The Canadian Trick That Built 1,133 Wooden Bombers Too Fast to Catch

In the Second World War a factory at Downsview, near Toronto, built 1,133 de Havilland Mosquitoes: a wooden bomber with no guns, too fast for German fighters to catch. De Havilland Canada had never built a combat aircraft. So the work was shared out. Massey-Harris, a tractor company, built the wings. General Motors of Canada built the plywood fuselages. The engines were Merlins made by Packard in Detroit. The film starts on 30 January 1943, when three Mosquitoes bombed Berlin at the minute Hermann Goering was due on the radio, and then goes back to the order that sent the aircraft to Canada after one German bomber hit the Hatfield works. It follows the concrete fuselage moulds, the first flight at Downsview on 23 September 1942, the slow first batch, and the ferry route across the North Atlantic, where some aircraft simply vanished. One of the civilian ferry pilots was Kirk Kerkorian. Then the Canadian Mosquitoes go to war: KB161 "Vancouver" over Berlin with No. 139 Squadron, the night fighter pilot who waited for them at 35,000 feet, the marker that hung up over Ludwigshafen, Guy Gibson's last flight in a Downsview-built Mosquito, and the Light Night Striking Force, which bombed Berlin on 36 nights in a row in 1945. The figure in the title needs care, and the film says so: 1,133 is the official count, some books give 1,032, and only about 670 were bombers in the strict sense. The rest were fighter-bombers finished in 1945, too late to fight. One of those sat on a farm in Alberta for thirty years and flew again in New Zealand in 2012. Did someone in your family build Mosquitoes at Downsview, or fly them? Leave the name in the comments. CHAPTERS 0:00 "It makes me furious" 0:22 The morning Berlin went off the air 2:25 Goering loses his temper 3:08 One bomber over Hatfield 5:01 A tractor company and a car maker 5:43 Concrete moulds 7:07 The first one flies 8:11 The slow first batch 9:01 The ferry route 9:57 Kerkorian's crossing 12:01 Vancouver's first night 12:59 Why the fighters could not catch it 14:31 The marker that did not fall 15:29 The line begins to move 16:30 Guy Gibson's last flight 17:56 Thirty-six nights over Berlin 19:53 What 1,133 really means 20:42 The one that was kept Sources: 1. De Havilland Mosquito (production in Canada, operational history) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havi... 2. DAIR Hub, Downsview heritage article on Mosquito production - https://dairhub.com/?p=16324 3. J. Dupas / R. Visschedijk, de Havilland Canada Mosquito notes - https://1000aircraftphotos.com/Milita... 4. Canadian Aviation Museum, history of Mosquito KB161 "Vancouver" - https://canadianaviationmuseum.ca/?p=408 5. William C. Rempel, The Gambler (2018), on Kirk Kerkorian and RAF Ferry Command