On the 27th of April 1944, 622 Squadron, RAF Bomber. A moving tribute to the sacrifice and bravery of the fliers of RAF Bomber Command. This story is from notes of my father Ron Hayes, who was a member of this crew, as Mid-Upper Gunner (MUG). He remembers 'two or three' close encounters with fighters over Germany. Writing this story, he says, has brought him to a real understanding what words like duty, sacrifice, selflessness, discipline and honour really mean. The Crew: The Story of a Lancaster Bomber Crew. Sam Thompson, 97, from Accrington, Lancashire, served as a gunner and flew 50 operations in Lancasters and Halifax planes. Through the stories of this one Lancaster crew, Colman has captured the achievements, loss and enduring legacy of a generation now almost gone.

This story began as a magazine article for QWeekend (published by The Courier-Mail) but quickly morphed into a book that brilliantly recreates J for Jig’s final mission and the story of those who survived. It involved more than two hundred aircraft and was designed to cause chaos behind enemy lines, hundreds of miles from the Normandy Battlefield. The crew of Lancaster Bomber ME814 took part in a major air raid in mid-July 1944. Some were to die that night, and others were to survive, withstanding incredible hardships and adventures as prisoners and evaders in a war that was far from over. Jesse Dallen and crew of Lancaster ME814. And it looks like the 50 Squadron crew who obtained the bombing photograph just. Try 6 issues for only 9.99 when you subscribe to BBC History Magazine or BBC History Revealed.

William Youngs Crew - The story of the crew of Lancaster ME699. John Nichol talks to Rob Attar about his new book, which tells the story of the Lancaster bomber, and the men who flew, fought and died in it during the Second World War. This book is about the seven lives on that aircraft. The search for the story of Lancaster B for Baker (and other things). This has proven to be a common story with the Bomber Command veterans and their. On board was the standard Lancaster crew of seven: all young men – five Australians, two Scots – whose mission was to bomb factories in Schweinfurt, Germany.īut J for Jig never reached its target. On the evening of 24 February 1944, RAAF Lancaster bomber J for Jig took off from Binbrook in Lincolnshire, the home of 460 Squadron, one of the most renowned Australian units of the war. The drama and anxiety of individual missions – to Kassel, Munich and Augsburg as well as Berlin – is evoked with thrilling immediacy while the military events and strategic decisions that drove the RAF's area bombing campaign against Nazi Germany are interwoven deftly with the narrative of the crew's operational careers.Crew The story of the men who flew RAAF Lancaster J for Jig Gloucestershire-born bomb aimer Ken Cook, hard-bitten Australian pilot Jim Comans, Navigator Don Bowes, Upper Gunner George Widdis, Tail Gunner 'Jock' Bolland, Flight Engineer Ken Randle and Radio Operator Roy Woollford were seven ordinary young men living in extraordinary times, risking their lives in freedom's cause in the dark skies above Hitler's Reich.įrom their earliest beginnings – in places as far apart as a Cotswold village and the suburbs of Sydney – through the adventure of training in North America and the dread and danger of the forty-five bombing raids they flew with 97 Squadron, David Price describes the crew's wartime experiences with human sympathy allied to a secure technical understanding of one of the RAF's most iconic aircraft. The Crew, based on interviews with Ken Cook, the crew's sole surviving member, recounts the wartime exploits of the members of an Avro Lancaster crew between 1942 and the war's end. A moving tribute to the sacrifice and bravery of the fliers of RAF Bomber Command.

Lancaster bomber crew stories