Britain mounted a heroic effort to build ventilators. But it never needed them.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread unchecked in Britain in March, Boris Johnson issued a panicky “call to arms” to 100 of the country’s top industrialists. The prime minister said he needed tens of thousands of ventilators, stat, to save Britain’s intensive care units from being overwhelmed by patients unable to breathe.

And in a remarkable, almost Hollywood-ready story, a consortium of old-school British companies — which normally make things like passenger-jet wings and Formula 1 racecars — responded, teaming up with a couple of small-time medical-device companies to pull off the near-impossible.

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