Avro Lancaster in action

My Oh My, what a discussion! 1st: I've seen a Lanc flying with the BOB Mem. Flight at Biggin Hill, awesome! 2nd: Not as sleek as the B-17, but in my regards the better looking of them ;-) 3rd: "Bomber" Harris self-declared aim was to bomb civilian targets, as to "demoralize" the enemy population, unlike USAAF, whose aim was to interrupt and destroy enemy key industrial complexes. Therefore he should be treated as a war criminal posthumously. 4th. Hey, folks, remember, the war is over! cya :-)

I hate the war, but i like this plane very much...

Bomber crews did what was asked of them - The controversy as to whether or not it was necessary is another issue. Bomber crew suffered higher losses than anybody else, they should be credited and truly ARE heroes. I believe the bombing campaign was entirely necessary, it wasnt simply a weapon of terror, strategic positions were bombed to the point of germans creating underground factories.

Lets get arguments in context, before D-Day , bomber command was the only way of taking the war to Germany, we had to do something...anything !. Most of us were not around in those dark days. Everytime a Lanc took-off for Germany, those guys had 50-50 odds of coming home, then again the next night etc. They did'nt ask, they saw it as their duty. We have no idea today how to comprehend those odds. I'm not arguing the rights & wrongs, just commenting on those crews commitment & courage.

edit, to my last message. I would consider the Japanese forces to have the smallest majority of decent men. I remember seeing a picture of a Hurricane with strange light blue markings on its wings and learned that it was Finnish. Its a pretty distinctive insignia they used but then you would need thta given the variety of aircraft that flew in the Finnish Air Force!

Yeah! The insignia was a svastika! LOL But this svastika was blue, not tilted and on a round white field. Our svastika was given by the Swedish Count Eric von Rosen who donated the first aircraft to the Finnish army after independence in 1917. He had painted this blue svastika on a white field as symbols of good luck. It is obvious that Hitler stole the svastika from older cultures like he stole the moustache of Charlie Chaplin. LOL

I hope crews of the night fighters are seen as heros in Germany. Same goes for the soldiers of the Wehrmacht and the sailors in the Kreigsmarine. I think that the majority of soldiers on both sides were decent human beings. What these videos are made for and what people see and think of, are the crews and the Lancaster itself. But you are of course entitled to your opinion.

Amen for that mate. My country waged three wars in ww2: the first as a neutral unallied country, the second one on the axis side and the third one on the allied side. All for the survival of our nation and for its democracy. My father served in the Finnish army.

Oh, and our air forces! We had aircraft from all sides. We had, American Brewster Buffaloes and Curtis PE 40s, British Hawker Hurricanes, German Messerschmit 109s, several Soviet fighter types (Jak and Lag), British Bristol Blenheim bombers, German Dornier and Heinkel bombers, American Douglas Dacotas, and Russian Petljakov bombers. Not the best types but still quite good selection of ww2 aircraft, some real rarities among them.

If these bombers were heroes, then the night fighters were too whenever they defended the civilians below. The industry and infrastructure is, ofcourse, another matter. The so-called dambuster raid was awesome.