B-24D Strawberry Bitch
A combat veteran of the North Africa fighting (serving with the 512
Bomb Squadron) the B-24D Strawberry
Bitch was
one of the few B-24s to remain in USAAF/USAF hands postwar; although
many B-17s found
use in secondary roles well into the 1950s, most
Liberators were quickly cut up for scrap. Strawberry Bitch
managed to evade the torch, and made the Air Force's final B-24 flight
when it was ferried to the USAF Museum in the spring of 1959. At
present, this is the only intact and preserved B-24D, although the
restoration of 41-23908 continues, and there are other partial
airframes and wrecks still extant.
Prior to the B-24D, Liberator production had been limited to a small
number of prototypes and preproduction aircraft, numbering only a few
dozen . The B-24D was the first really war-ready model, with the nearly
useless tunnel gun being replaced by a Bendix (later Sperry) belly
turret, and later block models having cheek guns added to boost forward
firepower. Powerplants were R-1830-43s. Over 2,600 B-24Ds were turned
out, and the type was flown by the RAF as the Liberator III. A D-model
was rebuilt after a crash as the prototype C-87 transport version, and
others were reworked as C-109 fuel transport versions to support B-29 operations
in China.
copyright
2009 Dataview Publishing
