Someone once said “What we learn from history is that we don’t learn from history.” Well, yes and no. It is certainly true that when man ignores or dismisses the lessons of history, he may be condemned to repeat them. It is also true that when we purposefully set out to discover and understand aspects of our history, we gain some knowledge about why things were done as they were, what mistakes were made, what was done well, and what resulted.
One of the ways in which we learn about the Second World War and more recent conflicts is through the warbird movement. Warbird has become a standard reference for an aeroplane which was developed for the use of the military and is currently held in private (normally non-military) ownership. Enthusiasts and collectors have been acquiring such planes, mainly since the end of WWII, to preserve and, in many cases, fly them for the pleasure, entertainment, and education of the public through airshows and other displays.
The pace of the movement picked up dramatically in the 1960s with the filming and attendant publicity of the motion picture Battle of Britain—that, and the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led to the discovery and acquisition of many wartime aircraft by aficionados in the west. The more history-minded among them have long felt that at least a few examples of the most important types of these aircraft should be saved, reprieved from the scrapman, and restored either to flying condition or pristine static display configuration. They have loved these old machines and wanted to celebrate them and show them to the general public and to young people in particular. They weren’t out to glorify war but have sometimes been criticized for that.
The world centres for warbird activity are Chino in southern California and Duxford, near Cambridge, England. At the start of the Second World War, Cal-Aero Academy operated an independent flying school at the Chino Airport in San Bernardino County. Cal-Aero was contracted by the U.S. Army Air Forces to give primary flight training to Army air cadets during the war years. It operated Boeing Stearman and Vultee BT-13 Valiant trainers. Schools like Cal-Aero were established in 1941 to provide the pilots then urgently needed by the Army. Cal-Aero closed in late 1944 when demand for primary flight training was lessening and the war had entered its final year.
At war’s end Chino was one of several American locations used for the storage and disposition of thousands of military aircraft that had been returned from the war zones. The majority of these aeroplanes got the chop and, via portable field smelters, were turned into aluminium ingots destined to become pots, pans and other items less glamourous than fighters or bombers.
Two fine collections of warplanes are housed at Chino—Planes of Fame, and the Yanks Air Museum. Founded in the 1950s by Ed Maloney, Planes of Fame was the first permanent air museum west of the Rockies. It was initially located in Claremont, California, before its growth required a move to Ontario Airport, followed by a further move in 1973 to its present home at Chino. Maloney was among the first people to recognize the importance of preserving the aeroplanes of WWII, most of which were being sold off to recover their scrap metal.
In addition to its two aviation museums, the Chino airport facility is home to several companies that specialize in the restoration of warbirds, one being Fighter Rebuilders headed by Steve Hinton, one of the world’s finest warbird pilots. Fighter Rebuilders is well known for its superb restorations for clients such as The Fighter Collection, Duxford, and the Palm Springs Air Museum, in California. Hinton is famous too as a movie pilot, airshow performer and unlimited air racing champion. He is also president of the Planes of Fame Air Museum. Steve appears regularly at the Flying Legends airshow at Duxford in July.
The force behind Flying Legends, one of the world’s great aviation events, is Stephen Grey of The Fighter Collection. TFC is one of the best collections of Second World War fighter aircraft, most of them flyers and many of them featured in Legends and the other annual Duxford displays. Among the most historically significant aeroplanes in the collection is Twilight Tear, a P-51D Mustang which was part of the 78th Fighter Group based at Duxford during WWII. Twilight Tear was flown by Lt. Hubert Davis of the 83rd FS, who shot down three enemy aircraft, two of which were Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighters.
Another TFC fighter that has earned its place in history is the Grumman F6F Hellcat that was flown by U.S. Navy Lt. Alex Vraciu of VF-6, who downed six Japanese dive bombers in only eight minutes during the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot” of June 19-20 1944. Lt. Vraciu has been credited with nineteen aerial victories in total.
In 2008, the great Flying Legends Air Display featured five P-51D Mustangs and one TF-51D Mustang, eleven Vickers-Supermarine Spitfires and one Seafire, a Hawker Hurricane and a Sea Hurricane, two Gloster Gladiators, one each Grumman Wildcat, Grumman Hellcat, and Bearcat, a Curtiss Hawk and two Curtiss Warhawks, a Yak-3 and a Yak-9, two Hawker Nimrods, two Boeing B-17s, a Piper L-4, a Douglas C-47 and a C-53, along with nineteen other types. It also marked the return to the air of AR213, then the world’s only airworthy Mk 1a Spitfire.
In addition to The Fighter Collection, Duxford provides a base for other warbird preservation and restoration companies, including Historic Flying Limited, B-17 Preservation Ltd., Plane Sailing, The Old Flying Machine Company, and Aircraft Restoration Company. Other restoration /preservation/operators in the UK include the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, Hardwick Warbirds, the Hangar Eleven Collection, Historic Aircraft Collection, the Real Aeroplane Company, the Royal Navy Historic Flight, the Shuttleworth Collection, Personal Plane Services, and the Woodchurch Warbirds.
The Old Flying Machine Company was established in 1981 by former RAF Red Arrows leader Ray Hanna and his son, Mark. For many years the Hannas, now both deceased, provided thrilling air displays and magnificent movie flying in the films Memphis Belle, Empire of the Sun (both of which featured Mustangs), Dark Blue World, and others.
The American Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and later the War Assets Administration, operated six large storage areas at airfields in the U.S. beginning in 1946—Kingman, Arizona; Walnut Ridge, Arkansas; Altus and Clinton, Oklahoma; Augusta, Georgia; and Ontario, California. In the beginning, storage and preservation was the primary function of these immense parking lots for the veteran warplanes. Through experimentation with a B-24 Liberator bomber, it was found that the thorough dismantling of such an aircraft to recover its 32,000 pounds of spare parts was extremely labour-intensive, requiring upwards of 800 man-hours. Policy was then changed; the engines and propellers, armament, radios and instruments were removed from all aircraft destined for salvaging. The airframe was then hacked into sections small enough to be easily fed into portable field smelters which melted the aluminium and the molten metal was then formed into ingots and sold to bidders.
Many sales were held to dispose of the aircraft, engines and the spare parts. The aircraft that were considered non-saleable, for whatever reason, were destroyed.
By March 1946, 16,000 American ex-military aircraft were still overseas awaiting disposition. More than 9,000 of them were eventually flown back to the United States. More than 5,000 such aircraft sat in Germany and France—P-51s and P-47s at Furth, P-51s and P-38s at Fritzlar, L-4s and L-5s at Goppingen, P-47s at Hesich-Lictenau, B-17s at Holzkirchen, P-51s and P-47s at Kassel, and B-26s at Landsburg. Some 1,200 gliders were stored in France at Beauvais and Creil.
The non-saleable combat aircraft in Europe were simply destroyed by various methods. Some were ripped apart by tractors, blown to bits by grenades, raised and then dropped from cranes onto concrete blocks where they were smashed. There, and in the Pacific, steel cables were also used to pull the unwanted planes apart. In the Pacific war theatre, enormous junkyards on New Guinea, Biak, Guam, and in the Philippines contained hundreds of such machines, while still airworthy examples there were returned to the U.S. on escort aircraft carriers.
Among the more desirable of the surplus warplanes were transport types—C-47s, C-46s and C-54s. Many of these were sold or leased to form the foundations of post-war nonscheduled airlines and air cargo operations. Still another destiny for some of the war-weary planes was what was known as “the disposal of Surplus Aeronautical Property to Educational Institutions for Nonflight Use,” in which aircraft were given to schools for the training of aircraft mechanics, and to cities and other communities to be used as war memorials. However, the level of support for the programme by many communities failed to match its scale in the minds of the government planners. It may be that educational value, historical significance, commemorative instincts, and any sort of nostalgia or sentimentality were simply outweighed by an overwhelming desire to forget everything about the war years and get on with the future. Thirty or forty years later that would change.
As a great number of veterans completed the bulk of their careers, raised their families, and achieved some of their ambitions, many paused to reflect on their own wartime experiences, which now seemed to have been an adventure rather than merely discomfort and misery. Some of them became interested in revisiting their old bases in England, Europe, Africa or the Pacific, places that held vague yet intriguing memories for them. Many did go back to see what was left of the sites where they had served. That compulsion was a part of what drove the warbird movement, a strange need to reach back across time and reconnect in some way with what, for many of them, had been the one great adventure of their lives.
By the summer of 1947, 65,000 ex-warplanes had been disposed of through the War Assets Administration. Of these, 35,000 had been sold for civilian use, while 10,000 were sold for scrap. The sales were slowing and only three of the major storage sites remained active.
The impact of the 1968 United Artists film Battle of Britain on the burgeoning warbird movement was major. In its background, the world-wide search by former RAF Group Captain and Stirling bomber pilot Hamish Mahaddie, for a stable of suitable Spitfires, Hurricanes, Messerschmitts and Heinkels provided the impetus for many enthusiasts and collectors to pursue their own warbird dreams. He located and arranged the loan of nineteen Spitfires and three Hurricanes, as well as for the maintenance facilities at RAF Henlow in Bedfordshire and the assistance of twenty-one RAF fitters. With the help of former Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland and RAF Group Captain R.L.S. Coulson, British Air Attaché in Madrid, Mahaddie got the use of seven Hispano HA 1112 Buchons and more than fifty Casa 2.111s (Spanish versions of the Messerschmitt Me-109 and Heinkel He-111, respectively) in the filming. He also provided two Casa 352s (Spanish-built Junkers Ju-52 transports). The movie, the publicity surrounding it, and the peripheral involvement of the Battle of Britain veterans Galland, Al Deere, James ‘Ginger’ Lacey, Douglas Bader, Peter Townsend, Johnny Kent, Robert Stanford Tuck, Tom Gleave, and Lord Hugh Dowding, sparked substantial interest in the growing warbird community. It considerably advanced the cause of preserving the historic aircraft, as did the subsequent television series Piece of Cake, based on the Derek Robinson novel about a squadron of RAF fighter pilots in France in 1939 and 1940.