Newest Liberator was cast for the ages

A lot of records were set by the Convair B-24 Liberator heavy bomber of World War II.

More B-24s were built than any other American military aircraft, topping 18,000. (Cessna 172s outstrip this at more than 44,000!)

And, given the size of the four-engine B-24, for many years it was posited that more aluminum went into the construction of B-24s than any other airplane. Wonder if (or when) the 737 will overtake that statistic…

But for all its records, the B-24 Liberator faded quickly from the post-war U.S. Air Force equipment roster. Newer machines and newer strategies prevailed. An abundance of other Second World War surplus aircraft fit the Air Force’s reduced needs for miscellaneous-duty aircraft.

A handful of shiny-new Ford-built B-24M Liberators — the last production model — served in the early post-war years as research aircraft for tasks like weather studies and new armaments. But these survivors were not around very long.

By 1954, only one B-24 Liberator remained in U.S. Air Force service. It was on a bailment contract serving the Aeronautical Icing Research Laboratories in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Its gun turrets were removed and faired over. The nose and bombardier’s station received new contours in sheetmetal, but there was no mistaking its Liberator silhouette with twin rounded vertical tails and high-mounted Davis wing.

By 1949, it was given the designation EB-24M, with the E prefix letter denoting an Electronics function. A late M-model, this Liberator also featured a revised cockpit canopy with overhead escape hatches and simplified windscreen with fewer obstructing bars than most Liberators. Such canopies were limited to late-production Ford Liberators, plus a few similar conversions made by Convair in San Diego.

During the summer of 1954, this B-24M was assigned in retirement to the technical museum collection at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. The scant population of surviving B-24 Liberators owes a lot to that prescient decision.

It joined a retired B-17 on Lackland’s main parade ground where it stood as a display, wearing many variations of paint and markings, until 1999.

Thousands and thousands of Air Force recruits marched past the Liberator over the years at Lackland. Some were oblivious to its significance; others appreciated it as a historical marker in the Texas sun; and a few, we are told by a veteran who was there, may have enjoyed its aluminum confines for surreptitious romantic liaisons.

As the 20th Century came to a close, a plan was executed that shipped the original B-24M from Lackland to the Imperial War Museum’s American Air Museum at Duxford, UK, in 1999. The Brits, in return, sent a Spitfire Vc to the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, where it represents Spitfires flown by American airmen in World War II.

The characteristic research airframe contours of the B-24M were cast in fiberglass, preserving all the quirks of this Liberator, and it was resurrected at Lackland as a remarkably faithful, if non-metallic, copy. Military Aircraft Restoration Corporation of Southern California made the doppelganger Liberator, says public affairs specialist Ty Greenlees of the Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio.

Once in England, the original B-24M was the focus of a diligent refurbishment by the Imperial War Museum that returned wartime armaments and detailing to the Liberator for public display.

B-24s were a significant presence in the U.S. Army Air Forces’ strategic bombing campaign against Germany from 1942 to 1945, and the American collection at Duxford needed a Liberator as a counterpoint to the B-17 already displayed. The former Lackland resident Liberator received the markings of a different B-24M nicknamed Dugan that had served in the Eighth Air Force.