How do you build a Wellington Bomber?

[jmorgan]

Quickly....

Came across this via the beeb website, interesting.

[Eric Mc]

It's a Wellington.

The "stunt" was organised as a propaganda exercise during the war. The aircraft was actually built, disassembled and then re-assembled within 24 hours for the film.

[mybrainhurts]

Bit of cheating with the prefabricated bits there...

[jmorgan]

Cobblers, someone nipped in and swapped my I and E.......

[Eric Mc]

Good stuff. Notice how they made sure they used someone with a North American accent for the narrative. This was deliberate because this film would have been shown all over the US and at this stage in the war Churchill wanted to impress the US with what British factories could do.

I 've done a bit of Googling and have found that the film was shot in 1943 (so nothing to do with the Blitz or Battle of Britain) and the particular aircraft LN514 survived the war and was scrapped in 1948.

Edited by Eric Mc on Tuesday 14th September 08:56

[jmorgan]

I know it was probably helped along prior build. Churchill, from what I have read, was very keen on showing the US what we were up to when it was holding our end up. Looking through a few of the other films they are also with a US narrative for obvious reasons. The art work is interesting as well.

Didn't think to look up the plane and its life.

[FourWheelDrift]

Programme on BBC4 tonight at 8pm all about it - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tr2p5

[Eric Mc]

FourWheelDrift said:

Programme on BBC4 tonight at 8pm all about it - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tr2p5

I wonder why they are showing it - as it has no relevance to their Battle of Britain theme.

[williamp]

The only link i can think of is that the Wellington was the bomber which bombed Berlin, which made Hitler decide to bomb London instead of the airfields and changed the face of the BoB??

[FourWheelDrift]

I thought he meant because it was a 1943 propaganda film, rather than being Battle of Britain vintage.

[Eric Mc]

It's an interesting film - I just don't think it fits in terribly well with the overall theme of this week's BoB programmimg.

[Yertis]

It's the same mentality that refers "Nazi Jet" in connection with Do17.

[Eric Mc]

Yertis said:

It's the same mentality that refers "Nazi Jet" in connection with Do17.

Probably.

[Eric Mc]

Watched the BBC doc tonight (on IPlayer) and it was very good.

[Rebuilda]

I kind of got the drift that it was partly shown in memorium of the pilot chap whose name slips my mind (which went to sleep a while ago) as he passed away this year.

[Eric Mc]

Perhaps. He seemed a very nice and thoughtful chap. His poem was very moving.

[jmorgan]

It was interesting. People behind the scenes and all that but the comments from the pilot were very moving.