The 24 Hour Wellington

[Story]

In the midst of World War II, workers at a Welsh aircraft factory gave up their weekend off to build a Wellington bomber from scratch in just 24 hours. Why? To set a new world record.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11107561

 

[Peacoat]

Typical wartime Brit worker: when the chips were down, they got the job done. Good article; thanks for posting.

 

[hag]

wow

Thanks for that tidbit; at first I thought they were building boots!

 

[H.Johnson]

Very interesting. A Wellington is currently undergoing restoration (really amounting to a rebuilding) at my local RAF museum. The geodetic structure is very different from other pre-war designs. Typical Barnes Wallis innovation. It will be a great addition to the collection when finished.

My wife's late mother worked at Vickers in Broughton in WW2 - she may have worked on this same 'plane. She would never talked about her time there.

I've always liked the Wimpy. I think the old bird's contribution to WW2* is often overlooked in the literature in favour of the later 'heavies'. Just my opinion of course.

* <Added later> I refer here, of course, to the medium bomber, and not my wife's late mother...

 

[kampkatz]

Great story about the 24 hour Wimpy. My cousin's husband comes from Germany, and he tells a story of seeing "many" Wellingtons fall from the sky during a raid over Wilhelmshaven as a child.

 

[filfoster]

What's in a day?

Typical wartime Brit worker: when the chips were down, they got the job done. Good article; thanks for posting.

How did this plane fare? I hope quality did not suffer. Many of us have bought a car built on a Monday with all that portends, but less serious consequences.

 

[Story]

The Interwebz says that LN514 went to No 19 OTU at Kinloss. The unit started to re-equip with Wellingtons in Aug 1944 so maybe it went into storage for a while. LN514 was eventually scrapped in 1948, quite possibly at the MU on the other side of Hawarden airfield from where she was built.

On BBC TV -

Wellington Bomber – a documentary built around a wartime propaganda stunt in which aircraft workers constructed a plane in under 30 hours – was more successful at conveying the intensity of those years and the poignancy of looking back at them now, mostly because the intensity of the individual voices hadn't been varnished with actorly intensity. "You couldn't call it dancing," said one old lady recalling her husband's performance on the dance floor, "it was like taking a wheelbarrow round the room." And an ex-Wellington bomber pilot called "Tiny" Cooling heartbreakingly recalled a young flyer called Naylor ("everybody liked him but nobody took the blindest bit of notice of him because he looked like he was just out of his pram") coming into his room at the base and weeping like a child because his best friend hadn't returned. Three weeks later, Cooling was clearing out Naylor's barracks room because he hadn't returned from a mission. Ways of making you feel younger than you are may be disputed. But if you want to make young men feel a hundred years old war seems to work every time.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...ight-bbc2-wellington-bomber-bbc4-2079273.html

*

Veteran recalls Wellington bomber raids
(article & video)
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/cardif...calls-wellington-bomber-raids-91466-27190873/