"Night Bombers" 1944 RAF film

Very Moving.

 

thanks for sharing that one-it was great

 

Just excellent...

 

I had that film on VHS tape as a kid, must have watched it a 100 times, and sure I've watched it a 100 more since I found it on youtube....just brilliant, for me that's the best part of the internet.. finding all these classic aviation/WW2 films and documentary's.....

 

Thank you for posting this, it is well done, accurate, and thankfully minus the grade B movie slosh that Hollywood usually throws in. I noticed several things that were puzzling at first but eventually made sense. The 500 pound GP bombs being loaded were of American design with the box type stabilizers and they were mixed in with the British types (those with the circular stabilizers around the fins). I imagine that we were suppling a lot of munitions to the British by 1944 so ours were mixed with theirs. Early Lancasters didn't have any radar detection of the German night fighters and they were easy targets and huge numbers were lost when the ME-110's simply pulled up under and to the rear and unloaded into their belly with upward firing 20 and 30mm cannons. I knew one Lancaster pilot and he ended up in a psychiatric hospital during and after the war. 71,000 crew lost by the British, 55,000 lost by the U.S.A.A.F. A heavy mental load to carry on every mission when you knew damn well that your chances of not coming back were very high. An ex- crewman in our barack came completely unglued one night and ended up permanent "Section 8".

 

Did anyone catch the eye-opening statistic quoted during the Lancaster engine change scene in the very beginning of the film? The operational life expectancy of a Lancaster was 40 hours.

 

Crazy isn't it...some one will correct me I sure, but I seem to remember that of the crews was way less than that, hence the stress.

I always used to ask my dad when I was a kid "why do they get a desk job after completing a tour, don't they like flying", because I was used to seeing PA474 blaze around the English summer skies at airshows and it seemed like the best job in the world...he would try to explain it as best as a small boy could understand, I think only now we are beginning to understand/respect mental illness brought on by stress.

What today we call post traumatic stress syndrome, in the British Military during the war it was called "a lack or moral fortitude"....can you imagine being made to feel ashamed and a coward...and I have a buck that says the chap that came up with that tosh never flew a mission.

It happened to all of them, Guy Gibson, Geoffrey Wellum, all of them allude in their books to getting "burnt out", what I call being "**** scared" and rightly so.

Its the reason I have so much respect and admiration for those guys.. and to think most of them were between 18-22 years old....just staggering respect..

 

I did notice that and thought of American bomber crews in 1942-43 whose life expectancy was far less than 25 missions, I don't remember exactly what it was but it was less then 10. The short life expectancy of American bombers is why there was no zinc chromate on any of the structure, I think that it was something like 20 hours so why put any protective finish on anything. Losing 71 planes in a month is gutwrentching. Anyway, a great video.

 

Thanks for posting. Any other must watch WWII aviation documentaries?