Brabazon Committee raison d'etre
For an article I'm writing for Air & Space Smithsonian on the Bristol Brabazon:
It seems to be an article of faith perpetuated by Wikipedia and other doubtful sources that there was some kind of wartime agreement between the US and UK that Britain would concentrate on developing and building bombers and the US would do the same for transports. Therefore the Brabazon Committee was established to help the British aviation industry re-establish itself in the commercial-transport field rather than ceding it to US wartime designs that would easily be civilianized.
Can this be true? Certainly the US developed the C-54 and C-87 (at least I think that's the designator for the Constellation), but the B-29 and even the B-36 were underway as well, and it hardly seems we'd left bomber development to the English. Nor did Britain come up with anything advanced beyond the Lancaster if the assumption is that they'd been tasked to develop bombers.
I'm suspicious of the oft-quoted "US did transports, UK did bombers" theory. Does anybody out there agree--or disagree?