Description
The collection contains items mostly about the B-24 Liberator Club, and includes newsletters, photographs, news clippings,
and some documents. Unfortunately, no biographical information is available for Glenn H. Smith. He clearly was associated
in some way, or had an interest in the B-24 Liberator bomber and the International B-24 Liberator Club.
Background
Unfortunately, no biographical information is available for Glenn H. Smith. He clearly was associated in some way, or had
an interest in the B-24 Liberator bomber and the International B-24 Liberator Club.
The Liberator Club was formed in October 1968 and is an international organization for anyone who was associated with the
B-24 Liberator airplane. The purpose of the club is to promote the significant role of the B-24 Liberator in World War II,
to call attention to the outstanding achievements of the airplane and its crewmen, to encourage the preservation of documents
connected with the history of the airplane, and to keep an inventory of the planes that still survive. Membership is open
to flight crews, ground crews, support personnel, production personnel, historians, writers, modelers, World War II aviation
enthusiasts, and relatives of crewmen.
The B-24 was born when the Army Air Corps decided early in 1939 that it needed a longer-range aircraft than the B-17. The
job fell to Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, founded in 1923 by Maj. Reuben H. Fleet. Fleet directed his engineering team,
headed by Chief Engineer Isaac M. (Ike) Laddon, to take the wing and tail from the Model 31 flying boat and the power plants
from the PBY and develop a bomber with twice the bomb load capacity of the B-17. Two days short of a nine-month deadline,
the XB-24 made its first flight, on December 29, 1939, from Lindbergh Field.
The B-24 was a four-engine, twin-tail aircraft, and was one of the workhorses of World War II for the then Army Air Corps
and the Navy, where it was known as the PB4Y-1. In its time it was the most produced plane in this country and third in the
world -- 18,188 were made, many of them in San Diego.
Extent
.33 Cubic Feet
The collection contains items mostly about the B-24 Liberator Club, and includes newsletters, photographs, news clippings,
and some documents.
The collection consists of one gray archival box, 10 x 12.5 x 2.5 inches.