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The Lancaster Story: True Tales of Britain’s Legendary Bomber
The epic story of the RAF’s legendary heavy the Avro LancasterThe Lancaster Story takes readers on a remarkable journey through the history of an aviation icon. Between its introduction in 1942 and the end of the Second World War, the Avro Lancaster flew more than 150,000 sorties, dropped more than 600,000 tons of explosives and took the Allied fight to Nazi Germany.The true workhorse of the RAF’s bomber corps, the ‘Lanc’ featured on some of the most daring and celebrated missions of the war, including the heroic Dambusters raid and the Operation Hydra bombing. These and many other successes came at a significant cost, almost half of the 7,377 Lancasters deployed into service were lost in action. Using archival documents, letters and first-hand accounts, The Lancaster Story delivers a dramatic and vividly rendered account of the most successful RAF bomber of the Second World War and the lives of the men and women who flew, designed, constructed and maintained it. Combining individual stories into a gripping, panoramic narrative, it paints a complete portrait of the battle over Europe, and the Lancaster’s unique and decisive role in it.
- GenresHistory
340 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 23, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 30, 2024
interesting book looking at the ww2 bomber the Lancaster with old interviews given by aircrews and general history about this plane
April 30, 2025
Interesting book. One of the last that will be written about any aspect of World War II whose author could ask people who were there what it was like.
While 'The Lancaster Story' is about a leading British World War II Bomber aircraft, much of this book could appeal even to someone not usually so interested in military history, as it concentrates on the human stories and experiences of those who flew Lancaster Bombers, their families, and the ground staff, men and women, who kept them ready to fly, planned missions and guided them home by radio and radar afterwards.
Lancasters were also flown by men from Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia, and by Polish airmen in exile.
One of the best bomber planes of World War II, the 'Lanc' was designed and developed under the supervision of Roy Chadwick, Chief Design Engineer of the Avro company, in the Hawker Siddeley group. It entered production in October 1941.
I bought the hardback edition, which was not too expensive, having heard Dr Sarah-Louise Miller speak on a different aspect of World War II on an Oxford University Extension course. A consistent error running through the Index to the hardback is that the page numbers are always two pages more than they should be, so if the Index says something is referred to on Page 97, you won't find it there, but two pages earlier on Page 95. I understand the publisher will correct this in the paperback edition.
The often terrifying experiences of those on the other side bombed by Lancasters, the controversy over the effectiveness and morality of Allied bomber strategy, the technical development of the Lancaster and how it differed from other aircraft of the time are all mentioned, but the main focus of 'The Lancaster Story' is on the experiences of those serving in the RAF (Royal Air Force) who flew, or, in one role or another, kept the planes able to fly, and bereaved families and fiancées of Lancaster crews lost in action, as losses of bombers during the War were considerable.
A large part of the book is drawn from accounts left by, and existing recorded and new interviews with, the men and women involved (women played a greater role in the RAF than in the other services, although not in aircrews on missions in this period).
Things I learned from this book include:
-Britain's Royal Air Force is the oldest separate Air Force in the World, formed in 1918, as recommended in a report for the British government by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts. At the end of World War I, the RAF was the World's largest air force.
-The job of a Navigator on a Lancaster on a long-range mission was likened to 'taking a 7 hour maths exam while people try to kill you'.
-As enemy bombers targeted Lancaster production sites, some were concealed in the shadow of other factories, or partly underground. One factory's roof was grassed over, with fake farm buildings and fences, to look like a farm from the air.
-Lancasters flew so high on the way to their targets that temperatures could be minus 40 degrees Centigrade. The planes and crews' suits were heated, but if the heating failed the crew risked injury from frostbite.
-A pilot wrote that relations between air crew and ground crew went well, if the air crew remembered that they only 'borrowed' the plane for missions. It 'belonged' to the ground crew who maintained it and got it ready for flying. Because of the high losses of bombers, in the course of the war some ground crews lost 10 or more successive planes and aircrews for which they were responsible. Yet they had to appear cheerful in front of their next aircrew so as not to unnerve them before a mission.
-At the beginning of World War II, in the 5 week 1939 Polish campaign, the Polish Air Force managed to shoot down nearly 10% of the Luftwaffe (German Airforce)'s aircraft, quite impressive given that they were heavily outnumbered. When Poland surrendered, many trained and experienced Polish airmen escaped to serve in the French Air Force until that country also surrendered to Germany in 1940. Still refusing to accept defeat, the majority of Polish airmen got away again to Britain, which they called 'Wsypa Ostatniej Nadziei', 'The Island of Last Hope'. Despite a language barrier, Poles formed some of the RAF's best squadrons, including of Lancasters. [The fact that many of them were unable to return to by then Communist controlled Poland after the War is not discussed in this book.]
-The Lancaster normally had 7 crew: Pilot, Flight Engineer, Navigator, Bomb Aimer (who was also the Forward Machine Gunner), Wireless Operator, Upper Turret Machine Gunner and Rear Gunner. The Rear Gunner operated 4 machine guns, the other Gunners each operated 2. There were no machine guns on the underside of the Lancaster, making it vulnerable to German fighter planes attacking from below.
-From 1943, some Lancasters had an 8th crew member to monitor and disrupt enemy radio communication between fighters and ground base, by jamming signals and, having been selected for fluency in German, and even learned to mimic the voices of particular German air controllers, to broadcast false instructions to German fighter planes. Some who volunteered for this were German-speaking Jewish refugees from Continental Europe, who, should they be shot down and captured, if identified as Jewish, faced immediate execution or a Concentration Camp. However, such was the anger in Germany at the death and destruction caused by Allied bombing, that any Bomber crews shot down over Germany, even if they safely parachuted clear or survived a crash landing, risked murder by vengeful soldiers or civilians.
-The British usually bombed Germany at night, to help conceal the bombers from German anti-aircraft fire and fighter planes. However, reduced visibility on night raids increased the risk of mid-air collisions between bombers, especially as the immediate loss of weight after dropping its bombs caused the Bomber to jump several hundred feet upwards. Raids on targets in France and other German occupied countries tended to be in daytime, riskier for the bombers but it increased bombing accuracy, to reduce civilian casualties in what were regarded as friendly countries.
-As the war went on, devastating losses of experienced air crews and lack of fuel for training flights meant German aircrews tended to be less experienced than their Allied counterparts. Ahead of the D-Day landings in the summer of 1944, the Americans and British sought to establish the air supremacy important for the landings to succeed, partly by targeting German aircraft factories. While less successful than hoped in destroying aircraft factories, the raids drew out the remaining German fighters into combat in which most were destroyed before the invasion itself. The Luftwaffe thus played little role on D-Day. This may explain one of the limitations of this book, that while it cites many interviews with or memoirs by Lancaster crews, there are none by German fighter pilots who opposed them; but then there were few German fighter pilots left by the end of the War to record their experiences.
******
Some years ago, I read another book on this subject 'Lancaster' by historian and journalist Leo MacKinstry. Both books are very good and contain memorable stories. If interested, it is worth reading both, as the examples and eye witness accounts in each book are mostly different.
Sarah-Louise Miller's 'The Lancaster Story' is shorter, so less forbidding to pick up and read. She takes a particular interest in the role of women in the RAF. Despite initial resistance from some officers, Britain's Air Force learned the value of employing women in a wider variety of, and in more important, non-combat roles, more than the other services, or the German Luftwaffe, did. Most points I gave above as things I learned from this book by Dr Miller, I do not remember from Leo MacKinstry, but I may have forgotten some.
On the other hand, MacKinstry gives more detail overall, including about wider and related questions. E.g. the Lancaster's .303 machine guns lacked the power and effective range for fully adequate protection against German fighters; the Lancaster's designer Roy Chadwick died in an air crash a few years after the War trying to develop a large civilian aircraft; sexual promiscuity on war time air bases and longer accounts of some of the more important raids such as the 'Dambusters' raid, including from a German anti-aircraft gunner defending one of the dams from what he called the 'four engine monsters'.
******
MacKinstry discusses in more detail the debate about Allied bombing strategy, which Dr Miller possibly considered beyond the scope of a book on a single type of aircraft.
The immense commitment of British resources to bomber production, to the comparative neglect of the army, to weaken the German war effort indirectly by bombing cities, began as a response to the deadlock in late 1940 -1941, when the German navy was not strong enough for the Germans to invade Britain, but the British army not strong enough to challenge the Germans on land in Continental Europe. The inaccuracy of bombing at the time (despite technical innovations during the War, like air to ground radar) meant that one of the few ways available to 'get at' Germany, and indirectly help allies like the Soviets who were still fighting on land, was to cause disruption and force the Germans to divert resources to home air defence by relatively indiscriminate bombing of German cities. The aims were achieved, although the bomber offensive against Germany only really got into its stride by 1943, too late to have caused the turn of the tide on the Eastern front in 1942.
Whether Bomber Command and the government were right to persist with this strategy throughout the War is more questionable. MacKinstry shows how effective the Lancaster was the few times it was taken away from bombing German cities to support the operations of front line troops. With hindsight, this should have been done more often.
However, MacKinstry also quotes a former Lancaster Bomber crew member, asked if the bombing of German cities, given the large civilian casualties it caused, was a 'war crime', who replied:
'The greatest war crime of all would have been to lose the War.'
******
My Mother, born in 1933, still alive aged 91, was a child in World War II. She grew up close to London, near British and American air bases. As a schoolgirl, she learned to recognise the distinctive sound of a Lancaster's engines, which turned her initial alarm at hearing the sound of a bomber overhead into relief that it was 'one of ours'.
Even so, it was 50 years after the end of the War before my Mother ceased to get a feeling of fear in her stomach whenever, in a film or documentary on television, she heard the sound of any World War II bomber's engines.
While 'The Lancaster Story' is about a leading British World War II Bomber aircraft, much of this book could appeal even to someone not usually so interested in military history, as it concentrates on the human stories and experiences of those who flew Lancaster Bombers, their families, and the ground staff, men and women, who kept them ready to fly, planned missions and guided them home by radio and radar afterwards.
Lancasters were also flown by men from Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia, and by Polish airmen in exile.
One of the best bomber planes of World War II, the 'Lanc' was designed and developed under the supervision of Roy Chadwick, Chief Design Engineer of the Avro company, in the Hawker Siddeley group. It entered production in October 1941.
I bought the hardback edition, which was not too expensive, having heard Dr Sarah-Louise Miller speak on a different aspect of World War II on an Oxford University Extension course. A consistent error running through the Index to the hardback is that the page numbers are always two pages more than they should be, so if the Index says something is referred to on Page 97, you won't find it there, but two pages earlier on Page 95. I understand the publisher will correct this in the paperback edition.
The often terrifying experiences of those on the other side bombed by Lancasters, the controversy over the effectiveness and morality of Allied bomber strategy, the technical development of the Lancaster and how it differed from other aircraft of the time are all mentioned, but the main focus of 'The Lancaster Story' is on the experiences of those serving in the RAF (Royal Air Force) who flew, or, in one role or another, kept the planes able to fly, and bereaved families and fiancées of Lancaster crews lost in action, as losses of bombers during the War were considerable.
A large part of the book is drawn from accounts left by, and existing recorded and new interviews with, the men and women involved (women played a greater role in the RAF than in the other services, although not in aircrews on missions in this period).
Things I learned from this book include:
-Britain's Royal Air Force is the oldest separate Air Force in the World, formed in 1918, as recommended in a report for the British government by South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts. At the end of World War I, the RAF was the World's largest air force.
-The job of a Navigator on a Lancaster on a long-range mission was likened to 'taking a 7 hour maths exam while people try to kill you'.
-As enemy bombers targeted Lancaster production sites, some were concealed in the shadow of other factories, or partly underground. One factory's roof was grassed over, with fake farm buildings and fences, to look like a farm from the air.
-Lancasters flew so high on the way to their targets that temperatures could be minus 40 degrees Centigrade. The planes and crews' suits were heated, but if the heating failed the crew risked injury from frostbite.
-A pilot wrote that relations between air crew and ground crew went well, if the air crew remembered that they only 'borrowed' the plane for missions. It 'belonged' to the ground crew who maintained it and got it ready for flying. Because of the high losses of bombers, in the course of the war some ground crews lost 10 or more successive planes and aircrews for which they were responsible. Yet they had to appear cheerful in front of their next aircrew so as not to unnerve them before a mission.
-At the beginning of World War II, in the 5 week 1939 Polish campaign, the Polish Air Force managed to shoot down nearly 10% of the Luftwaffe (German Airforce)'s aircraft, quite impressive given that they were heavily outnumbered. When Poland surrendered, many trained and experienced Polish airmen escaped to serve in the French Air Force until that country also surrendered to Germany in 1940. Still refusing to accept defeat, the majority of Polish airmen got away again to Britain, which they called 'Wsypa Ostatniej Nadziei', 'The Island of Last Hope'. Despite a language barrier, Poles formed some of the RAF's best squadrons, including of Lancasters. [The fact that many of them were unable to return to by then Communist controlled Poland after the War is not discussed in this book.]
-The Lancaster normally had 7 crew: Pilot, Flight Engineer, Navigator, Bomb Aimer (who was also the Forward Machine Gunner), Wireless Operator, Upper Turret Machine Gunner and Rear Gunner. The Rear Gunner operated 4 machine guns, the other Gunners each operated 2. There were no machine guns on the underside of the Lancaster, making it vulnerable to German fighter planes attacking from below.
-From 1943, some Lancasters had an 8th crew member to monitor and disrupt enemy radio communication between fighters and ground base, by jamming signals and, having been selected for fluency in German, and even learned to mimic the voices of particular German air controllers, to broadcast false instructions to German fighter planes. Some who volunteered for this were German-speaking Jewish refugees from Continental Europe, who, should they be shot down and captured, if identified as Jewish, faced immediate execution or a Concentration Camp. However, such was the anger in Germany at the death and destruction caused by Allied bombing, that any Bomber crews shot down over Germany, even if they safely parachuted clear or survived a crash landing, risked murder by vengeful soldiers or civilians.
-The British usually bombed Germany at night, to help conceal the bombers from German anti-aircraft fire and fighter planes. However, reduced visibility on night raids increased the risk of mid-air collisions between bombers, especially as the immediate loss of weight after dropping its bombs caused the Bomber to jump several hundred feet upwards. Raids on targets in France and other German occupied countries tended to be in daytime, riskier for the bombers but it increased bombing accuracy, to reduce civilian casualties in what were regarded as friendly countries.
-As the war went on, devastating losses of experienced air crews and lack of fuel for training flights meant German aircrews tended to be less experienced than their Allied counterparts. Ahead of the D-Day landings in the summer of 1944, the Americans and British sought to establish the air supremacy important for the landings to succeed, partly by targeting German aircraft factories. While less successful than hoped in destroying aircraft factories, the raids drew out the remaining German fighters into combat in which most were destroyed before the invasion itself. The Luftwaffe thus played little role on D-Day. This may explain one of the limitations of this book, that while it cites many interviews with or memoirs by Lancaster crews, there are none by German fighter pilots who opposed them; but then there were few German fighter pilots left by the end of the War to record their experiences.
******
Some years ago, I read another book on this subject 'Lancaster' by historian and journalist Leo MacKinstry. Both books are very good and contain memorable stories. If interested, it is worth reading both, as the examples and eye witness accounts in each book are mostly different.
Sarah-Louise Miller's 'The Lancaster Story' is shorter, so less forbidding to pick up and read. She takes a particular interest in the role of women in the RAF. Despite initial resistance from some officers, Britain's Air Force learned the value of employing women in a wider variety of, and in more important, non-combat roles, more than the other services, or the German Luftwaffe, did. Most points I gave above as things I learned from this book by Dr Miller, I do not remember from Leo MacKinstry, but I may have forgotten some.
On the other hand, MacKinstry gives more detail overall, including about wider and related questions. E.g. the Lancaster's .303 machine guns lacked the power and effective range for fully adequate protection against German fighters; the Lancaster's designer Roy Chadwick died in an air crash a few years after the War trying to develop a large civilian aircraft; sexual promiscuity on war time air bases and longer accounts of some of the more important raids such as the 'Dambusters' raid, including from a German anti-aircraft gunner defending one of the dams from what he called the 'four engine monsters'.
******
MacKinstry discusses in more detail the debate about Allied bombing strategy, which Dr Miller possibly considered beyond the scope of a book on a single type of aircraft.
The immense commitment of British resources to bomber production, to the comparative neglect of the army, to weaken the German war effort indirectly by bombing cities, began as a response to the deadlock in late 1940 -1941, when the German navy was not strong enough for the Germans to invade Britain, but the British army not strong enough to challenge the Germans on land in Continental Europe. The inaccuracy of bombing at the time (despite technical innovations during the War, like air to ground radar) meant that one of the few ways available to 'get at' Germany, and indirectly help allies like the Soviets who were still fighting on land, was to cause disruption and force the Germans to divert resources to home air defence by relatively indiscriminate bombing of German cities. The aims were achieved, although the bomber offensive against Germany only really got into its stride by 1943, too late to have caused the turn of the tide on the Eastern front in 1942.
Whether Bomber Command and the government were right to persist with this strategy throughout the War is more questionable. MacKinstry shows how effective the Lancaster was the few times it was taken away from bombing German cities to support the operations of front line troops. With hindsight, this should have been done more often.
However, MacKinstry also quotes a former Lancaster Bomber crew member, asked if the bombing of German cities, given the large civilian casualties it caused, was a 'war crime', who replied:
'The greatest war crime of all would have been to lose the War.'
******
My Mother, born in 1933, still alive aged 91, was a child in World War II. She grew up close to London, near British and American air bases. As a schoolgirl, she learned to recognise the distinctive sound of a Lancaster's engines, which turned her initial alarm at hearing the sound of a bomber overhead into relief that it was 'one of ours'.
Even so, it was 50 years after the end of the War before my Mother ceased to get a feeling of fear in her stomach whenever, in a film or documentary on television, she heard the sound of any World War II bomber's engines.
August 5, 2024
Great little book on the Lancaster. I really enjoyed it.
December 31, 2024
A lovely history of a historically important aircraft. My grandma fitted rivets at Woodford aerodrome so it was lovely to hear of the stories of those that built the plane there too. The bravery of the airmen comes through and the respect and affection for the aircraft is clear.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews