Tuesday 16 May 2017

Martin Baltimore, part one.

We go back to the World War II in order to cover this excellent light bomber.
The Martin Baltimore was a twin-engined light attack bomber built by the Glenn L. Martin company in the United States. It was originally ordered by France in May 1940 as the successor of the previous Martin Maryland. However, when France fell, all the production was diverted to the United Kingdom. The first versions, labelled Mk.I and Mk.II were delivered to the Royal Air Force in 1941 which, initially, used them to equip operational training units and used them only in the Mediterranean theatre of operations and in the North African one.
The Mk. I version was powered by two 1600hp Wright GR-2600-A5B radial piston engines and was armed with a total of ten 0.303in (7.7mm) machine guns, being eight of them fixed Brownings and two flexible Vickers K guns. Two of them in the leading edge of the wings, and four more, two on each side of the lower fuselage aft firing backwards plus the Vickers ones in dorsal an ventral positions. That configuration would be common for every variant of the airplane except for the late production Mk.V which had the backwards firing ones removed. It was used exclusively by the Royal Air Force.
The Mk.II version was just like the Mk.I but it had 12 machine guns instead of ten. Those additional two were placed in ventral and dorsal positions. It was employed by the Royal Hellenic Air Force, the South African Air Force, and the Royal Air Force, however we could only find pics for the late one.










Sources:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Baltimore
2. http://www.militaryfactory.com/aircraft/detail.asp?aircraft_id=264

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