Pathfinder

Coastal Command used it to hunt submarines on the surface and attack German warships.

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.

and ended up building something that flew at 400 miles per hour over Berlin, Geoffrey de Havilland's people built the most versatile combat aircraft of the Second World War out of materials a good carpenter could have sourced from a lumberyard.

And the Air Ministry said it couldn't be done.

Sources for this one include the de Havilland Aircraft Heritage Center, the Imperial War Museum London, and John de la Berre's work on the Pathfinder Force.

More at RadioHanger.com. I'm TailDragger.

The sirens came again.

Mosquitoes from the Pathfinder force had found Berlin in daylight, on a day the Luftwaffe was supposed to have the capital of the Reich locked down tight.

Göring had famously told the German people that if enemy aircraft ever reached Berlin they could call him Meyer, a common surname.

An insult in context, the Mosquito crews made him eat those words, and the German public understood exactly what it meant.

The Pathfinder Force deserves its own mention here, because the Mosquito's role in guiding the heavy bomber offensive is often overlooked when people talk about the type.

Number 8 group, the Pathfinder Force.

Used Mosquitoes equipped with a precision navigation system called OBO, two ground stations in England, would track the aircraft's position and transmit tones to the navigator.

When the tones aligned, you were on course.

Now, Sean began his career as a journalist before becoming one of Britain's leading aviation historians and authors.

He's written more than 20 books covering Bomber Command, the Pathfinder force, and the Royal Air Force, and his meticulous research has brought countless individual stories to light.

He's back with us today to discuss his remarkable new book, which tells the extraordinary story of Stanley Booker, a 10 Squadron navigator whose wartime experience has stretched far beyond operational flying.

Shot down just before D-Day, Stanley endured Gestapo interrogation, imprisonment, deportation to Buchenwald concentration camp as one of the so-called terror flyers, post-war service during the Berlin Airlift, intelligence work during the Cold War, and then spent decades fighting simply to have his story believed.