THE MIGHTY LANCASTER
A GLORIOUS SOUVENIR PULLOUT TRIBUTE TO . . .
Against the backdrop of a moonlit sky above western germany, the mighty RAF avro Lancaster of 617 squadron swooped low over the water and released its deadly cargo. the spinning bomb bounced across the surface of the lake towards the wall of the Mohne dam.
For a moment there was silence, then the sound of crumbling masonry and a thunderous floodtide began to echo down the valley. Wing Commander guy gibson, the 617 squadron leader who was flying his own Lancaster nearby, recalled the scene of unfolding destruction: ‘i could not believe my eyes. i heard someone shout: “i think she’s gone! i think she’s gone!”
‘there was no doubt about it: there was a great breach 100 yards across, and the water, now looking like stirred porridge in the moonlight, was gushing out and rolling into the Ruhr Valley towards the industrial centres of germany’s third Reich.’
the Dambusters Raid on the night of May 17, 1943, carried out by 19 Lancasters from gibson’s squadron, has gone down in history as one of the most audacious exploits of World War ii.
not only was the colossal Mohne dam breached, but a second, the Eder, was also smashed, while a third, the sorpe, was damaged, though not broken. although the attack cost the lives of 53 RAF airmen, it caused
devastation to the German economy and gave a tremendous boost to public morale. The tale of the assault on the vast structures almost seemed a national metaphor for Britain’s increasingly confident fight against the once-impregnable Nazi empire.
Gibson won the Victoria Cross and 33 other airmen were awarded medals for gallantry in the raid. A CBE was also awarded to Roy Chadwick, Avro’s chief designer who had conceived the Lancaster bomber.
The honour was fully deserved, since the Dambusters could never have succeeded without the Lancaster, whose unique qualities of robustness and responsiveness made it the ideal plane for such a precision task.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the inventor of the bouncing bomb, Barnes Wallis, wrote in fulsome tones to Chadwick: ‘May I offer you my deepest thanks for the existence of your wonderful Lancaster, the only aircraft in the world capable of doing the job.’
But the impact of the Lancaster went far beyond the Dams raid. The plane dramatically enhanced the potency of Bomber Command, turning the RAF strategists’ dreams of a hard-hitting aerial offensive against the Reich into a practical reality.
During the crucial years before the D-Day landings in 1944, the nightly Lancaster raids on Nazi Germany effectively formed a second front in Europe alongside the epic struggle by the Soviet Union in the east.
FLyING over 156,000 missions against Germany and its ally Italy, the plane dropped around 608,000 tons of bombs. So bullish at the start of its campaign of European conquest, the Reich was forced on to the defensive by the Lancaster. More than two million Germans were engaged in anti-aircraft duties by early 1944.
yet, as the Dams raid proved, the Lancaster was not just a broadsword. Its finesse meant it could also make pin-point attacks. This is the bomber that sank the German battleship the Tirpitz in November 1944, that destroyed one-third of German submarines in their ports and wrecked the transport system in occupied France in the run-up to D-Day, paralysing the movement of German reinforcements.
Similarly, in August 1943, 324 Lancasters led a devastating raid on the Nazi experimental research station at Peenemunde in the Baltic where the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets were being developed.
Given its role in turning the tide of World War II, it is no exaggeration to describe the Lancaster as by far the most important bomber in the history of the RAF. In fact, Sir Arthur Harris, the tough-minded head of Bomber Command from 1942, once declared that the Lancaster was ‘the greatest single factor in winning the war against Germany’.
The magnificence of the plane lay in its design, which combined a heavyweight punch with speed and manoeuvrability. Harry yates, a pilot with 75 Squadron, said of the plane: ‘Some products of the hand of man have the uncanny capacity to pull at the heart-strings and that Lancaster was one such.
‘Everything about it was just right. Its muscular, swept lines were beautiful to look at. It flew with effortless grace and had a precise weighted feel. It made the pilot’s job easy. you could throw it all over the skies if you had the physical inclination.’ The plane’s agility was all the more surprising because of its size and bomb-loading capacity.
With a maximum weight of over 30 tons, far heavier than the RAF’s previous generation of bombers such as the Wellington and the Hampden, its standard version could lift on average 14,000lb of bombs, though towards the end of the war a specialised version could carry the colossal 22,000lb Grand Slam ‘earthquake’ bomb, the biggest conventional weapon dropped during the conflict.
‘The Lancaster totally transformed the damage that could be done by bombing operations,’ said RAF crewman Bill Burke. When one Lancaster had to land at the U.S. Army Air Force base in Newark, Nottinghamshire, in bad weather, the pilot opened the bomb doors to show Americans the plane’s underside interior.
One looked in awe at its scale, then declared: ‘Goddam, it’s a flying bomb bay’. Some U.S. experts were so impressed that they suggested the Lancaster should be used to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, but in the end the mission fell to the huge B-29 Superfortress.
The Lancaster could not just carry a far heavier load than any of its rivals, but it could also fly much further. It had a range of 2,350 miles, thanks to its six fuel tanks which held 2,154 gallons. Altogether, the Lancaster squadrons used up an astonishing 228 million gallons during wartime sorties.
It also had a stronger armament than any previous British bomber,
provided by eight Browning guns across three powered turrets. Yet its heaviness did not inhibit its speed. Its four reliable Rolls-Royce Merlin engines meant it could travel at 275mph, far faster than most pre-war fighters, as well as reach a ceiling of 24,000ft.
‘The power that surged through the machine was terrific,’ recalled Bomber Command engineer Leonard Miller. The tough airframe could sustain brutal amounts of punishment from enemy fighters and anti-aircraft guns.
Typically, one Lancaster landed after a raid on Homberg in July 1944 with 450 bullet holes and more than 100 shrapnel holes. The same summer Malcolm Hamilton of 617 Squadron managed to bring home his battered Lancaster from a mission to occupied France, in which the plane had been badly hit by flak.
Surveying the extensive damage after Hamilton had made an emergency landing in Kent, a fireman said: ‘God, how the bloody hell did you get this thing back?’
One of the most intriguing aspects of the Lancaster story was that the British government had not initially commissioned the Avro company to build a fourengined heavy bomber. In 1937, the Air Ministry had instructed Avro to design a twin-engined medium bomber capable of fulfilling multiple roles across the world.
One crucial requirement was for the aircraft to have the capacity to carry two torpedoes, which
entailed a long bomb bay. It was further stipulated that Avro would have to use the new, largely untested Rolls-Royce Vulture engines. Meanwhile, the task of creating new four-engined heavy bomber types was in the hands of two other aircraft firms: Shorts, which came up with the Stirling, and Handley Page, which developed the Halifax.
At first, Avro designer Roy Chadwick was enthusiastic about a medium bomber, the Type 679 or Manchester.
The son of a Mancunian engineer, Chadwick had joined Avro in 1911, when he was just 18. Inspired by his fascination with aircraft, he became a qualified pilot and, with his innate technical grasp, he soon rose up the company.
‘Much of his genius lay in his uncanny understanding of the need for perfect control,’ said Avro’s managing director Roy Dobson, who formed a powerful creative partnership with Chadwick.
But by early 1940 it was clear to both men the Manchester would fail, mainly because its Vulture engines were unreliable and provided inadequate power.
CHADwICk, however, had a simple but innovative solution. He proposed adapting the Manchester by the elongation of its wings and the installation of four RollsRoyce Merlins. Apart from the improvement in performance, the advantage of this scheme was that it would not involve much redesign or retooling by Avro.
The Air Ministry, now under the dynamic control of newspaper tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, gave a guarded welcome to the change, not least because the early performances of both the Stirling and the Halifax had proved disappointing. A new weapon to hit back at the Reich was badly needed.
In September 1940, government approval was formally given for the development of the Lancaster prototype, officially named the Type 683. Avro, one of the most efficient aircraft manufacturers in the country, now went to work with urgency. within less than six months, the prototype was ready for its maiden flight. On January 9, 1941, the Lancaster took to the sky for the first time, piloted by Avro’s Sam Brown.
when Brown landed, he was full of praise. ‘It was marvellous — easy to handle and light on the controls,’ he told Chadwick. Dobson was even more ecstatic after the aerial display. ‘Oh boy, oh boy, what an aeroplane! what a piece of work!’ he declared.
The Air Ministry, more concerned than ever about the ineffectiveness of Bomber Command, were almost as excited, ordering 450 before the official trails were completed. The first Lancasters went into service with 44 Squadron at RAF waddington, Lincolnshire, before the end of the year.
Pip Beck, a telephone operator at the base, described her reaction to the arrival of the first of the new bombers. ‘I stared in astonishment at this formidable and beautiful aircraft, cockpit as high as the balcony on which I stood and a great spread of wings with four enormous engines. Its lines were sleek and graceful, yet there was an enormous feeling of power about it. It looked so right after the clumsiness of the Manchester.’
with the arrival of the Lancaster, the RAF’s bombing war now started in earnest. Under Harris’s uncompromising command, it was a fight waged with ruthlessness, as shown in the assaults on cities such as Hamburg in July 1943, which left 45,000 Germans dead, and Dresden in February 1945, where around 25,000 were killed.
Harris had no doubts about the morality of campaign, given the savage nature of the Nazi enemy. ‘They have sewn the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind,’ he had said in November 1940 at the height of the Blitz.
The Lancaster enabled him to fulfil that prophecy. But the bombing campaign was also fought with extraordinary heroism by RAF airmen in the face of overwhelming odds.
Of the 125,000 men who served in Bomber Command, half did not survive the war.
In total, 7,377 Lancasters were produced. Almost half, 3,349, were shot down or destroyed in action. Even the troops on the western Front during world war I did not suffer such appalling rates of attrition.
There were few more terrifying combat experiences in the European war than to be part of the seven-strong crew in a Lancaster on a bombing run, under the lethal attention of German fighters, anti-aircraft guns and searchlights. One airman said it was like ‘entering the jaws of hell’. Another said that when a German searchlight found his bomber: ‘Its blinding power flooded the cockpit bluish white, the colour of fear.’
Yet hardly any Lancaster airmen deserted their posts. On the contrary, the plane’s crews were often distinguished by their almost superhuman bravery.
Leonard Cheshire — later to win renown as a campaigner for the disabled — won the Victoria Cross for his feat of flying more than 100 combat missions, many of them as the leader of the Pathfinder Force which had the dangerous task of laying down incendiary target indicators to guide the main bombing formation behind.
BILL REID was another VC. Flying towards Dusseldorf on the night of November 3, 1943, his Lancaster came under a wave of attacks from German fighters, which left him severely injured, two of his comrades dead and his plane crippled.
Yet he carried on another 200 miles over German territory and managed to drop his bombs on the target before limping back to England. ‘His tenacity and devotion to duty were beyond praise,’ read his VC citation.
After 1945, the Lancaster lived on in RAF service for more than a decade, mainly in maritime reconnaissance, until it was finally retired in 1956.
Its contribution to the war effort could never be forgotten. One of the Luftwaffe’s top fighter pilots, wolfgang Falck, admitted that the influence of the Lancaster had been decisive.
‘It didn’t only make the fighting more difficult,’ he said. ‘It was the beginning of the end as far as I could see.
‘The Lancaster had a longer range, it could fly for a longer period of time, it could carry more bombs and it had good protection. That’s why our losses became so high and that’s when we began to feel the superiority of the RAF.’
Spitfire: portrait Of A Legend, by Leo McKinstry, £12.99, John Murray.