NIGHT BOMBERS RAF HEMSWELL LINCOLNSHIRE 1943

On Saturday we drove to Wickenby Airfield, near Lincoln, as we have done before a few times.

This was once the home of two RAF bomber command squadrons: 12 and 626.  Lancaster bombers were housed and flown from RAF Wickenby during WW2 and from other airfields nearby.  Lincolnshire was known as Bomber County in those 1940s wartime days. 

RAF Hemswell was another bomber station not far away. It was here that a unique film was made, in colour, of the preparation for a night-time raid on Berlin by 40 Lancaster bombers and their crew of seven courageous men.

We all know much about the Spitfire and Hurricane fighters and rightly so.  These pilots undoubtedly deserve all the praise heaped upon them by Winston Churchill and others and I used to watch their vapour-trailing 'dog-fights' when I was a kid, but when one sees what these bomber crews went through I am overcome by emotion and pride. 

This 60 minute film is quite outstanding. Even if you have no connection with the war or the RAF it's so informative as to be un-missable in my opinion.  The average lifetime of a Lancaster bomber and crew was about 40 flying hours. Thousands were built and thousands were destroyed.  Only two survive in the UK, only one of those is still flying.

Here's the link: https://archive.org/details/NIGHT-BOMBERS