I’m partial to the B-24 Liberator.
I’m surprised they were able to get off the ground considering the collective weight of the stones it took to fly a mission over Europe in one.
My father worked in the B-24 Liberator factory before being drafted. He was put together the training for women to show them how to properly rivet the structures. I still have his training manual he created.
The F-4U Corsiar is my favorite WWII bird, Spitfire would be 2nd.
Those young guys could not have realized the weight of their stones. Therefore, they became airborne. That's why it's called glory.
I had the pleasure of touring a B-24 at an air show years ago. It really was rather roomy. More so than the B-17 which surprised me.
The B-24’s were notorious gas leakers. But they carried a heck of a bomb load. Conversely, by today’s standards, most people would be shocked just how little ordinance was carried by a B-17. But when you have thousands of them in one raid and they are being manufactured faster than the enemy can shoot them down, there is a certain quality that counts.
I have a WWII film of B-24’s on a mission where they are flying so close to the ground that it appears that one of the planes is literally coming within less than 10 feet of the ground - filmed from one of the other planes in the formation. I believe it was the first failed mission to Poesti.
On a side note, I was at a moving sale today of an elderly couple and as I talked to them, I discovered the guy flew as engineer on a Mosquito out of Italy during WWII. They had 50 cal guns (apparently no cannon) and their mission was night fighter. His plane was shot down once and he was credited with saving his pilot’s life when he pulled him from the wreckage.