Bomber Command at war

The Lancaster rose from a failure. Avro’s twin-engined Manchester was let down by its Rolls-Royce Vulture engines, so Roy Chadwick’s team gave it a longer wing and four Merlins. The prototype flew in January 1941, and the Lancaster became Bomber Command’s most successful heavy bomber.

R5868’s nose carries 137 bomb symbols, one for each operational sortie it flew.

R5868 was built by Metropolitan-Vickers in 1942 and flew 68 sorties with No. 83 Squadron as OL-Q before joining No. 467 Squadron RAAF at Bottesford as PO-S, “S for Sugar”.

The Halifax began as Handley Page’s design to specification P.13/36 for a twin-engined bomber powered by the Rolls-Royce Vulture. When it became clear that the Vulture would be late and unreliable, the design was enlarged to take four Rolls-Royce Merlins instead. The prototype, L7244, first flew from Bicester on 25 October 1939, and the first Halifaxes reached No. 35 Squadron at Leeming in November 1940.

The Halifax was the only aircraft that could tow the General Aircraft Hamilcar, the glider that carried a light tank, on operations.

The Yorkshire Air Museum’s Halifax was rebuilt by its volunteers at Elvington, the wartime home of the two French Halifax squadrons.

The Wellington was designed at Weybridge to Air Ministry specification B.9/32 for a twin-engined day bomber. Its structure came from Barnes Wallis, who had used geodetic construction on the R100 airship and the Wellesley bomber: a lattice of curved light-alloy members crossing each other in a basket weave, so that the loads in one member were balanced by those in its neighbours, all covered in doped fabric. The result was light, roomy and immensely strong.

Its crews called the Wellington the “Wimpy”, after J. Wellington Wimpy, the hamburger-loving friend of Popeye in the cartoons.

MF628 was built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Blackpool and first flew there on 9 May 1944, and two days later it went into store at No. 18 Maintenance Unit at Tinwald Downs.

The Hampden was Handley Page’s answer to Air Ministry specification B.9/32, the same requirement that produced the Wellington. Gustav Lachmann’s design packed a crew of four into a deep fuselage pod only three feet wide, with the pilot sitting high above a glazed nose and gunners above and below the trailing edge, and carried the twin fins and tailplane on a slender boom behind it. Leading-edge slats and big flaps gave it a low landing speed, and it was fast and agile for a bomber of its day.

The fuselage was so narrow that the crew could not change places in flight. Crews called the Hampden the “Flying Suitcase”.

P1344 was built by Handley Page at Cricklewood and delivered in December 1939.

De Havilland proposed the Mosquito in 1938 as an unarmed bomber that would rely on speed rather than guns to survive. It was built almost entirely of wood, with a fuselage of plywood skins over a balsa core, so it could be made by furniture and joinery firms without using scarce light alloy. The Air Ministry ordered a prototype in March 1940; W4050 was built in secret at Salisbury Hall in Hertfordshire and first flew from Hatfield on 25 November 1940, with Geoffrey de Havilland Jr at the controls.

Mosquitoes with the bulged bomb bay could carry a 4,000 lb ‘cookie’ to Berlin, and some crews of the Light Night Striking Force flew there twice in one night.

TJ138 was built at Hatfield in 1945 and flew with No. 98 Squadron in the British occupation forces in Germany, based at Celle.

The Blenheim began as a private venture. In 1934 the newspaper owner Lord Rothermere asked Bristol for a fast executive aircraft, and the all-metal Type 142 that resulted, which he named ‘Britain First’, flew in April 1935 and proved faster than any fighter the RAF then had. Rothermere gave it to the nation, and the Air Ministry ordered a bomber version straight off the drawing board.

‘Britain First’, the private aircraft from which the Blenheim grew, flew at over 300 mph in 1935, some 70 mph faster than the Gloster Gauntlet the RAF was then bringing into service.

This aircraft is really Bolingbroke IV-T 10001, built by Fairchild at Longueuil, Quebec, and taken on RCAF charge in October 1942 as a gunnery and navigation trainer at the Bombing and Gunnery Schools in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Airspeed based the Oxford on its Envoy, a small twin-engined airliner, to meet an Air Ministry specification for a multi-engined trainer. It was a low-winged wooden monoplane with a retractable undercarriage, flaps and a cabin for a pilot, a navigator or bomb aimer and a wireless operator or gunner. The prototype, L4534, first flew at Portsmouth on 19 June 1937, and the Central Flying School received the first Oxfords that November.

Amy Johnson was killed in an Oxford in January 1941, while ferrying one for the Air Transport Auxiliary; it came down in the Thames Estuary.

V3388 was built by de Havilland in 1940 and, after a spell in storage, had an uneventful wartime career.