How a Brantford farm machinery company helped bring down the Nazis

A farm machinery company making precision aircraft parts? No chance.

“They  were considered forgers of crude iron up to that point,” said Rob Adlam of the Brantford-based Canadian Industrial Heritage Centre.

“There’s  a world of difference between making a hand plow and making aircraft  components,” Adlam said. “The government even had doubts they could do  it.”

But wartime calls for creativity, and Cockshutt Plow Company in Brantford — best known  for making tractors and harvesters — rose to the occasion to get Allied  planes into the sky to take on Nazi Germany.

From inside a million-dollar factory on Greenwich Street — built in just three months in 1943 — Cockshutt’s newly formed aircraft division turned out landing gear for the Lancaster bomber, targeting components for the B-29 Superfortress  bomber, and fuselages for the Mosquito, a speedy, lightweight fighter made of laminated plywood.

Pilots at Commonwealth air force training bases across Canada — including in  Jarvis and Dunnville in Haldimand County — learned to fly inside the  Avro Anson, whose exhaust manifolds were made by Cockshutt’s wartime workforce.

“No implement manufacturer had ever attempted any of that,” Adlam said. “But they proved that they could do it.”