Complete this sentence..the Mosquito was amazing because…
as if it had been found in the bear’s cottage by Goldilocks, it was ‘just right’

What was the role of the Mosquito in WW2 and in which was it most and least proficient?
As far as I can tell, the Mosquito is the only aircraft in history to have successfully performed all four roles required of an air force by air power doctrine: air defence, attack, intelligence and mobility. It was an successful night fighter, a hugely effective bomber, perhaps the outstanding reconnaissance aircraft of the war – that was certainly the view of FDR’s son Elliot, who commanded a USAAF reconnaissance wing – but, after dozen Mosquitos were pressed into service with BOAC to fly passengers, cargo and diplomatic mail between Sweden and RAF Leuchars in Scotland, it can also claim to have been useful transport asset. Given the different demands each of these roles requires of an airframe, performing all four gives the Mosquito what I think is a unique full house. It was not, despite its great range, an escort fighter. While it was fast and manoeverable, it couldn’t hope to match the the agility of much smaller single-engined fighters like the Me 109 or Fw 190.

How does a twin-engined fighter survive an attack from a more agile single-engined fighter? How did the Mosquito agility compare to likely fighter opposition?
Turn, dive or find cloud. The speed differences between the Mosquito and the Focke-Wulf Fw 190 varied according to height, but the Focke-Wulf never had a sufficiently decisive advantage to be able to overhaul a Mosquito from behind in a straight and level race. Instead they needed to dive down on to the Mosquitos. If the latter could confound the initial attack by turning to throw the fighter’s aim, then pour on the coals, it was likely to be able to get away. But a Mosquito flying predictably straight and level on a bombing run or reconnaissance mission was always going to vulnerable to fighter attack – like any other aircraft.

What was its survivability like compared to heavy bombers?
After entering service with 105 Squadron in its intended role as an unarmed day bomber, the Mosquito actually suffered heavier losses than the Blenheim it replaced. To the point where many were coming to the conclusion that that they’d been right all along about the folly of an unarmed bomber using speed alone for protection. That changed in the latter half of 1942 under the leadership of the squadron’s new CO, Australian Hughie Edwards VC. Instead of high level daylight attacks along the predictable flight paths that had made them vulnerable to detection and interception, Edwards would cross Europe at low level in the late afternoon, attack at dusk, then return to base under the cover of darkness. His initiative transformed the Mosquito’s fortunes. And during the Battle of Berlin over the winter of 1943 and 1944, Bomber Command’s heavies suffered losses at around ten times that Mosquitos the Light Night Striking Force.

How wooden was the Mosquito? Was it wood or laminate or what percentage of the weight or volume did it make up?

More wooden than Keanu Reeves (67%) less wooden than Steven Seagal (100%). With respect to the use of solid woods and laminates, see my next answer …

Where did the wood come from?
Sitka Spruce, from forests in British Columbia, was used to build the two spars that ran unbroken from wingtip to wingtip. Britain entered the war with stock of two hundred standards of Sitka Spruce. To cover the first year of fighting, Timber Control needed eight thousand. European Ash was used for the Mosquito’s primary structure. The stringers that completed the internal skeleton, help dissipate loads around airframe, were sawn from Douglas Fir sourced from forests in British Columbia and American’s Pacific North West. The all-important plywood skin of the aeroplane was actually part of a sandwich comprised of two layers of hard three-ply Birch filled with balsawood, which was so soft you could push your thumb into it. As far as was known at the time, Balsa grew only in Equador and, demand might outstrip supply, Timber Control, the organisation responsible all Britain’s wood requirements during the war, sent an explorer to Central America to find an alternative source. After travelling thriough seven counties he found none of sufficient quality, but in Panama’s remote Darién Gap, the expedition discovered the Quipo tree that, at the base of its trunk, contained wood that was sufficiently light to fall within narrow density range specifed for the Mosquito. Samples were sent back to Hatfield where de Havilland used them to build an experimental fuselage and by the end of 1942 a modern sawmill had been built in Panama to supply it.

Biggest myth about the Mosquito?
That it was wooden. I was very surprised to discover that this was just a rumour put around to puzzle and annoy the Germans – like carrots helping you see in the dark. You heard it here first …*

What is your book about?

Ah, I know this one. At its heart the book’s about the RAF Mosquito raid on the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen in March 1945. But the more I got into in to it the more it became this remarkable weaving of aerial action with the story of spies, special forces and saboteurs on the ground. It’s like a real-life 633 Squadron. I’ve never written about the Second World War before and opening my account with the Mosquito was a gift. It’s such an extraordinarily capable and charismatic machine, and 2 Group’s low level pinpoint raids that were the focus of Mosquito are so inherently dramatic, that I was spoilt for material. There was simply so much good stuff. But in the end, as ever, it’s the people I’m writing about on which the book depends, from the man who led 2 Group, Air Vice Marshal Basil Embry, whose story was so remarkable that if you made it up, no one would believe you to the incredible Danish commando, Anders Lassen, the only member of the wartime SAS to win the VC, I was blessed with such a rich cast of characters that the worry was whether I could do them all justice. I hope I have. I’ve tried to weave together some amazing stories along the way, but ultimately all roads though lead to the wildly difficult and dangerous Mosquito mission to Copenhagen to prevent the destruction of the Danish resistance and need to forestall any possibility of Denmark becoming the scene of a catastrophic Nazi last stand. In the words of my publisher it’s ‘the story of that legendary aircraft told through that one impossible mission’.

How much did the DH.88 racer and other interwar type actually contribute to the Mosquito’s design?

It was a useful stepping stone. After spending twenty years building civilian machines for general aviation and commercial air transport, de Havilland was out of practice when it came to building high performance waplanes. A fast, long-ranged twin-engined racer with a crew of two, the Comet served as something of a proof of concept. There was even some discussion at de Havilland about developing a military version of the Comet. As significant a proof of concept, though, was de Havilland’s DH.91 Albatross. A four-engined airliner that first flew in 1937, this achingly beautiful design, was built of wood using exactly the same construction methods.

At We Have Ways Festival, you and I discussed the Whirlwind – what was similar and different about the aircraft?
They’re superficially similar, but in reality very different. They share a muscular twin-engined layout – Geoffrey de Havilland thought Mosquito prototype looked like it was ‘largely made up of engines and propellers’. But in many ways the DH.88 Comet was a much closer analogue. The low-winged Comet and Whirlwind were almost exactly the same size and layout. The Mosquito was about a third bigger and nearly twice the weight of the Whirlwind. Geoffrey de Havilland reckoned that the qualities required of a successful aircraft were ‘simplicity, right size, cleanness in design and, of course, a very reliable engine.’ The Whirlwind actually had three of these – even the much-maligned Peregrine engine was generally pretty reliable – but it’s small size and single-seat limited its development potential in comparison to the Mosquito The problem in the end was that the bigger Mosquito, with it’s two-man crew, bomb bay and long range, could do all sorts of things that a Spitfire could not. The smaller Whirlwind, even if it had enjoyed the sort of time, money, care and attention lavished on the Spit, would never have been able to offer a meaningfully different capability.

Could DH been more forthcoming telling Westland about the DH propeller issue on the Whirlwind -and in what ways (if any) did DH cockblock Westland?

There’s no doubt that Havilland, who designed and built the Whirlwind’s propellers, could have helped. But so too could Rolls-Royce, the RAF and Farnborough. The latter even conducted wind tunnel tests in 1940 that highlighted the compressibility drag caused by the Whirlwind’s thick propeller blades. The issue could easily have been solved but by that point the Whirlwind’s ship had sailed. The lack of high-altitude performance those propellers inflicted on the Whirlwind kept it benched up in Scotland during the Battle of Britain and its reputation never recovered. During the banking crisis we became familiar with the idea that some institutions were simply deemed to be too big to fail. In the end, the Whirlwind programme was too small to succeed. As more and more resource was focussed on a handful of aircraft – a policy to which even the Mosquito nearly fell victim – the Whirlwind, with its unloved, bespoke Peregrine engines, was a luxury and a distraction and so was allowed to fall behind the drag curve, a victim of neglect rather than any inherent fault in the design.

Was the Mosquito more precise at bombing than other fighter-bombers, if so, why?
I’m not sure that it was particularly. It’s only real advantage over single-seat fighter bombers like the Typhoon and Thunderbolt was that it had a two-man crew that brought with it better situational awareness – the life blood of successful tactical aviation. They had a better chance of actually finding the target than the single-seaters. With respect to accuracy, the starker comparison is with rival bombers. Compared to other medium bombers like the Boston and Mitchell the Mosquito required a far smaller tonnage of bombs to ensure the destruction of a target. On average, the Mosquito required less than forty tons of bombs to destroy a V1 launch site. The next lowest figure was 195 tons required by USAAF Flying Fortresses. The big difference was the altitude at which they attacked. Of the bombers, only the Mosquito had the fighter like performance to attack from low-level. And Air Vice Marshal Basil Embry made sure that his crews extremely well trained, building a full scale model of a V1 on the bombing range to ensure they were adept at identifying the correct aiming points for a bomb run flown at a height of just twenty feet.

What was the Mosquitos biggest failing or limitation?
Well, as I’ve mentioned, it wasn’t actually terribly successful in the role of high level day bomber that it was designed for, but that was largely a failure of tactics and imagination not the aeroplane. When the Mosquito was first deployed to Southeast Asia there the heat and humidity caused issues with the glue that occasionally led to what Space X would call ‘rapid disassembly’, but this was solved to the extent that the RAF was still using the Mosquito on operations in Malaya into the late fifties. If you’d asked Mosquito veteran Colin Bell the same question, he’d have said only that ‘it pulled a bit to the left on take-off’ …

How lucky was the Mosquito?
There were undoubtedly lucky breaks, but then I think you can probably argue that all successful aircraft are lucky, such are the odds against any putative design actually making it into full-scale production. De Havilland were certainly fortunate to have Air Vice Marshal Wilfred Freeman in the corner. Responsible for RAF procurement, he kept the programme alive despite a lack of interest from Bomber Command and an effort to cancel it by Churchill’s Minister for Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook. At the same time, though, de Havilland made their own luck: they took a deliberate decision to develop the Mosquito as private enterprise without the backing of the Air Ministry, to build it out of wood to speed it into production and then design a flying machine which nailed it pretty much straight out of the box.

This article is here to plug your book but I want to plug mine too, what are you most looking forward to in The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes Vol 2?
More of what made the first Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes such a brilliantly entertaining and informative read. There aren’t many aviation books I read for fun, but the Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes was a notable exception. So I’m looking forward to curling up on the sofa and enjoying a bit of me time with THKBOW2. Also, I hear that it’s going to feature a surprisingly sweary piece about one of my favourite aeroplanes, the one-off, none-more-black Vickers Valiant B2 ‘Pathfinder’. The V-bomber the RAF should have bought …

Is it true that a vital meeting that led to The Hush-Kit Book of Warplanes took place between yourself and I mere metres away from where the Royal Air Force was formed?
Fact! And I think they’ve even put a plaque on the wall to mark the significance of the location. There might be one about the RAF too …

What analogues of the Mosquito were there from other manufacturers?

Focke-Wulf actually tried to build a wood and glue nightfighter of their own in the shape of the Ta 154 They even called it the Moskito! But its performance was disappointing and it was cancelled. ‘Let’s build the Mosquito!’, ranted Herman Göring to the technical heads of the German aviation industry, ‘That’s the simplest thing to do.’ Interestingly, Argentina developed a couple of aircraft, the Calquin and the Ñancú that looked very similar to the Mosquito – the former proving beyond all doubt that radial engines would have turned the Mosquito into a bit of a minger. But perhaps the best analogue was the machine that amounted to the Mosquito’s replacement in the RAF, the Canberra. Designed, like the Mosquito as a high-performance twin-engined bomber, it was also extremely versatile and, after a first flight in the 1940s remained in service with the RAF until well into the 21st century.

What should I have asked you?
What responsibilities does an author have in writing about a subject that may provoke nationalist or ‘fun’ war feelings in the readership?

What responsibilities does an author have in writing about a subject that may provoke nationalist or ‘fun’ war feelings in the readership?
Oh …

Mosquito The RAF’s Legendary Wooden Wonder and its Most Extraordinary Mission is available here

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• I lied about this. The Mosquito was of course wooden …