de Havilland Mosquito

This speed and manoeuvrability, along with its ability to carry a wide variety of ordnance, made the aircraft perfect for precision strikes against small, difficult-to-reach targets.

For example, on September 25, 1942, four Mosquitos of No. 105 Squadron RAF carried out a raid on the Gestapo's Norwegian headquarters located in the Victoria Terrace building in downtown Oslo.

the raid designed to boost the morale of the norwegian people was deemed successful enough for the raf to reveal the existence of the mosquito to the british public by the war's end the rf would carry out two more precision raids against costabo headquarters in aarhus denmark on october 31 1944 and copenhagen on march the 21st 1945 but those are stories for another video In preparation for the Amiens raid, RAF photo reconnaissance aircraft flew multiple sorties over the prison.

Located along the highway connecting Amiens to the town of Albaire to the northeast, the main prison building was a cruciform structure 130 meters along the north side, 120 meters long on the south side, 200 meters wide, 90 meters tall.

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The weather that day was worse than any 140-wing had previously flown in, with low clouds and driving snow.

But at around 1100 hours, all 18 Mosquitos managed to get safely into the air.

From Huntsman, they turned south toward Little Hampton to rendezvous with their Typhoon escorts.

He was 26 years old.

His de Havilland Mosquito went down over the Netherlands under circumstances that were never fully explained.

He is buried there.

His crash site was identified 50 years after the war.

The Pathfinder Force, the precision marking organization led by Air Vice-Marshal Donald Bennett, used it to fly ahead of the main bomber stream and drop target indicators on the exact aiming point before the heavies arrived.

By the time production ended after the war, de Havilland and its Commonwealth partners had built 7,781 Mosquitos in Britain, Canada, and Australia.

Every one of them doing something different, most of them doing it faster and lower than anything else in the theater.

Let me tell you about a mission that captures what the Mosquito was in the hands of a trained crew with a specific target and a very small margin for error.

The Mosquito entered operations in the photo reconnaissance role first, and here it did something that changed the war in a way most people have never fully appreciated.

In the summer of nineteen forty-three, photo reconnaissance Mosquitoes operating out of Scotland began returning photographs of a remote peninsula on the Baltic coast of Germany called Peenemünde.

The images showed construction that the photo interpreters at Medmenham did not immediately recognize.

Large horizontal cylinders, rail lines running to the water's edge, structures unlike anything in the existing intelligence catalogs.

He had flown Whitleys over Germany in the early years, flown in support of the Bruneval radar raid in 1942, flown enough operations that command was trying to pull him off frontline duty.

He asked to fly this one himself.

18 Mosquitoes of the 2nd Tactical Air Force departed England on the morning of the 18th.

The weather over the channel was ugly.

It was used for reconnaissance, weather study and as a tactical bomber.

It was originally designed in the mid-1940s as a replacement for the de Havilland Mosquito bomber, although the prototype didn't take to the skies until May 1949.

They were used by the UK's RAF right up until 2006.

On the 3rd of May, 1977, a two-man Canberra was returning to its base at RAF Whiteon, near the town of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire, England.

His frontline fighter pilots quickly corrected that impression.

At one point, Goering told his staff that every time he went to brief the Fuhrer, a handful of Mosquitos were over Berlin, and the Luftwaffe could not do anything about it.

He had publicly promised the German people that no Allied bomber would ever reach the capital.

The Mosquito made that promise impossible to keep.

Now, I want to tell you about something specific, something that I think shows what this aircraft and its crews were truly capable of.

On the 18th of February 1944, 18 Mosquitos of the 2nd Tactical Air Force flew low across occupied France to the city of Amiens.

Their target was the prison there, Amiens Prison, where the Gestapo was holding French resistance members awaiting execution.

The plan was to breach the outer walls and destroy the guards' quarters precisely enough to allow the prisoners to escape.

The company had been building aircraft since Jeffrey de Havilland himself had founded it.

In 1920, they had built the Mosquito, perhaps the most versatile warplane of the Second World War.

Out of wood and epoxy and sheer engineering nerve, they knew how to build aircraft.

They knew how to build them fast.

I'm Tail Dragger, and this is The Hangar on Radio Hangar.

Today we are talking about the de Havilland mosquito, the wooden wonder.

The aircraft nobody wanted until they couldn't get enough of them.

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With two Merlins and a clean wooden airframe, his calculations showed speeds north of 380 mph, maybe higher.

The Air Ministry remained skeptical right up until the prototype flew.

The first flight of the Mosquito prototype happened on 25 November 1940.

Geoffrey de Havilland's son, Geoffrey Junior, was at the controls.