Avro Lancaster
The Avro Lancaster was Britain’s most successful bomber of WWII. First flown in 1941 and entering operational service in February of 1942, it became the mainstay of Britain’s strategic bombing campaign, displacing the RAF’s other heavy bombers, the Halifax and Sterling, to become Britain’s principal bomber in the second half of the war. Lancasters carried 64% of the tonnage dropped by Bomber Command during the conflict, They could also carry the heaviest payload of the war at 22,000 lbs bomb, exceeding the 20,000 lbs maximum payload of the bigger and more advanced B-29 – an airplane twice as heavy as the Lancaster.
Bomber Command preferred Lancasters because, unlike the Halifax whose bomb bay was compartmentalized, thus limiting the size of the individual bombs it could carry, the Lancaster had a long and unobstructed bomb bay. That allowed them to carry the RAF’s biggest bombs, such as the 4000 lbs “Cookie” and 12,000 lbs “Tall Boy”. Specially modified Lancasters could also carry the 22,000 lbs “Grand Slam” – the heaviest payload of any WWII bomber.
On strategic bombing raids, Lancasters typically carried a mix of large high explosive bombs, such as 2000 lbs bombs or 4000 lbs and heavier “blockbusters”, plus clusters of smaller incendiary bombs. The idea was that the big bombs would tear open buildings and the incendiaries would start fires in their innards, now well ventilated. The blockbusters would hopefully have also ruptured the city’s water mains, making firefighting difficult or impossible. That allowed individual fires to coalesce into larger conflagrations that, if conditions were ripe, could produce firestorms in which hurricane strength walls of flame and whirling tornados of fire would sweep and dance through cities, killing tens of thousands by burning them to cinders or, as the stories-high inferno sucked oxygen out of the air, suffocating those whom the flames did not touch.
Lancasters were capable of great precision by WWII standards. Equipped with ground-mapping radar, by 1944 they could bomb at night with higher accuracy than American bombers could during the day. In the runup to D-Day, Lancasters accurately bombed communications and transportation targets such as bridges and rail yards.
In addition to strategic bombing, Lancasters were used by 617 Squadron, “The Dam Busters”, immortalized in the book and movie of the same name, for special operation aerial attacks, such as breaching the Ruhr dams in 1943. Lancasters has flown by 617 Squadron also sank the battleship Tirpitz in 1944 with 12,000 lbs “Tall Boys”, and were used in Operation Manna towards war’s end, a mercy mission that dropped food into Holland to avert widespread starvation.