After their feature-length documentary Spitfire, David Fairhead and Ant Palmer return with a wartime history of the Lancaster bomber. With its encyclopedic detail and commanding narration by Charles Dance, this feels like a film for second world war buffs and aviation enthusiasts. Everyone else will stay for the interviews with the now elderly men who flew bombers as lads (teenagers some of them) at terrifying odds: 55,573 airmen out of 125,000 were killed during the war. Returning from missions, they measured lost mates by empty seats in the dining room.
The film is expertly bolted together from archive newsreels, snippets of classic war movies and interviews with surviving airmen from Britain and one from Jamaica: Neil Flanigan. The Lancaster first saw service in 1942, as the RAF shifted tactics from targeting German factories to entire cities. There’s extraordinary footage here of test runs in Kent of the bouncing bombs dropped on German dams in the Ruhr valley, immortalised in The Dam Busters.
