What Happened to Britain’s Lancaster Bombers After WW2

📖🎧 The stories that never made it into the official record — collected in one place. Available now as both an ebook AND an audiobook, both included in a single purchase. 👉 £9.99 — get it here: https://britishwararchive.gumroad.com... In May 1945 the war in Europe ended, and the most famous bomber Britain ever built began to disappear. Within three years almost all of them were gone — not shot down, not lost over Germany, but cut up in fields in England by the country that had built them. Seven thousand three hundred and seventy-seven Lancasters were built, and more than half were already destroyed before the war even ended. This is the story of what happened to the survivors: why a bankrupt Britain scrapped them by the hundred every month, melted them down into saucepans and car panels, and kept so few that only two Lancasters still fly anywhere in the world today. It takes in the ones that found a second life — over the sea, as airliners, and as the flying test-beds that carried the very jet engines that had made them obsolete — the Dambuster aircraft that nobody thought to save, and the uncomfortable truth that the last military Lancasters flying were Canadian, not British, nearly twenty years after Britain began cutting up its own. Sources: Imperial War Museum Archive — iwm.org.uk Royal Air Force Museum — rafmuseum.org.uk Battle of Britain Memorial Flight — Avro Lancaster records Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre, East Kirkby #WW2 #Lancaster #RAF #MilitaryHistory #BomberCommand