How Did K.C. Irving's Veneer Plant Help Build the Mosquito Bomber?

Shane Parrish says the first part of K.C. Irving's business transformed by the war was Canada Veneers, a small veneer company he had purchased the year before. He bought it because it was cheap and he thought he could fix it. The war changed the company's fortunes overnight.

St. John businessmen had started Canada Veneers in 1933. It made veneer, wood shaped into sheets thinner than cardboard, mostly for orange crates. By 1938 the company was struggling and Irving took control. In England, de Havilland was designing a bomber made largely of wood. Metal was already scarce, and the war made it scarcer. The Mosquito was built almost entirely from plywood, thin sheets of veneer stacked and glued until the wood was light and strong. Crews called it the Wooden Wonder. Yellow birch suited plywood for the plane, New Brunswick had it in abundance, and Irving already owned a plant that could turn it into veneer. Britain called for every sheet of aircraft plywood the empire could produce. The plant that had nearly gone out of business in 1938 soon ran seven days a week, with 500 people working around the clock. More than 6,000 Mosquitoes were eventually built on sheets of wood like the ones from his plants.

Irving never pretended he had seen the boom coming. He had bought a broken company because it was cheap and he thought he could fix it. Then the war came and saved it.