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
machineryasia 
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
