Film: Lancaster

FILM HARRY MOUNT LANCASTER (PG)

Well, that’s the 2023 Oscar for Best Original Score sorted out.

The opening credits of this exemplary documentary show a Lancaster bomber, flying over a lake and dam. The background tune isn’t The Dam Busters March, as you might imagine, given that the Lancaster was used in the 1943 raid.

Instead, you hear the stirring music of the low, gentle, rising hum of the Lancaster’s Rolls-Royce Merlin engines.

The engines of the ‘Lanc’ – as its aircrew called the plane – made it a superior bomber. It celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. In 1942, the Avro Lancaster grew, almost by accident, out of an earlier incarnation, the Manchester, with its lacklustre Vulture engines. When the Vultures were swapped for the Rolls-Royce engines used in Spitfires, the Lancaster was born.

As in all the best documentaries, there’s minimal voiceover in this one. Instead, the talking is done mostly by the remarkable old boys who were there. My God, they look in good nick for men in their late nineties.

There isn’t a whiff of triumphalism from the last of the aircrew, drawn from Britain, Canada, Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand.

As one of those aircrew, Peter Kelsey (who has sadly died since filming), says, the bombing was ‘fundamentally wrong’ but circumstances dictated that they had to do it. The only way to take the battle to Germany was to bomb it.

For decades after the war, members of Bomber Command were criticised – not least because Churchill let Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris take the flak for the area bombing of Dresden and Hamburg.

Only with the unveiling of the Bomber Command War Memorial in 2012 did the tide begin to turn and the heroism of these extraordinary men become properly recognised.

The Spitfire has long been hailed as a vital instrument in the Allied victory. David Fairhead and Ant Palmer, the directors of Lancaster, made another fine documentary, Spitfire, in 2018, to record that wonder plane’s contribution. Now the Lancaster gets its turn.

The Lanc was noisy and cramped, but comfort came second to the plane’s purpose as a precision-targeted bomb-dropper. The pilots drool over its capabilities – ‘responsive but very powerful’.

Lancasters were constructed on a vast scale in Britain and Canada. Some 1.1 million people were employed in building 7,300 of the aircraft. And the Lancaster proved lethally effective in swinging the war the Allies’ way.

Lancasters bombed the industrial heartland of Germany, the Ruhr Valley, known ironically as ‘Happy Valley’ by the aircrew because it was so well defended.

Most famously, then came the Dam Busters’ raid under Guy Gibson, still only 25. His old comrades are honest about Gibson – a ‘disciplinarian’ but a ‘brilliant’ one. What terrifying odds they faced, travelling at 240mph, 60 feet above the water. Fifty-three aircrew were killed on a single night and three were captured, with eight aircraft shot down.

Later in 1943, Lancasters bombed Peenemünde, where the V2s were launched. Things got even hairier in the Nuremberg raids of 1944. 96 Lancasters were shot down over the city. Bomber Command lost more men that night than Fighter Command lost in the whole Battle of Britain.

As one veteran remembers, that meant ‘672 empty chairs at breakfast’ the next morning. Waitresses wept over the gaps at the mess tables.

In the face of the non-stop slaughter, the aircrew developed a poignant kind of gallows humour. Returning pilots even paid into a kitty to reward the pilot who correctly estimated how many comrades had been shot down. There’s no element of ruthlessness – just natural defence mechanisms to deal with the horror.

Whenever there was a ‘stand-down’ from the ops, the boys had a whale of a time at station dances. They danced and drank furiously to Glenn Miller, never sure whether this would be the last girl they danced with.

Many of them were innocent teenagers. One veteran, Jack Watson, says of Yvonne, a girl he met at a dance, she ‘taught me more about the facts of life than [our instructors] did about the Lancaster’.

The Lancaster grew ever more accurate towards the end of the war. Lancasters attacked Normandy gun emplacements on the eve of D-Day – pilots talk movingly of returning over the Channel to see the water packed with the Allied invasion fleet.

By 1945, the Lancasters had grown terrifyingly precise in their bomb-aiming – with tragic results for Dresden in particular. This masterly film doesn’t ignore the agony of the Germans. Nor does it rejoice in the Allied victory.

But, as one diffident old boy puts it, ‘If we hadn’t bombed Germany, we wouldn’t have won the war.’