Now in their 90s, RAF heroes consider the full-fledged horror of deadly missions for a gripping new movie.

Rusty Waughman, now 99, is one of the few surviving Lancaster bomber pilots who can tell war stories more about surviving against sometimes overwhelming hardship than wandering.

“Survival was 99% lucky,” he tells me. “They smashed us into pieces and pierced us with holes.

“There was a mid-air collision over Belgium and we had just left the target for another operation against France when another plane exploded below us and blew us upside down, so I had to tip over carefully.

“We lost about 10,000 feet and our operator, little Taffy, ended up with the contents of the pee can thrown at him. It wasn’t exactly the taste of the month, I would say.

The extraordinary stories of Rusty and other non-contemporaries in their teens and twenties wielding the mighty fighter jet are at the center of a long-running, deeply intriguing and deeply moving documentary called Lancaster.

In it, the greats also consider how, after the victory of the Second World War, their main contribution to the victory was effectively erased from history. It wasn’t until 2012 that an RAF Bomber Command memorial was unveiled in Green Park, London.

Featuring stunning aerial footage of one of the two Lancastrians still ready to fly, the documentary was conceived by David Fairhead and Anthony Palmer, whose equally excellent 2018 Spitfire film highlights the war’s most iconic aircraft and the brave men who used it. , fourth.

Lancaster’s crew were no less brave, but their stories are much more complicated, due to the devastation wrought by the bombing of Nazi Germany.

Pictured: 99-year-old John Bell remembers how Lancaster’s teams were founded as playground football teams

From his home in Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Rusty tells me about his own moral distress. “In 1948 and 1949, after bombing the city five times during the war, I flew the Berlin airlift,” recalls his mission to supply the people of West Berlin, which was thwarted by the Soviet Union in one of the first major crises. the Cold War.

“We were then taken to Berlin and they showed us the sites and all the reconstruction, but I remember seeing a church in ruins and the guide asking why it wasn’t rebuilt. “Oh, it will remain as it is, in memory of the 360 ​​children who died while taking shelter there,” he said.

There is a brief but meaningful silence. “Well, you know,” he adds, “I knew right away that I could do it.”

But everyone who served in Bomber Command knew very well that the four-engine Avro Lancaster was designed as a direct response to the Luftwaffe’s monstrous campaign against British cities – the Blitz, which was bombarded every night for eight months. It soon became clear that the twin-engine Manchester, Lancaster’s predecessor, would not be able to bring the war back to Germany.

That’s why the aircraft’s designer, Roy Chadwick, suggested replacing Manchester’s two Rolls-Royce Vulture engines with four Rolls-Royce Merlins, the same engine that powers the Spitfire.

The dreaded Lancaster first commissioned in early 1942, when Bomber Command took on a new chief, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, ordering a change of tactics to come to be called “zone bombing.” The targets would no longer be individual factories, but entire cities, such as Cologne, the target of the first ‘thousand bombings’, and Dresden, which was nearly destroyed.

It was an extremely dangerous undertaking for everyone involved. By the end of the war, Bomber Command had lost 55,573 crew members, while more than 600,000 German civilians had been killed.

“But when we were making this movie, we realized that it wasn’t a campaign of aggression,” said co-director Anthony Palmer. “It was a campaign against bullying, and Lancaster was at the center of the scene.”

The young men leading these Lancastrians were in most cases little more than boys. Rusty was only 18 when the pilot received the wings and only 20 when he conducted his first operation in November 1943.

The destination that night was where the crew feared most because it was the farthest and most fiercely defended place: Berlin.

A WWII pilot using a bomb in front of a Lancaster. The dreaded Lancaster first commissioned in early 1942, when Bomber Command took on a new chief, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, ordering a change of tactics to come to be called “zone bombing.”

“But we were a little over Europe when we had five hunting attacks in a row,” he recalls. “Our Canadian rear gunner, Harry Nunn, actually kept us alive.”

The Lancastrians usually had a crew of seven, although Rusty, the eighth man whose job it was to collect the radio frequency used by the Lancastrians, flew in 101 Squadron, a German-speaking, “special mission” crew. so they couldn’t communicate.

However, this released electronic emissions that the enemy could intercept, putting the 101st Squadron at greater risk than any other. “Our mortality rate was the highest, around 40 percent,” Rusty says.

While Fighter Command was primarily public schools, Bomber Command was a melting pot of class and ethnicity. Born in County Durham, Rusty still speaks with a soft Tyneside accent, and Neil Flanigan, another veteran interviewed on the film, remembers leaving his hometown of Jamaica to serve in the RAF and wondering if he would ever see him again.

Lancaster teams were formed as a football team in the schoolyard. John Bell, also 99, who lives near Worthing, remembers being ordered to organize themselves into groups of seven after the men had assembled.

“It was just a matter of luck,” he says. “You had no idea what the other guys were like.

“I remember being there with a Canadian sailor, probably a little lost and we both said, ‘How do we find a good driver?’ we thought. Then a gunner came to us from behind and said, ‘I have a pilot, come with me’.

John was a bomb marker, the perfect job description for the man who lay on Lancaster’s nose and dropped bombs on their targets. Not all Lancastrian crews could easily cope with the mortal fears of their mission that night.

At times, teenagers had to be physically pushed onto giant planes and were accused of “moral fiber deficiency,” some of which even have their own acronym, LMF.

But joining the famed Dambuster 617 fleet, John managed to stay philosophical about the dangers. “I have the best view, if you can call it that.

“I could see everything around us and knew it wouldn’t take more than a single splinter to bring us down.

So there was no point in dwelling on it. You ignored that and went about your business.

Like most veterans, John was disillusioned with Winston Churchill, who at the time supported Harris’ brutal tactics but later turned away from them.

“He spent more time thinking about what we were doing to the Germans than how we helped win the war. This attitude really lasted for years until the monument was finally erected.

Rusty was also bitterly disappointed that Churchill did not recognize Bomber Command on VE Day.

‘Evil devil,’ I thought. But you know, later on, when we did the same to them, I realized that it was hard for him to convict the Germans for bombing us.

Rusty and John are among 38 veterans featured in the documentary. They were interviewed shortly before the outbreak, and many have died since then.

Finding old men like this and talking to them was difficult, but Anthony thinks his advanced years are for a stronger movie.

“There were documentaries about Bomber Command 40-50 years ago, there were many more back then, but the guys interviewed at the time were pretty belligerent about what they were doing.

Men in their fifties give very different interviews to men in their nineties. Now, they are much more reflective in later years. That makes him very excited.’

• Lancaster launches May 27