B-24 Liberator Bombers Rolling Off the Assembly Line
On April 17, 1942, the first of three thousand B-24 Liberator bombers rolled out of the new mile-long Fort Worth assembly building of Air Force Plant 4—known locally as the “bomber plant”. After Pearl Harbor the city lobbied the government to build a defense installation here, offering 1,400 acres on Lake Worth. The result was Air Force Plant 4, which opened in 1942, operated by Consolidated Aircraft. When the war had begun, Fort Worth had 176,000 people; Tarrant County had 225,000. During the plant’s peak in 1944-1945 Consolidated employed 38,000 workers. That’s one in five Fort Worth residents, one in six county residents. Probably most blocks in Fort Worth had at least one resident who worked at the bomber plant. Air Force Plant 4 produced B-24s for two years.
