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More B-24 heavy bombers were built than any other American airplane in history. The B- 24 was used in every theater in World War II, and it had greater range and could carry a much larger bomb load than the B-17, but it never had the notoriety of the Flying Fortress. Probably the most famous B-24 was named Lady Be Good. On April 4, 1943, returning from a bombing mission, it overshot its base at Soluch, Libya, and was not heard from again. In 1959, the wreckage was found by an oil exploration party 440 miles into the Libyan desert. On August 1, 1943, staging from Benghazi, Libya, 177 Ninth Air Force B-24 crews dropped 311 tons of bombs from low level on the oil refineries at Ploesti, Romania, during Operation Tidal Wave. This was the first large-scale, minimum- altitude attack by Army Air Forces heavy bombers on a strongly defended target. Five officers (Lt. Col. Addison E. Baker, Col. Leon W. Johnson, Col. John R. Kane, Maj. John L. Jerstad, and 2d Lt. Lloyd H. Hughes) were awarded the Medal of Honor for this mission. More Air Force Medals of Honor were awarded for this mission than any other in the service's history. The B-24 was also used extensively by Britain. Almost 1,000 were used by the US Navy as PB4Ys. A total of 6,678 B-24Js were built, starting in August 1943. One C-87, the widely used cargo version of the Liberator, named Guess Where II, was intended to be the first Presidential aircraft, although there is no evidence that Franklin D. Roosevelt ever flew in it. B-24 operations were concentrated in the Pacific, and the first Liberators went into action on November 16, 1943, at Bougainville in the Solomon Islands. There were 6,000 operational B-24s in use by the end of 1944, equipping 45 groups. A year later, the type was declared surplus and hundreds were scrapped virtually overnight. The lone XB-24N was a single-tail test version. Approximately a dozen Liberators remain today.

Jirka Wagner