(Image: Alan Wilson; N2980, one of only two surviving Wellington bombers)
It’s one of the most amazing yet little-known stories from the annals of RAF Bomber Command. In the early summer of 1943, workers at Vickers-Armstrong’s Broughton factory in Flintshire, North Wales, gave up their weekend to build an operational Wellington bomber from scratch in less than 30 hours. Their monumental effort, which produced Wellington LN514, established a new world record and gave the public at large a much needed boost.
Several years earlier, in September 1940, around the time that he made his stirring tribute to The Few of Fighter Command, Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously remarked that “the bombers alone will provide the means for victory.” His words echoed the actions of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, which, under the direction of Lord Beaverbrook, was pouring vast resources into the design and construction of the light, medium and heavy bombers that would take the fight to the enemy, many of which would never return.
By 1943, as World War Two raged relentlessly with horrific civilian and military casualties on both sides, the War Department decided that a propaganda effort was needed to boost morale on the home front while demonstrating to Adolf Hitler that Britain’s aircraft factories were a force to be reckoned with.
(Image: Emoscopes; Wellington variants)
“It might seem odd, but the whole point of wartime aircraft production is speed,” historian James Holland told the BBC. “It’s sticking two fingers up at Nazi Germany and at the rest of the world. Our image of Germany is that they were all Teutonic efficiency and we were a bit amateurish, but it was the opposite.”
The propaganda effort, however, wasn’t merely a way of bolstering morale and sending a strong message to Hitler’s Third Reich. It was also intended to impress the United States, which had become the existing record holder after a California factory produced an operational aircraft in 48 hours.
Keen to beat the US record, officials selected the Welsh factory in Broughton – one of several Vickers-Armstrong facilities producing bombers for the RAF and Coastal Command – to take up the challenge of building a fully operational Wellington in just a day. They clearly had their work cut out for them, but as Holland remarked: “If you’re breaking records in the middle of a war, it shows confidence, and it gives the workers involved a boost.”
Nowadays the Broughton plant produces wings for the massive Airbus A380, the world’s largest jet airliner, but at peak production during the Second World War the factory was churning out an impressive 28 Wellington bombers every week.
(Image: UK Government; Vickers Wellington bombers under construction)
Designed by engineering genius Barnes Wallis – best known for the bouncing bomb dropped by the iconic Dambusters during Operation Chastise – the Wellington’s easily assembled yet highly robust geodesic design, employing a fuselage skeleton of 1,650 aluminium alloy W-beams covered by an outer layer of doped Irish linen, made it an ideal airframe for the challenge.
The Broughton factory alone boasted six thousand employees working exhausting 12-hour shifts in a job that demanded the highest precision and quality. More than half the workforce were women, including former Co-operative employee Betty Weaver, who said of her time there: “I didn’t know one end of a screwdriver from another but I got there,” she said. “I do now. For the first three weeks I didn’t sleep, then it all slotted into place.”
Poised to make history, the workers assembled at Broughton one Saturday morning in 1943 (the exact date is unknown) to begin the construction of Vickers Wellington serial number LN514. They were accompanied by the Crown Film Unit who recorded the event for posterity in a classic wartime newsreel titled Worker’s Week-End, directed by Elton Ray.
(Image: UK Government; a Wellington bomber similar to LN514)
The BBC reports that: “Throughout the day, workers swarmed to slot together its body, to assemble the engine, to tightly sew its fabric shell – eight stitches to the inch, or the wind could get it and rip the seams open.
“By 8.23pm, soon after the night shift arrived, it was time to fit the propellers to the wings. The plane was coming together so fast, workers began laying bets on whether they’d beat their target.”
Wellington LN514’s undercarriage was installed two hours later and, by the early hours of the following morning, the aircraft had left the production line for engine tests and other inspections. By 6:15am engine testing was complete and inspections revealed that vital stitches securing the airframe’s fabric shell met the high standards required.
Finally, just before 8am the following morning, less than a day after the first sections had been laid down, Wellington LN514 was ready for takeoff. The workers, who reportedly donated their overtime pay to the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund, had beaten their target time of 30 hours without compromising the integrity of the airframe, and it’s said that the test pilot, who’d been scheduled for an afternoon flight, had to be woken early from his Sunday lie in.
The understandably concerned airman was recorded saying “I hope to God they haven’t missed anything” before lifting Wellington LN514 off the runway for its maiden flight, an incredible 24 hours and 48 minutes after construction began. The previous world record had been smashed.
(Image: RAF; operational Wellingtons at RAF Stradishall, 1939)
LN514 is understood to have been delivered to an operational squadron for service over Occupied Europe that very same day, but sadly there’s no record of what ultimately became of the aircraft. With no evidence that it crashed in either combat or training, it’s likely that Wellington LN514 was broken up for scrap after the war – a sad fate for a record-breaking machine, but one that befell thousands of storied aircraft with their own heroic tales to tell.
An understandably war-weary public, who just a few years earlier had received a much-needed morale boost from LN514, no longer had any need for the tired old bombers parked silently on increasingly decommissioned airfields, nor any desire to preserve them as they sought to rebuild their lives and move forward.
(Edit: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referenced “TV cameras” in relation to the Crown Film Unit.)
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