WW2 AIRCRAFT PRODUCTION LISTS

I found some great WW2 aircarft production lists for Lancaster, Halifax, And Stirling on Bob Baxters site here.

www.bomber-command.info/sitemap.htm

It got me thinking.

Are there similar production lists and serial numbers for Wellington, Mosquito, Blenheim and Beaufighter.

I tried googling without success.

Thanks Ian

Wellington: 11,461
Mosquito: 7,781
Blenheim: 5,371
Beaufighter: 5,864

For a "quick & dirty" answer. Source: Owen Thetford's Aircraft of the Royal Air Force by Putnam.
I don't know if the figures include those built for export though.
Production "number jungles" exist for the above on the internet somewhere.

I am trying to track aircraft serial numbers (for example as recorded in Bill Chorley's Bomber Command Losses) to production sites.

Some of the records are a jungle as you say. For example, Shorts built Stirlings at South Marston (Swindon) and two local dispersed sites (Sevenhampton: Extant; and Lady Lane Blunsdon, now housing). The records on Bob Baxter's site do not acknowledge this.

It may be the contracts were placed at other sites (Bedford, Rochester) and the production executed elsewhere, eg: South Marston.

Paul wrote:

Surely, South Marston was final assembly not manufacture - we have a picture of the hangar. This topic is of particular interest to me as well. I had previously carried out research into glider production (by sub-contractors) and final assembly at Cosford - the fruits of this research is recorded in ARGRN 14 available in the ARG members area. I have the raw data for other aircraft and we have the large records compiled by the late Barry Abraham on aircraft production who also had a particular interest in sub-contractors.

Paul. South Marston has an interesting history.

South Marston was to shadow the Phillips and Powis Aircraft Ltd factory at Woodley, near Reading - and by 1940 some of the production of a training plane called the Miles Master was transferred to the new South Marston site.

Building work on the factory at South Marston began in January 1940, but a hasty change of plan was ordered by government officials when they saw the size of the building that was taking shape.

They felt that it presented too big a target to enemy bombers, so units were set up at Sevenhampton and Blunsdon instead.

The South Marston factory was ready by the summer of 1940 - just as the RAF was about to fight and win the Battle of Britain.

First production starts

By the following spring, the first South Marston Master had rolled off the production line and a year later the factory was turning out nearly 80 a month.

In all, over a thousand Masters would be produced at South Marston - and the aircraft was to prove one of the unsung heroes of the war.

Many Spitfire and Hurricane pilots learned their trade in a Master, while a number of other air forces also used them, and some were to see active service as glider tugs.

But it was as an effective trainer that the plane really made its mark.

Some Masters could almost match the speed of early Spitfires and Hurricanes and are an important milestone in RAF history because they were the first high-powered monoplane trainers with similar handling characteristics to the new fighters.

They also had the same 'goodies', such as retractable undercarriages, flaps and variable pitch propellors.

At the same time as Masters were being produced at South Marston, the area also found itself helping with the manufacture of other aircraft.

Men at Swindon's giant Railway Works machined 171,000 components and carried out some timber airframe refurbishment for Hawker Hurricanes, while Marine Mountings (later Lister and Petter or RA Lister), at Wroughton, and Plessey, in Swindon, were also involved in producing components for the war effort.

The area was also about to put together whole bombers.

In August 1940, the Short Brothers Ltd factory at Rochester was bombed and put out of action, and when the Belfast factory was also attacked, the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) switched much of the Short Stirling manufacturing to the Swindon area.

Fuselages were built at Blunsdon and fitted out at Sevenhampton, while parts, including wings, were also manufactured in No. 24 Shop in Swindon Railway Works (in buildings now owned by Clares Retail Equipment Ltd, at North Star) and at a garage in the town centre (later to become Skurray's).

These parts were all taken to South Marston, which also produced some of the wings, for assembly in a new purpose-built factory, called FS2.

Take-off and landing facilities were also needed for the four-engined Stirling, so two 1,000-yard concrete runways were constructed close to the FS2 site.

These were painted with woodchips dipped in camouflage paint, while sections of hedges were also put together to be spread across the runway when not in use, and complete the deception.

The first Stirling took off for delivery to the RAF at the beginning of 1942 and soon the factory was completing 16 a month.

Between the autumn of 1942 and the spring of 1943, however, production of both the Master and the Stirling was wound down.

The intention was to produce Lancaster bombers instead, but plans were shelved as the factory prepared to play host to the world's most celebrated military aircraft.

The Spitfire story

First the factory undertook modification work on US aircraft, but demand for the new generation of Spitfires - the Mark 21 - became so great that South Marston turned all of its production facilities over to these most famous of fighters.

Control of the factory duly passed from Phillips and Powis to Supermarine, with South Marston now becoming the shadow factory of the famous Castle Bromwich site in the Midlands and the original Supermarine factory in Southampton (which was extensively damaged by bombing in 1940) where RJ Mitchell designed and tested the original plane.

Much of the workforce received hasty retraining in metalwork as a result and, at first, the factory only carried out modifications on older Spitfires before the first South Marston-built Mark 21 was delivered to the RAF just before Christmas 1943.

South Marston's role in the Spitfire story, however, was short-lived. The new Spitfire was a high altitude fighter and - especially with D-Day on the horizon in the summer of 1944 - the situation had moved on.

In the end, only 121 Mark 21s were built at South Marston, although another 50 modified Spitfires bound for naval action (which the Royal Navy called Seafires) were also made there.

Production of later versions of the Spitfire also continued after the war, before South Marston's last Spitfire (actually a Seafire) was completed in January 1949.

In October 1945, Vickers bought the factory and airfield from MAP (it cost them £500,000) and the factory's new roles included the modification of planes which had survived the war into trainers.

Spitfires also continued to fly out of South Marston after repairs and modifications, with most of these ending up in foreign air forces.

Walrus and Sea Otter amphibians were also refurbished - the former destined to fly the colours of the Netherlands and Argentinian air forces, and the latter for civil duties.

By the 1950s the South Marston factory was part of the Vickers-Armstrongs (Aircraft) Ltd, Supermarine Division.

Still the spirit of the Spitfire was proving persistent as production turned to the Attacker, a jet version of the Spiteful, which in turn had evolved from the Spitfire.

The Attacker was the Royal Navy's first jet fighter designed for launching from aircraft carriers and was also used by the Royal Pakistan Air Force. In all, 182 attackers were built at South Marston between 1950 and 1953.

www.swindonweb.com/index.asp?m=8&s=116&ss=402

Ian,

You might find this site useful:

www.aviation-links.co.uk/prodam.html#D