The USS Macon and its sister ship, the USS Akron, were the largest helium-filled airships ever made. They were launched in 1933 and 1931 respectively, and each only had a service life of roughly two years – both were lost in separate severe storms. Macon had a hull made from structured duraluminum with three internal…
In the post-WWII years Winston Churchill once famously said “The only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril”, this was largely because of how reliant Britain was on supplies, manpower and equipment from Canada, the USA, Australia and further afield. If Hitler had successfully managed to close off the resupply…
The Kawanishi H6K was a flying boat developed by the Japanese in the years leading up to WWII, it was largely based on European flying boats of the era and boasted remarkable endurance – with many of its wartime flights lasting 24 hours or more. With a crew of 9 and a cruising speed of…
The story of Captain Eric Melrose “Winkle” Brown is one of the greatest WWII tales you’re every likely to come across. Many of us have seen dozens, perhaps even hundreds of documentaries about the Second World War, but this one is my favourite and I don’t think it’ll ever be usurped. It’s difficult to condense…
The idea of taking a motorcycle and attaching a machine gun to it seems to have occurred to someone very shortly after the motorcycle was first invented. The benefits of a mobile machine gun are fairly obvious, especially when you throw in the additional capabilities of a motorcycle. The First World War was the first…
Flight Characteristics of the P-51 Airplane is a WWII film designed as a preliminary How To guide for pilots, mechanics and other ground crew. The film has a slightly more upbeat tone than you might expect, with the narrator cracking jokes throughout (at the expense of the Germans of course) and generally keeping it light and…
Men Bet Their Lives on It is a 20 minute Packard-produced documentary from the post-WWII era about their version of the Merlin engine – almost certainly the most famous engine of the Second World War and the only aircraft power unit that even non-aircaft fanatics can reference by name. We’ve been having a bit of…
The Rolls-Royce Merlin Owner’s Workshop Manual is a detailed look into the development, engineering and evolution of the legendary aero-engine that powered the both the British Spitfire and American P-51 Mustang. Rolls-Royce built over 150,000 Merlins by the time production stopped and a significant number of them still exist in museums and private collections around…
Guy Martin’s Spitfire is a British documentary about the recovery and rebuild of a rare MK1 Spitfire from the French beach where it was crash landed in 1940 by RAF pilot Squadron Leader Geoffrey Stephenson. The Spitfire had slowly been buried under generations of beach sand so the recovery operation took weeks of digging and…
The story behind the creation of the Jeep is a fascinating one, in fact it’d make an excellent film if we could somehow convince the movie studios to lay off all this vampire nonsense. As the Second World War descended over Europe, the USA began to ramp up its own military capabilities, by 1940 the…
Barn finds come in all shapes and sizes, but very rarely do they come pre-fitted with a Rolls-Royce Merlin V12. After last week’s popular feature of a barn find Messerschmitt BF 109 (technically a Hispano Aviación HA-1112) we did some further digging and quickly realised that old warbirds have been slowly coming out of the…
It isn’t everyday we stumble across a barn find quite as remarkable as this Messerschmitt BF 109, or more accurately, this Hispano Aviación HA-1112. It isn’t commonly known that the Spaniards built licensed copies of the Messerschmitt from 1942 onwards, although they weren’t produced in any significant numbers till after the war due to constraints…
