset of the day: Lose a bomber, build 3 more, lose an aircrew, train 5 more and send the family a gold star. Tragic, but our fore fathers were made of sterner stuff. The B-24 performed to its design goals extremely well. That's why they built 18,000 of them. Click-bait title from an OP who apparently knows very little about the subject.
I just wish this muppet would learn to speak properly.
Its so bad I found it unwatchable.
I also found it maybe overstated - He says 'Crews prefered the Fort'
My Dad flew both. Reconed the Liberator was a lot more comfortable.
That said, the Fort was the one he talked about most. Go figure.
I've been inside both. I'm a heavy guy and I could get through the B-24. The fortress was too small all over.
You are correct about the design filling a required mission. The fortress was designed around a two engine requirement. With the four motors, they could carry the same load farther and faster. Adding the large wings and lots of controlling surface, the bomber could take a huge amount of damage and still fly. It survived mid-air collisions that almost cut the plane in two. One landed in England without a crew. A B-17 had another B-17 land on it and they flew.
Both were needed. Both performed their jobs perfectly. It is true that escort fighters helped the bombers perform even better.
It’s a computer generated voice.
@@zefallafez, and therefore gets my thumbs-down.
My great uncle flew in these in WW2 he was an Observer with RAF Coastal Command and part of 224sqn. He used to descibe this aircraft as 'very luxurious' and prefered these to the Hudsons they had been using. His squadron was one of the first to use them and his plane was fitted with the then top secret ASV radar. Tragically he lost his life in a flying accident when his B24D hit a barrage balloon whilst attempting an emergency landing on 30 October 1942. The Aircraft was FK242 and the sqn letter was 'K' call sign K - King. Let us all remember all these brave aircrews and the sacrafice they made for us.
What a true 🇬🇧 hero your great uncle is. I am so disappointed that today we don't remember and commemorate our fallen heroes who defeated the most evil regime to walk this planet.
@@anandmorris thanks for the reply, you are correct we should remember the sacrafice made by these airmen. Many of them said nothing and just got on with their lives when they got home. So it's up to us to research and share their stories.
My great uncle Flying Officer Victor Crowther was only 24yrs old when he died, he trained in Canada and actually become the Squadron bombing leader. But, they wrre all so young, Flying Officer Gavin Sellar the pilot of his aircraft was only 21yrs, the oldest crew member was 26yrs and the youngest and only survivor of the crash was 19yrs, sgt Dennis Pass he was the tail gunner.
When i look back now my only regret is not asking my Grandad more questions about WW2 before he passed away.
We will remember them.
Yes, a great sacrifice.
Before the US entered the war my wife's Uncle drove from Texas to Canada and joined the RCAF. He flew Spitfires from England until the US entered the war. He transferred to the US Army Air Corp as a B-24 co-pilot. His plane was shot down in the raid on the Ploesti oil refineries. All of the crew perished. Back in 2000 some of his family went to Germany and met the German pilot who shot down the bomber.
@@txdave2 I've read about that meeting, it must have been hard for everyone involved.
One thing that struck me about my great uncles flight was how many other people nowadays have been affected by the accident. His crash was featured in a book 'Dartmoor Air Crashes' by Bob Jones. Through his research he managed to get hold of the living relatives of the crew and we all petitioned Dartmoor National Parks into letting us erect a new memorial for them. Over 100 relatives were at the crash site for the dedication ceremony. I couldn't make it because I'm in NZ but the RNZAF sent a representative for us. But it's very important for us to remember them all and all the other aircrews that served during any war.
I would have loved to of found out what your uncle thought about the B24 after flying in Spitfires?
Best wishes to you and yours from NZ.😉
Both the B-17 and B-24 had their advantages and disadvantages. The Liberator had greater range, speed and bomb load, the Flying Fortress was more durable, could fly higher and was better defended. In Europe the B-17 probably was the superior bomber, but in the Pacific it was definitely the B-24. They both served their role admirably.
Which was superior depended on the mission requirements. 8th AF command preferred their B-17’s. Having a mixed fleet of both was a logistics headache.
Keep in mind the B24 dropped more Tonnage in the European Theatre than the 17 that was in Service longer..
Funny how B-17 fanboys don't want to talk about how the B-17 was retired from the Pacific in mid-1943 because of not only range issues but because it was a terrible anti-ship/submarines bomber! It couldn't bomb ships or submarines very well. B-24s served in all theaters throughout the whole war and was never retired anywhere like the B-17! B-24s won the Battle of the Atlantic and helped win the war in the Pacific! Also the sorties to losses ratio for B-24s (226,775 sorties with 3,626 shot down) was 1.60% vs 1.61% for B-17s (291,508 sorties with 4,688) in Europe! B-17s weren't able to bomb Romanian oil refineries in 1942-43. You know what bomber was able to do so? B-24s!!!
B-17s could only do one thing which was short range strategic bombing runs from England to Germany.
Btw, 3,626 lost B-24s and 4,688 lost B-17s in Europe alone in WWII is INSANE!!! We treat it today like it was not a big deal at all. Like that is normal. The British lost 57,000 KIA/MIA and 9,000 POWs on bomber crews alone in Europe also! How good were those German flak and fighters?
@@nogoodnameleft I knew a guy who was a mechanic on both the B-17 and B-24 in the European theater. He much preferred the B-17 to work on because it was far easier to service engines and do any airframe work. The B-24 was a great bomber, but it was more difficult to service.
@@pimpompoom93726 I know the B-24 is ugly and very tough to work with unlike the beautiful and easy to fly B-17. But the B-24 still was the truly rugged plane that lost less planes in ETO than the B-17 and had a less sorties to losses ratio than the B-17. The B-17 was a non-factor in the Atlantic, Pacific (where it was actually withdrawn for poor performance in mid-1943), North Africa, Italy, and Romania until air bases were established in central Italy in spring 1944, unlike the B-24. The B-24 was truly an awesome Swiss Army knife. The Ford Assembly Plant for swift construction of 8,500 B-24s was one of the greatest feats of engineering and manufacturing in history also! The B-17 was not able to be built fast and efficiently like the B-24. The B-24 truly looks like a can of spam with wings. 🤣
My brother was crew chief on a B24 that took off from a base in Italy and bombed Germany. German artillery was shelling our troops and the artillery piece was so disguised, they couldn't tell where it was coming from. An observer spotted it located in a large cathedral. B-24s took off from Italy and my brother said they flattened that building. They didn't have any more trouble with artillery after that. He survived 2 crash landings in B24s. In the last one the fuel lines were all shot up and leaking. My brother wrapped some rags tightly around the fuel line and had to hold it. He held it until they slid in and got all the wounded and everybody off. Then at the last he barely got off before the fuel ignited and the plane blew up. He got a medal for that.
I am proud of your brave brother for his Service .
Aviation fuel is high on octane, i.e. burns well and fast. He deserved his medal.
What a hero! That is an amazing story. Thank goodness having the 🇺🇸 as our allies, we 🇬🇧 are eternally grateful.
Nice story! Glad your brother made it back.
I am also proud of your brother...and my fellow Brits too!
Flaws ? What flaws ?
It was good enough to bring my father home from every mission so he survived WW2.
Sorry, my dad was in a B-24 outfit (459 Bg). He would never let anyone put down the plane.
Don't Apologize to him. You're Dad was Awesome for what he did my Patriot American brother.
My Dad was a Marine in the Pacific campaign.
I get it!🇺🇸✝️❤️💪👍
B-24 was a POS IN THE ETO. It was only good as a anti submarine platform
It’s no comment on your dad or the accomplishments of units who flew the B-24. It’s range closed the gap in the mid-Atlantic so that the U-boats no longer had a sanctuary for hunting the convoys vital to the war effort, including our own, in the UK and then on the Western Front. It’s higher speed reduced the time German fighters had to attack them. The bomb load was higher than the B-17’s. Crews died in legion on both European Theater bombers. Nonetheless the B-17 had a reputation for ruggedness that the B-24 did not. How much that assertion is backed up by actual numbers is not stated here. The stats have to be out there as the USAAF documented the hell out of every mission.
Like every aircraft it had it's weak points and strong points
My dad was in China. 308th. Radio man and gunner. Flew the hump many times. He also argued in favor of the 24. On best of the web check out Miss Conduct.
I would say it's durability was very underestimated. My Father's Ship a B24 H Ford Willow Run had the Hydraulics shot out, flak damage to both wings & one stabilizer, and lost an engine, it went in to a spiral. The Pilot gave the Order to bailout my Father and 5 others went down the catwalk and out through the Bombay Doors. MACR 2398. After dropping about 5000 feet the Pilot and Co Pilot regained control of the Ship and using manual controls limped it back to base. The Plane part of the 449th Bombardment Group Original Cadre was patched up and replacements were put into the crew and it completed it's 25 Missions. It was then turn over to a New Pilot and crew and flew 21 more Missions until being shot down in June of 44 MACR 6443 and had flown 46 missions without full escort. I think it was a pretty durable Aircraft. You also have to keep in mind that the 15th Air Force received no P51s. The 17s mostly flying out of England with the 8th Air Force were first in line to have full escort to and from the target and got them in late 43. My Father was in a Stalag Luft 1. They, heard about the P51s listening to crystal radios they built in the Camp. To the best
To the best of my knowledge they never received P51s and only had P38s & 47 for full escorts in the early Part of the War when they were hitting Northern Italy. Once they went any further, they were on their own and the Escorts would drop them off and pick them up @ the Italian border. Funny thing that was actually a travesty and a big FUP by the Brass, it turned out the P47 could handled larger drop tanks and could have been used for long range escort well before the P51 was deployed. A lot of Ships could have been saved had the Brass not been so adamant
about not experimenting with the P47 that was by far the most underrated Fighter in the Inventory.
I went on a hiking holiday in Italy and came across the remains of a drop tank with a marker saying it was from a P-47.
My Dad was a waist gunner on a Lib during the Ploesti raids.
Man I've done all kind of research on that raid. Absolute balls of steel by men like your dad...I wouldn't have been able to crap for about a week after being puckered for hours.
I salute your father and all the bomber crews of Tidal Wave. Very costly operation.
@@BiggHogg870 Thanks for the Salute to my dad and all the Lib crews.
Ball of steel ! Nothing but huge respect and gratitude. 🇺🇸👍
My dad was a bombardier during the ploesti raids...564th bomb squadron.
Churchill used his personal B-24 for anti-submarine patrols? Wow, what a true all-around hero!!!
My neighbor Dan was a B-24 pilot in WWII. He always wore a hat that said “Liberator” on it. He talked about this one time when a German plane was tearing his Liberator up, when all of a sudden the shooting stopped. He said a P-51 with a red tail pulled up next to him, and in his own words “there was a black man flying it!” The Tuskegee airman had a big grin, shot Dan a salute, and then peeled off to regroup.
Sure he did... you watch too many movies. ;)
@@SmokinLoon5150 you can believe what you want, he told me the stories
@@JackSmith-hm7fh of course he did. ;)
@@SmokinLoon5150 again, believe what you want
@baileyboy73 baileyboy73 let's not get political here . you won't like my comments about covid Joe.
Until long range fighters came to theater, the strategic daytime bomber campaign was a failure. If the fighters hadn't shown up the 8th Airforce would have ceased to exist.
The B24 Liberator was still a great heavy Bomber 🇺🇸👍
Better in my view..see post.
Medium bomber like the B-25?
My dad was nose gunner and second radioman on a B-24 in the Pacific.
Most of his missions were anti-submarine. He brought back dozens of plane pics and most of them were of the unique “Nose Art” on many aircraft.
There are some beautifully painted noses on planes of that era.
Reading a story about a B24 that was out on patrol around the Aleutian Islands during WWII. The plane took some flak from the Japanese on either Attu or Kiska, dropped their bombs and headed back to base. On the way back and in addition to their flak damage, the plane started icing up big time. Their base in sight, the pilot orders the landing gear down and everything locks into place... EXCEPT the nose wheel that had caught the most of the flak damage! Pilot and copilot have read about two wheel landings in a B24 and had heard stories from other pilots. Though not impossible, you need some piloting magic and some, ok, lots of luck! The pilot orders EVERYONE to the rear of the airplane, needing that extra weight to keep that nose up as long as possible while he stamps on those breaks to slow the ship down. Pilot lines up on the runway where it is snowing and freezing raining out. He sets her down on those two wheels, hits the breaks for all that they are worth and just off to the side of the runway end, the plane stops completely... WHILE STILL BALANCING ON THOSE TWO WHEELS! The pilot is like WTF as well as the crew members. They all get safely out of the damaged B24, throw their flight gear over their shoulders and head to the nearest warm building... though they do occasionally turn around and look back at their B24 that is STILL BALANCING ON THOSE TWO WHEELS!
*The B-24 loss rate in the ETO was actually slightly better than that of the B-17.*
*The B-24 flew 226,775 sorties with 3,626 losses or 1.60% while the B-17 flew 291,508 sorties with 4,688 losses or 1.61%.*
Not being a dick but can I have a source for that? I'd love to learn more. Strategic bombing/ DoR has always fascinated me
My father was a mechanic originally assigned to Pueblo, CO airfield. He went to B24 school at the Ford facility in Ypsilanti, MI, and there was no assignment for him, so he was asked if he'd like to go through the program again! He did so, and despite later assignments to B29 and other aircraft, my Dad always liked the B24 over other planes. I have a picture of him in the copilot's seat in a B24 that was visiting a local airport. Of all the photos I have, that one is my favorite.
There are several examples of how “the narrative” doesn’t line up with the facts.
Look into P-47 -v- P-51.
Yeah, video titles like this one, "major design errors", always piss me off. Many, like this one, border on, or are, complete lies. The B-24 was built here at the Consolidated factory in SoCali where it still stands today and currently houses the HQ for Naval Information Warfare Command, earlier the Space & Naval Warfare Systems Command. Unknowledgeable people posting videos like this seize upon a few tidbits of information and build "major design errors" around it.
@Galileo7of9 Ford built them at a rate of 1 an hour at Willow Run..... Henry's mass production genius.
My uncle, Lynn George Peterson, piloted a B-24, and was shot down on his 23rd mission,
March 18, 1944, over Friedrickshafen Germany.
Dad was a B-24 bottom turret gunner flying out of Italy, got 17 missions in before engine failure forced them to parachute out. He was captured and spent over a year in a German POW.
When I was a cadet in the Ait Training Corps (13-18 year-olds), one of the instructors was an RAF navigator in B24 Liberators. He was proud to have served in the aircraft. He donated a prize, which was a plaque of a Liberator, to be awarded to the cadet who passed the navigation exam the best, which was me the first year.
They were working on changes to improve the B24 but Ford put a stop to it. " Quit changing it and I'll build you thousands of them" Henry Ford.
A B 24 got my Dad back from 35 missions over Europe, so they must have done some things right.
All I know is I’m very thankful I wasn’t born yet and didn’t have to fly in one of those things
B-24… B-17… doesn’t matter, both were loud, cramped, cold, dangerous…
Caught a ride on both. The B-17 had more room. A lot easier to get in and out of the bombardiers position.
I remember reading the book written by the commander of JG400, the Luftwaffe unit that flew captured allied aircraft for evaluation and training. He hated the B-24. Said it handled terrible and was an unpleasant aircraft to fly. He said no German aircraft would have been put in service with the B-24's weaknesses. However, he said it could not be denied that regardless of the drawbacks B-24s were being built by the thousands and were bombing German targets daily. An uncle of mine was a navigator in the South Pacific in WWII. He flew a mix of combat and cargo flights across the South Pacific late '42 to his death in combat in July '43. He flew cargo runs in LB-30s (the cargo variant of the B-24) between the major US bases like Henderson Field and Esprito Santo. He hated them compared to the B-17. I have his logs and letters and he called the '24 noisy, drafty, and cold. He was lost on a bombing mission in a B-17E at the end of the B-17's use in the South Pacific. All heavy units using them transitioned to B-24s by late '43. The '24's range and bomb load advantage made them more effective in the South Pacific than the B-17.
My grandfather flew a PB4Y-2 in WW2, Navy squadron VPB118. I’m glad to see it get a mention in the video.
I didn't even know that plane existed until I saw one on final approach to KBLI in 2002. It had been converted into a fire bomber. They retired them a few months later after one overstressed its wing and crashed. It was just a few weeks after a Hercules crashed on camera fighting a fire.
@@frankmoreau8847 I remember that. Grandad was very proud of his plane he said it was superior to the standard PB4Y (B24) because its big single vertical stabilizer made it much easier to fly at lower speed and altitude.
My father in law was also trained on a PB4Y-2 out of Florida preparing to go overseas for the invasion of mainland Japan when the war ended. They trained heavily at low altitudes. They used to drop dummy bombs on whales they spotted. He always wondered how he would have performed his job had they seen combat.
@@justme8340 Wow! Do you know what squadron he was in? My granddad did two tours in the pacific. After his first tour he was sent to Texas and was an instructor for a short time before he volunteered for a second tour and went back to the pacific with VPB118.
I’ve got his log book around here somewhere. I’ll have to dig it up and look. I know he was based out of the old Master Field near Miami, Opa-Locka. He once did time in the “Brig” for being late for duty. The supposed Brig was a hotel on the beach and his punishment was handing out beach towels to pretty girls sunbathing.
Had the B-24 been used by RAF coastal command at the start of the battle of the Atlantic,U-boat kills would have gone through the roof.The Davis wing on the Liberator wasn't suited to high altitude flight with a heay bomb load,but at medium and low levels it would have excelled,as mentioned previously as a maritime patrol aircraft.
absolutely correct. Coast Command could not wrangle many long range bombers from Bomber Command for maritime duty. since payloads could be smaller, depth changes and smaller contact bombs could be used, additional fuel cells could be mounted to extend flying time even more.
@@BigSkyCurmudgeon; depth charges.
Sometimes the top army brass do not think logically . Applied to both the sides in the WW2.
If Hitler had listened to his top Generals, there would be no Russian front and the Germans would have conquered Europe.
The navy versions of the B24 lacked superchargers entirely. Their mission never called for them.
@@robertphillips9017 Yes,but RAF coastal command used the supercharger equipped B-24 D and J.
Bro why would you support the bad guys?
We took some B24 veterans to fly over their WW2 airfield in England. They all loved the B24!
That is great! Were they English crews, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, American? What craft was used for the flyover?
My Dad recently went on an Honor Flight to DC and was pretty lukewarm on going. But he was so swept away and caught up in the ceremonies, the effort mostly by volunteers, the honor and praise from adults and children everywhere, and the recognition from his friends back home who saw him on TV, moved him to tears and serious introspection. I haven’t seen him this happy and humbled in a very long time, and it was one of the few times I’ve seen him so proud to have served. It’s not that he wasn’t always patriotic nor had pride for our country, he just never talked about it much or wear it on his sleeve. Suffice it to say, we unboxed his 8mm films from Korea (he was drafted for the war, but the ceasefire was implemented before he got there) and watched him and his buddies do there thing in the Signal Corp, but mainly of all the building he ran work for, for both the base and the Korean communities surrounding. He’s a mason by trade, and had 12-16 brick layers working for him in his late 20s, but can pretty much build anything…so, that’s what he did. Even in his mid-70s he was building homes because he said he was bored. He’s approaching 88 now and, I swear, he has more energy and motivation than I do. He even still downhill skis, for pete’s sake!
I wouldn’t have thought it’d have affected him like it did, but it was pretty amazing seeing it. I learned these tributes are a big deal to these warriors and rebuilders from our past, and won’t ever underestimate the impact and importance people like you bring to folks like my Dad.
You’ve done a great thing. Thanks for that.
My grandfather was a draftsman working on the B-24 design.
Heard a conversation between a B-17 Veteran and a B-24 Veteran. The Liberator Vet said; "The B-24 carried more bombs further." The Fortress Vet replied; "Yeah, but the B-17 carried more aircrew further."
Each one had their own strengths and weaknesses for sure
Truth is they had almost the same exact loss rate with a small edge going to the 24.
@@fawnlliebowitz1772 Considering that the B24 was taped for deeper penetration bombing attacks, the similar loss rates is miss leading. The average B24 bombing run required more air time, and thus exposure to enemy attack than what the normal B17 was tasked to do.
My father was also a B24 pilot in the 8th Air Force. A member of the original 492nd Bomb Group. When that Group was disbanded, his crew was assigned to radar/radio jamming missions. Frequently, their missions had no end time or destination assigned to them, as the planes being used were expected not to return. He had told me that they flew jamming missions that kept them in the air for 12 plus hours at a time, all in range of Germany attack. He was in the air doing radio jamming on the second day of the Battle of the Bulge when all of western Europe was socked in. They never heard another allied radio air transmission that day and he always suspected they may have been the only plane in the air for those hours they were aloft.
The design flaw missed in this story is how difficult it was for airmen to escape from a stricken B24. The procedure was to leave out the open bomb bay doors. Getting opened manually was time consuming. Trying to leave by way of the waist gunner openings risked being hit by the horizontal stabilizer. The sole dedicated exit door in the nose could only be accessed by three crewmen easily. A wounded B24 too frequently took most of its crew to their deaths.
My father, and his crew were lucky. No one in my dad's crew earned a purple heart in service. This is remarkable considering he was assigned to a group (the 492nd) that only had six of the original 36 crews complete their tours of duty.
@@cdjhyoung Good points all. My father flew his 35 missions out of Italy to points north. Strong advocate of the B24.
@@fawnlliebowitz1772 The number of mission flown to complete your tour of duty changed: the original 492nd 'only' needed to fly 25 missions and be done. My dad, one of the last replacement crews, need to fly 50. Your dad in Italy had to make 35. Some of the guys in the South Pacific needed 100 missions for a tour of duty. Those had to be hard count downs to fly that many missions.
I talked to a Pearl Harbor and 15th AF vet a few years ago at the Mid Atlantic Air Museum WW2 weekend. I was mostly asking him about his experiences in the B-17. He mentioned on one mission while they were forming up over the Adriatic that the B-24 groups had to swing their formation wide so that they could fly with the 17's and it was because the 24 couldn't fly as slow. I did mention to him that the 24 guys would have said they had to swing wide bc the 17's couldn't not fly as fast and he laughed. They were both great bombers that were no frills designed with minimal safety engineered into them. My pap would go toe to toe with anyone who dissed his Lib. This is a link to an interview with the vet I talked to. He was a facinating guy. ua-cam.com/video/3faXf5UtU0c/v-deo.html
Yup, my dad a bombardier 455th BG 15th AF loved the 24. 35 missions and he walked away from all of them.
My grandfather flew a B-24 off the coast of Georgia at the time!
German fighter pilots believed that the Liberator caught fire easier and burned faster than the Fortress
My father, a Ploesti 1 survivor, said that if the 24 got hit either in the wing root, or in the landing gear well, that the wing would snap off. Many of the people in his outfit (the Pyramiders) really did not like the airplane (mostly A models), but they were stuck with it.
I talked to one of the workers who flew on the Collings Foundation B-24 bomber and he told me that the B-24 drifted up and down a lot in the higher altitudes that it was a full workout for the pilots to correct it and keep in formation. One wrong move could send the plane drifting up and away from the formation and force them to fly back alone without escort fighters.
The wing root area is the weaker spot on most aircraft.
The wing root is the weakest spot on all large aircraft. The 24 could also take more damage than the 17 because of it's shape and design. The 24 also had an auxiliary flight control system the 17 didn't including hydraulics for the flaps.
@@riproar11 I too have worked with the Collings Foundation and flew in the Witchcraft many times. The up and down drift is due to no pay load. In combat with a high wing the dihedral would be left to right with a full load. That is compensated with the twin tail, though more dihedral is present on the 24 at higher altitudes with a 3/4 bomb payload still higher than that of the 17, it would maneuver just fine without the drift to the left and it's performance was better.
My Dad flew the Ploesti raids with the 449th Bomber Group. Never talked about his war time experiences.
My father flew 33 combat missions as flight mechanic in B-24's in the 735 sq/461bg/15AF. The Liberators had their issues but he was able to keep a badly damaged aircraft flying to get back to base. There were many 24's that suffered extreme damage and still flew. It was not so much the aircraft as where they took battle damage. Flak and enemy fighters were able to down just as many 17's as 24's.
My Dad was a B-24 gunner flying out of England with the Mighty 8th. Long ago war. Interesting to see the "Ford vs Chevy" comments about the 24 and 17.
Another issue with the Davis wing was that it was vulnerable in icing conditions. Some designs would tolerate a fair bit of ice before losing control but the Liberator with the Davis wing was not one. A relatively small amount of ice could disturb the airflow around the airfoil to the extent that the aircraft would depart controlled flight. This is mentioned in Ernest K. Gann’s classic of aviation literature ‘Fate is the Hunter’. Gann flew C-87’s, the transport and cargo variant of the B-24, during WWII.
We call the B-24 "the box the B-17 came in."
History's verdict on the rightness of the B-24 shape, boxy fuselage and high aspect wing?
Look how Boeing built the B-52: boxy fuselage and long flexible wing. Imitation is the most sincere praise.
Dad was a WWII veteran (and career Air Force). He said one nickname for the B-24 was :The hydraulic deathtrap".
They were exhausting to fly because they simply could not be neutrally trimmed. The pilot could not take his hands off the controls even for a second or it would jaw and pitch to port. No amount to aileron adjustment could fix it. The Davis wing was basically unstable. The B17 was better but neither could achieve the stability of the Lancaster which could fly itself once trimmed and only ever needed one pilot. There were many instances of Lancaster pilots being shot hot in combat and the plane flying all the way back from Germany on its own. Even a radio operator could get one back on the ground.
Unlike the Lancaster, both the B-17 and '24 had "Auto-pilot" to take care of that, which the RAF specifications did not provide for.
Last year I had the privilege to fly on the Diamond Lil a B-24. It had been on the top of my bucket list for years. My one Aunt was engaged to a bombardier on #42-109814 ( Jive Bomber ) ( 392nd Bomb Group out of Wendling, Norfolk , England ) that had its right wing blown off by flak near St. Pol , France on 26 Mar 1944 killing all ten on board. It was the only aircraft in that flight that was shot down . The German Report said all were buried in the British Cemetery at St. Pol. In 1951 his body was laid to rest in Ottawa Hills Cemetery near Toledo, Ohio. It was their 11th mission. When my Aunt died I got all her pictures of him in uniform. I also have a picture of the nose art of the Jive Bomber. I have also had the privilege of flying on a B-25 ( Berlin Express ) and a B-17 ( Liberty Bell ) . In the USAF I caught rides On a C-47, C-135, and a KC-135. I worked on B-52E and Kc135A aircraft.
There were other things. The B-24 was difficult to bail out of in an emergency. It also lacked armor for the pilot and co-pilot. Some pilots and co-pilots used to carry a plate of 1/4" steel with handles which they would hold up in front of their lower bodies when fighters were coming at them head on.
Wasn't there a central fuel-tank in the 'B-24' fuselage that turned the aircraft's interior into an inferno if punctured ?
@@None-zc5vg That was only used on special long range missions when they
removed half the Bomb racking and replaced it with the extra fuel tank.
The H Model my Father Flew in had self sealing tanks, which prevented fires. My Father's Ship had the Hydraulics shot out, flak damage to both wings & one stabilizer, and lost an engine, in went in to a spiral. The Pilot gave the Order to bailout my Father and 5 others went down the catwalk and out through the Bombay Doors. MACR 2398. After dropping about 5000 feet the Pilot and Co Pilot regained control of the Ship and using manual controls limped it back to base. The Ship, part of the Group Original Cadre was patched up and replacements were put into the crew and it completed it's 25 Missions. It was then turn over to a New Pilot and crew and flew 21 more Missions until being shot down in June of 44 MACR 6443 and had flown 46 missions without full escort. I think it was a pretty durable Aircraft. You also have to keep in mind that the 15th Air Force was did not get P51s and did not have them the entire time that Ships were Flying. The 17s mostly flying out of England with the 8th Air Force were first in line to have full escort to and from the target and got them in late 43. My Father was in a Stalag Luft 1 for a long time before his Group received P51s. They, heard about the P51s listening to crystal radios they built in the Camp.
@@user-qy9tf2im7f That's got to be bitter-sweet seeing the crate you were just ORDERED to bail out of, recover and fly on home almost like nothing ever happened.
Then again from the pilots perspective they would have been doing all they could to right the machine anyway and wouldn't want the rest of the crew to die should the attempt fail.
@@ToreDL87 They probably never saw it as they
were in free fall counting down to pull their shutes.
They were looking at the ground from that point on.
The Pilot tried to communicate that he was regaining manual control, but they had already removed headsets scrambling toward the Bombay doors
along the catwalk. You got to remember that when a Pilot gives an Order he is the Captain of the Ship. You don't question, you follow Orders. It was only took a minute to drop 5000 ft in a spiral and all
hell is breaking loose. The Pilot said "BAIL OUT". They went.
My dad was a B17 and. B24 co pilot,(age of 20) during WWII B24 during the war. He had to fly a B25 for awhile after Casselbury (sp), most of the men and planes did not make it back. Horrible. Read about the Casselbury or Castlebury mission. He stayed in the Air Force as a lifer and they called him in to fly and instructor on the B47. McConnell A.FB. After take off ,only a few minutes the fuselage exploded and the lost a wing then the tail dad got the plane to a field away from the houses before it crashed. 1956 March 28th in Wichita,Kansas.
It happened a lot with the B47s, that was the first jet engine bomber. The Squadron dad was in during the war was the 445th eighth A.F. Jimmy Stewart was too; at the same time. Jimmy Stewart’s plane was named “3or 4❓yanks and a jerk”. I was a baby when dad was killed, and I miss him, but oh so proud of him. I’m Tim’s wife maiden name Craggs dad was William (Bill). God Bless them all for keeping us safe and America free‼️
"It didn't fly as high, so it was easier to hit with flak"
They had a larger maximum bomb weight, so they didn't fly as high and were easier to hit with flak.
That's a decision, not a design flaw.
As for "hard to manuever"... my grandfather (B-24 ball turret gunner, Flak Happy, Flak Happy Too, Kontagious Katy) told me a few stories about experiences on the 24 before he passed. He never expressed a wish they would move around better.
...a few times he wished people would stop throwing out toolboxes and parachutes while lightening the craft.. but nothing about the 24 itself.
2 great Liberator pilots. Jimmy Stewart and George McGovern ( who later became Senator )
George McGovern was considered by many to be one of the finest 24 pilots in the war.
I thought Stewart flew the B-17?
Another Democrat that proved their mettle in WWII
@@robertthegrape2192 Stewart started out WWII by training pilots in both the B-17 and the B-24. He later led squadrons and flew missions out of England in B-24's.
@@robertthegrape2192 He could fly both aircraft. But over Europe, he piloted B-24s.
Supposedly, Jimmy Stewart and another pilot took up a B17 by themselves and buzzed the commandant's quarters. There weren't any major repercussions.
My dad was a B24 Radar Navigator in WW2 based out of New Guinea. He said his squadron flew bombing raids over Japan.
Lots of rivalry between B-17 & B-24 crews.
The Flying Fortress guys would tell Liberator crewmen they flew in the shipping crate for a B-17 .
Great aircraft my father was chief tooling engineer for DOUGLAS aircraft he was sent to Tulsa Oklahoma to build these aircraft along with the dauntless
The B-17 had a major flaw too, and to this day no one can say how many were lost due to that flaw, as no air crews were known to survive the catastrophic fire that flaw would cause until the one that led to it's discovery.
The design flaw was discovered very late in the war, so it is highly probable that losses were attributed to combat when they were in fact due to the flaw.
What was the B17 flaw?
Don't leave us in suspense now
@@augustdenger8231 Apparently, an oxygen feed to the cockpit was close enough to the upper turret ring as to rub against it and wear a hole in the pipe, this resulted in oxygen flowing under pressure over the turret electric drive wiring panel, resulting in a spark igniting the oxy and flooding the cockpit with a ball of flame, often killing the flight crew. after it was discovered, literally hundreds of aircraft had to be refitted to fix the flaw, which had been there since the B-17 was designed.
Britain thinks highly of the B24 because of it closing the mid-atlantic gap, and I guess the 'flaws' were unimportant there.
I believe Harris had to be forced to concede them to Coastal Command, despite their usefulness.
I think they were designed for US requirements (long range high altitude day bombing) but at that time flying over Germany in daylight was suicide and US took a very long time to learn that when they came in and used the B-24 themselves.
The Lancaster could carry 14,000 pounds of bombs to the B-24s 8,000 so Harris would need two B 24s and two crews to do the same damage as one Lanc. As Berlin is only 600 miles from London we did not need a plane with a 3,000 mile range bombing Germany.
Also, the US way is to just make lots and win with numbers. UK had limited resources and limited money and so fought the war in a way to retain and use its resources as best it could.
So B-24 was used in the best way to utilise its assets and limit any flaws.
@@grolfe3210 I didn't know about the limited bomb load, which makes Harris' attitude seem even more 'dog in a manger'.
If Jimmy Stewart flew this beast, it must have worked for the job it was designed to do. I loved the B-17, but the B-24 was more versatile in different roles.
Ford’s Willow Run B-24 factory was the world’s largest aircraft factory
B-24s would fly over my house everyday of the war from Willow Run. I live in White Pigeon in SW Michigan and wish I could’ve seen them like my grandparents could have.
I read that a B24 every 100 minutes was produced here (!)
That slewing 24 gives insight how the Lady Be Good came down under auto control on
Libyan sand plain near Egyptian boarder. She after crew bailed out landed very similarly as evidence of wreckage. Landing in very dark conditions crew was unsure of terrain below .
Discovered 16 years later she was amazingly intact just as that fateful mission had left her.
Had she been retrieved and displayed in museum setting what an incredible tribute to the sacrifices of our aircrew service’s.
Her gages, radio, guns etc. still in working order. A time capsule epic.
I remember when they found the Lady Be Good. Not long after, Armstrong Circle Theater presented a dramatization of the airplane and it's fate. The video is available on YT. My father was a navy CB in the Aleutian Islands during WWII. After the war ended he was waiting for a ship to take him back to the U.S. A B-24 pilot said he was leaving the next day and could give him a hop. My father turned down the offer. He later learned that aircraft crashed due to bad weather with all crew killed. He went back to San Francisco via the ocean.
There was also a highly fictionalized show based on Lady Be Good. Richard Basehart and Vince Edward played in it. Can’t recall if it was a show like Twilight Zone or not. The wreckage was haunted by the crash victims that only Richard Basehart could see. He had been the lone survivor but had been the navigator who the others blamed for the crash. Again, it was a fictionalized account and the LBG was not called out by name.
Young Novices Flying at Night over the Sea and the Desert, without a Functioning Navigator.
@@geodes6722 The Twilight Zone had an episode inspired by the Lady Be Good called "King 9 Will Not Return" starring Robert Cummings. His B-25 crashes in the desert and when he comes to after the crash he is alone with no sign of his crew. In the episodes climax, it is revealed that Cummings was in a hospital bed and dreaming about his crash. In the end, the doctors realize his visions were triggered by the headline in a newspaper about a crashed WWII bomber found intact in the desert.
@@aaaht3810 I’ll need to find that one too!
Please get rid of that robot voice. The diction and syntax are jarring. Outside of that, a decent video if a bit short.
The B24 gets criticized for the tendency of its wing to fold up if hit in the main spar at the wing root, there is actually a very dramatic if short video of this happening to a B24 available on UA-cam. The thing is, all aircraft are vulnerable at this point, and if a B17 gets hit in the same place its wing is likely to fold up too. Plus the B17 had been designed and built several years earlier and had built up a reputation among the press and the public as being invulnerable, the name Flying Fortress says all you need to know about the legend it had built up before it flew a single mission against Germany. the reality was different of course, B17's were being shot out of the sky in frighteningly large numbers, raids to places like Regensburg and Schweinfurt were disastrous and the vulnerability of any heavy bomber without fighter escort was obvious to all.
Ultimately an aircraft succeeds if it fulfils the purpose it was designed for, and the B24 did perfectly well in this regard, its losses were overall no greater than the B17 and succeeded in roles that the B17 failed in, such as a maritime patrol aircraft and U Boat destroyer. It's a shame it gets an undeserved bad rep next to the B17, it was a great war-winning aircraft and deserves to be remembered.
Every WW2 bomber had its Achilles heel...some times more than one..
Proportionately the Wellington was incredibly tough as it was built on a Geodesic framework .
The Lancaster carried the heaviest bomb load of any but it was vunerable from attacks from below. The liberators gift was to coastal command because its range closed the Iceland gap against the u boats... allowing thousands of troops to get through and supplies to let everyone else to take the war to the Nazis.
The film I know of showing the left wing folding and bursting into flame was shot from above, and it appears it was bombs released from that plane hit the wing. Either mistimed release, or the B-24 in question was too close and directly underneath. It was blamed on a direct flak burst, but look closely...there was an attempt to airbrush the falling bombs out of each frame.
My Dad flew combat in the southwest Pacific in B-24s as a pilot until a catastrophic takeoff crash due to a blown tire on takeoff from a crushed coral runway on the island of Morotai. He was one of three badly burned survivors. He said that B-24 pilots called the airplane the "Agony Wagon", among other things, due to the high control effort required to fly good formation. OTOH, he LOVED the Pratt and Whitney R-1830 engine to the end of his days. He spoke of the fire issues with the APU in the bomb bay that others have mentioned, an issue that resulted in another nickname, "Consolidated Incinerator", mentioned it as a perceived feature of Willow Run (Ford) built airplanes - and refused to buy Ford vehicles for most of his life! (He did finally relent on that with a 1988 diesel pickup, rationalizing that it didn't have any spark plugs or gasoline to create the type of fire hazard that had killed crews in his bomb group!). He appreciated the B-24 for its long range and the efficiency of the Davis airfoil, noting that in the Pacific, "Range was God", but he much preferred flying C-47s, A-20s and B-25s.
When Davis, the inventor of the wing, was taken to the factory as the first planes were being made he walked around one and said "You have the wing on at the wrong angle." The pilots had to fly with the tail up 10 degrees to get all of the fuel out of the tanks.
Author Ernest Gann flew the C-87 cargo version of the 'Liberator' in the Far East campaign: he wrote that 'the much-vaunted Davis wing couldn't hold enough ice to chill a highball'.
@@None-zc5vg Icing is the fatal problem of all laminar flow aerofoils. An insect in the wrong place will wreck the performance.
It is not a laminar flow wing.
@@givenfirstnamefamilyfirstn3935 The Davis aerofoil was a laminar flow aerofoil. That was shown by the Caltech wind tunnel tests. It wasn’t as good as the later properly engineered laminar flow aerofoils but it was one none the less.
Maximum camber and thickness was at 29.6% of chord. End of argument.
At an airshow with a B-24 met a guy who would not believe they built more of them than the B-17 - said I must be mistaken guess because he’d never seen any in movies before.
My grandfather flew as flight engineer over the South Pacific, ie, top turret gunner & radio opperator. And told me the crews referred to the B-24 as flying coffins.
Once hit with enemy weapons the plane would go into a flat spin, trapping the crew to interior walls while the plane would spin in and crash. Killing most everyone onboard. The B-24 was large enough that you could park a B-17 under the wing...
Kelly you know nothing, b24 wingspan 110 ft, length 68 ft, b 17 wingspan 103 ft, (just 6ft less) length 76 ft, and the b17 was to tall to fit under the liberators wing despite it been shoulder mounted
@@jukeseyable Obviously this is your exact condition. When visiting the Pima air museum in Tucson Arizona, they have each plane displayed in the position described. I was even able to walk into the bomb bays of each plane. So I've seen this with my own eyes! Have you even seen either of these two planes in person?
@@blankeny yes they are very similar in size. One does not dwarf the other
@@jukeseyable I never said it dwarfed the B-17, I just said, "you can park it under the wing of a B-24"! Both planes I saw were in polished aluminum with a mirror like finish. The B-17 being a tail dragger is the obvious explanation. So I guess I do know something about these aircraft.
During WWII British PM Winston Churchill was given a B-24 for his official use by U S Pres. Roosevelt. This speaks highly on the B-24.
Despite a few small problems, the B24 was an excellent aircraft and hold up pretty good under ground fire also it was one of the best gun platform in the air Force, one version carried 13, 50cals and a 75mm cannon, simply a beast.
My father flew on Navy PB4Y Liberators during the 50's. He didn't say much about them, mostly talked about when he was in the surface Navy.
Is there an alternative to the robot voice narration? It's very irritating.
Side note - my father-in-law (Canadian) flew in B-24s out of India against the Japanese.
They were doing things like skipping bombs into the sides of ships from 50 feet - pretty hairy stuff.
Had a patient who was in the CBI theater during the war. He was a camera man and his CO said he wanted pictures of bombs dropping out of a plane from the bomb bay. He went up on a 24 and w one leg wrapped around a part of the plane he leaned over the bomb bay he got his shot. He also said he almost fell out of the plane. When the bombs drop their load, the plane jolts up and not being prepared for that, scared the crap out of him.
Ben was a family friend who was a B-24 flight instructor stationed in Kansas in WWII. One clear, 95F day he and his students took the plane up to see how high they could get. One, two, then three engines cut out on due to oil freezing. And inside, even with an electrically heated suit it was colllld. The students did not rank heated suits. I wonder if the followup instruction was how to avoid a spin.
And Ben told the story of flying so low over his hometown in NW central Missouri that the B-24 blew the laundry off the clothes lines.
my dad was a pilot CBI . Ice was non existence. they wanted a cold beer ? they took a case up with them . still frozen on landing .
@@brettbader8305 China-Burma-India ?
These flew over my family’s house every day when they were made back in the 40’s. They’d fly from the plant in Willow Run to airports on the East Coast. I wish I was alive back then to see them.
My dad flew both the B-24 and B-17 out of Mendelsham, England during WW2. He preferred the B-17 describing the B-24 as "drafty", while the B-17 was "snug". Interesting that the B-17 soldiered on with the Air Force for years after the war while the B-24 was quickly deleted from inventory. Telling that.
Yeah the unarmored cockpits, draughty design, and lower service ceiling would have been strong minus points for sure!
Almost nobody who flew the B-24 liked the B-24 and I chalk that up to failure in doctrine rather than failure in design, not softening up the airwaffle enough with B-17's that the B-24 could be used with a higher margin for safety.
Would have been a more effective use of it, and would have saved the many B-24 crews that needlessly went down.
Respect to your father for his service at Mendlesham. I live just a few miles away from the now disused airfield and where ever you travel in Suffolk,Norfolk or Cambridgeshire you are never far from a Usaaf air station. Unfortunately the Mendlesham memorial is all but what remains of the huge airfield.
@@stuartbuxton4316 Thanks for your acknowledgement of my dad's service.
On 10/7/44, just after bombs away at Meresberg, flak blew off the tail of his B-17. Five of the nine onboard survived. He ended up in Stalag Luft One and was eventually liberated by the Russians.
I'd put my chips on the line in WW2 Germany with the B-24 Liberator instead of the B-17. Pratt and Whitney R-2800 twin wasp radial engines were a better engine than the Wright Cyclone's on the B-17. It was almost bullit proof, still operating sometimes even with a few cylinders shot up, and the high aspect ratio Davis wing made the most of a large 12,000 pound payload bomber. The comparison here reminds me somewhat of the Mustang vs. the P-47 Thunderbolt. -- Mustang, sleek, sexy, but somewhat delicate .Thunderbolt tough, hard hitting, heavier armament/larger payload, fast, almost as manuverable, usually got you back to base in 1 piece. The unsung U.S. fighter and bombers here...Robert at 66.
There’s a pic of a P47 flying back to base with missing an entire wing with just a stub wing remaining, the Jug was tough !!!
The B 24 was equipped with Pratt and Whitney R-1830 engines (14 cylinders.
The P47 shot down more German fighter's than any other Allied fighter in the western ETO, and it was the fighter responsible for breaking the back of the Luftwaffe in the crucial first 3 months of 1944, 570 out of 873 German fighter's shot down during those first 3 months were shot down by P47's, it also shot down 900 of the 1,983 during the first 6 months of 1944, it's tally would undoubtedly been the bulk of them but after those first 3 months most P47 units were switched to ground attack, however in that roll it destroyed over 9,000 locomotives, and countless other targets on the ground.
P47's flew 423,435 sorities during the war, that's more than all the P51's, P38's and P40's combined.
Also the 56th Fighter Group that flew P47's exclusively had more aces in it than any other Allied fighter group of the ETO.
And contrary to what most people believe P47's were escorting bombers over Berlin before P51's were, the fact is every single P47 that saw service in the ETO had the ability to escort bombers all the way to their target even on the early unescorted missions to Schweinfert and Regensburg, it's a myth that they lacked the range to do it early on, the reason that they couldn't early on is because they were forbidden to use drop tanks on escort missions at that point because the "Bomber Mafia" Generals who ran the USAAF wanted to prove their concept that the bombers could fight their way to the targets and back unescorted, starting with the P47C-2 they had the shackles to mount drop tanks, no P47's that saw service in the ETO were earlier than the P47C-2, even then 3 months before the Schweinfert/Regensburg missions the 56th Fighter Group was already receiving the P47D-15 which had the ability to mount the all metal pressurized drop tanks, it was that very configuration that was used by P47's to escort bombers over Berlin weeks before P51's were doing it.
The narrative that the P51 was the first fighter that could escort bombers deep into Germany was a lie concocted by the Bomber Mafia Generals and fed to the Press Corps to cover their asses for sending those bombers unescorted on those early raids because they were trying to prove their concept.
The P47 was the true rock star fighter of the ETO, it was a hockey player in a figure skating contest and I giggle myself silly every time I think about one of those figure skaters getting slammed into the boards.
The B-24 was powered by PW R1830 engines, not R2800.
@@davidkallewaard750
That's right but he was correct concerning the name of the engine, it was called the Twin Wasp, the R2800 was called the Double Wasp.
Long-Range Bomb Truck. The B-24 did its job.
We should remember that is was the Liberator that was used to bomb the Ploesti oil fields because they had the range. This was extremely because it, of course cut the German fuel supplies.
The chief characteristic of the Davis Wing was not the fact that it was a high aspect ratio wing. Other bombers had high aspect ratio wings. A high aspect ratio wing is simply a long, thin wing. (Aspect ratio is determined by Span divided by Chord.) It was the AIRFOIL shape that made the Davis Wing. The Davis airfoil was taller, as seen in cross section, which allowed for a taller wing spar. The strength of a wing spar is largely determined by how far apart the top cap strip and bottom cap strip are. This is a basic I Beam principle. They were very far apart in the B-24, which gave the Davis spar great strength, allowing for heavier loads. The weakness was that there was no room for turbulent air flow going over the top of the wing and, consequently, the B-24 could not carry ice loads! Suggested reading: Fate is the Hunter, by Earnest Gann. He flew the cargo version of the B-24. I believe it was called the C-87. He did not like it.
(From memory, from decades ago) Gann said the "vaunted " Davis wing "couldn't carry enough ice to chill a highball".
I think Gann also said either the C87 (or DC4 or DC6) flew like a fighter when he was spiraling tightly down a steep hole in the clouds into a San Francisco or Iceland airport.
@@bernardscheidle5679 a truly dangerous thing to do, but Gann was a Pilot...... a real one...
@@fredferd965 I think the chapter in "Fate is the Hunter" may have had the word "HOLE" in the title. I think there was a hydraulic fire, smoke in the cabin, and some scared passengers. He saw the hole, knew it could close, but chopped power to almost not running, I think put down the gear to slow the dive, and did a tight spiral following the hole all the way down to the center of the runway. It was night, clouds, fog, no visibility, and apparently no modern instruments in that day. He also had a chapter that was titled with one word, "Ice". That was a nail biter. I read years later in the 1990s I think, in the New York Times, that aviation was doing research on "super cooled drizzle drops" that explained more why ice could be so dangerous to planes.
@@bernardscheidle5679 Sounds right to me. Gann was also a great writer - he could make you feel like you were there....
About 15 years ago while flying for Delta Airlines, I flew with an F/O that had been at an airshow in Memphis (I think), and luckily met the right person. This person called him later and asked if he would like to be his co-pilot and help him ferry his B-17 from Memphis to California. The F/O jumped at the opportunity got to fly the B-17. A few weeks later, the guy called the F/O and asked him if he would like to help fly his B-24 out to California. Again, he jumped at the chance. He told me that flying the B-17 was a pleasure; it had very light controls and you could trim it up and fly it with your fingertips. The B-24 was a different story. The controls were extremely heavy; it felt like you were driving a dump truck. He said it felt like you were trying to balance a ball on the head of a pin.
I have heard that from a former B-24 pilot from WWII, Sherman Beard, of Hillsboro, WV, now deceased. He told me you could easily tell a B-24 pilot as one arm was more muscled than the other. He flew his required missions over Italy and Germany and got to go home, flying his crew into Bradley Field, CT, as their final destination.
@@UncaDave Same thing I'd heard: a B17 was easy to keep in formation, or as one guy said, 'once it's trimmed, it can fly itself'; but the B24 was rather harder to fly in tight formation (and it could not quite go as high nor could it absorb the same amount of damage the 'Fort' could). As a result German fighters would often be vectored to the 'Libs' because they were lower altitude and looser formation--right in the 'heart' of the FW190's 'peak' performance envelope.
@@nickmitsialis Probably so. Sherman Beard told me he was hit with lots of flak and everyone of his crew was wounded at one time or another. His co-pilot got hit badly and he told me the cockpit was covered in blood. What these men lived through, survived and died in is impossible for us to imagine. Thanks for your comments.
@@UncaDave Too high to breath and you're freezing cold, and on top of that, you're wounded. I can't imagine how people endured that.
My college friend's father (who was a lot older than our fathers) had flown both the B-17 and B-24 and he said that he preferred the B-24 because it was a lot more maneuverable than the B-17, outperformed the B-17, and was more modern. Maybe it was a matter of positive stability versus neutral stability... or maybe just a matter of preference.
the payload factor alone enabled the starving Netherlanders to survive after the Germans flooded most of the country. the B-24s dropped food and other necessities to the distaught people for months on end, until the flooding was stopped and humanitarian aid could be trucked in.
B-24s, B-17s, and British heavies like the Lancaster were all used. The US called it Operation Chowhound, the Brits called it Operation Manna. :)
Do not forget that the Germans agreed not to shoot down the bombers in order to let them bring much needed food nor that also the B-17 and the British bombers contributed as well....
I spoke to a WW II veteran Army Air Force pilot who flew the B-24 with the 8th Air Force over Germany. He told me that the Davis wing had excellent lift characteristics and efficiency at lower and medium altitudes, but at high altitudes at about 20,000 feet or higher, the Davis wing is ineffective and useless in the thin air and made the bomber was notoriously difficult to handle. He said it handled like a “fat lady trying to do a ballet dance.” He said you had to “fight it with all your might just to keep it in formation” and it took great skill and experience to be an accomplished B-24 pilot.
or
" trying to have sex with a fat lady " :))
That's also what my father in law told me. He was a B-24 pilot/aircrew commander in his early 20s, and when asked about it would just shake his head and say "It was like trying to fly a dump truck". Especially when heavily loaded and in thin air, he felt like the biggest challenge and danger was trying to stay in formation and not run into the aircraft around him, or vice versa. It was exhausting, mentally and physically, and took a certain kind of pilot to be physically able to wrestle with that beast for hours and perform the necessary large, unassisted control inputs. Because of the challenges of flying them in close formation, the 24's tended to fly looser formations than the B-17s, which of course the Germans noticed and tried to use to their advantage.
Very true, but it was calculated tradeoff for more speed range & bomb load.
My Dad was a 24 Navigator and like the Bombardier had basic Flight Training
so they could jump in should either Pilot or Co-Pilot be disabled. He said it handled well in flight, but he never wanted to have to land one because it
landed at a very high speed and took tremendous skill to get one back on the ground safely. They often flew above 20,000 ft and unless they started icing up
it remained fairly stable. The icing was a know fact about the Davis Wing.
Also nicknamed the "Porcupine" by the Canadians flying for the RAF in India because of the number of gun turrets visible to the enemy. Japanese fighters avoided the Liberator Squadrons when they were flying shipping recon missions according to my late uncle who flew the B24 in India.
My father flew in both the 17 and the 24. He preferred the 24.
My dad (Air Force) told me that the nickname for the B24 was "Shithouse".
He said that since the missions were long, if someone had to "go", they'd toss it out the window, where it'd coat the aircraft behind it in the formation.
Some said the B-24 was the shipping crate for the B-17.
Strange I never heard about the Bomb bays being half open because The B-24 Had a gasoline fuel vapor problem and suddenly some of them would blow up in mid air due to the fumes!
The liberator was a very dangerous aircraft in a role that honestly it was not designed for, transport. Looking at the airplane you would think it would convert well to a transport but it did not. This was experienced flying the Hump, from India to China over the Himalayas. In one of my books regarding b-29 operations during World War II, the initial deployment of the b-29 was in China. There was no road or rail to get supplies to the b-29s forward air bases. Everything had to be flown in including fuel and bombs. The b-24 for some reason being loaded as a transport had a negative effect on the center of gravity. The plane was very unstable in this role. I have never read anything about a B-17 being converted to transport duties having these kinds of issues.
My Dad made 52 trips over Europe in a B 24, first a 24 D then a 24 J. He said when he picked up his new J model the first take off he almost looped it because of new controlls.
I fly historic aircraft. I was ready to get out of the B-24 before the engine was started on my first flight. The design problems were immediately evident. However, my grandfather, who was a B-24 mechanic in 1944 loved them.
I honor the brave boys who used these beasts.
The biggest flaw was its modular construction… which was not as damage resistant as the B17 … and you didn’t want to ditch it …
I meet a former pilot of 24's in 70' he said you had to stay on the aircraft as it wouldn't fly it's self.
18,000 B24 built!!!!. The scale of WW2 when entire national economies are devoted to war is so hard to comprehend.
The problem was the unit-construction method of building the B-24. You can see, in the wing framework drawing, at 3:05 to 3:13 in this video, that the wing was manufactured in one unit, and joined completed to the mostly completed fuselage assemblies. I don't remember the details, but it was another UA-cam video. A lucky hit with a cannon shell from the Germans(who found that they caused more damage than regular bullets, even bigger ones, like 50 cal.) could cause a fiery explosion(from the main gas tanks being in the middle of the main wing section, right over the wing spar for superb load-carrying ability) that would shuck the wings from the unlucky Liberator and kill most of the crew by not letting them bail out. There's a widely-seen film-clip - seen in many videos - showing a lucky hit to the center of a B-24's wing section and you can see the fatal flaw in it's entirety; the plane bursts into fire and the wings fold back almost instantly and burning aviation fuel floods into the fuselage.
My father flew B-17s in the war and was shot down and became a POW. He also flew B-24s after WW2 and said that the B-24 was more comfortable to fly(he was taller) and very reliable if well maintained. I also spoke to some German pilots who fought against us and were glad to talk to us US servicemen stationed in Germany in the Cold War; they told me that B-24s were popular as a target for that first high-speed pass through the bomber formation, because a lucky 20mm cannon-shell could burst the plane apart like a clay pigeon in skeet-shooting, except that the plane exploded into flame. They said that ALL the USAAF bomber formations were hard work to attack from anywhere besides the front because of the hundreds of 50 cal gunners trying to kill you, some of them quite skilled - many Luftwaffe planes came home with at least SOME kind of damage from machine-gun fire.
I read they didn't usually survive a ditching in the ocean, as the nose would usually break off and the whole plane somersault. I think the roll-up bomb door set-up made a weak area in the fuselage
My mom was a Rosie the riveter and used to help assemble the b24s built by consolidated in fort Worth Texas. She was 18 years old then and got a job doing that through a government training program that was going on. I never knew about the Navy's version bb4y with the single tail. Now I have something new to research, lol. Thanks for the information, and good video.
We thank your mother for her service in the factory.
Ernest K. Gann gives less than glowing reviews of his experiences flying C-87's for the ATC during WWII in his famous book Fate is the Hunter
My old man at 19 piloted "The Flying Truck" out of Maxwell Field Alabama and I have all of his manuals. I have no friggin' idea how they did it. Neither did the young F-35 pilots who looked them over when I was able and proud to show. Both generations with nerves of steel. Wild Blue Yonder Boys!
A coousin who flew B-24s told me that the ones built by Consolidated were a dream to fly and would easily fly hands-off, but the ones built by Ford required constant attention as they tended to wander all over the sky and had to be manhandled to fly straight. Very tiring.
I heard the B-17 crews jokingly said the lower flying B-24s were the best escorts they ever had.
The Liberator, unlike the B17, did not have armoured fuel lines and hydraulic pipes, so that when attacked these pipes would turn into flame throwers, dousing everything in burning fuel. US airmen said that if you looked around you in a POW camp, you could tell the B24 crewmen because they were the ones who were burned. The Lancaster was also guilty of burning like a Roman candle, made worse by an escape hatch that was too small for a crewman to exit wearing a parachute. Good examples of how expendable lives were.
Not being better is hardly a weakness. The same could be said of every single thing ever. The aircraft was good enough.
My Grandfather a ball Turret gunner he was in the 443rd BG in England. He went over in 42 and came home alive in 45.
His name was Tommy Francis Moody
The B-17 had one thing and only one thing better than the B-24. And that is the full might of the Boeing marketing department.
....Andy Rooney choose the B-17 over the B-24..He flew in both of them during WW2 as a War Correspondent.......
I heard the survivability in water landings was far worse in b-24 than the b-17
Ironically this was contributed by the high wings
The forward section would break off, often killing the pilots
I think the big fault was that Willow Run produced about one per hour.
At the end of the war, the B24 was the first to be scrapped.
The RAAF had them also, one being restored near Melbourne currently.
My father was a waist gunner on a B-24 in the war with the 467th bomb group. I’m luck to be here.
Wow! I didn’t know Churchill used his personal B24 to hunt subs. Amazing!
It's Naval Variant, the PB4Y Privateer, had one of the Strangest Air-to-Air kills, by flying alongside a Japanese H8K Flying-Boat bomber, then, using it's many turrets (and Starboard waist-gunner), ripped into the 'Flying Porcupine, taking out it's Port-side Engines, downing that large plane in, perhaps, the only time two 4-engined Patrol Bombers ever directly fought each other! It's also notable, that as early as Early '43, the USAAC in Alaska was using 'Orbital Strafing' putting up-to 9 .50-cal machine guns onto One Land-target, very much as 'Spectre' Gunships do today.
My Grandfather was a flight engineer in a US Navy PB4Y squadron and his aircraft hunted down and destroyed a G4M Betty. He told me that they removed armor on the aircraft and added extra 50 cals to fly escort missions.
I saw a documentary on these once and it was considered slightly superior to the B17. The only serious flaw was the it was difficult more difficult to escape if the plane was shot down.🇦🇺
At least the crew in either the B 17 or B 24 as a whole had their parachutes harnessed to them ( with obvious exceptions ) , the British 4 engined bombers , Short Stirling , Handley Page Halifax ,and of course the Avro Lancaster , had crew positions that as a rule didn't allow for harnessed parachutes , and consequently mortality rates amongst those crews was ( noticeably ) higher when compared to USAAF crews on ( similar ) missions