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Old 27th December 2013, 08:53
tcolvin tcolvin is offline
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Is this a true statement about the B24?

A volume of 284 B24 Liberators with their revolutionary Davis Wing were delivered to the RAF in 1941. Of these aircraft, 120 had been ordered by France. But instead of being stationed in Iceland (occupied in May 1940) and used to close the mid-Atlantic air gap to defeat the U-boats, all B24s were converted in Montreal into transports for VIPs and also used to ferry pilots across the Atlantic. Kapitän Werner Furburger predicted in a pre-war exercise that Britain would need two years to assemble the anti-submarine assets required to force the fleet of Type VII submersibles - they were not true submarines - to stay submerged. This would destroy their productivity and make them both ineffectual and sitting ducks ripe for destruction. Had Coastal Command been assigned the 284 B24s, then Furburger's forecast would have been achieved. As it was, it took until mid-1943, four years rather than the two forecast by Furburger, to finally close the mid-Atlantic air gap. Tony