Wings of memories
The stirring war documentary Lancaster may be about the slow and sturdy British bomber that turned much of Nazi Germany to rubble more than 75 years ago, but making the film was a race against the clock.
When David Fairhead and his co-director, Ant Palmer, made , their 2018 hit cinema feature about the iconic British fighter, the average age of the pilots they interviewed was 92. The average age of the 38 Lancaster veterans was 95. Of those who appear in the film, more than a dozen have since died, Fairhead tells from his home in Surrey. Although he’s sad that many of the men he and others interviewed have gone without having seen the finished film, it allowed them to tell their stories and reflect on being the lucky ones – out of the 125,000 in the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, some 55,000 died. Air crews’ chances of survival were less than for a soldier in the trenches of the Western Front during World War I.
