Dan Snow's History Hit - The Lancaster Bomber
Episode Date: June 20, 2020I was thrilled to be joined again by one of our most popular guests, John Nichol. John shot to international prominence when he served in the first Gulf War. When his Tornado was shot down in 1991 he ...was captured, tortured and paraded on television provoking worldwide condemnation and leaving one of the enduring images of that war. Since then, John has become one of our most successful aviation historians, writing bestsellers such as 'Spitfire – A Very British Love Story'. His latest book explores the Avro Lancaster - described by Bomber Harris as his 'shining sword' and the 'greatest single factor in winning the war'. Carrying out offensive operations from the first day of the Second World War until the very last - more than five and a half years later - they flew nearly 300,000 sorties and dropped around a million tons of explosives. Of the 7,377 Lancasters built during the conflict, more than half were lost to enemy action or training accidents, and of the 125,000 men who served in Bomber Command, over 55,000 were killed. The figures are remarkable. But John also took me behind the statistics to uncover the human stories - truly unbelievable accounts of survival.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Hi everybody, on the podcast today I've got the one and only, the one and only John Nicol.
Now John Nicol is, quite frankly, one of the best contributors I've ever had on History Hit.
He wrote the best-selling book Spitfire, he came on to talk about that.
He's just written another best-selling book on the Lancaster bomber,
the history of the men that flew it, its role in the Second World War,
and the women and the men who built them on the ground as well.
He is such
an engaging speaker. He is of course famous for his tornado was shot down at low level over the
deserts of southern Iraq back in the early 1990s during the Gulf War. He was then picked up, beaten
up, tortured by Saddam Hussein's secret police before being released with pictures of that were
broadcast all over the world.
So he's a truly remarkable man who's played his own role in history and now writes brilliant history books. So enjoy this conversation we had. This was one of our live Zoom webinars,
our live podcast records, lots of History Hit TV subscribers watching and suggesting questions I
might want to ask John, for which I'm always grateful. If you want to listen to previous
podcasts with John
he's done a few for History Hit you can go to History Hit TV it's like Netflix for history
got audio video on there and you can sign up using the code pod1 p-o-d-1 that gets you a month
free in one month just one pound euro or dollar and you can fill your boots with John Nickel
content with Lancaster bomber content we've got the dam busters we've got the last living British
dam buster Johnny Johnson a documentary about him up there. We've got a
documentary of Max Hastings talking about Dam Busters. And then we've got a documentary about
aerial campaigns of the Second World War with historians like Victoria Taylor and James Holland.
So we've got a lot of content up on History Hit TV. Thank you very much to everyone who's signed
up. Once you've signed up, you get automatically invited to join our live podcast record. It's great to have you guys there as well. But before you rush off and
do that, here is the wonderful John Nicol. John, welcome back on the podcast. Great to have you.
Thanks very much, mate. Really good to be with you. I really appreciate the fact that you kind
of want to have a natter. Always a joy. Well, any excuse, any excuse,
because you've written what I'm sure will be another smash hit.
This time, perhaps going back to your roots,
you've gone away from a fighter aircraft
to something a little bit more familiar for you.
Perhaps for everyone who doesn't know some of your backstory,
can you just tell the listeners exactly
how you came to write Aviation History in particular?
It's nearly 30 years ago now.
I was a navigator
on tornadoes going back to the first Gulf War in 1991. And in 1991, I was shot down with my pilot,
John Peters, captured, had a bit of an unpleasant time at the hands of some Iraqi interrogators
and ended up paraded on TV. And, you know, lots of your listeners, lots of your viewers might
remember that. When myself and JP came back from the Gulf, we wrote a book about our experiences.
One of the first military books of that ilk that came out.
So people who followed us were people like Andy McNabb.
Andy was a good friend of mine.
He was one of the first people that I met when I walked out of my cell door in Iraq.
And after I wrote Tornado Down with JP, Andy then asked about writing a book.
And there was lots of other books came out
of it. And although I stayed in the Air Force for another five years, I saw service in Bosnia as
well and in the Falklands in the aftermath of the Gulf. But when I left in 1996, I think it was,
I was looking for something else to do. I'd been offered a job as a combine harvester salesman.
That's not a joke. I'd been offered a job as a combine harvester salesman. That's not a joke. I'd been offered a job as a combine harvester salesman when I'd left the Air Force. And at the same time, I turned my hand to
a bit more writing. And it went from there. And so Lancaster's the, I think it's the 17th,
I'll have to count the 16th or 17th. And it's a series now of personal stories linked to an
aircraft. The Lancaster bomber is one of the icons of the Second World War, a heavy bomber with a huge bomb load compared to what had gone before.
Your history particularly is of an oral history of the veterans that flew it and built it, is it?
If you Google or go on Amazon or whatever and Google Lancaster, it'll come up with, I think, something like a thousand books.
So the history of the aircraft and the nuts and the bolts and
the rivets and the engines and the propellers is well told by other people. This is the story of
the aircraft and the history of the aircraft is there, but it's the story through the eyes of
the men and the women who built the aircraft and the men who flew the aircraft. And what I always
try to do is reunite the veterans with their aircraft, get them to relive their experience. So I took one of the veterans back to the Lancaster and to see the joy on their face,
you know, the years, you know, 95 year old men and the years just drop away from them when they
see it. And it's to try to tell the story with that joy. So there is sadness, there is death,
there is destruction, there's horror,
but there's also their love of that aircraft and what it gave to them and why 75, 80 years on,
they still love that aircraft. Before we come to some of those reunions that you've
been part of, can we go back to the beginnings of the Lancaster? Did its design date from before
the war or was it a hastily commissioned piece of equipment as the war was going on?
War is a great driver of technology. And at the beginning of the war, our capabilities to take the war to the heart of Germany, which is what Bomber Command did.
We can discuss the rights and the wrongs perhaps later on if you want to. But Bomber Command's task was to take the war to the heart of Germany. We were nation pitted against nation, and that involved the
Bomber War. There's no doubt about that. And our early bombers, the Wickleys, the Hamdens,
the ill-fated Manchester, had all come before the Lancaster. But I suppose like the Spitfire
was developed through the war, we needed a bigger and a better bomber that was going to be
the mainstay, the backbone of operation. So the four engine bombers, the Halifax and of course,
the Lancaster became the mainstay of bomber command and its operations. 1942 coming into
service and seeing first operations. And it was a sea change. It was a sea change in capability. The Lancaster is built around its
bomb bay. Its sole purpose in life is to carry a massive bomb load. It'd take, you know, seven
people on board to get that aircraft to the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe, Nazi Germany,
and to deliver a bomb load. And that's its only raison d'etre. That's what it was designed to do.
For those listening to this podcast, we're talking on Zoom. It's our weekly live Zoom webinar.
And there's history TV subscribers who are joining us.
And I'm putting up pictures now of the trip in the Lancaster that I was lucky enough to have.
It was an enormous honour.
It was a step change in its ability to carry ordnance.
What was it like to fly?
Was it designed to try and be kind of quick enough that it could avoid interceptors under its own steam.
With the way that technology developed through the war, trying to design a bomber that could
outrun fighters was never going to be a player. It was designed to be part of a massive force,
and the protection came from within the force, within the armaments, within the force. And,
you know, the Lancaster's main defensive capability, if you want to put it that way, was to fly at night. Almost all,
not all, there was obviously some daytime ops. Most ops were carried out at night in darkness,
carrying that massive bomb load with questionable accuracy. There's no doubt about that. It was never
a precision bomber, not in the way that we understand that these days. But I think that
sometimes we look at what went on during the Second World War
and we try to compare it to now and say, well, what was the theory behind this or what was the
protection? Well, it had some protection, but the simple fact was we built enough that we could lose
them. So we built 7,377 Lancaster bombers in the UK and half of them were lost to training accidents or enemy action.
Can you imagine that now?
7,377, half of them were lost during the course of the war.
And that was its main defence.
We built so many of them, we trained so many aircrew that we could afford.
And it was a sausage machine.
It was a sausage machine driving forward, driving forward
with the sole purpose of carrying bombs into occupied Europe and Germany.
That is an astonishing, astonishing fact. I didn't know that.
Bomber Command was obviously the most dangerous portion of the armed forces,
well, one of, if not the most dangerous portion of the armed forces during the Second World War.
Did the veterans that you met reflect upon that?
All the time. I think, first of all, it's important to see that at the time,
nobody really looked at the harsh realities of the time. I think, first of all, it's important to see that at the time, nobody really looked at the harsh realities of the figures.
Today, we know with the current crisis that people are really concerned with numbers and analysing everything.
You've got to look to the Second World War, which was a total war, nation against nation, and people didn't count deaths in the same way.
So, I mean, were the veterans aware? Well, I'll tell you what they were not aware of was another staggering fact. About 125,000 men served in bomber command over
the course of the war. 125,000. Nearly half, 55,000 of those were killed. So that meant if you
served in bomber command during the course of the war, you had nearly a 50-50 chance of being killed.
It's beyond comprehension. Can you imagine any government now saying, on our deployment overseas
to Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria or to the Gulf, we have lost half of our fighting force? That would
just be unsustainable now. So they did reflect on it, but they didn't know that brutal reality.
They did reflect on seeing their friends die.'t know that brutal reality. They did reflect on
seeing their friends die. They saw their friends die in the aircraft. There's a number of stories
in the book where some of their friends were killed by flak or by fighters when they were
flying the Lancaster. The stories of them watching the Lancaster next to them in the darkness
explode and knowing seven of their friends had been killed. The stories of them
coming back to the Nissen hut they shared on their RAF base with another crew. So there's
seven beds on one side of a Nissen hut, seven beds on the other side. And one crew would come in,
go to bed after an operation, and the other crew would simply never return. Their beds
would be empty. And in the morning or sometimes in the middle of the night,
people would come in, remove their last possessions, their hairbrushes, their shaving kits, their spare underwear, put them in a bag, they'd be gone, and a new crew would be in.
That was part of the sausage machine of Bomber Command. There was no time for reflection, no time for fear, no time for open fear, no time for mourning.
Were these volunteers largely initially in Bomber
Command as it shifts to becoming a conscript force? No, they were all volunteers. You volunteered to
be air crew. You know, some of the people who are featured in the book were boys when the war
started. So maybe 15 or 16 when the war started. The guy who started the book and finished it,
who was a rear gunner, was a butcher's boy volunteered as did everybody in bomber command you volunteered to fly they did various
tests that would say okay you might make a navigator you might make a pilot you will make
a wireless operator they went off for their training sometimes to the other side of the
world to canada to south africa some in the uk and then they came back together rear gunners
trainer a few months a pilot training possibly a couple of years they came back together, rear gunners trainer a few months, a pilot training,
possibly a couple of years. They came back together and they were formed into crews.
And it was like speed dating, Dan. You could have maybe two or 300 air crew, age between 18 and 21,
22, two or 300 air crew put in a hangar like the one you've got on the screen behind you there.
And they were simply be told, form yourselves into a crew.
There's no science.
Nobody said this guy's got good marks at gunnery school.
This guy's got good marks at wireless operator school.
It was by the cut of your jib.
And so a pilot might look at somebody and say, well, he looks like he might be a good gunner.
A wireless operator might go up and say, I like you, Skipper.
I don't know anything about you, but I think I'd like to fly under your command.
And this way, pure chance, pure luck, they formed themselves into a fighting unit of seven men.
And they were choosing simply by the figurative toss of a coin, the men that they were going to fly with,
the men that they were going to socialise with, the men that were going to deal death and destruction together,
and the men who would die together as well. That's how it happened.
We've got questions and comments, which we will come to mostly at the end if that's all right,
guys. But I just want to pick up on one from a History Hit subscriber. Elian Gallagher
says her dad was a rear gunner in Lancaster in 42 to 43. He was shot down. He was the sole
survivor of the crew and he lost his two front teeth, which were apparently embedded in the gun
turret. You must have heard a lot of stories like that.
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Oh, the rear gunner. What a position to be in them. You know, the Lancaster, the length,
the dimensions of the lancaster
are astonishing you know sort of 69 feet from front to back pilot and a bomb aimer up front
rear gunner your contributor's uncle was it or grandfather sorry rear gunner out on his own in a
perspex bathtub the rear gunner turret was kind of like you know your wheelie bin outside your house? It was like a
Perspex wheelie bin, and they sat in that, so you're exposed to the elements. It's not pressurised
like your aircraft when you go on holiday, so if you're at 22,000 feet and it's minus 30 degrees,
minus 35, 40 degrees, that's the temperature that you're sitting in as the rear gunner,
540 degrees, that's the temperature that you're sitting in as the rear gunner, staring into the darkness. Can you imagine, first of all, five Lancasters, 10 Lancasters, and then maybe 500,
600 Lancasters, all heading towards the target in darkness, the rear gunner looking out, eyes
peeled, looking for that enemy fighter. And the other thing that the rear gunner had to contend
with was, that's where the enemy fighter was aiming. They were coming in behind, and they were
aiming at the rear gunner's position. It was a deadly place to be. I've met lots of aircrew from
the Second World War, and they all tend to say the aircraft they flew is the best aircraft in the
whole world ever. And you're, I'm sure, the same with the Tornadoes. What do you think is different
about the Lancaster? The Lancaster's a bit like the Spitfire, Dan. It became famous because of what it did,
not because it contributed more or less to the war effort.
As you know, people argue about whether the Spitfire or the Hurricane
was a better fighter.
People argue about the Halifax and the Lancaster.
I don't think you can say one aircraft contributed more to the war.
Bomber Command's role was to take the war to Germany.
Obviously, that involved attacking the German industrial heartland. But its role, and it carried
out that role from day one of the war, the very first day, to the very last day of the war. It was
on operations, and very few other military big formations could say that they were fighting those battles on a
daily basis. And so for me, that's what Bomber Command did and that's what the Lancaster did.
It was taking the war to the heart of Germany when nobody else could. And that was really
important for the vast proportion of the war in actual fact.
Can't talk about Lancaster without talking about Operation Chastise, the Dam Busters raid.
Was this the Lancaster's biggest moment?
Does that overshadow some other extraordinary missions that it flew?
I would say that it was the Lancaster's most famous moment.
Even during the war, it was celebrated.
Guy Gibson, in the aftermath of the Dam Busters raid, as it became known,
was sent off on a world spin tour, sent around the world on a spin tour, regaling the world
about stories of the Lancaster and Bomber Command and what the home country, if we call it that,
was doing in the fight against Nazi Germany. But I don't think that you can say that it was
crucial to the war effort. It was incredibly brave, incredibly skilful, but I don't think
you can compare it to some of the thousand bomber raids in the necessity of what it carried out. You can't compare it, I don't think, to what Bomber
Command did in the run-up to D-Day, preparing the D-Day landing zones and attacking the German
defences. And as a whole, you can't compare it to what Bomber Command and the Lancaster did
throughout the war. And for me, that's the point that people miss when they see the dam busters,
the war. And for me, that's the point that people miss when they see the dam busters or the raid on Hamburg or the raid on the V2 sites and the V1 sites. The role of Bomber Command was all-encompassing
to take the war to Germany. The veterans you've talked to, what's their view of the slaughter
that was being unleashed on the ground? Is that something that they've dwelt on? Yes, very much so. I think that not
many of them thought about it too much at the time. There's a couple of accounts in the book
where people look down on a burning Hamburg or a burning Bremen or a burning Dresden, of course,
look at the fires that they've been caused and that they're flying in to bomb even more into
the fires. And they talk about, about oh my god what must it like to
be down there but you then juxtapose that to the fact that we were fighting a total war it was
nation pitted against nation and i also in the book on a couple of occasions when you know so
we follow a crew as it bombs hamburg and then i cut to an account from a young girl who was on
the ground in hamburg and describes what it was like.
And it's horrific. It's brutal. It is tragedy beyond compare.
You know, never think that any of this is glory of war because it isn't.
It's brutal and it is truly horrific.
And they did reflect on it, reflected on it more afterwards.
And I think that possibly where some of the hurt came in, and you'll know because you've spoken to them,
was the way that some of the opinion turned against them in the aftermath of the war.
They'd watched their friends die. They'd been lucky to survive. And now in the aftermath of the war, people were criticising what they'd done.
And Bomber Harris was thrust to one side. Churchill turned his back on the Bomber War, even though he was a huge proponent of the bomber war,
a real proponent of the bomber war. But he was a politician and he understood how times were changing. And so they were hurt in the aftermath in actual fact. They reflected on the brutality
of it all, but they were primarily hurt in the aftermath. And they felt as though the country
abandoned them. And in some cases still do. I spoke to one guy and he said, people still refer to bomber
command veterans as murderers. You murdered people. And that is quite hurtful for young men
who were fighting a total war in the only way that we had at our disposal at that time.
What about also when those young men were shot down? The Lancaster was a famously difficult
plane to get out of, wasn't it? If it suffered anti-aircraft fire or enemy interdiction, a spinning, falling fuselage must have been very,
very challenging to escape from. Very, very difficult. And there are obviously countless
stories of some of them escaping. There's a couple of things that really struck me.
First of all, whilst it is a big aircraft, it is quite narrow inside. So if you are, what are you,
Dan, six foot two or six foot three, something like that, you will bang your head every time you move around in a Lancaster.
And where the wings are attached to the body, the gap that you have to get through is about two and
a half, three feet. It's like trying to get through a letterbox in a cave. So simply moving around in
a Lancaster in the daylight, in daytime on the ground is difficult. Can you imagine what it
is like at night, in darkness, with holes in it, when the German flak's gone through, when it's on
fire, when it's spinning? If an aircraft is in a flat spin, the G-forces are astonishing. You know,
they found themselves pinned on the ceiling or pinned on the side of the fuselage. So try to
imagine that. Most people will know what the feeling is like to be on a waltzer at the fairground. If
you're on a waltzer and it's spinning around, you're experiencing probably one and a half,
two, two and a half G. And you're pinned to the back of the waltzer. And it's quite difficult to
get your head forward. It's quite difficult. You couldn't stand up. Now you imagine, put that
waltzer on a roller coaster, put that roller coaster on the night on fire and shoot at it, put a lid on
the waltzer and then try and get out. And that's what it was like for those men. And so it was
astonishing. And some of the guys were lucky. There's one story in there that I'd never heard
anything like this before until the chap told me, a Lancaster pilot. He was attacking, I think it
was Berlin in 1943 as part of the Battle of Berlin.
And they were carrying flares. They were part of the Pathfinder force, carrying green flares
to mark the target for other bombers. And they're flying in towards the target and their aircraft
is hit. And the first thing that Jim says is, he said, everything turned green. Everything
turned green. And what had happened was a flak or something,
it hit the bomb bay and the flares had exploded and set the aircraft on fire. He lost all
communications with the rest of his crew. He lost all awareness of where he was. All he knew that
it was green. And he said, I knew that the aircraft was finished. The aircraft was finished.
I had to now sacrifice my life for my six crew friends.
I had to keep that aircraft straight and level.
I knew that if I could keep it straight and level for 25 seconds, they could bail out.
And so that's what he did.
He said, I'm going to die.
He just continued.
And he's counting in his head.
One, two, three.
At one point he said, I knew I was going to die.
And he thought, my mum is really going to be annoyed by this.
And then he said, the other thought that I had was, I've never slept with a woman.
I've never left a son or a daughter to continue my line.
I've never known. He was 21, 22.
I'd never slept with a woman. I didn't know what that was like.
And he got to 15, 16.
He got to 17. The flames are coming up. The flames are between the control column and where all his
instruments are. The flames are licking up around him. He got to 17 and he said, 17. And the next
thing I knew, I was still sitting, still with my hands forward as though on the control column,
still sitting, still with my hands forward as though on the control column, but the aircraft had gone. There was nothing there. I was still in a sitting position. I was still going forwards,
but everything else had gone. The aircraft had simply exploded around him and he was left sitting,
holding nothing at all in a sitting position over Berlin.
And he managed to deploy his parachute.
And obviously at 20,000 feet, what does that take?
Maybe eight or nine minutes to float down, something like that.
The flak barrage is still going off.
He's in the middle of the flak.
And his story of survival, I think, is one of the most astonishing untold stories of the war, in actual fact.
We've got Nigel Leaney, one of the subscribers, is on the chat here.
And he's talking about your time with 15 Squadron.
And obviously you would have met many of these veterans through your time in service.
Do you think they talk to you more frankly and more diligently than they would to me?
Because you've ejected from an aircraft. You have that in common with them.
I would never take anything away from you, Dan, that's for sure. But I think the only thing I'd
say is that you've interviewed the veterans. It's far too easy for them to say, we just got on with
it. We never thought about it. We never thought about the death. We never thought about destruction.
And I feel confident in pressing them, in challenging them. And they know that I know
what they're talking about. And I know that they're
not being entirely truthful or most of them aren't. And so I think that they are willing to open up
more when they know that somebody understands. When they talk about death, when they talk about
killing, it's quite difficult to talk to somebody about that actually, to talk, you know, when I
killed somebody. If somebody is really quite happy to talk about that, there's a tendency to be a bit of a braggart in actual fact, and they're very,
very reluctant to talk about it. So I felt privileged that they trusted me enough with
their stories in actual fact. Thank you so much, John. I think you're going to stick around if
that's okay and answer one or two questions from subscribers. It's going to be a remarkable book.
Just tell everyone what it's called. It's Lancaster, the Forging of a Very British Legend.
Amazing stuff.
That'd be interesting.
I mean, did you talk to people who are part of the forging of these airframes?
It must have been a gigantic industrial effort.
Absolutely.
Enormous effort.
7,377 Lancasters built.
Just think of that and some of the pictures from the factories coming off the production line,
built in sections so that
they could be bolted together. Really astonishing. Now, in actual fact, I didn't really find any
survivors because they tended to be older people who were working in the factories. Veterans that
I spoke to who are maybe, what, 20, 21, 22 at the end of the war, they're 97, 98, 99 now.
And so if you were working in a factory in your 30s, you know, they're long gone.
But there are enough contemporary accounts. And one of the chaps from the Battle of Britain
Memorial Flight, the old squadron boss there, Clive Rowley, has done a lot of interviews that
he allowed me access to with people that had helped build them and their stories. Really
astonishing. You know, a little bit of hanky-panky going on in the factories as well, Dan, in actual
fact. Lots of women in there, lots of men men working in there and I'm reliably informed that a number
of babies were conceived in the back of Lancasters really yeah yeah well that's a that's a
happier story than we usually associate the Lancaster bomber with that's lovely well John
Nicol thank you very much for coming on the podcast and very good luck with this next book
it's going to be a smash hit. Thanks very much, Dan.
Absolute pleasure to speak to you again.
Cheers.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast.
Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask.
I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money.
Makes sense.
But if you could just do me a favour,
it's for free.
Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast.
If you give it a five-star rating
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purge yourself,
give it a glowing review.
I'd really appreciate that.
It's tough weather,
the law of the jungle out there
and I need all the fire support I can get.
So that will boost it up the charts.
It's so tiresome,
but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful.
Thank you.