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List of surviving Consolidated B-24 Liberators

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ6641965 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Consolidated B-24 Liberator was an American four-engine heavy bomber used by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and other allied air forces during World War II. Of the 19,256 B-24, PB4Y-1, LB-30 and other model variants in the Liberator family produced, fourteen complete airframes (including one airworthy example) survive today. Nine of the fourteen aircraft reside in the United States.

Post-World War II

The B-24 was quickly declared obsolete by the USAAF and the remaining stateside aircraft were flown to desert storage in the US Southwest. In the Pacific theatre, many were simply parked, the oil drained from their engines and the aircraft left for reclamation by scrappers. The last flight of a B-24 in US military service was on 12 May 1959 when Strawberry Bitch left Bunker Hill Air Force Base (now Grissom Air Force Base), in Peru, Indiana following an Armed Forces Open House. It was bound for the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where it is now displayed.

Lend-lease

While at the end of the war both the British Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force were willing to continue operating the B-24, the terms of lend-lease agreements stipulated that these aircraft had to be either paid for or returned to the US, and vast graveyards of aircraft accumulated in India as well as Tarakan and Australia.

India

When India gained independence in 1947, 39 abandoned Liberators were refurbished by Hindustan Aircraft for the Indian Air Force and served until their retirement in 1968. It is to this that six of the remaining fourteen B-24s owe their existence.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “List of surviving Consolidated B-24 Liberators” as wikimedia list article. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1959, 1947, 1968—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, surviving and Consolidated can be independently traced.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as wikimedia list article. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6641965. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1947 and 1968.

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This entry incorporates text from “List of surviving Consolidated B-24 Liberators” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.