At eleven o’clock on the morning of January 30, 1943, Hermann Göring, the head of the Luftwaffe, stood before a microphone in the great broadcasting house in Berlin. It was the tenth anniversary of the Nazi seizure of power, and the second most powerful man in Germany was about to address the nation. Loudspeakers had been strung across town squares. Factory floors had gone quiet.
Millions of Germans waited for the triumphant voice of the Reichsmarschall. Then, precisely as he began to speak, the air raid sirens tore open across the capital. Three aircraft had come in low and very fast out of the west. They had crossed the North Sea, slipped through the coastal defenses, and arrived over the most heavily protected city in Europe in broad daylight, entirely alone, without a single friendly fighter to guard them.
They dropped their bombs on Berlin and turned for home. The German fighters clawing up into the cold air behind them could not close the gap. Göring’s speech was thrown off the air for more than an hour. Across Germany, radios that had promised a glorious anniversary address gave the listeners nothing but nervous marching music.
That same afternoon, a second flight of these machines came back and spoiled the broadcast of the propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, as well. The carefully staged spectacle of the anniversary, a decade in the making, was humiliated in a single day by a handful of airplanes that the finest air force in the world simply could not catch. Here is the part that turns this raid from a war story into a genuine mystery. The machines that did this were not made of aluminum.
They were made of wood, plywood, balsa, and spruce, glued and screwed and molded into shape, in many cases by the hands of furniture makers and cabinet builders, men who before the war had assembled wardrobes and shop counters and grand pianos. Only three years before that morning over Berlin, the men who ran the British Air Force had looked at the idea of this airplane, an unarmed bomber built out of wood, and had treated the whole notion as close to a joke. This is a story about an argument, a single stubborn, unfashionable argument over one question that every air force on earth believed it had already answered. What is it that actually keeps a bomber alive over hostile territory?
The entire weight of expert opinion gave one answer: guns. Turrets, gunners, and armor plate. A bomber bristling with defensive fire, flying in tight formation so that dozens of machine guns could throw up a wall of lead against the fighters. That was the wisdom of the age.
Against all of it stood one man and one company with a reply that sounded like heresy. Take the guns away. Take the gunners away. Take the turrets and the armor and every last ounce of defensive weight and spend the whole of it on speed instead.
Build the machine so fast and so clean that nothing in the sky can lay a glove on it. That argument has a date, a test, a price, and a payoff. The date is a cold November morning in 1940 on a quiet airfield north of London. The test would be flown through flak and searchlights over occupied Europe, night after night, for years.
The price would be paid by young aircrew and, on one terrible spring afternoon, by a schoolhouse full of children. And the payoff would be a machine that finished the war with the lowest loss rate of any bomber in the whole of the Royal Air Force, and an enemy commander who confessed, in his own bitter words, that the sight of it turned him green with envy. The story begins on a wet English airfield on a gray October dawn in 1934, with a scarlet racing plane and a crowd of people who could not quite believe what they were about to see. The airplane was called the DH88 Comet, and the De Havilland company had built it for one purpose only.
That year, a great air race was to be flown, a contest all the way from England to Australia, more than 11,000 miles across half the surface of the world, with a rich prize for the fastest machine. De Havilland could not simply buy an aircraft fast enough to win, so it chose instead to design and build one from nothing in a matter of months. It was made of wood because wood was light and because it could be shaped into clean, slippery curves that metal could not easily match. On October 20, 1934, one of these slender crimson machines, flown by Charles Scott and Tom Campbell Black, lifted off and pointed its nose at the far side of the planet.
They reached Melbourne in under three days. They beat modern all-metal airliners with far larger crews and much bigger engines. A wooden racing plane dreamed up and hammered together in a single frantic English winter had flown across the entire world faster than anything else alive. The newspapers lost their minds, and inside the De Havilland company a loose idea began to harden into a firm conviction.
If wood and clean lines and raw speed could win the greatest air race ever flown, then wood and clean lines and raw speed could do something far more serious than win a trophy. The first thing that mattered was the way the airplane was built. Not from thin metal sheets riveted over a skeleton, but from a kind of sandwich: a skin of plywood on the outside, a light core of balsa wood in the middle, another skin of plywood within, the whole thing molded into a smooth shell that carried its loads in its own surface, the way the shell of an egg does. The second thing that mattered was the man at the very center of it all, Geoffrey de Havilland himself, a pioneer from the earliest days of powered flight who had come to believe with something close to religious certainty that sheer speed was itself a form of armor.
By the late 1930s, the British Air Ministry knew that a great war was coming, and it had already made up its mind about what a proper bomber ought to be. A bomber should be large. It should carry heavy loads across long distances and, above everything else, it should be able to defend itself with power-operated gun turrets, several gunners, and a crew of six or seven men working the weapons as the formation fought its way to the target and back through the fighters. This was the settled and respectable wisdom of the entire age, shared by every major air force on the planet.
Into that solid certainty, Geoffrey de Havilland proposed something that sounded to the official mind close to lunacy. A bomber carrying no guns at all, no turrets, no gunners, no armor plate, no defensive weapons of any kind whatsoever, only two men, two engines, a load of bombs, and speed. He wrote to the Air Ministry. He wrote directly to individual air marshals.
He argued that in the coming war, aluminum and steel would be desperately short while wood and the men skilled at working it would be plentiful and standing idle. He argued that stripping away the guns and the gunners and the armor would leave behind an airplane so light and so aerodynamically clean that it would simply run away from any fighter sent up to destroy it. The response was cool, and often worse than cool. The official view held that German fighters would turn out to be faster than this dreamer imagined, that an unarmed bomber was nothing but a flying coffin, and that the whole scheme was a distraction from the serious business of building real weapons.
There were repeated requests that he add a defensive gun turret, that he add a third crewman to work it, that he make the thing look and behave more like the bombers everyone already understood and trusted. But De Havilland had one advantage that the doubters had not reckoned with. He had a believer sitting inside the building. His name was Wilfrid Freeman, and he was one of the most senior officers in the Royal Air Force, responsible for research and for new aircraft.
Where other men saw a wooden folly, Freeman looked at the calculations, and the calculations were telling him that a small, clean, twin-engined machine built around the magnificent new Rolls-Royce Merlin engine might well fly faster than any fighter then in existence. Late in 1939, at a crucial meeting on the whole question of fast bombers, it was Freeman who cut straight through the demands for turrets and gunners and pushed for the airplane that De Havilland actually wanted to build. On the first of March 1940, an order was placed for fifty of the aircraft. There was a second improbable thing about this airplane beyond the astonishing fact that it would carry no guns, and it lived in the simple question of who would actually build it.
Because it was made of wood, it did not need the enormous metal presses and vast armies of skilled riveters that a modern all-metal bomber demanded. What it needed was woodworkers, and Britain was full of woodworkers whose ordinary trade the war had just brought to a halt. Contracts spread out across the country to furniture factories, to cabinet makers, to firms that had built shopfronts and church pews and grand pianos. In High Wycombe, the ancient heart of the English furniture trade, workshops that had turned out dining chairs and tables the year before were now shaping the fuselage shells and wing ribs of a frontline warplane.
When France collapsed in the summer of 1940 and Britain suddenly stood alone, the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook, ordered the nation to concentrate every effort on a short list of proven aircraft and to stop wasting labor on anything else. More than once, word came down that the wooden bomber was to be halted altogether. The nickname that fastened itself to the whole project in those desperate months was cruel and simple. They called it Freeman’s Folly, after the one senior officer stubborn enough to keep shielding it.
Beaverbrook is said to have tried to shut it down three separate times. Fortunately for Britain, he never quite put the order down in writing, and so Freeman very quietly kept on ignoring him. On the 25th of November 1940, the very first prototype, painted a bright trainer yellow and carrying the identity W4050, was taxied out onto the grass at the De Havilland field at Hatfield. At the controls sat Geoffrey de Havilland Jr.
, the founder’s own son and the company’s chief test pilot. He eased the throttles forward, and the little wooden machine lifted cleanly into a cold English winter afternoon. Every man on the ground who understood airplanes could see at once that this was something entirely out of the ordinary. Flown to the official testing establishment and pushed hard to its limits, the prototype reached 388 mph at 22,000 feet.
It was faster than the frontline Spitfire of the day, which topped out at around 360 mph. The unarmed wooden bomber that the experts had called a flying coffin was quicker through the sky than the finest fighter in the entire Royal Air Force. The heresy had been proven right on the very first attempt. Speed truly could be armor, for the simplest reason imaginable: you cannot shoot down what you cannot reach.
The genius of the machine was almost entirely a matter of subtraction rather than addition. Every gun turret on a bomber is a blister sticking up into the airstream, dragging at the aircraft, stealing its speed. Every gunner is a man who has to be carried, kept warm, fed with oxygen, shielded with armor, and given a heavy powered turret to sit inside. The De Havilland team looked at the entire catalog of it and simply deleted it.
No turrets meant no blisters, so the fuselage could be drawn as one smooth and unbroken shell, tapering from nose to tail like a single falling drop of water. Thousands of pounds of weight vanished from the design before the first bolt was ever turned. What remained was tiny by the standards of a bomber: two crew, a pilot and a navigator sitting almost shoulder to shoulder, two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, and a wooden airframe so clean and so polished that the air itself barely seemed to notice it was there. As the war went on, the enemy’s fighters slowly grew faster.
For a lightly built machine that lived or died by its speed, that could have become a death sentence. It did not, because the airplane simply kept climbing away from the threat. Rolls-Royce gave the Merlin engine a two-stage supercharger, and the wooden machine gained a whole new lease of speed and height. New versions appeared with pressurized cabins, so crews could fly in comfort at altitudes where the outside air was far too thin to breathe and where no ordinary fighter could ever follow.
It was an arms race fought in the vertical, and for most of the war, the airplane made of wood was quietly winning it. The wooden bomber went off to war first not as a bomber at all, but as a spy. Late in 1941, the earliest aircraft entered service with a photographic reconnaissance unit, slipping out over occupied France and then deep into Germany itself. The aircraft flew so high and so fast that interception was rare, and very often simply impossible.
Then, in September 1942, came the raid that first told the wider world what this machine could do. Four of the bombers flew all the way from Scotland to Oslo at very low level to strike the local headquarters of the Gestapo. German fighters caught them over the city, and one of the bombers was lost with its crew. The raid did not destroy the building as intended.
But its meaning was enormous, because the day after that raid, the BBC revealed to the British public for the very first time that this remarkable new aircraft even existed. Now the Royal Air Force did something rare. It changed its mind. It ordered the aircraft in ever greater numbers.
It poured the design into role after role. The folly had become the favorite. Across the air war, the beautiful theory of the bomber that could defend itself was being disproved in blood. Formations of heavily gunned bombers flying by day straight into the waiting fighters were being torn to pieces despite all their turrets and all their carefully arranged crossfire.
The wooden bomber, carrying nothing at all but its bombs and its speed, was slipping through the very same skies and coming home. On the 18th of February 1944, a formation of these wooden fighter bombers flew across the English Channel at the height of the treetops on a mission that sounds almost like fiction. Their target was the prison at Amiens in occupied France, where the Gestapo was holding hundreds of French resistance fighters and political prisoners. The plan was to breach the thick prison walls with bombing so precise, so low, and so fast that the outer walls would crack open and the guards’ quarters would be destroyed.
The aircraft came in so low that crews afterwards spoke of flying below the tops of the very walls they had come to attack. The bombs cracked the outer wall wide open. Prisoners came pouring out into the snow. More than 250 of the several hundred people held inside managed to escape.
But around a hundred prisoners were also killed. And Group Captain Percy Pickard, leading the raid with his navigator, Flight Lieutenant John Broadley, did not come home. Circling back to see the results of the attack, his aircraft was caught by a German fighter and shot down. Both men were killed.
Over the whole course of the conflict, the wooden bomber flew tens of thousands of bombing sorties and finished with a loss rate that careful historians place at around 0. 63 percent, the lowest of any bomber in Bomber Command. In the ferocious battles fought over Berlin through the winter of 1943 to 1944, one careful study found the heavy bombers losing better than five out of every one hundred aircraft dispatched, while the wooden machines were losing only around one in every two hundred. The gunned, armored, defended bomber, the confident choice of every expert in the world, was dying at roughly ten times the rate of the naked wooden speedster that those same experts had mocked.
The airplane did not only bomb and photograph. It also learned to lead. As the bombing campaign grew more scientific, the wooden machines took on the role of pathfinder, flying ahead of the great streams of heavy bombers to find and mark the target with flares so that hundreds of aircraft following behind could aim at a single burning point in the darkness. Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire, one of the most decorated airmen Britain produced, took to diving his wooden aircraft down almost to rooftop height to lay his markers directly onto the aiming point.
In the darkness, the same airframe became a hunter. Fitted with radar in its nose, the night fighter versions prowled the skies, defending the homeland against raiders and stalking the enemy’s own night fighters over their own airfields. By some accounts, these night-fighting and intruder aircraft destroyed well over two hundred German machines in the last eighteen months of the war alone. Britain’s highest-scoring night fighter ace of the entire war, a pilot named Branse Burbridge, credited with twenty-one victories, hunted in one of these wooden machines.
For the German night fighter crews, the wooden bomber became a very particular kind of torment. They coined their own grim word for the feeling, a word that meant in effect the mosquito terror. The aircraft would come over in the night, high and impossibly fast, drop its heavy bomb, and be gone again before the defenders could even climb to its altitude. German pilots described the maddening experience of tracking a target they could clearly see on their radar screens but could never quite manage to reach.
The frustration reached all the way to the very top of the Reich. Hermann Göring, who had staked his entire reputation on the promise that the skies over Germany were sealed shut, was forced to watch a wooden airplane make a public mockery of that promise again and again. Later in the war, he reportedly raged about it in front of his own assembled officers. The substance of his words is well attested: he said that the machine drove him to fury and to envy.
He marveled bitterly that the British could take an aircraft made of wood, thrown together in his contemptuous phrase by the piano factories over there, and give it a speed that his own proud metal fighters could not match. The most powerful air commander in Europe admitted in front of his staff that a plane built by cabinet makers left him green and yellow with envy. By the beginning of 1944, the airplane poured that whole advantage down onto Berlin night after night. A group of these machines was gathered into what became known as the Light Night Striking Force, and its entire purpose was to make the nights of the German capital a living misery.
Each of these aircraft could haul a single enormous 4,000-pound bomb, a great thin-walled blast weapon nicknamed the cookie, all the way to Berlin and back. In one remarkable stretch beginning in February 1945, this small force struck at Berlin on thirty-six nights in a row. Night after night, the sirens howled. The exhausted population was driven down into the shelters once more.
Sleep was shattered across the city, and yet the losses among the attacking crews stayed almost negligible. The airplane reached out past the business of terror and struck directly at the enemy’s own instruments of control. Because it could strike with such surgical precision, it was sent time after time against the local headquarters of the Gestapo, the secret police whose files and interrogation cells held the lives of countless resistance fighters in the balance. After that first raid on Oslo, a formation flew in October 1944 against the Gestapo headquarters housed in the university at Aarhus in Denmark, coming in at rooftop height and burning the archive of records that could have destroyed the entire Danish resistance.
But the same precision that could save resistance fighters could also, in one dreadful instant, take the most innocent lives of all. On the 21st of March 1945, a formation flew all the way to Copenhagen to destroy the Gestapo headquarters in a building known as the Shellhus, where prisoners were being held in the attic as human shields and where the records of the Danish underground were stored. The crews came in at rooftop level in a series of waves. In the very first wave, one of the leading aircraft struck a tall lamp mast, was crippled, and crashed to earth close to a Catholic girls’ school in a nearby part of the city.
Aircraft in the following waves, seeing the smoke and flames rising from that crash, mistook the burning wreck for the target and released their bombs directly onto the school. The Gestapo building itself was hit and destroyed, and a number of prisoners did escape. But at the school, eighty-six children were killed, along with many of the adults, the teachers, the nuns, and the rescuers who died trying to carry them out. It stands to this day as one of the most painful accidents of the entire air war.
The Germans understood all too well how much this airplane was costing them, and they set out to answer it. They tried to build a wooden speedster of their very own, a fast twin-engined machine, and they even borrowed the enemy’s nickname for it, calling their design the Mosquito. But they could never make it work. The special wood glue their design depended upon came from a plant that Allied bombing helped to knock out of action, and the substitute glue they were forced to use attacked the wood itself.
They were also short of the right engines and short of skilled woodworkers. Germany could not just copy the wooden bomber, because the wooden bomber was never merely a design on a drawing board. It was a whole ecosystem: the great furniture and woodworking trade, the superb Merlin engine, and above all, the willingness to gamble everything on speed. From a project that senior and serious men had tried again and again to strangle in its cradle, this airplane went into production in Britain, Canada, and Australia.
By the time the last assembly line fell silent, roughly 7,781 of them had been built. When the analysts sat down after the war and compared the damage the airplane had done against the cost paid to do it, the wooden bomber came out as dramatically more cost-effective than the great heavy bombers, delivering its blows for a small fraction of the price in men and machines. The very first one, the original prototype, the yellow machine numbered W4050 that Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. lifted off the grass at Hatfield on that cold November afternoon in 1940, still exists.
It survived the war and the long decades of peace that followed, when so many thousands of its sisters were scrapped and forgotten. It stands today, preserved and honored, inside a museum just north of London, on the very ground where the secret design team once labored over it. It is the oldest surviving aircraft of its kind anywhere in the world. The historians who study these things now call the wooden bomber one of the finest and most versatile aircraft of the entire war.
The experts who ridiculed it were not fools. They were measuring the airplane with the only ruler their world had ever given them. But the war was not won by the bomber that carried the most guns. It was won, over and over, by the bomber that the enemy could not catch.
The family that gambled everything on this airplane paid for it in the most intimate way imaginable. One of Geoffrey de Havilland’s sons was killed during the war when two of these very machines collided in the air during testing. After the war was won, Geoffrey de Havilland Jr. , the chief test pilot, was himself killed while pushing the next De Havilland design, an experimental jet, toward the speed of sound.
The line runs straight from the racer through the bomber and on into the modern age. The fast, lightly defended or entirely undefended bomber, trusting its speed and its great altitude to carry it clear of the defenders, became the standard toward which the whole world began to move. The gunned, turreted, self-defending bomber that had been the unquestioned wisdom of 1939 faded slowly and completely into history. The heretics had been right all along.
And the open sky proved it beyond any argument.
