A special preview feature from Aviation Classics - The Avro Lancaster

Lancaster III EE139 was built by Avro at its Newton Heath works in Manchester. Part of an order for 620 aircraft, it was built as a Mk.III powered by Americanbuilt Packard Merlin 28 engines.
The aircraft was delivered brand new to RAF Grimsby – better known as Waltham – in Lincolnshire at the end of May 1943. No.100 Squadron arrived at the station in December 1942 and began to re-equip with Lancasters as part of No.1 Group Bomber Command. It was re-forming at Waltham having been virtually wiped out earlier in the year during action against the Japanese in Singapore while flying Vickers Vilderbeest biplanes.

The unit flew its first operational sorties from Waltham on 4 March 1943 and was to remain in continuous action until the end of the war. Sgt Ron Clark and his all NCO crew arrived at Waltham from 1656 Heavy Conversion Unit at Lindholme, Yorkshire. As a ‘sprog’ crew they were fortunate to be given charge of the brand new EE139, which had been delivered at the same time as their arrival.

The crew’s first flight in this Lancaster was carried out on 2 June 1943, when they took it on a local air test in daylight for 45 minutes. After successfully completing seven training flights with EE139, and having attended three briefings for operations that were cancelled, the crew appeared on the Battle Order for what was to be their first ‘op’ on 11 June. Along with over 780 other heavy bombers, they were sent to the heavily defended city of Dusseldorf during the full ferocity of the Battle of the Ruhr. Flying at 21,000ft over the ‘Valley of Hell’ between Cologne and Dusseldorf, they somehow got through the ‘solid wall of flak’ as it was described that night and bombed the rail yards and factories, returning shaken but uninjured to Waltham. Lish Easby wrote of his introduction to night bombing: “Long before we reached the target we spotted the red glow in the sky and when we got near it the cloud had dispersed giving us a bird’s eye view of what looked like the crater of a volcano. The whole town appeared to be one mass of flames with a column of dense, black smoke towering up to a height of at least 18,000ft.”

The squadron lost two aircraft that night, both to night-fighters. Thirteen men died and one survived to become a prisoner of war. By mid-June only two crews from those that had re-formed 100 Squadron at Waltham survived. Throughout June nine crews would be lost, one-third of 100 Squadron’s strength. The chances of Ron’s crew completing 30 operations at Waltham were not good. At the airfield EE139 was parked on dispersal 7, close to the village Post Office in Holton-le-Clay. Ron and crew soon became good friends with the two elderly ladies running the Post Office and established a routine of joining them for tea and toast after their morning inspection of EE139.

BECOMING THE ‘PHANTOM’

As was the fashion, the crew members were soon discussing an identity for their aircraft. At the time the film Phantom of the Opera was being shown, and was to be the inspiration for the name of their aircraft. Harold ‘Ben’ Bennett, the flight engineer, was given a free hand designing the motif and came up with the ghoulish hooded skeleton figure throwing bombs out of the night sky. ‘Ben’ said he might have been influenced by feelings of revenge from his time as a ground engineer with Fighter Command and suffering frequent bomb attacks by the Luftwaffe.

Little did they know at the time that when they created their Phantom of the Ruhr it was destined to become one of the best-known Lancasters in Bomber Command. It gained the squadron code HW-R. Ron Clark flew the Phantom on 32 occasions, logging over 165 hours in the aircraft – 147 of which were operations at night. He was captain of the Lancaster for 25 of the 33 ‘ops’ it carried out with 100 Squadron. When the aircraft left the unit in November 1943 its tally of bombing ‘ops’ was recorded in two rows on the port side under the canopy.

Operational sorties were represented with yellow bombs, while a red bomb signified a trip to the ‘Big City’ – Berlin. ‘Ops’ to Italy were recorded with an ice-cream cornet, an unofficial marking used by Bomber Command to signify a raid on Italian targets. Ron and his crew were responsible for two of the four cornets on Phantom, including an 11-hour epic to Turin, and took the bomber to Berlin on three occasions. Few of their ‘ops’ with Phantom of the Ruhr were without incident, but it was their last trip in it, to Mannheim on 23/24 September 1943, when they came closest to disaster.

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Above: Postagram to Ron from Commanderin- Chief Bomber Command ACM Sir Arthur Harris, congratulating him on the award of his gallantry medal.