The Lancaster by John Nichol, review: What was it really like to fly in a Lancaster?

Thanks to the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight – not to mention the regular showings on television of The Dam Busters – the silhouette of the Lancaster bomber is almost as familiar today as it was between 1941 and 1945, when it took the war directly to the German heartland, and with devastating effect.

John Nichol’s book is not so much about the aeroplane that delivered bombload after bombload to the enemy, and the drone of whose engines one occasionally still hears from the sky if one lives in the vicinity of an air show, as about the people who flew in it. Nichol managed to interview several, in their 90s and, sadly, most of them dead by the time his book appeared, and – rather movingly – the daughter of a man killed over Germany in 1943, whom he accompanied when she went to visit the wreck of what is believed to have been her father’s aircraft.

Their testimony, faithfully recorded by Nichol, a fellow ex-RAF man (he was shot down over Iraq in the first Gulf War), forms the bulk of this book. Nichol enters a crowded field, but his work will appeal to those fresh to this particular branch of Second World War heroism.

We hear of pilots managing to return to base in planes shot to pieces, men parachuting out over enemy territory and being helped by courageous French civilians, or almost lynched by angry Germans. If there are any boys left (and one hopes there are) who relish the Commando comics, in which Germans inevitably cry “Donner und Blitzen!” when attacked, or “for you, Tommy, ze var iss over” when apprehending a bedraggled, fugitive airman, they will love this book.

Nichol presents some unfamiliar stories, too. There is much discussion of the lavatory arrangements on the Lancaster, reminding one of when King George V met Charles Lindbergh after the latter’s first solo transatlantic flight: his principal question, taking Lindbergh aside, was “How did you manage?” By 1942 one “managed”, on a bomber flight that could take nine hours there and back, using a primitive communal Elsan latrine, situated uncharmingly in the middle of the aft fuselage.

“While we were flying in rough air,” one veteran recalled, “this devil’s convenience often shared its contents with the floor of the aircraft, the walls and the ceiling, though sometimes a bit remained in the container itself … this loathsome creation invariably overflowed on long trips and, in turbulence, was always prone to bathe the nether regions of the user. It was one of the true reminders to me that war is hell.”

Why a simple device was not installed to allow the contents to join the bombload as a present for the enemy is not recorded.

Also striking is the tale of a Canadian crew of the Lancaster Vicious Virgin at RAF Scampton – the Dam Busters’ base – who took the pilot’s girlfriend, a WAAF driver called Iris, on a sortie with them, an excursion against so many regulations it is almost impossible to know where to start. Iris, who one presumes had a death wish, had the time of her life, watching the bombs being dropped and the plane turning safely for home. However, her oxygen feed became disconnected and when nothing had been heard from her for a while a member of the crew found her unconscious on the floor. She had to be carried off the plane.

There was superb camaraderie, and bacon and real (as opposed to powdered) eggs for breakfast when, or if, you returned; but there was also the somewhat sinisterly named Committee of Adjustment which, as Nichol points out, was not a committee and adjusted nothing. It was a team of men led at each station by a discreet, low-profile junior officer whose job was to remove all visible traces of a man who did not return as soon as it was clear he was lost, so his billet could be given to his replacement – who would normally arrive within hours. The dead or missing man’s effects were then returned to his next of kin.

Of the 125,000 men who fought with Bomber Command One, 55,553 were killed in action. Some servicemen cracked up, and were transferred or discharged with the salutary “LMF” – standing for “lack of moral fibre” – stamped on their service records. The great moral question concerning the Lancaster is whether the campaign it took part in – wrongly depicted by revisionists as the attempt to bomb Germany into submission by breaking its civilians, but in reality aimed (as Nichol argues) at vital factories and transport hubs – was justifiable. Nichol clearly thinks it was.

He quotes veterans being snubbed and abused years after the war when admitting they had served in Bomber Command. He reminds us of the shameful treatment of Sir Arthur Harris (who never received the peerage that, had he been an Army commander, would have been his due) and the even more shameful disregard of the men who simply obeyed orders and served under him. It took until 2013 for there to be a Bomber Command medal, by which time virtually all those entitled to it were dead.

The book with which one must compare Nichol’s own is Leo McKinstry’s Lancaster, published in 2009: it is more deeply researched, says more about the conception and design of the aircraft (a weak point in Nichol’s book) and reads far better: there is too much of the tabloid about Nichol’s writing, and it is surprising his editor did not advise him to avoid the cliché “to hell and back”, which he uses without apparent irony.

McKinstry’s book upset supporters of Harris, who will find Nichol’s far more palatable. It is the Dresden raid of February 1945 that ultimately divides opinion over the deployment of the Lancaster in saturation bombing, and Nichol makes a brief and rather thin case for it: anyone wishing to have more meat on the bones should read Frederick Taylor’s Dresden, published in 2004, which authoritatively proved that it was a necessary target. And, as Nichol reminds us, in February 1945, the V2s were still pummelling London; no one knew that the war in Europe would be over within three months.

Nichol tells a succession of human stories well and clearly. In an era when a virus has forced us into the modern equivalent of air-raid shelters, Lancaster leaves us marvelling yet again at the bravery, stoicism and sheer level-headedness of our forebears.

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