Should have been in a museum. "A 'lucky' Lancaster bomber which survived an impressive 109 missions during the Second World War was deliberately set on fire in a training exercise, a new book reveals. Such was the precarious nature of bombing runs that the average lifespan of a Lancaster before it was shot down was just 25 raids. Yet 42 different captains took Lancaster EE136 - which was part of No. 9 Squadron and then No. 189 Squadron - on 109 missions. As part of its illustrious time in the air, it went on 14 raids to Berlin where German aircraft defences were at their strongest. The Lancaster EE136 was used in a firefighting exercise and set on fire during a routine firefighting drill at Sutton on Hull station in Yorkshire in 1954 A total of 315 men flew in operations in the EE136 and all came home safely. Shockingly 101 of them - more than a third - were later killed in other aircraft. The last raid carried out by the EE136 before it was pensioned off was Karlsruhe, Germany, on February 2, 1945, the worst night of the war for No. 189 Squadron which lost four Lancasters and crews. However, instead of taking pride of place in a museum, EE136 was deemed surplus to requirements by the RAF and set on fire during a routine firefighting drill at Sutton on Hull station in Yorkshire in 1954. From the first flight of the EE136 on June 11, 1943, to her last with No. 9 Squadron on October 19, 1944, 86 Lancaster bombers were assigned to the squadron. Of these, 50 were lost to enemy action, another five crashed at home, three crashed in Russia on the first Tirpitz raid and four were transferred to other squadrons only to be lost by them." The luckiest Lancaster: Bomber that survived 109 missions | Daily Mail Online
I've got mixed feelings about this. Highly experienced Lancaster but then so were many others in our modern iconoclast sort of way. There are, in relative terms, many Lancasters in museums all around the World. Why were more museum pieces needed?. It was used in a training exercise many years ago when sentiments were different anyway and at least it wasn't just simply scrapped. There were also still rather a lot of surviving examples at that time as well. Why didn't we keep more for posterity? Why didn't we preserve the one used by Guy Gibson in the Dambusters raid?....or one of those that attacked the Tirpitz?.....why didn't we keep shed loads of other things like running Tiger tanks? Why didn't we preserve HMS Warspite....or HMS King George V ? Why didn't they preserve my dad's Comet tank? The list is endless. Don't know about you guys but I personally want to visit museums....not live in one.
Aye, fair points. It's only really in the last twenty years that the two world wars have stopped being something that "happened a long time ago" and started being deemed worthy of preservation. Martin, myself and others have often commented on the pitying looks we sometimes get when we express an interest in pillboxes etc- almost like the ones trainspotters used to get.
