Bomber Boys

Between 1939 and 1945,

125,000 young men faced the most dangerous task

of any British serviceman in the war.

They suffered the highest casualty rates.

Nearly half of them, 55,000, were killed.

It looks like hell. And you really think this is going to be it.

They were the bomber crews, who took on Hitler when airpower was the only way of striking back at Nazi Germany.

We were involved in total war. We were involved in fighting for our lives.

I'm Ewan McGregor, and this is my brother, Colin.

We've always had a fascination with the Royal Air Force during the Second World War.

Last year we made a documentary about the Battle of Britain.

But we wanted to know what happened next.

The few had saved us from invasion, and the RAF was already building a huge force

that would take the fight over into Germany.

And that force was Bomber Command, and during my career in the RAF, I, too, was a bomber pilot.

I flew this supersonic Tornado, unlike my predecessors,

who flew the legendary Lancaster,

and I'm going to get the chance to see if I can fly the last remaining Lancaster in Britain.

The pilot was one of a team of seven who lived, fought and often died together.

I'm going to explore what it was like to be part of this band of brothers in the air.

Their story is one of endurance, teamwork and understated heroism.

No, I'd never flown before. Hadn't even driven a motor car before.

You'd got a job on.

And that's what you just did, you just sat there and did it.

But it's also a story that is dogged by controversy.

Despite the undoubted heroism,

the men of Bomber Command found themselves to be ignored after the war.

The massive attacks on Hamburg and Dresden killed thousands of civilians

and were judged by many to be unnecessary.

There was a war on, and we had to win,

because God knows how it would have turned out if we hadn't have won.

In 1940, the RAF's fighters repelled invasion in the Battle of Britain.

But the German Luftwaffe continued to bomb Britain's cities in the Blitz.

And with the British army defeated at Dunkirk,

Prime Minster Winston Churchill identified the only way to hit back.

"Our supreme effort must be to gain overwhelming mastery of the air.

The fighters are our salvation, but the bombers alone provide us the means of victory."

Winston Churchill, 1940.

And one aircraft, more than any other, symbolises that struggle for victory.

RAF Coningsby in Lincolnshire is home to the last flying Lancaster Bomber in Britain.

It's maintained by the RAF's Battle of Britain Memorial Flight.

Squadron Leader Ian Smith is its guardian.

She is one of two airworthy Lancasters in the world.

There's only two left flying?

Yeah. And the other one's in Canada.

-And here she is, in all her glory.

-Wow! Absolutely incredible.

-Isn't she stunning?

-Yeah. So many would they have built then?

-7,377 Lancasters were built.

-Yeah.

But circa three and a half thousand were shot down over Germany.

Lancaster was the best aircraft ever during the war.

It could hold a very big bomb load,

it could take a lot of punishment,

and it was a real pleasure to fly.

Four beautiful Rolls Royce Merlin engines at the age of 22?

Who wouldn't enjoy that?

Ah, a fantastic aeroplane, beautiful.

She was a real lady.

And like all ladies,

if you treat them right, they go!

The Lancaster carried the heaviest bomb load of any bomber in the war.

It meant there was little space inside.

Mind your head.

And what will be transparent straight away is just how,

despite the fact that it's an enormous aeroplane.

-Yeah.

-Just how little room there is in here.

Just think, you're just in normal gear here.

-Imagine you had a flying kit on.

-Yeah.

I can't actually do it with my jeans, cos they are slightly too tight anyway.

Imagine with a flying jacket on.

It's all very well doing it in daylight,

but if this aeroplane was on fire, spinning out of control in the dark,

it would be a bit of a challenge, wouldn't it?

Ah, just a bit!

God!

Oh yeah, look at this.

Oh, it's incredibly open at the side, it's amazing.

This is exactly as she would have been when she was flying in wartime.

-All these instruments are original, are they?

-Yeah, absolutely.

So, the pilot, the captain of the aeroplane would have sat

in the left hand seat in front of you, Ewan,

and this is the bullet proof plate here at the back there,

which would have protected him to some degree.

You've got a really good view and all the rest of it,

but it does feel very vulnerable, doesn't it?

You do feel really vulnerable up here.

I mean this is, literally, only three eights of an inch Perspex,

and the side of the walls of the aeroplane is two millimetres of aluminium,

which won't stop anything.

To realise my dream of piloting this precious and iconic aircraft,

I need to train first on some other heavy planes from the era.

The roar of a wartime Spitfire heralds the arrival of the man

the RAF trusts to supervise that training.

This fellow taxiing in in his Spitfire now is your instructor.

Oh right!

And he's going to take you through the training

-for you to be able to see what the boys went through to fly the Lancaster.

-OK.

Making this dramatic entrance is Air Marshall Cliff Spink, a former RAF pilot.

He's an expert on Second World War planes, and recently taught me to fly the Spitfire.

-Hello!

-Hello!

There's a pilot we recognise.

They told me that the McGregors were here,

so I thought I'd better come and make sure you didn't get up to any mischief.

-Good to see you again.

-Good to see you, Colin.

Going to see if you remembered all that you learned last year.

Yeah, exactly, yeah. I'm going to have to shift my view a little higher up next, I think.

Last summer, Cliff guided me through the basic training all wartime RAF pilots experienced

before I was allowed to pilot a single-engine Spitfire.

But this time, I'll have to master a two-engine World War Two transport plane

before I'm allowed to pilot the four-engine Lancaster.

For me, as a member of 617 Squadron, it's probably the greatest privilege that you could ever get

just to fly a Lancaster, so, you know, certainly a career-long ambition of mine to do.

The Lancaster would become the most successful bomber of the war,

but it only came into service two and a half years into the conflict.

In the early days of World War Two, Bomber Command was ineffective.

Its force of just 280 light bombers, flying in daylight, sustained losses of up to 50%.

In one disastrous attack on Alburgh in Denmark, all eleven planes were shot down.

Then, on November 14th 1940,

a German night raid on Coventry showed the RAF how to bomb effectively.

Steven Bungay, an expert on the Air War, has brought us to look at newsreel of the attack.

-NEWSREEL:

-All the available German night bombers were put into the air.

On the night of November 14th, a million pounds of bombs were dropped on the city.

It was the most devastating raid of the war so far.

Coventry was smashed as bad as Warsaw and Rotterdam.

60,000 buildings were destroyed, and 568 civilians lost their lives.

Coventry was a centre of aircraft manufacture,

but instead of targeting just the factories, the Luftwaffe chose to flatten the whole city.

-Incredible.

-Yeah.

The mass grave and things, I had never seen that, I didn't know that went on.

What the Germans achieved in Coventry was a concentration of bombing.

It wasn't just scattering things over quite a wide area.

And that's very important for the consequences that the RAF drew from this.

They realised that if you had some specialists using specialised equipment,

which we didn't have at the time but quickly started to develop,

then you could achieve concentration.

And concentration had a big impact.

Bomber Command now knew what it had to do.

If it couldn't hit individual factories,

it would destroy everything around them in concentrated raids.

This became known as area bombing.

The objective was industrial disruption.

By destroying infrastructure, simply the means that people use to get to

work in the morning, you can produce a dip in industrial production.

The targets were the major German industrial cities,

like Berlin and Hamburg,

and the manufacturing heartland of the Ruhr.

But it would take nearly two years before Bomber Command could put its plan into action.

If I'm going to fly the Lancaster by the end of the week, I'll have to start my training.

So I've come to White Waltham, a former RAF base, to learn on this wartime Dakota.

My supervisor, Cliff, is hooking me up with Kath Burnham.

Hi, Kath.

She's one of only two qualified Dakota instructors in the country.

-Nice to meet you.

-Colin McGregor.

-He's your new student.

-Very good.

I hope he doesn't let me down. He flew the Tiger Moth and the Harvard and the Spitfire last year.

I hate him already(!) Yeah. Go on.

-Back on the heavy metal now.

-Great stuff.

-So, best of luck and I'll see you tomorrow.

-Yeah, cheers.

-Shall we go in?

-Yeah, let's do it.

This is a pretty solid old aeroplane, the DC-3.

It's excellent for him to get a feel for that,

before he gets on to something which is extra tonnage of the Lancaster.

That's it.

Now I've got Kath next to me, and I've got to make sure that when she asks me to do something

I do it correctly.

It's going to have to happen like that, so I'm quite nervous about it.

He's asking all the right questions, it's always a good start.

And, um, looking a little bit apprehensive, I think.

You tell me it's turning.

This World War Two veteran is so unlike the type of plane

I fly today in my job as a commercial pilot.

And even though it needs Kath to help me get it off the ground,

I'm going to have my hands full piloting this beast.

Cliff will be passing a critical eye over the proceedings.

If I shout "bird" just put your hands over your eyes. This is glass.

OK, it'll smash, yeah.

Now, after all the pre-flight checks, it's time for the real test.

Take off.

There's so much to concentrate on.

It's so difficult to control this type of plane on the ground.

I'm straining to keep it on a straight track.

Oh, yes!

Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo! That was nice.

That looked all right, didn't it? Nice and straight.

Cor, sounds amazing, doesn't it sound brilliant, that plane?

He's a very good pilot, of course, one of the best.

It's hard to describe what it feels like.

It's like driving a vintage bus with manual gears, after being used to a modern sports car.

That was good. To me, anyway. When you're in the back of a big aeroplane like this,

you sense the yaw, and he was not paddling too much,

which suggests he was keeping it reasonably straight.

I've been flying for more than 20 years and this tough.

It makes you think about those 18-year-old trainees flying

a monster like this for the first time.

Attention!

At RAF flying schools, potential pilots were cherry-picked from the raw recruits.

The remaining volunteers went on to specialise in other crew disciplines.

All pilot recruits were then sent abroad to one of the 333 Empire air training schools.

They were scattered throughout the British Empire.

18-year-old Desmond Pelly went straight from Charterhouse School to learn to fly in Canada.

Canada, of course, happened to be an extremely good place for training.

Because there were no blackout conditions,

and you flew in completely peacetime conditions,

which was wonderful.

Reg Barker was just 19.

To be up in the sky, on your own, in a beautiful aeroplane,

with the freedom of the sky.

Oh, fantastic. What a privilege it was.

No, I'd never flown before. Hadn't even driven a motor car before.

-Remind me when you take flat one again?

-With the gear.

-With the gear, so that's already done.

-That's it, yeah.

So when you're at final and you're stable...

On my training flight in the skies above Berkshire,

I'm still wrestling with this demanding twin-engine workhorse.

But now I've got the measure of the controls I'm really enjoying it. This is real, physical flying.

He's on final approach. They've got the gear down.

So, as you can see, he's working pretty hard.

What I'm nervous about now is getting this plane back onto the bumpy grass runway.

The tricky part is stopping it swerving on landing.

OK, this is the big moment, let's see if he does it.

-Bingo!

-And take the flap down. Busy with your feet. OK, pop the tail down.

-Now the fun really starts, is keeping it straight.

-Well done!

-That was, that was very good.

-Good man.

He's just trying to show me up now.

Landing's one thing, but with a tail will aeroplane,

the next thing is keeping it straight.

Where is it? There. Ooh!

KATH LAUGHS

You did that on purpose!

I didn't kill anybody!

Yeah, well done. Mind the little red sign.

Yeah, got it. I think we'll quite while we're ahead, shall we?

KATH LAUGHS

Woo-hoo-hoo!

All right Colin?

Good job!

I'm a bit sweaty! It was hard work.

Considering you've never flown one at all, ever, I think not too bad, eh?

-It was very good.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How does it feel, what does it feel like to fly?

-It's beautiful in the air, it's really solid, you know?

-Yeah.

I mean you, like you say, you've gotta come in and command it,

you've gotta, you know, tell it where you want it to go.

Before I finally get my hands on the Lancaster, Cliff has a much tougher task up his sleeve.

If you went to the cinema in 1941 you'd have believed that the bombing campaign was going very well.

Let go of a thousand pound, Mick.

Bomber Command had switched to night-time raids,

and the crews were reporting that they were hitting their targets.

I got a ghoul there with the last one!

Good man. Make a Nazi cigar.

But Prime Minister Winston Churchill was about to discover the shocking truth.

At the National Archives in Kew, I'm meeting archivist Jessica Lutkin,

who's going to show me what was really going on in 1941.

Right, this is an important document for the history of Bomber Command and it was written in 1941,

and it's an analysis of the success rate

of the bombing campaigns that went on over in Germany.

It was the first scientific report that was done, so the first time they had statistics.

Before that, it was just the crews reporting back and saying whether they'd hit target or not.

How did they gather that evidence? How did they get scientific evidence?

They used photographs. They used photographs on the undercarriages of the planes

that would take pictures of when the bombs were set off,

and from those photographs, they could then write a report.

I want to make a sort of snooker joke but I can't think of one.

"For those of you watching in black and white, the pink is next to the blue."

Right. So, let me turn to a report for you. So there you are.

"An examination of night photographs taken during night bombing in June and July

points to the following conclusions.

Of the aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within five miles.

And over Germany as a whole, the proportion was only one in four.

And over the Ruhr, it was only one in ten."

-Yes.

-Does that mean only one in ten got over the target?

Or the bombs dropped hit the target?

Only one in ten actually reached the target.

So what would the reaction have been when this report was read by the top brass?

And what was, what was the reaction to it?

It was shock. It was simple shock.

They couldn't believe just how bad things were.

Wow!

Surprising to see how ineffective the bombing campaign was early on.

And clearly to Churchill, and to the powers that be at the time, that it was so ineffective.

And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how they put that right,

what they put in place to try and improve matters.

For Churchill, the answer was simple.

Bomber command needed a complete overhaul, and he started at the top.

In February 1942, Arthur Harris was appointed its new Commander-in-chief.

We're meeting author Patrick Bishop to find out more about Harris.

The one name that keeps cropping up during our journey through this research is Bomber Harris.

Well, Bomber Harris was the name that the general public knew him by,

but among his peers he was Burt Harris,

and to his men he was Butch.

He had a bristly little moustache that gave him this air of porcine belligerence,

and you crossed him at your peril.

But what he did have was enormous drive and enormous energy and enormous confidence,

and he brought all those qualities to Bomber Command.

He arrived at a good time,

these big four-engined bombers were just arriving at the squadrons,

and he turned these heavy bombers into weapons of mass destruction.

I mean, you can date from his arrival,

the time when things start getting very unpleasant for the Germans.

Was he liked, do you think, by the crews?

I think he was respected enormously.

And they, I think, understood what it was that he was doing,

and the fact that their lives were being put on the line,

I think they, they understood that that's what had to be done.

I mean, hard men are needed in wartime, and he was certainly that.

Harris had an unflinching belief that bombing alone could win the war. And he didn't mince his words.

"The Nazis entered this war

under the rather childish delusion

that they were going to bomb everybody else

and nobody was going to bomb them.

At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places,

they put that rather naive theory into operation.

They have sewed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

That whirlwind had four engines and it was called the Lancaster.

With a top speed of nearly 300 miles an hour, it was faster than any of its predecessors.

It also carried the biggest bomb load of any aircraft in the war.

-COMMENTARY:

-It's 33 ft long. When it's released its load,

another two or three acres of Germany will never be the same again.

Harris now had the weapon he needed.

He placed it at the centre of his plans to build a huge force

that he believed could break the Germans by area bombing alone.

He dreamed of assembling a thousand bombers for a single raid,

so he doggedly pursued the Air Ministry to build more planes.

The drive to get the new heavy bombers out of the factory demanded a huge workforce.

I'm meeting Susan Jones, who, as a teenager,

worked as a riveter on the new, state-of-the-art Lancaster.

So Sue, this is the first time you've seen your plane for a little while, isn't it?

-It's so emotional. You know, I could just cry now, looking at her.

-Yeah.

She's absolutely brilliant.

How long did you build these planes for?

Five years.

-From what age?

-16.

-16.

-Regular nights. Seven at night to seven in the morning.

-For five years?

-Five years. Happiest days of my life.

Oh, they were brilliant.

These four-engine bombers were affectionately known

as 10,000 rivets flying in close formation.

-You hold it upright, go on.

-Yep.

And then I'll hold onto the back, and then when I call "rivet",

-just give it a couple of seconds on the gun.

-Just a touch.

Rivet!

That's it.

-There we go. That's one done.

-That's it?

-Yeah.

-OK, let's have another go.

Oooh, you'll have to be quicker than that.

Rivet!

-There we go.

-That's a good rivet, though, no?

-Let me see.

-Yeah, it's not bad.

-Can you get that underneath there?

-Yeah.

-Oh sorry, I didn't wait for your command, I beg your pardon.

-Oh!

That will definitely not pass inspection!

I think you should have a go.

-It's a bit heavy for me, this one.

-OK, I'll hold it with you.

Right.

Rivet!

-There we go.

-OK.

-Oh, that's a professional one, you see!

That's a real pro, that one.

Think I'll get a job here?

In 1942, 700 of the revolutionary new Lancasters

were delivered to frontline bases.

The Lancaster was, you know,

something else. It was a real war machine,

it looked the part.

It's still, to me, a powerful, powerful machine,

I'm very proud, you know, I was associated with it.

Whatever manoeuvre you wanted it

to do, it did. It did. It did.

Brilliant.

You felt comfortable in it.

It could take a lot of punishment.

It could fly on two engines

and one side quite easily.

In fact, I do know of one chap

who brought a Lancaster all the way back from Germany

on one engine.

To fly the new bombers, trainees were pouring out of the flying schools.

And it wasn't just the pilots.

Each Lancaster needed six more crew members. Two gunners, the flight engineer,

the navigator, the bomb aimer, and the wireless operator.

Bomber command was also a multi-national force.

One in four of its recruits came from overseas. All were volunteers.

In a wartime hangar, wireless operator John de Hoop recalls

the reasons he joined up when he was just 18.

One, you got more money.

Two, you got sheets with your blankets,

-which I thought was so civilised.

-Yeah.

Three, you were given a pair of shoes and a pair of boots,

rather than two pairs of boots, I hated wearing boots.

And fourthly, because once you'd got your wing,

using a colloquial term of the time, it pulled in the birds.

COLIN LAUGHS

The process of turning the individuals into a team was known as crewing up.

This wasn't the usual hierarchical military process.

It was rather more democratic.

Looking back, it seemed a bit chaotic,

because you'd be put in a hangar and they said,

"Right, get on with it, get crewed up", and closed the doors.

So you were stuck in a great big room.

Full of pilots and navigators,

bomb aimers, wireless operators

and two gunners.

And told yourself, get yourself crewed up.

You stand around wondering what's going to happen next, who should you go with?

And this chap came up, he was obviously older than we,

and he said, "I'm a rear gunner," he said, "Are you two chaps looking for a crew?"

We said, "Yeah, yes we are." And he said, "Well I've found a pilot.

I've questioned him, and he told me he had a crash while he was training,

so I think he'll be bloody all right in future, he'll do for us!"

So I said, "Well, OK, that suits us." So off we went.

So that was the crew!

This was a remarkable mixing of classes,

ages and nationalities, unthinkable before the war.

A crew might consist of a former public schoolboy,

a London docker, a farmer from New Zealand and a Canadian bank clerk.

All of a sudden, we became blood brothers.

We helped each other out in everything. And we were a good team.

If we hadn't have been I wouldn't be here today.

The one thing that I remember with some emotion is the fact

that in the billet, sharing with another crew, all Kiwis,

and I recall both crews went on an operation,

and when we came back all their kit had gone, and bed stripped,

and I remember sitting on our beds and being quite shattered

by this experience of losing these guys who'd been with us.

So we did what most blokes would do in that case,

there's only one thing to do, go down the pub and get sozzled.

The crews were now setting out nightly in the new four-engine bombers

to carry out Harris's grand plan of defeating Germany by area bombing alone.

A mission could last up to ten hours,

targeting industrial centres deep in the heart of Germany.

The telephone perhaps would ring.

Then the Flight Commander would call "That's it, boys! It's on."

Then there'd be a deadly hush.

That meant that night, we were going to be on ops.

We would disappear up to the mess for your meal,

always eggs and bacon and sausage, a bit of fried bread.

Then you would go up to the briefing room and there

they would draw back the curtain and you could see where your target was.

Then there'd be a big "ohh!" if it was, you know, a long one.

Once the planes were loaded up with bombs and fuel, the crews were ready to go.

Once you got on the end of a runway to take off,

then the tension was really wound up.

There was no talking at all. None.

You waited for a green aldis lamp, and you took off and saw them waving to you to take off.

Used to think, "Am I going to be back here in a few hours' time?"

Navigator Douglas Hudson recalls an extraordinary moment

just as his bomber force headed out across the North Sea.

There was a flight of German bombers coming almost on the reciprocal,

on the opposite track.

So the skipper said, don't do anything unless they do.

And you know what they did? They just gave us a wing salute.

And they went on to bomb Goole. And we went on to bomb Stuttgart.

The crews would have to remain alert for many hours,

and something stronger than coffee was on offer.

Amphetamine pills.

They gave us wakey-wakey tablets.

Well, we used to call them wakey-wakey tablets!

Personally, myself, I never, ever took them.

I used to stick mine with a bit of chewing gum on the side,

to the inside of the rear turret, you know?

I only did it once. I didn't need them again.

I was wound up before I went anyway, like the seven in the crew.

Stan Bradford was a mid-upper gunner. He's also a decorated ace.

He shot down five German fighters.

Never, ever, ever in my life was I ever comfortable. No. No.

Frightened to death.

And anybody that says he wasn't, well, he's a bloody liar.

The crews were about to run the gauntlet of the German air defences.

Back at White Waltham, I'm ready for the next stage of my training on another Dakota.

It brings me one step closer to flying the Lancaster.

And Cliff wants to use the flight to give me a flavour

of how difficult the most basic navigation task was during World War Two.

I've plotted the course and I need Colin to fly at a set speed to get to the destination on time.

-So, what sort of speed do I need to fly?

-120.

-120 what?

-120 knots.

-Knots?

-Knots.

No, this is in miles per hour.

-It is.

-Is it?

-Yeah.

Well, we've worked it all out in nautical miles.

I'm not mucking around, man. It's in miles an hour?

What's the speed dials in this one?

Miles an hour.

-That's what I thought.

-OK.

-Can you manage that conversion?

I don't know how to convert it. What is the conversion?

Were you not taught? What, come on, basics!

What are the basics? Go on, how do you convert it from knots to miles then?

Well, I'll just have to fly 138 miles per hour.

-And that will equal 120 knots.

-Is that right?

-Yeah.

OK, good, good, good on you! No-one told me about the nautical miles.

Thankfully World War Two navigators were better informed.

It's properly exciting to be here.

I'm a bit nervous about the navigation, but we'll just have to see how that goes.

But it is unbelievably exciting to be in this aeroplane.

Yeah, maybe we'll end up somewhere fancy in Normandy or something, and we can have a crepe!

Modern planes have GPS, radar and air traffic control.

But all trainee navigators had was a map, a compass and a watch.

First, Cliff wants me to navigate south to a point on the Isle of Wight.

This is exactly the kind of training trip a new crew would have undertaken.

INAUDIBLE RADIO CHATTER

What I need to do now is use landmarks along the way to make sure I'm on course and on time.

You should be crossing a road.

Yeah, I've got a main road we're just crossing now. It's quite heavily wooded.

Bang on. Well done, pilot!

But after a good start, I think I may have lost an entire town.

You wouldn't happen to know where Haslemere is, sir, would you?

-No, no, I'm not a navigator here.

-Haslemere?

How big is it? Well there's a town there, just west of the nose. Looks quite big.

-We are three minutes to target, three minutes.

-OK.

-A little bit over to the right, Colin. Two degrees.

-Good man. You've got it, you've got it.

And we're coming a little...the target's just a little way to the right there, Colin,

that building on the...

The building, is it? All right. Just here.

-Bugger me, Ewan, you've found it!

-Yeah.

Yeah. There you go, smack over the top. Well done, mate.

-Going out to there now. Target now.

-Yep.

We've reached the first destination. Not bad for a beginner.

When we were flying the Lancaster,

my Canadian navigator was able

to produce a fix every six minutes

throughout the flight,

which I think was a tremendous achievement of concentration,

in order that we would arrive at our target dead on the time that

we'd been instructed to arrive.

Look at that, dead on, zero nine zero. Very nice, pilot, carry on.

Now for the tricky part.

Cliff wants to take me on a simulated bombing run over water.

It's the closest I'll get to night flying. So, no landmarks to help me at all.

Target's just on the left there, captain.

Right, so that's the lighthouse, is it?

There it is, my destination. The lighthouse at Beachy Head.

Ah, we're going to be over it, but we're going to be one...

Going to be a bit early, I think.

Maybe a little early, yeah. One minute now. So.

We've got to the target a minute early.

60 seconds that mark the difference between success and failure.

In a night bombing run, we would have dropped our bombs into the darkness.

We're going over the top now.

On a raid to Berlin, we would have overshot by a disastrous 20 miles.

But navigating at night wasn't the only problem the bomber crews faced.

As they crossed the North Sea, they were picked up by German radar.

The closer they got to their destination,

the more intense the searchlights and the flak from the anti-aircraft guns.

We were caught in searchlights and they had us for 35 minutes.

Now, you could guarantee, basically, that if you were caught

in searchlights, you could say goodnight, nurse, that was your lot.

But fortunately for us, we came through it.

The Germans had the ideal anti-aircraft weapon in the 88mm gun.

Thousands were diverted from the Russian front to stop the RAF getting through.

You can view the target on flames and surrounded by millions of shell bursts.

It looks like hell.

And you really think

that this is going to be it.

To overwhelm the enemy's defences, the bombers travelled through

the target area in a tightly packed bomber stream.

It meant there was always the danger of mid-air collision.

Another Lancaster came out from our starboard side

and stuck his wing tip straight into us.

Just under the mid-upper turret.

There was, putting it crudely, a bloody big bang.

Even though the tail of the aircraft was close to breaking away,

Dave refused to abandon his position.

The skipper said to me, "Well David, you can bail out if you wish."

We could still have been attacked by enemy aircraft.

My turret was still operational. So why should I jump out?

What, leave my mates?

If the plane made it to the target,

then the most dangerous part of all. The bombing run itself.

The pilot had to fly straight and level, no matter what.

You say bombs away, and you could also look into the bomb bay

from the bomb aimer's position to make sure they've all gone.

And if they have, close the bomb doors

and then the pilot gets out of the trouble.

Then the aircraft lifted,

having got rid of the weight,

we were all very relieved,

shut the bomb doors,

and away we went for home.

Bomber Harris was a man in a hurry.

By May 1942, just three months into the job,

he mustered enough resources to unleash 1,000 bombers in a single raid.

The target was Cologne.

The first wave was so successful,

that by the time the second wave took off they didn't need their navigators.

"Before we crossed the English coast,

the skipper said to the navigator,

"I think I can see a red glow in the sky.

It's a long, long way away."

The navigator replied, "That's Cologne.

You don't need me any more, just head for it."

We could actually see Cologne burning from England.

Looking out, it was just a small red glow on the horizon.

When we got there, the whole place was a sea of fire

and we dropped out bombs into the middle of it.

It was a piece of cake really.

The raid destroyed 2,500 industrial buildings.

It killed 469 civilians and bombed more than 40,000 out of their homes.

It shook the Nazi high command so much that Cologne survivors

were ordered to remain silent about the devastation on pain of death.

For Harris, it was confirmation that his masterplan would work.

There are a lot of people who say that bombing can never win a war.

Well, my answer to that is that it has never been tried yet,

and we shall see.

Soon, the Ruhr, Essen, Berlin

and countless other cities were

the targets of area bombing, being hit night after night.

The bomber crews were now undertaking large-scale

raids into the heart of Germany.

They were often flying twice a week to targets up to six hours away.

And with US entry into the war in January 1942,

Bomber Command now had a formidable ally.

In the summer, the US began to bomb by day.

It meant the Allies could hit German war industry around the clock.

But there was a price to pay.

The German defences were becoming ever more deadly.

A Lancaster lasted for, on average, just seven missions over Germany.

Only one in six of the crews was expected to survive a tour of 30 operations.

The biggest threat was German night fighters.

The tail gunners were the bomber's first line of defence.

Learning how to hit a fast moving fighter plane involved constant practise.

87-year-old Dave Fellowes wants to show Colin and I how he did it.

So you did use clay pigeon shooting as, you know, these clays as practise, didn't you?

We did, a lot. Right from the very elementary gunnery school.

Because it was the best way of teaching deflection,

and also your line of sight.

Pull.

Gunners were given a regular allocation of clays, so that they continued to practise.

Pull.

18 inches ahead.

Oh, dear.

< Try a bit more over towards me.

Try a bit more up in the air.

I feel the fraternal competition kind of starting to swell.

Pull.

It's hard to hit these fast-moving clays.

Pull.

Shooting down night fighters must have been infinitely more difficult.

OK!

Really close.

Ha-ha-ha!

From going through the training,

to actually flying in the rear turret there for a real mission must have been a big, big difference.

-I had eyes sticking out like organ stops.

-Did you?

Looking for an aeroplane that was an enemy one.

Up!

-Cor, he's right in there, isn't he?

-He's right quick, isn't he?

-Oh, you got a bit off the side of that one.

-Yeah. We winged it.

You winged it, you definitely winged that last one there.

Having trained with a shotgun, Dave then had to master the .303 calibre machine gun.

Armourer David Main wants to show us how effective they were.

-Ready?

-OK.

-OK.

I'm shooting at metal plate the same thickness as the armour on a German night fighter.

OK, Ewan, in your own time, go on.

OK. Clear.

-This was protection for the pilot and air crew.

-Yeah.

Usually round his seat.

And it's actually failed to penetrate in the armour piercing or the ball.

-Oh, yeah, yeah. The ball didn't go through.

-No.

-And the armour piercing sort of didn't go through either.

-No.

It broke the back but it didn't go through.

More than survivable, that kind of thing.

Dave's chance of shooting the aircraft down was purely

hitting a fuel line, a hydraulics line, or a control service.

That is the only thing that was going to bring that aircraft down using a .303.

The tail gunner strikes me as the loneliest and toughest job of all.

I want to get some sense of what it was like for Dave, aged just 19.

So, I'm going to squeeze into a Lancaster turret, wearing all

the gear he wore to withstand the sub-zero temperatures.

That would shut behind me.

That's quite weird.

I mean that is quite, that's quite a claustrophobic feeling.

So, that's your world, now. For nine hours or more, this is my world.

Well, if we'd have had a thermometer in there, it would never have got above zero, that's for sure.

It was cold.

It was no good taking a flask,

because at around 20-odd thousand feet or more it used to freeze up anyhow.

They gave you a bar of chocolate, but that froze so hard you couldn't even chew it.

You couldn't stand, couldn't do anything.

All you could do is move like this. That's all you could do.

It's difficult enough getting in,

but getting out in a hurry was another thing altogether.

So, if I had to bale out of this, my parachute's out there.

OK, I would have to turn the turret into this position,

so the doors were there.

I'd have to open the doors like this.

This is when it gets a bit stuck.

I'd have to lean back,

grab my parachute here, off that,

and get it back here, clip my parachute on,

then I'd have to turn the turret round so that my back was

outside here, and then fall backwards out, into the night.

And if the plane was on fire, or if the plane was in a spin,

which it often was, it would be, I mean, almost impossible, I think.

Which is why so many of the poor rear gunners didn't make it,

you know, they didn't get out.

I knew where my parachute was.

If the skipper gave the orders to bale out, I knew exactly what to do.

We had an attitude in our aircraft, in our crew,

if the aeroplane stays up there, we stay with the aeroplane.

Simple as that.

"From my mother's sleep I fell into the state,

"and I hunched

"in its belly

"till my wet fur froze.

"Six miles from Earth,

"loosed from its dream

"of life,

"I woke to black flack and the nightmare fighters."

"And when I died, they washed me out of the turret with a hose."

With limited firepower, the crews employed another tactic to avoid German night fighters.

The corkscrew.

This was a series of fast dives and climbs more suited to a fighter.

But the brilliant Lancaster was more than up to it.

If your gunner suddenly said

"Corkscrew port",

you went right the way,

turned it, right down

like that, you screwed around

at the bottom, you went up the gauge,

screwed over the top and down.

And you can imagine the strain on that aircraft.

And with a full bomb load on, you were doing this sort of thing.

We were attacked four times on one night by fighters.

And we escaped from them every single time by corkscrewing.

But the corkscrew was only useful if you could see the enemy coming.

In 1943, crews reported seeing other planes blow up in mid-air for no apparent reason.

The Luftwaffe had developed a new deadly secret weapon,

known, rather bizarrely, as jazz music.

Schraege Musik.

German night fighter pilots realised

that the bombers had a blind spot,

namely underneath.

They were able to come up underneath,

and they had a couple of guns pointing up at an angle through the cockpit.

The bomber they were attacking wouldn't see them,

it wouldn't hear them.

The first thing they would know is there'd be cannon shells

ripping through the aircraft from beneath.

If the thing was below you firing this jazz music cannon, there was no way out.

One of the pilots who used this deadly weapon was Rolf Ebhart.

He flew the Messerschmitt 110, hunting down British bombers.

He shot down eight.

Tell us about the first time you engaged a Lancaster.

I saw it about 120 yards higher.

So I was shaking and my heart was throbbing, of course.

And I said to me, "Don't miss, don't miss, so I positioned myself under the Lancaster,

and not thinking that the Lancaster

was on the flight to the target,

so it had all the bombs in,

I aimed in the middle of the fuselage

and the thing exploded after a second.

And the result was I couldn't see anything any more,

I was so blinded, for about five minutes, then slowly the sight came back.

Rolf was so close to his victims that he was able to record their serial numbers in his logbook.

Abschluss, Lancaster. Abschluss, Lancaster.

I've got the code number from some of them.

It was a third, Halifax.

And here, three in one night, within 15 minutes.

The new upward firing cannon meant that in 1943,

the night fighters were accounting for 70% of Bomber Command losses.

One man lived to tell his story of this invisible enemy.

Reg Barker's Lancaster was torn apart by Schraege Musik.

His plane went into an uncontrollable dive and Reg began to black out.

I couldn't move a little finger, even,

I was pinned up against the canopy of the roof, the roof canopy of the cockpit.

And I could see the fires burning below,

the fires that we'd started in Kiel.

And it was quite evident that it would only be seconds,

perhaps, before we hit the earth.

Then suddenly it, all was peace. All went quiet.

Had I arrived in the place, in the heavenly abode

to which, no doubt, the Almighty had intended? I don't know.

Suddenly there was a swishing sound,

which I realised afterwards

was the wind tearing through my clothes.

I was out in the sky, I wasn't in the cockpit any more.

How that happened really is only a matter of conjecture.

And I could see my aircraft coming down beside me,

very much ablaze, of course.

The parachute opened and I could see below me the trees of a wood,

floodlit by the flaming aircraft.

At that moment, I dropped into the treetops.

So that was a miraculous escape.

Reg spent the rest of the conflict as a prisoner of war.

So these are my identity tags, dog tags as we called them.

One was my RAF officer's tag,

and the other one is the one issued to me by the Germans

when I became a guest of the Nazis.

Stalag Luft 1, it says. 5182, that's me.

The nightly dice with death was a horrendous strain for the young men of Bomber Command.

Gunner Stan Bradford remembers a crew-member who cracked up on a mission.

During one trip, we had a problem with our engineer.

To this day, Stan won't reveal his name.

There was no Ginger. I'm not letting his name out.

Ginger, he was ginger haired.

And Ginger, he wasn't available.

He was hiding behind the pilot's seat.

He was just took away. We never saw him again.

Your documents would be stamped LMF, lack of moral fibre.

And that put you in a terrible situation afterwards,

if anybody would have asked to see his documents, service documents.

Cases of LMF were rare.

For the rest, their stress was released in other ways.

There were some extreme cases,

people were shooting off revolvers

out of the windows at night,

and, you know, really low level beat-ups of the aerodrome,

and all sorts of things, and they would just get told off.

They realised that you had to let off steam.

Across the East of England, hundreds of bomber bases were bursting with thousands of young men,

desperate to get away from the war for a few short hours.

We always did everything together.

So, when we went out together, we had to get on by two-seater MG.

So, we sat three on the hood at the back, three on the front seat,

and two on the front mud guards.

And we used to strap them round their waist

and over the bonnet so they didn't fall off.

And only on one occasion was I stopped by the police,

not because we were breaking the law, but he wanted to make

quite sure the two on the front mudguards weren't going to fall off.

Ewan and I have come to the Bluebell in Lincolnshire,

a favourite haunt of the Bomber boys.

Here, the crews would drink the pub dry.

We're meeting Dave, pilot Tony Iveson

and navigator Douglas Hudson.

A lot of silly things happened.

But I guess you were young guys, weren't you? You were 20, 20 years old?

-There wasn't any malice aforethought at all.

-No.

Like the burning of the pianos that took place

and all the other things, motorbikes in the mess.

-Oh, that!

-Oh, yes!

Doing a doughnut in the mess.

Doing doughnuts round the mess. Now that appeals to me!

Well, the boys with me brought a cow in the mess one day.

They got this cow in the mess and it didn't half make a mess!

Many of the young men were inexperienced, baffled by the opposite sex.

Most of us were to bloody young to understand female company at that age.

We were all fingers and bloody thumbs!

And we were also told and shown films,

vivid, vivid American films about VD.

You know, the horrors of what could happen to you.

Well, that used to put you off for life! Nearly.

"If she's easy, she's got it."

"If she's got it, you'll get it."

"And remember, a blob on the knob slows demob."

LAUGHTER

Yeah, I haven't heard that one before. Very good!

By 1943, Bomber Command was fighting the war with an even greater ferocity.

It was dropping more and more bombs.

But German industry didn't appear to be collapsing.

After a while, people began to suspect that

factories could be repaired

and got working again fairly quickly,

so the next point of vulnerability

was actually seen to be the workers,

and this was the beginning of the sinister thought that,

actually, the real target is civilian workers.

The term used to describe this policy was "de-housing".

The aim was not just to blow up, it was to burn as well.

Bomber Command was now dropping more incendiaries than high explosives.

In July 1943, Harris used this lethal cocktail to devastating effect.

-COMMENTARY:

-Hamburg, second largest city of the Reich,

is being liquidated in a series of record attacks by the RAF.

The main attack started on Saturday, 24th July, and for nights afterwards,

hundreds of our four engine bombers kept it up hot and strong.

We're travelling to Hamburg to find out more about the impact of the raid.

A number of factors made this attack so shattering.

RAF deception diverted the German night fighters away from the bomber force

and the elite pathfinders marked the target perfectly.

The combination of a hot dry summer and the high proportion

of incendiaries created a phenomenon never seen before. A firestorm.

Temperatures reached 800 degrees. Winds, 150 miles an hour.

Nadia Convery is a Hamburg resident and researcher.

She's brought us to St Nicholas' Church.

It was so prominent in the landscape that the RAF used it as an aiming point.

Today, it's a memorial to those lost in the bombing.

-God! That's unbelievable, isn't it, the destruction.

-Yeah.

The blockbuster bombs, they would drop first to sort of lift the roofs of the houses,

and then they would drop the incendiary bombs into houses

where there was a lot of wood inside.

They would just go up in flames, and the streets were quite narrow,

so it was easy for the fire to spread.

And that was the aim, to set fire to them?

That was the aim, and apparently the British researched into how flammable German cities were.

In one area, 96% of the houses were completely gone. Destroyed.

Bloody hell.

The Nazis feared six more raids like it would finish the war.

42,000 men, women and children were killed.

Quite an eye opener, really, when you see those pictures and you see the endless,

endless empty shells of buildings,

and the tons and tons of rubble.

I just keep thinking about families, and children,

and trying to get, you know, as a parent, trying to get your

kids out of that hellhole must have been beyond awful, you know.

Nadia has invited us to a city centre hotel

to meet some of the victims of the Hamburg firestorm.

Hans Werner Prell was 13 at the time. Helga Hunter was 16.

Very nice to meet you, hello.

The story of this suitcase is a special one, actually,

so in this suitcase were important documents, a bit of, you know,

jewellery, that's all that remained.

It's the only thing he saved. He was clutching it through the firestorm.

HANS SPEAKS GERMAN

They could hardly move because of the force of the winds.

And so he's described it quite powerfully.

He said there was this red wall coming towards him,

and then they'd get pushed over and have to get up again,

and try and sort of battle against that force.

So that's quite a powerful image.

He says that just as you're sitting next to me,

people would, would go up in flames next to him.

It's unimaginable, it's just, what he saw, it's just, yeah.

Yeah, I was 16 at that time, on that night. Can I speak German?

Of course.

HELGA SPEAKS GERMAN

The streets had been hit. And everything had gone up in flames.

And so, walking home, she had to pick her way across, you know,

people lying in the streets dead, dead bodies.

Because of the intense heat, the tarmac melted,

and she saw people trying to walk across, and getting stuck,

and then, yeah, not being able to, to free themselves,

and no-one else could help, because they would get stuck then too.

I think when you read about the area bombing campaign,

and how that was described by senior officers and what have you,

there's ways that you can phrase it

to sound like it's not the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, you know,

you can justify it in words by saying that it's a legitimate tactic

to damage the industrial might of the country you're fighting against.

I don't know if you can ever justify one way or the other.

You know, you can't say, you know,

there's a statistic, there was 42,000 civilians killed here in a week in Hamburg, in one raid.

You can't ever justify that.

You can't ever justify the killing of innocent people,

you can't justify the killing of six million Jews and homosexuals

in concentration camps, either, extermination camps,

but it's not really about that, I suppose, it's just trying to understand it.

Yeah. What it took to ultimately defeat that evil.

Yeah, Nazism. Yeah, yeah.

And 70 years ago, things were very different. The war was far from won.

Bomber Harris felt that more raids like Hamburg would bring victory by the spring.

We propose to entirely emasculate

every enemy centre of war production if necessary.

We are well on the way now to that end.

The shadow of raids like Hamburg has influenced the way we've fought wars ever since.

The RAF now uses air power in a much more targeted way.

Bosnia, Iraq, where I served, Libya and Afghanistan,

are so different from the area bombing of World War Two.

We are all use to seeing images of precision strikes.

Collateral damage is no longer acceptable.

My old squadron, the Dambusters, was at the forefront of developing

this new tactical approach to airpower.

It's currently on active service in Afghanistan.

I want to see for myself how the modern RAF copes with

the conflicting demands of using air power and avoiding civilian casualties.

To get to the squadron base in Kandahar, I have fly there by night.

This is to avoid a Taliban attack on our plane.

I've got a full set of body armour on.

Obviously we're in a combat zone at the moment, so, yeah, we've got

to protect ourselves from anything that could get fired up at us.

It's four years since I've been with my old squadron,

so I'm looking forward to getting there

with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

We're making the journey in a blacked out Hercules.

Just before we arrived, a rocket was launched into the Kandahar base.

This reminds me of what those young bomber crews experienced

setting off on a night mission, 70 years ago.

In World War Two, a thousand bombers would set out on a mission.

Today, the RAF is using a detachment of just eight

supersonic Tornados to achieve its aims.

I mean, my experiences from Iraq are pretty similar to this operation really,

it's a similar sort of size.

But it's still nothing on the scale of World War Two.

I mean, you're talking over 100,000 people flying in World War Two.

The coalition is in the process of handing over power to the Afghan government.

The highly political situation could hardly be more sensitive,

and the last thing they can afford is to inflict any civilian casualties.

But, fortunately, modern planes are much more flexible than the Lancaster of 70 years ago.

They can perform a variety of roles that range from attacking the enemy

to identifying improvised explosive devices hidden in the ground.

Wing Commander Keith Taylor is the current 617 Squadron Commander.

He's at pains to show how he is using the latest technology to avoid collateral damage.

Before he even considers using a weapon to support forces on the ground,

he'll intimidate the enemy first with a low-level fly past.

I did a show of force, and, you know, we pulled up afterwards,

back into the wheel, and asked the ground commander if we'd met his intent.

And his words were, yes, you know, there was a bit of a situation developing down here,

and I just wanted to show, you know, the bad guys that my dog was bigger than his dog.

If that fails, only then will he reach for his range of precision weapons,

from heavy cannon to guided missiles and bombs.

And to help the crews make the right decision,

they are also using some of the world's most powerful cameras,

in what's known as the lightning pod.

So you can, I mean you basically can, even up at sort of 15,

20,000 feet, you can pick out an individual person.

Absolutely, yeah, you can pick out people.

You know, we can really get up close and, in some situations,

identify whether or not the guys are carrying weapons or not.

On the current tour, the Squadron has flown hundreds of missions deterring insurgents,

without dropping a single bomb.

All this makes you realise what a blunt but effective instrument Bomber Command was

for the first years of the war.

But in 1944, Churchill wanted to use the bombers differently.

He felt they were now capable of a much more precise role.

In the build up to D-Day, he wanted Harris to move from bombing German cities

to hitting specific communication and transport targets.

Bomber Command had made huge advances in the last two years of total war.

It had become the most destructive force in history.

But it was now more than capable of carrying out this new task of precision bombing.

The switch to new methods,

it was now safer to fly in daylight,

so some of the raids

took place in daylight,

was not welcome to Harris.

He still stuck to his doctrine that the way to win the war

was to flatten as many German cities as possible.

So he put up quite a strong rear guard action, as only he could,

against a move that everyone else seemed to think was the right one.

Bomber Command had been a very blunt instrument indeed.

At this stage in the war, it's now becoming a surgical instrument,

something that is capable of carrying out applied violence in a very precise way.

My old squadron, the Dambusters, was pivotal in developing these new tactics.

They were formed in 1943 to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley,

using inventor Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bomb.

In 1944, they undertook perhaps the most audacious precision raid of the war.

We've come to the squadron's former officer's mess, now the Petwood Hotel,

to meet Squadron Leader Tony Iveson to talk about his part in the raid.

The Tirpitz was the largest remaining German battleship.

She represented the most powerful single threat to Allied shipping,

and it became a British obsession to sink her.

She was sheltering in the safe haven of the Norwegian Fjords, almost out of range.

They adapted the Lancaster with more powerful engines,

and took out the mid-upper turret and the front guns,

and lots of other heavy stuff, including the armour plating behind my seat.

The Lancaster could then reach Tromso from northern Scotland,

which was about, well, it turned out to be

a twelve and a half hour flight.

The bomb chosen to sink the Tirpitz

was the latest Barnes Wallis wonder weapon. The 12,000 lbs "Tallboy".

We lined up for the run in.

And the first nine bombs of 617 Squadron went down in 90 seconds.

So, had you been standing on Tirpitz,

you had nine five ton bombs arriving,

through the speed of sound on the way down.

And there were two direct hits and three near misses.

And then the 56,000 ton battleship was doomed from that moment.

-COMMENTARY:

-The ship still firing as the bomb bursts flash and gleam.

In the smoke of giant explosions, the Tirpitz capsizes and sinks.

It was an astonishing demonstration of how far Bomber Command had come.

And it had been achieved with the mighty Lancaster.

Today is my chance to fly it.

I think for me, as a member of 617 Squadron,

it's probably the greatest privilege that you could ever get,

to fly in a Lancaster, and obviously it's the only one that's left in the UK.

But the fact that I'm going to be able to do it with Ewan on board as well is really incredible,

that both of us are going to be able to experience this at the same time,

and that's what it was all about, it was about being a crew,

it was about that, that band of brothers kind of feeling,

so to do it with the person that you feel the closest to is really quite something.

It's as iconic, the Lancaster, as the Spitfire was.

The Spitfires were fighting one against one in the air against the enemy.

And the Lancaster, you know, it's much more complicated than that.

They were bombing towns and cities, and over the week that we've been doing this,

the time that we've been doing this has been, you know,

I've been getting more and more of a sense of how complicated that is.

The last flying Lancaster is so precious

that the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight will only take her up in ideal conditions.

So it's great that the weather is perfect.

Can't believe you arranged a piper, that's pretty good!

You've got to remember that this is a war machine, really,

and people went to war in it, and some, a lot of them didn't come back, so...

Cor, the pipes make you feel quite emotional as well, don't they, yeah?

Very nice. Nice touch, that.

A large crowd, including some of the veterans,

is here to see the Lancaster on one of the few occasions in the year she takes to the air.

-This is your end of the aircraft, wasn't it?

-That's right.

Then when we got the word to go, up the ladder.

-And then I used to turn to the left.

-Yeah.

Back in, slide myself into there.

-Check the rotation of the turret, once the engines had started.

-Yeah.

Just check everything through.

Anyone who says he's not afraid is not a human being.

And the worst period I felt was before a flight, when we knew where we were going,

and you had the hours getting ready, and you couldn't stop this churning around over your mind,

but once you were in the aeroplane you had a job to do, and it was a different situation,

and she was a beautiful aeroplane,

and you, as a pilot, will understand how thrilling it is to handle such a big machine on take off,

and feel her ready just to...

Yes, flying was still, even in those days, exciting.

Did you shake hands, before you got on, with each other or not?

Was there none of that sort of thing?

No, the crew would, the crew would piss on that wheel, but...

We would do that, but there's just too many people standing around watching,

otherwise we would do that, we would do that very thing.

-Thank you very much though.

-Yeah, good luck to you.

-Brilliant.

-Yeah, cheers.

-Enjoy that trip.

-Yeah. Thank you very much indeed.

-Thank you very much, thank you.

-You enjoy that trip. I'm sure you will.

-Thank you.

INAUDIBLE RADIO CHATTER

Ah, it's an amazing feeling. Exhilarating, as the tail lifts.

70 knots. 80 knots.

Air brakes, air brakes off, feel that breeze.

Easy level travelling.

-Travelling left.

-And right.

Colin up front, now.

And then it's the moment I've been waiting for.

I'm handed the controls.

I'm piloting the RAF's only flying Lancaster.

And we're just coming up on the left hand side. Is that what you want?

OK, Ewan's in position. Ewan, you all right in the nose? Thank you, yeah.

And I'm in the nose of the Lancaster with my brother at the controls.

What a moment.

Unbelievable view, isn't it? Fantastic visibility up here.

We're flying in the Lincolnshire skies that, 70 years ago,

would have been full of hundreds of bombers about to head off to Germany,

containing thousands of nervous young men, some who would never come back.

Then, all too soon, I have to hand back the controls.

You have control?

We buzz the crowd below, and then it's time to land.

The last flying Lancaster in Britain, one of the 7,000 or so

that flew 156,000 sorties, is safely back on the ground.

Don't fall out!

That was unbelievable.

That was really, properly amazing. Properly amazing.

It was all kind of angles that I've never seen before in my life,

taking off from there was just extraordinary, because you see the whole of the wings,

watch all the four engines starting up in front of you.

I went through to the front, there's a view I've never seen before,

like lying on my belly looking down, out at the ground, and the sky,

and an experience that you can't imagine. Well done.

Well done. That was really good flying, Colin. Really good flying.

The Lancaster was a brilliant plane, but it was still a devastating weapon of war.

And nearly 800 of them took part in the raid in 1945

that defined how some have judged Bomber Command ever since.

The D-Day invasion had led to a combined push by land and air forces from the west.

The Russians, too, were pressing from the east.

Stalin called on the western allies to help clear the way for the Red Army.

So, Winston Churchill agreed to the last great bomber offensive of the war.

The one that everyone remembers.

The irony is that

when Bomber Command was finally able to

do what it had always been trying to do,

trying to do it had lost a lot of its sense.

But, Harris being Harris, he carried on.

And one can say that with Dresden, it turned out to be a city too far.

In February 1945, the Allies unleashed Operation Thunderclap on the city of Dresden.

-COMMENTARY:

-Dresden, the capital of Saxony,

becomes a fantasy of the destructive pyrotechnics of the air war.

The city was a railway hub through which German troops travelled to the Eastern Front.

But it was also packed with a million refugees, escaping the Russian onslaught.

The bombing was so devastating that it whipped up another firestorm.

It killed 25,000 people.

Churchill had approved the plan, but within weeks he had changed his tune,

perhaps with an eye to the imminent peace.

"The destruction of Dresden remains a serious

"query against the conduct of the Allied bombing."

Winston Churchill, 1945.

Harris was appalled by Churchill's comments.

To his dying day, he defended the policy of area bombing.

Harris had been

an outstanding leader.

He motivated his men,

he did what he was told

very effectively.

But by the end of the war, it has to be said,

he was wrong to persist in this notion

that they should carry on battering German cities when the

war was obviously won, it was doing no good,

in fact it was doing harm.

At the end of the war in Europe, on May 13th, 1945,

Winston Churchill went on the radio to thank our armed forces.

He chose not to mention Bomber Command at all.

I thought we got a rough deal.

Not so much us, although they didn't give us a medal,

but that's only a little trinket, really.

But I thought the treatment that Bomber Harris got

was absolutely, utterly disgraceful,

because he was only carrying out the orders of Churchill.

Harris's vision of a war won by heavy bombers alone never came to pass.

German war industry was damaged, yet never collapsed.

But a million troops, and thousands of anti-aircraft guns, were pinned down defending the Reich.

For those who fought in the campaign, there are few doubts about its value.

Total war is total war, and we were involved in total war.

We were involved in fighting for our lives.

And Bomber Command was the only force that could take the war to Germany for four long years.

They started it. They were, what did they do?

Auschwitz and all these places, I mean, Christ Almighty,

they're the ones that started the bloody war, we didn't.

And, well we finished it off, Germans went off with their tails between their legs.

I felt badly about it, in many respects, and yet, you know,

I mean, the war doesn't have Marquis of Queensbury rules.

And, of course, immediately after the war,

we got all the screen of what had happened

in the concentration camps, and the extermination camps,

and I suppose, you know, it rather hardens one's heart.

Today, the controversy around the bombing campaign of World War Two still remains.

Only in the summer of 2012, nearly 70 years after the war,

will there be a memorial in London

to honour the 125,000 men of Bomber Command.

It's very sad that the 55,500 young men in Bomber Command

who were killed have never been recognised until now,

which is too late in my view, it's a pity, but it is a little late.

But, thank goodness, a memorial is now going to be put up for them.

I knew when we started this project

that it was going to be a really difficult journey in places, and it has been difficult.

You know, our visit to Hamburg has raised some questions in my mind.

But what this journey has taught me is that these very young men who joined Bomber Command

joined the only force that was taking the fight to Germany.

What has struck me is how young they were, and what a terrible price they paid.

Almost beyond any of the controversy,

I'm also unmoved in my feelings about the men who flew in those planes.

Because they were demonstrating such unbelievable bravery to

get in those bomber planes, night after night after night after night,

twelve hour missions, freezing cold, cramped, frightened,

and the fact that they would lose friends and they would still get back in the planes.

So I haven't changed my mind about them,

other than they're the heroes that I always thought that they were.

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