The Rarest World War Two Planes You've Never Heard Of

[Music] thank you now we've covered all sorts of World War II Vehicles already on the channel this year yeah yep done tanks we've done trucks we've ships there's one thing missing that's right today our challenge is to find some of the rarest original and restored planes of World War II and if you're looking for rare airplanes where better to be than the Battle of Britain Air Show at iwm Duxford but to find them we're gonna have to splice up May the best rare plane win with over 200 planes here at Duxford we weren't exactly stoked for choice but no ordinary plane would do we were seeking out aircraft that were rare unique or downright weird some of these planes want a common sight in the skies are now almost extinct with the score on our Challenge Series level at two points each this was a competition neither of us wanted to lose [Music] to begin our search we got up bright and early and headed straight to the aircraft Restoration company Hangar where director and pilot John Romain had promised to show us two of the rarest World War II planes on the planet okay John now this is a very unique looking aircraft what is this this is a Bristol Blenheim a Bristol and uh this is actually the uh the only flying example in the world wow and it's actually a blender mark one uh with this short nose and it is the only mark one Blenheim physically in the world now at the time it came into the Royal Air Force it was faster than any of their biplane Fighters so it it came into the Royal Air Force a very quick airplane for each day uh heavily used at the beginning of the second world war um and especially in the Battle of France then into the Battle of Britain and then it was used for Convoy work they sent them out to the Far East the Middle East widely used during the second world war up until it became redundant purely because the the development of the German aircraft out exceeded this and so the blenheims were then taken out of service and things like mosquitoes and Beau Fighters came in to replace it it was a bomber a light bomber so it had bombs in the bomb well or this aircraft was used as a night fighter so it had a gun pack that went into the Bombay um this glass area here you can still see the bomb uh sight Mount there yeah they could transform it from being a night fight or into a bomber within hours so its roles changed all the time and it's got two engines engines um Bristol Mercury is a very rare engine these days there's only actually six of these engines running in the world um they are incredibly difficult to keep running and keep maintained there's no spares they are very difficult to keep going so you're looking at a very rare piece of Machinery now you have a pilot and a navigator in the front and then if we walk around to the back you'll see the rear or the mid turret very wide wing as well very wide wing um of course it was a a good lift Wing So it because of the bomb loads and everything it you know it had to be able to carry a bomb load and here we have the turret um yeah with a little the mark ones just had this little Vickers K Machine Gun which according to to history wasn't very successful at all I was going to say it doesn't look very big or powerful but it's not it's not and so the guy in the back was the radio operator and the rear Gunner so he had two roles it must have been incredibly difficult when you don't know where you know the Pilot's going one way you're trying to fire another the angles must it must be very difficult to defend this aircraft with such a small it would have been incredibly difficult and of course the the other thing is you have to be so careful that in your Panic or rush to fight to fire back at a fight so you don't actually hit your own aircraft absolutely so that that sort of plate there oh yeah that rides over stops the the Gunner from actually shooting off his own tail so so you've got that to consider as well so it was unique in so many ways the Blenheim um but it was just you know it was overtaken by development very quickly and will you be flying this this weekend or will anyone be flying this yeah this is flying in the show um we are putting it up with two lysanders and a gladiator so and they all have the same engines I mentioned earlier there's only six of those Bristol Mercury just actually flying in the world currently we will have five of those engines flying together they sound lovely and as luck would have it we could hear the sound of those magnificent Bristol Mercury Engines as a Lysander pulled in after a test flight I think Luke's just seen the Blenheim which is a very rare one isn't it yes it is but we've got one here that is as rare certainly as impressive yes it's a uh a western Lysander um not as rare as the Blenheim there are three of these flying in the world so it's pretty close this is our particular aircraft um a British built one some of them are Canadian built this is a an actual British airplane with British history as well so it was built in the early 1940s used right through the second world war ended up in Canada on a training Squadron but before it went to Canada it was used in the UK a lot of them were used eventually for dropping spies into France and so they would then have a ladder fitted on the side they'd take the winglets and the bombs off it's got the ability to land in very short spaces so it um although it'll Cruise quite quickly at 170 miles an hour to 190 miles an hour it will land at about 45 to 50 miles an hour in very short areas so they used to fly them into fields in France and drop spies off and then the return flight they would hopefully bring back down there and that had been found by the resistance and then they were flown back to the UK in lysanders that's a very interesting role I mean maybe not capturing the same Glory as the Spitfire but a very important role in World War II yeah absolutely it's got the the winglets um and it carries um small bombs on there it's also got machine guns in the wheel spats so there's 303 machine guns in here and then they would have a two two Browning machine guns in the back so the the rear hatch would slide open and they would pop up two machine guns there there were two crew there was a pilot and a rear Gunner and he obviously operated those rear guns so it was it carried a fair amount of arm and in its time but of course when they were doing the Spy work they took all of that away because all they wanted to do was to get people inside it rather than have any guns at all good start for both of us two special aircraft that we'd get to see flying later on in the day but I was in a hurry and I'd heard about a very rare aircraft being worked on nearby [Music] now here in the fighter collection at iwm Duxford you've got all sorts of planes that are under restoration being restored to air worthiness so we've got the P51 Mustang here you've got the Spitfire the super moon Spitfire over here but the one I'm most excited about isn't even finished is this one here it's an Italian aircraft it's the Fiat Falco and when this one is airworthy it'll be the only example that can fly in the world now the Italians during the second world war weren't known for being particularly effective I think that's fair to say but this plane the Fiat Falco biplane was praised by the RAF for its exceptional maneuverability and speed and it did serve in almost every theater of war it was involved in the Battle of Britain the Battle of France Malta and was particularly effective on the Eastern front but what really did for the Falco was the more effective monoplanes the Spitfires the hurricanes and by the time the Italians surrendered in 1943 there were only a handful of these that were still in flying condition now there's clearly some work to do before this particular plane is Air worthy the wings aren't on for a start but we do know a little bit about the history of this plane we know that it went down during a test flight in the North of Sweden in 1942. the pilot was killed during that incident and the plane wasn't recovered until 1983. but it's nice to think that 80 years after that crash this Fiat Falco could soon be airworthy again two rare planes in the bag meanwhile Luke had predictably headed straight for the largest Hangar on site and was weighing up his options I'd need to catch up now when you think of British World War II bombers you might think of the Sterling or indeed the Lancaster you probably don't think of this plane up here this is the de Havilland mosquito also known as the wooden Wonder when Jeffrey de Havilland first sent his design to the British government after air Ministry calls for a faster medium-sized bomber they simply weren't interested a bomber made out of wood was initially deemed unfit for action in spite of this with his own Factory and Workforce de Havilland continued production of the mosquito and after overwhelmingly positive performance tests it didn't take long for the project to receive financial backing and the mosquito to become a crucial bomber of the royal Air Force the fact that the de Havilland mosquito was made out of wood meant three things first of all it could be produced at a much quicker rate than any other bomber second of all it was more buoyant that have to ditch into water and third of all it could reach speeds of up to 415 miles per hour in fact when it was tested against Spitfires it was actually the Spitfires that were struggling to keep up with this plane hoping the mosquito achieved these speeds of these two twin Merlin V12 27 liter Rolls-Royce engines and with them you have these absolutely gigantic propellers now if you actually follow the trajectory you can see they virtually touch the cockpit [Music] when it was finally put into service this plane actually had the lowest loss rate of any aircraft in bomber command now that was because of a combination of its speed its maneuverability and the fact it was very difficult for radar to detect it foreign [Music] weapons were added four 303 caliber Browning machine guns and the same number of cannons fitted underneath its chin amazingly the weapons only slowed the already rapid aircraft by 15 knots now one measure of the success of this aircraft is the way in which luftwaffe commanders used to speak about it none other than Hermann Gering the head of the German air force said this I am furious when I see the mosquito I turn green and yellow with Envy I'm really excited to have found one of my favorite planes here this is the fairy swordfish it's not the most glamorous plane we've included and in many ways it looks like a relic of the first world war and it certainly had its problems in terms of performance it was so slow that some crew described the feeling of being in it as being like going downhill and yet as a torpedo bomber it was extremely effective certainly the most effective of the British Fleet air arm shortly after we filmed this the very lucky Dan snow got the chance to fly in one of the few air-worthy swordfish and you'll be able to see that video on the channel soon so what made the swordfish so effective well it could take off from British carriers in the most atrocious weather conditions it was slow but that actually made it really difficult to hit and ended up as a torpedo bomber sinking more tonnage of axis shipping than any other aircraft we know a little bit about the history of this swordfish we know for example that it was painted black for nighttime operations but lots of swordfish were used to defend Allied convoys against German U-boats and among its many accolades the swordfish was actually the first aircraft in the British Fleet air arm to sink a U-boat the swordfish was involved in various notable battles of the second world war it carried out a really successful raid on the Italian Fleet at taranto proving itself once again but perhaps the moment of Glory for the swordfish came in May 1941 when 15 of them took off from HMS Arc Royal to attack the German battleship Bismarck now each of these swordfish carried only one of these Torpedoes they had one chance to hit their Mark and two of them did so foreign of the second world war each playing decisive roles in key battles during the conflict to have a chance of winning I'd have to think outside the box and I'd already spotted something pretty wacky inside the battle of britainhanger when I saw this aircraft earlier I had to stop by again this is the c38 auto gyro it's a Spanish design but it was licensed to be produced in the UK and only 146 were made so it's very rare indeed now let's talk about what makes this aircraft so weird and unique it obviously doesn't have any Wings it's driven forward by the propeller and the engine at the front but then it has these great big rotor blades which provide the lift and ensure the stability of the aircraft invented by the Spanish engineer Juan De La Sierra who wanted to create an aircraft that could fly safely at slow speeds the auto gyro was first flown in 1923 in Madrid after his initial success sialva accepted an offer to establish his own Auto gyro company in England and by 1925 Britain had become the world center of Auto gyro development once the wall broke out the RAF quickly found a role for the aircraft that would prove vital in defending Britain's Shores now a more important question is what was this aircraft used for well in the early 1940s radar was an entirely new innovation and this aircraft helped to calibrate it what it would do is it would fly very slowly so it was able to get into an exact position so that radar could obtain an accurate signal admittedly that is one weird flying machine but if Luke believed small and unusual would win this competition I was going for the complete opposite for my final choice I'd gone for a plane that was truly gigantic thank you right we've already seen lots of planes that were around at the start of the second world war this one was responsible for ending it dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and really changing the world in the process it's not the rarest plane here but it is an absolute Beast it is of course the American B-29 super Fortress foreign it was 30 meters long the wingspan was 40 meters it was 61 tons when loadable bombs and it could fly over 3 000 miles which made it perfect for hitting targets across the Pacific in japanese-occupied territory one really interesting thing about the super Fortress Is these gun turrets are remotely operated so the Gunners wouldn't be sat here in a glass bubble exposed to enemy Fighters they'd be up in the fuselage at a sighting station and these are controlled by computers so it just shows how technology has moved on since the start of the second World War and it's remotely operated gun turrets aren't Space Age enough for you than the nose of the super Fortress was the inspiration behind the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars our choices were locked in and typically Louis had managed to squeeze in an extra entry but before we had discussed who'd actually won we had a show to watch among the dozens of recognizable and rare planes preparing for takeoff were the Brussel Blenheim and two lysanders but for any fans of World War II aircraft this was going to be quite a spectacle [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] y end to the Battle of Britain Air Show at iwm Duxford hasn't it but we've loved this weekend I mean we've seen so many Fantastic rare World War II planes absolutely I mean we've seen some of the last of their kind to fly in the skies and we've seen some pretty weird aircraft as well I mean the the auto gyro Springs to mind immediately I mean that was really weird what were your standouts well I have to say one of my favorites is the swordfish it's just one of those planes that like punches above its weight you know was involved in such a huge moment in World War II the sinking of Bismarck even though it looks completely Antiquated involved in other battles the Lysander as well fantastic history picking up Allied Airman and Franz picking up members of the French Resistance and we got to see that one fly so that was pretty good what was your favorite that's true I mean we got to see the Blenheim fly as well that was a remarkable aircraft John remain an absolute Legend as well I've got a soft spot for the mosquito similarly to the to the swordfish it's a very underrated aircraft of the second world war but I think I'd be an idiot not to choose the auto auto gyro I think that's such a weird looking plane it's like a helicopter and a plane combined it's a weird sort of hybrid there are only 140 or so made for me that's got to be the winner but it didn't fly I mean the point of this air show is that we get to see see the planes fly right I mean I didn't even mention the Fiat Falco which is the Italian fighter plane because it in bits you know it's a very fascinating plane but I have to go for the Lysander because we got to see it actually fly so you're going for the Lysander I'm going for the auto gyro plainly obvious that we're not going to agree I don't think we're going to agree how we're going to solve it I think you are going to have to tell us what you think your favorite is okay guys you heard him let us know down in the comments what plane do you think should be the winner of this Challenge and if you like this video please like it and subscribe to the channel we'll be back with more like this very soon Cheers Cheers welcome to the history kit YouTube channel hope you enjoyed that video and if you'd like to see more videos where we attempt to try and bring history to life please don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification Bell cheers guys see you soon [Music]

Channel: History Hit

Views: 892,998

Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, world war ii, ww2 rare vehicles, world war two rare planes, world war two aircraft, world war two autogyro, autogyro ww2, bristol blenheim bomber, bristol blenheim documentary, western lysander, lysander plane ww2, bristol blenheim flying, lysander ww2 flying, iwm duxford airshow, battle of britain airshow duxford, fiat cr 42 falco, fiat falco fighter, mosquito bomber ww2, mosquito ww2, b-29 superfortress documentary, b-29 superfortress

Id: MP-A85XRR28

Length: 22min 46sec (1366 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 25 2022