Four Merlins and a Legend: The Story of the Avro Lancaster Bomber

There are aircraft that people admire, and there are aircraft that make people stop in the street. When the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight's Lancaster rumbles over a town on a summer afternoon, conversations halt mid-sentence and grown adults point at the sky like excited schoolchildren.

Four Rolls-Royce Merlins will do that to a crowd, even eighty years on.

The Avro Lancaster earned that reaction the hard way. Some 7,377 were built, and between 1942 and 1945 they flew around 156,000 sorties with the RAF's Bomber Command, dropping more than 600,000 tons of bombs.

The Lancaster breached the Ruhr dams, capsized the German capital ship Tirpitz, carried a 22,000 lb bomb that no other aircraft could carry, dropped food to a hungry Netherlands and flew tens of thousands of prisoners of war home. It also cost the lives of more than 21,000 of the young men who crewed it.

Sir Arthur Harris, who led Bomber Command for most of the war, was never known for gushing, yet when he wrote to thank those who had built it he called the Lancaster "the greatest single factor in winning the war".

This is the story of how a failed twin-engined bomber became that aircraft: its design and specifications, the raids that made its name, the crews who flew it and the handful of survivors that still carry its memory, checked against museum, government and veterans' sources rather than whichever figure happens to be repeated most often online.

A Bomber Two Engines Short: The Avro Manchester

The Lancaster began life as a disappointment. The Air Ministry's Specification P.13/36 called for a twin-engined bomber, and A.V. Roe and Company answered it with the Avro Manchester.

The prototype, L7246, first flew from Ringway on 25 July 1939, and No. 207 Squadron took the type to war with a raid on Brest on the night of 24/25 February 1941.

On paper the Manchester was promising. In practice it was let down by its engines, a pair of 24-cylinder Rolls-Royce Vultures that proved underpowered and troublesome. Rolls-Royce, with only so many engineers and a war to win, sensibly concentrated on the Merlin rather than rescuing the Vulture.

An Imperial War Museum curator has described fully loaded Manchesters struggling to reach 10,000 feet or 200 mph, which is not a comfortable place to be when the other side has fighters.

Only 202 Manchesters were built, and the type flew its last bombing sortie during the "Thousand Bomber" raid on Bremen in June 1942. By then its replacement was already at war, and in a sense it had been hiding inside the Manchester all along.

Roy Chadwick's Four-Engined Fix

Avro's chief designer, Roy Chadwick, was born at Farnworth, near Widnes, in 1893, joined A.V. Roe in 1911 and had risen to chief designer by 1918. His answer to the Manchester's troubles was admirably direct: a larger wing and four Rolls-Royce Merlins in place of two Vultures.

The design was first known as the Avro Type 683 Manchester III before it was given a name of its own, the Lancaster.

The prototype, BT308, was a converted Manchester airframe with a 102-foot wing, four Merlin X engines, the Manchester's original triple tail and no guns whatsoever. It took off from Ringway, Manchester, on 9 January 1941.

A second prototype, DG595, introduced the twin fins that would give the Lancaster one of the most recognisable silhouettes in the sky.

Chadwick was made a CBE in 1943. He did not live to see the full reach of his work: he was killed on 23 August 1947 when the prototype Avro Tudor 2 crashed on take-off at Woodford.

Into Service: No. 44 Squadron and the First Lancaster Operations

The first three Lancasters arrived at No. 44 (Rhodesia) Squadron at RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, on 24 December 1941, which must rank among the better Christmas presents the squadron ever unwrapped.

Operations began on the night of 3/4 March 1942, when four of the squadron's Lancasters laid mines in the Heligoland Bight and all came home. A week later, on 10/11 March, two 44 Squadron aircraft joined a raid on Essen, the Lancaster's first bombing sorties over Germany according to several Bomber Command chronologies.

It was a modest start for an aircraft that would soon be the backbone of the Command.

Avro Lancaster Specifications at a Glance

Published figures for the Lancaster vary from source to source, largely because weights, engines and armament changed as the war went on and different marks were measured in different conditions. The figures below are for the B.I unless stated, and where respected sources disagree the range is given rather than a single tidy number.

Crew: seven (pilot, flight engineer, navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, mid-upper gunner and rear gunner).

Wingspan: 102 ft (31.09 m).

Length: 69 ft 4 in (21.11 m), the figure used by BAE Systems and the RAF.

Height: 20 ft 6 in (6.25 m).

Engines: four Rolls-Royce Merlin V12s, with Packard-built Merlins on the B.III and the Canadian-built B.X, and Bristol Hercules radials on the B.II.

Maximum speed: about 275 to 287 mph, depending on the source, altitude and weight.

Cruising speed: about 200 to 210 mph.

Service ceiling: about 25,000 ft, with sources ranging from 24,500 to 25,700 ft.

Range: about 2,530 miles with a 7,000 lb bomb load, falling to a little over 1,600 miles with a load of around 14,000 lb.

Maximum take-off weight: 68,000 lb.

Typical bomb load: around 14,000 lb.

Largest bombs carried: the 12,000 lb Tallboy and the 22,000 lb Grand Slam.

Defensive armament: eight .303 Browning machine guns in three hydraulic turrets, two guns in the nose, two in the mid-upper turret and four in the tail.

Number built: 7,377.

The Lancaster's real trump card was its bomb bay, a single unbroken space about 33 feet long. That long, uncluttered bay meant it could swallow almost anything Bomber Command's armourers could think of.

One Imperial War Museum curator describes a standard mixed load as a single 4,000 lb "Cookie" blast bomb, two 1,000 lb, two 500 lb and two 250 lb bombs, topped up with incendiaries.

Lancaster Variants and Production

The standard B.I used British Merlin engines, while the B.III was essentially the same aircraft fitted with Merlins built under licence by Packard in the United States. Armstrong Whitworth built 300 B.IIs powered by Bristol Hercules radial engines instead, and Austin Motors at Longbridge built the B.VII, easily picked out by its American Martin mid-upper turret carrying a pair of .50 calibre guns.

In Canada, Victory Aircraft at Malton, Ontario, built 430 Lancaster B.Xs. The first, KB700, named "Ruhr Express", was rolled out on 1 August 1943.

Special jobs called for special versions. Twenty-three Type 464 Provisioning aircraft were modified to carry Barnes Wallis's Upkeep mine for the Dams Raid, with their bomb doors and mid-upper turrets removed. Later the B.I Special was stripped of turrets and bomb doors to carry the Grand Slam.

Production was a national effort, and eventually a transatlantic one. Avro's own works at Chadderton, with final assembly at Woodford, built the largest share, with Metropolitan-Vickers, Armstrong Whitworth, Vickers-Armstrongs and Austin Motors all playing their part.

The RAF Museum describes the whole enterprise as six major companies and ten factories, drawing on more than 1.1 million people across more than 920 firms. The generally accepted total is 7,377 Lancasters, although period figures of 7,366 and 7,373 also appear in the records.

Seven Men and a Lancaster: The Crew

A Lancaster normally carried seven men, and every one of them had a job nobody else aboard could do. The pilot flew the aircraft, with the flight engineer on a fold-down seat beside him looking after the engines.

The navigator plotted the route, the wireless operator worked the radio, and the bomb aimer lay in the nose directing the pilot on the final run to the target. Two gunners completed the crew, one in the mid-upper turret and one alone at the very back in the rear turret, the man crews called "Tail End Charlie". Pathfinder crews often carried an eighth man.

Every Bomber Command aircrew member was a volunteer. Around 125,000 served, most of them in their late teens or early twenties, and the International Bomber Command Centre puts the average age at death at just 23.

A tour was 30 operations, and the odds of finishing one were grim: depending on how the figures are counted, somewhere between 44 and 51 per cent of Bomber Command aircrew were killed on operations, with many more killed in accidents, wounded or taken prisoner.

Crews came from right across the Commonwealth and far beyond, with the IBCC recording aircrew from more than 60 countries. Canada alone lost around 10,000 airmen serving with Bomber Command, and Australians and New Zealanders served in their thousands.

Unsurprisingly, superstition flourished. Men carried lucky charms, from rabbits' feet to a daughter's baby bootie, some refused to be photographed before a tour was finished, and a thirteenth operation might be logged as "12B".

One pilot recalled crews relieving themselves on the tailwheel for luck before take-off, a tradition the ground crew presumably found rather less charming.

Low Level to Augsburg, April 1942

The Lancaster's first great set-piece raid was also one of its most costly. On 17 April 1942, twelve Lancasters, six each from No. 44 Squadron at Waddington and No. 97 Squadron at Woodhall Spa, set out in daylight and at low level to attack the MAN diesel engine works at Augsburg in southern Germany, a factory building engines for U-boats.

Seven of the twelve did not return. According to the RAF Museum, of the 85 men who set out, 37 were killed and 12 were taken prisoner.

The raid's leader, Squadron Leader John Nettleton of 44 Squadron, pressed home the attack and brought his aircraft back, the only one of his six to return, and was awarded the Victoria Cross, gazetted on 28 April 1942. The damage to the factory was disappointing for such a sacrifice; the RAF Museum records that five of the seventeen bombs that hit it failed to explode.

Nettleton did not survive the war. He was killed in July 1943 returning from a raid on Turin in Lancaster ED331 and, with no known grave, is commemorated on the Runnymede Memorial.

Augsburg showed how costly unescorted daylight raids deep into Germany could be, and most of the Lancaster's war would be fought in the dark.

Operation Chastise: The Dams Raid, May 1943

If one raid made the Lancaster famous, it was this one. A new squadron, No. 617, was assembled at RAF Scampton under 24-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, and in the spring of 1943 its crews practised low flying over the reservoirs of the Upper Derwent Valley in the Peak District, whose dams and towers bore a useful resemblance to their targets in Germany.

Local farmers, reportedly, were not delighted by Lancasters thundering over their fields. The RAF's Memorial Flight returned to the valley on 16 May 2008, exactly 65 years later, a moment captured in our RAF Lancaster over the Derwent Dam print.

The weapon was Barnes Wallis's Upkeep, a spinning cylindrical mine of around 9,000 lb, better known ever since as the bouncing bomb, which needed backspin applied before release. Nineteen modified Lancasters carrying 133 aircrew set out on the night of 16/17 May 1943 to attack the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in western Germany.

The Möhne and Eder dams were breached and the Sorpe was damaged but held. Gibson's Victoria Cross citation, gazetted on 28 May 1943, records that after attacking the Möhne he circled very low for 30 minutes, drawing the enemy fire on himself so that the crews following him could press home their attacks.

The price was brutal. Eight of the nineteen Lancasters were lost, 53 aircrew were killed and three were taken prisoner.

On the ground, the floods killed at least 1,300 people and possibly more than 1,600, many of them forced labourers and prisoners of war, including hundreds of women from the Soviet Union held in a camp below the Möhne. Industry in the Ruhr was running again within months, and the Möhne dam itself was rebuilt by the autumn of 1943.

What the raid did achieve, beyond any doubt, was a permanent place in the national memory and a nickname that has never left 617 Squadron. The Dambusters reformed in April 2018 to fly the F-35B Lightning from RAF Marham.

The Shuttle Raid: Friedrichshafen, June 1943

A month after the Dams Raid, Lancasters of No. 5 Group tried something entirely new. On the night of 20/21 June 1943, 60 Lancasters attacked the old Zeppelin works at Friedrichshafen, on the shores of Lake Constance, where Würzburg radar equipment was being made.

Rather than turn for home, they flew on south and landed at Blida in Algeria.

After refuelling and rearming in North Africa, the force bombed the Italian naval base at La Spezia on the way home two nights later, completing the first shuttle bombing raid of the war: a wartime return ticket with a refuelling stop in Algeria and a detour via Italy.

Among the aircraft taking part was No. 9 Squadron's ED831 "WS-H", photographed taking off from Bardney in Lincolnshire. Her captain for the raid, Squadron Leader A M Hobbs of the Royal New Zealand Air Force, and his crew were shot down and killed in the same aircraft just six days later, returning from a raid on Gelsenkirchen. Fortune turned quickly in Bomber Command.

Hamburg and Peenemünde, Summer 1943

The summer of 1943 also brought Operation Gomorrah, four RAF attacks on Hamburg between the nights of 24/25 July and 2/3 August. The first raid saw Bomber Command drop "Window" for the first time, strips of foil that swamped German radar screens with false returns.

On the night of 27/28 July the bombing created a firestorm, and estimates of the dead in Hamburg across the whole operation range from around 35,000 to 45,000.

Three weeks later, on the night of 17/18 August 1943, Operation Hydra sent 596 aircraft, 324 of them Lancasters, against the German rocket research establishment at Peenemünde on the Baltic coast. Group Captain John Searby of No. 83 Squadron acted as Master Bomber, directing the attack over the target, while Mosquitoes staged a diversion towards Berlin.

Forty aircraft were lost, 23 of them Lancasters. Several hundred people were killed on the ground, many of them forced labourers in the Trassenheide camp, which was hit by early bombs, and the V-2 programme was set back by an estimated two months.

The Battle of Berlin, 1943 to 1944

Through the long winter of 1943 to 1944, Bomber Command turned its attention on Berlin itself. The main battle opened on the night of 18/19 November 1943, when 440 Lancasters and four Mosquitoes attacked the city.

Photographs like this one of R5729 "KM-A" of No. 44 Squadron, running up her engines at Dunholme Lodge before a Berlin raid in January 1944, capture the grinding routine of that winter. This veteran Lancaster had already flown more than 70 operations since joining the squadron in 1942.

On the night of 14/15 January 1944, during a raid on Brunswick, she was shot down with the loss of her entire crew.

The RAF Museum, counting the wider campaign from August 1943 to March 1944, records 19 raids on Berlin, more than 10,800 sorties and 625 aircraft lost, while more than 10,000 people in Berlin were killed. The last major raid came on 24/25 March 1944, when 72 of the 811 aircraft sent were lost.

Berlin had been badly damaged, but it had not been knocked out of the war, and the campaign is generally judged to have fallen short of its aims.

Nuremberg: Bomber Command's Heaviest Loss, March 1944

Six nights later came the heaviest loss Bomber Command suffered on any single raid. On 30/31 March 1944, 795 aircraft, 572 of them Lancasters, set out for Nuremberg.

The forecast cloud cover never arrived, the moon was bright and the bombers left condensation trails across the sky, which was about as helpful to the German night fighters as it was possible to be.

Ninety-five aircraft were lost, 64 of them Lancasters, and more than 500 aircrew were killed. To make matters worse, Nuremberg itself was only lightly damaged, and around 120 aircraft bombed Schweinfurt by mistake.

D-Day, Tallboys and a Ghost Convoy, June 1944

On the night of 5/6 June 1944, as the invasion fleet crossed the Channel, Bomber Command flew more than 1,200 sorties. Just over 1,000 aircraft, 551 of them Lancasters, dropped around 5,000 tons of bombs on ten German coastal batteries, a record for a single night at the time.

No. 617 Squadron spent that night flying one of the strangest missions of the war. In Operation Taxable, 16 Lancasters led by Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire flew carefully timed orbits over the Channel, dropping "Window" to paint the radar picture of an invasion convoy heading for Cap d'Antifer, well away from the real landings.

It demanded extraordinary precision in order to deliver, quite deliberately, nothing at all.

Three nights later, on 8/9 June, 617 Squadron used the 12,000 lb Tallboy in action for the first time. One Tallboy bored through the hillside above the Saumur railway tunnel and exploded inside it, blocking the line for months.

Sinking the Tirpitz, 1944

The German capital ship Tirpitz spent much of the war sheltering in Norwegian fjords. In September 1944 Nos. 9 and 617 Squadrons, led by Wing Commanders Bazin and J.B. "Willie" Tait, flew to Yagodnik, near Archangel in the Soviet Union, and on 15 September attacked her in Kaafjord with Tallboys.

A hit on her bow left the ship unseaworthy, and she was moved south to Tromsø. On the way home one Lancaster crashed in Norway, killing everyone aboard.

An attack at the end of October was defeated by cloud. Then, on 12 November 1944, around 30 Lancasters of the two squadrons found her at Håkøya, near Tromsø. At least two Tallboys struck home and the Tirpitz capsized, with the loss of around 1,000 of her crew.

Both squadrons claimed the decisive bomb, and neither has ever conceded the point. When Norway presented the RAF with a bulkhead from the wreck in 1950, 9 and 617 Squadrons spent the next half century stealing it from one another by what the RAF Museum describes as "innovative and underhand means", until in 2002 it was handed to the museum, presumably for its own protection.

Grand Slam and the Bielefeld Viaduct, March 1945

By 1945 the Lancaster was carrying weapons that would have seemed fanciful when BT308 first flew. On 14 March 1945, Squadron Leader C.C. "Jock" Calder of 617 Squadron dropped the first 22,000 lb Grand Slam on the railway viaduct at Bielefeld, a structure that had survived thousands of tons of earlier bombs.

Together with the Tallboys dropped by the rest of the formation, it brought a large section of the viaduct crashing down. Only the Lancaster could carry the Grand Slam.

Operation Manna and Operation Exodus, 1945

The Lancaster's happiest work came at the very end of the war. Between 29 April and 8 May 1945, 33 squadrons of Bomber Command flew around 3,150 sorties in Operation Manna, dropping somewhere between 6,685 and 7,100 tons of food to the civilians of the occupied Netherlands, while American aircraft flew a parallel operation called Chowhound.

Operation Exodus followed, bringing freed prisoners of war home, with 20 or more men crammed into each Lancaster. The RAF Museum records 72,500 prisoners carried in 2,900 sorties over 23 days from 4 May 1945.

It was not without tragedy: on 9 May, Lancaster RF230 of No. 514 Squadron crashed near Roye in France, killing her six crew and 24 former prisoners on their way home. After the war in Europe ended, Operation Dodge used Lancasters to fly soldiers of the Eighth Army home from Italy.

The Lancaster's Victoria Crosses

Ten Lancaster aircrew were awarded the Victoria Cross. Nettleton and Gibson have already appeared in this story; the citations of the other eight make humbling reading.

Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire of 617 Squadron received his VC, gazetted on 8 September 1944, not for a single act but for four years of sustained courage. His citation records 100 missions, a voluntary drop in rank from group captain so he could fly a fourth tour, and his pioneering of very low-level target marking, including a dive to 700 feet over Munich in April 1944.

After the war he was the British observer at the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, and on 22 May 1948 he took a dying former serviceman, Arthur Dykes, into his home at Le Court in Hampshire, the beginning of the charity that still bears his name.

Flight Lieutenant Bill Reid of 61 Squadron was attacked twice by night fighters on the way to Düsseldorf on 3/4 November 1943. Wounded, with his navigator dead and his wireless operator fatally injured, he flew on for around 200 miles, bombed the target and brought the aircraft home to a crash-landing in England.

Sergeant Norman Jackson, a flight engineer with 106 Squadron, climbed out through the hatch of his burning Lancaster at around 20,000 feet on 26/27 April 1944, clutching a fire extinguisher, while his crewmates held on to his parachute, which had opened inside the aircraft. He was swept away, landed badly burned with a broken ankle and survived as a prisoner of war. He had already completed his tour.

Pilot Officer Andrew Mynarski of the Royal Canadian Air Force, a mid-upper gunner with 419 Squadron, tried to free his trapped rear gunner from a burning turret over Cambrai on 12/13 June 1944, with his own parachute and clothing on fire. Unable to do so, he stood to attention and saluted before jumping.

He died of his burns; the rear gunner survived the crash and told the story that led to the award.

Squadron Leader Ian Bazalgette of 635 Squadron marked and bombed a V-1 site at Trossy St Maximin on 4 August 1944 with his Lancaster on fire, ordered his crew out, then crash-landed to save two crewmen who could not bale out, avoiding a village. The aircraft exploded, killing all three.

Squadron Leader Robert Palmer held a steady bombing run over the Cologne marshalling yards on 23 December 1944 with two engines on fire, bombed accurately and was shot down and killed. Captain Edwin Swales of the South African Air Force kept directing the Pforzheim raid on 23 February 1945 in a crippled aircraft and then held it steady while his whole crew baled out, losing his own life; he remains the only member of the SAAF to win the VC. Flight Sergeant George Thompson, a wireless operator with 9 Squadron, pulled both gunners from their burning turrets on 1 January 1945 and beat out the flames on their clothing with his bare hands. He died of his burns on 23 January 1945.

Notable Lancaster Pilots and Aircrew

Wing Commander Willie Tait, who took over 617 Squadron from Cheshire in July 1944, led all three Tallboy attacks on the Tirpitz and finished the war with the Distinguished Service Order and three Bars and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar, a chestful few could match.

Gibson's Dams Raid pilots made up a genuinely international roll call. Mick Martin, an Australian serving in the RAF, saw his mine explode short of the Möhne and then flew alongside the following aircraft to draw the flak away from them; he retired as Air Marshal Sir Harold Martin.

David Shannon of the Royal Australian Air Force was just 20 when he attacked the Eder. New Zealander Les Munro was forced to turn back when flak knocked out his intercom, and outlived every other pilot on the raid, dying in 2015 at the age of 96.

Joe McCarthy, a New Yorker who had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force before his own country entered the war, attacked the Sorpe and needed ten runs before he was satisfied enough to let his mine go. His bomb aimer, George "Johnny" Johnson, became the last surviving member of the raid of any nationality, was appointed MBE in 2017 and died in December 2022, aged 101.

Not everyone came home. John Hopgood's aircraft was hit on its run at the Möhne, and he held it in the air long enough for two of his crew to bale out. Henry Maudslay, just 21, was shot down near Emmerich on the way back from the Eder with the loss of his whole crew.

Gibson himself was killed on 19 September 1944 flying a Mosquito as controller of a raid on Rheydt and Mönchengladbach, and is buried at Steenbergen in the Netherlands.

The Cost: Remembering Bomber Command

Bomber Command lost 55,573 aircrew during the Second World War, and more than 21,000 of them died in Lancasters. Roughly half of all the Lancasters ever built were lost, and the RAF Museum reckons the average Lancaster survived only around 21 operational sorties.

The morality of the bombing campaign has been argued over ever since, above all the raid on Dresden on 13/14 February 1945, in which 796 Lancasters took part. The city's own historians' commission concluded in 2010 that around 25,000 people died.

Even Churchill, in a minute of 28 March 1945, called Dresden "a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing". That debate is a serious one, and it sits alongside, rather than in place of, the courage of the young volunteers who flew.

On 28 June 2012 the Queen unveiled the Bomber Command Memorial in London's Green Park, with its seven bronze aircrew figures by the sculptor Philip Jackson. The following year the Bomber Command clasp was introduced, first presented at 10 Downing Street on 19 March 2013.

In Lincoln, the International Bomber Command Centre's memorial walls now carry almost 58,000 names.

After the War: Lincoln, Lancastrian and Shackleton

Peace did not end the Lancaster's career. Its successor, the Avro Lincoln, first flew in June 1944 and replaced it as the RAF's main bomber after the war, while surviving Lancasters were adapted for maritime reconnaissance, air-sea rescue carrying an airborne lifeboat, and photographic survey work.

A civil transport version, the Lancastrian, flew with airlines including BOAC and British South American Airways. The family line ran on through the Lincoln to the Avro Shackleton, the maritime patrol aircraft that first flew in 1949 and served the RAF until 1991. Chadwick, killed in 1947, never saw it fly.

The last RAF Lancaster, RF325 of the School of Maritime Reconnaissance, left St Mawgan in Cornwall to be scrapped on 15 October 1956. The Royal Canadian Air Force kept its Lancasters in service until 1964.

The Survivors: PA474, VeRA, Just Jane and S-Sugar

Of 7,377 Lancasters built, just 17 largely complete airframes survive, and only two of them can still fly.

In Britain, the flying survivor is PA474 of the RAF's Memorial Flight. Built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Broughton near Chester and completed on 31 May 1945, too late to see combat, she joined the Flight on 20 November 1973 and adopted the name "City of Lincoln" in 1975.

Her appearances with the Flight's Spitfires, Hawker Hurricanes and Dakota, including flypasts down The Mall, remain one of the great sights of a British summer. At the end of October 2025, just over a week after the air-to-air photograph at the top of this article was taken, she went to Duxford for major maintenance, and she is expected to spend the 2026 season on the ground.

Across the Atlantic, the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, Ontario, flies FM213, known as "VeRA" after her code letters. Built by Victory Aircraft in July 1945, she served with the Royal Canadian Air Force until 1963, spent years on display at Goderich and flew again after restoration on 24 September 1988.

She is painted as KB726, the Lancaster in which Andrew Mynarski won his Victoria Cross.

At East Kirkby in Lincolnshire, the Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre keeps NX611 "Just Jane", an Austin-built B.VII, in running order. She cannot fly, but her engines run and she taxis, and a long-term restoration aims to one day return her to the air.

And at the RAF Museum in London sits R5868 "S-Sugar", which flew as "Q-Queenie" with 83 Squadron before joining 467 Squadron RAAF. Her bomb tally records 137 sorties, although the official records credit her with 125.

Her nose art carries the words "No enemy plane will fly over the Reich Territory", which, on an aircraft credited with well over a hundred sorties over enemy territory, rather makes its own joke.

Why the Lancaster Still Matters

The Lancaster was not Britain's only heavy bomber, but it was the one that could carry the Tallboy and the Grand Slam, and the one that flew the raids people still talk about: the dams, the Tirpitz and the food drops over the Netherlands.

More than eighty years on, it has also become a memorial with wings. The sound of four Merlins over a Lincolnshire field or a London crowd connects new generations to the 125,000 volunteers who served in Bomber Command, and to the 55,573 who did not come home.

Our collection of RAF Lancaster photo prints includes wartime photographs restored by Hampshire Prints alongside modern images of PA474 in flight, and every photograph in this article is available as a print, along with our wider range of RAF aircraft photo prints up to 1945.