Australia Had No Fighters — They Built One From Scratch in 16 Weeks

In February 1942, Australia faced its darkest hour. Singapore had fallen. Darwin was burning. Japanese forces were advancing south at terrifying speed. And when Australia begged Britain and America for fighters, the answer was the same: we have none to spare.
So Australia did the impossible. In just sixteen weeks — 116 days from government approval to first flight — a small team of engineers at the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation designed and built an entirely new fighter aircraft from scratch. The CAC Boomerang wasn't the fastest fighter of the war. It wasn't the most advanced. But it was THERE when nothing else was.
This is the story of Fred David, the Austrian-Jewish refugee who fled Nazi persecution and designed Australia's only indigenous fighter. The story of factory workers who laboured around the clock whilst Japanese carriers prowled ever closer. The story of pilots who flew into combat over the jungles of New Guinea in an aircraft that existed only because Australians refused to wait for someone else to save them.
The Boomerang remains the only fighter aircraft Australia ever designed and mass-produced. Its legacy isn't measured in aerial victories — it's measured in the simple, defiant fact that when the world said no, Australia said yes.
📚 Sources: Australian War Memorial archives, RAAF Historical Section records, Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation documentation
🎬 Chapters:
0:00 - Darwin Burns
2:15 - The Corporation
4:30 - The Impossible Arithmetic
7:00 - Fred David's Solution
10:30 - Building in the Blind
14:00 - First Flight
17:30 - Into Combat
21:00 - The Smoke Pilots
24:00 - Legacy
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