This post is from Paol Soren in Australia, about his visit to the RAAF museum where they are currently restoring an Australian Mosquito. I know that a lot of the aviation fans who follow my blog will enjoy this, so, thanks a lot, Paol!
My first job after year twelve was in a large Lawyer’s firm in Collins Street, Melbourne. There were two of the originating partners still alive and the one I knew was Mr Cook. Mr Cook had his right index finger missing and one day he noticed me looking at it and decided to tell me what had happened. Cookie had been a Pathfinder pilot during the War. He flew an unarmed and unarmoured plywood Mosquito over Europe. His job was to fly at great speed into the full horror of war, drop marking flares onto the target and then get the hell out of the way as the bombers flew over to destroy Hitler’s war machine. One night a German Messerschmitt got a bit cross with him and fired his machine-guns. Only one bullet hit the Mosquito passing through the cockpit and blowing the top off the plane’s joystick and Mr…
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John Knifton 
The mossie is certainly a difficult aircraft to make unless you know what you are doing. If you’ve never been to the DH museum at St. Albans you should go. They have an original mould used to shape the fuselage and were (at my last visit) restoring the original prototype. I believe this is now complete and has moved, but it’s an interesting place if you like the Mossie and DH aircraft in general.
Thanks for that. I had an idea that working with wood to produce a Mosquito was quite a difficult thing to do. If you ever read “Vulcan 607” by Rowland White, he says that what must have been very similar processes and problems occurred with the Handley Page Victor, where none of the parts of any of the last few aircraft were interchangeable. In other words, each one was pretty much, hand made and slightly different from all of its siblings. A bit like a Morgan sports car, only slightly bigger!
Quite amazing and rather baffling considering how big it was!
Thank you for shearing this story about the Mosquito. I did not realize it was a wooden plain. I loved reading the story. 🙂 Jim
Glad you enjoyed it, Jim. I believe that parts of the aircraft’s construction even involved balsa wood, as if it were a model.
It’s a beauty! Like Harbin77, I didn’t know it was made of wood. Man’s creative genius.
It certainly was. The tragedy is that that creative genius was employed ultimately to kill and destroy. And an even greater tragedy is that the Mosquito was only ever built because we had no aircraft capable of dealing with a determined enemy, intent on carrying out even greater death and destruction. This cycle may never stop!
And they built it even after the Ministry said they didn’t want it. I think that’s the way it went.