Vickers Wellington

The Wellington’s defining feature was invisible under the fabric. Barnes Wallis — later of the bouncing bomb — built its fuselage and wings as a geodetic lattice: a basket-weave of light duralumin members in which every piece carried load in tension or compression, and no single member was critical. Over it went doped fabric, which is why a 1936 design looked, from a distance, like something from the previous war.

The consequence was structural resilience that has never quite been matched. Wellingtons came home with whole sections of fabric burned away and the lattice showing like a ribcage, with metres of structure shot out, with sections of wing missing. Losing part of a geodetic frame simply redistributed the loads through the members that remained. Crews knew it, and the confidence it bought was worth as much as the engineering.

The RAF entered the war believing that bombers in tight formation, defended by power-operated turrets, could attack in daylight without escort. That belief died in a single afternoon. On 18 December 1939, twenty-four Wellingtons flew from Suffolk and Norfolk to attack German warships off Wilhelmshaven. German radar detected them, fighters intercepted, and twelve of the twenty-two that reached the target area were shot down.

The lesson was absorbed immediately: by January 1940 Bomber Command had abandoned unescorted daylight raids and turned to bombing at night, which is what it did for the next five years. It is worth setting beside Schweinfurt, where the US Eighth Air Force reached the same conclusion at far greater cost in October 1943. Both air forces had to be taught the same lesson by their own casualty lists, four years apart.

From 1940 to 1942 the Wellington was Bomber Command. The four-engined heavies — Stirling, Halifax, Lancaster — arrived slowly, and until they did the Wellington carried the campaign, hauling around 2,000 kg of bombs to the Ruhr night after night with crews navigating by dead reckoning and the stars.

How well that worked was answered brutally in August 1941 by the Butt Report, which examined bombing photographs and concluded that only about one crew in three claiming to have attacked a target had come within five miles of it — and over the Ruhr, with haze and flak, closer to one in ten. The finding did not stop the offensive; it changed its aim, from precision targets to cities, and the Wellington flew that campaign too.

The type’s largest night was also, in effect, its farewell to the main force. For Operation Millennium — the first thousand-bomber raid, against Cologne on the night of 30 May 1942 — Arthur Harris scraped together every airframe that would fly, including training units. Of the 1,046 aircraft dispatched, 599 were Wellingtons: more than half the force.

It was a demonstration aimed as much at the British Cabinet as at Germany, and it worked as one. Within a year the heavies had taken over and the Wellington was leaving the front-line bomber squadrons — but the raid that proved Bomber Command could concentrate a thousand aircraft over one city was flown, in the majority, by a medium bomber designed in 1932.

Its second career was over water, and it solved a specific problem. ASV radar could find a surfaced U-boat at night, but the returns disappeared into sea clutter in the last mile of the approach — precisely when the crew needed to see the target. Aircraft arrived over the right patch of ocean in total darkness with nothing to aim at.

The answer was the Leigh Light: a searchlight of enormous power slung under the wing, switched on in the final seconds of the run. From April 1942, No. 172 Squadron flew Leigh Light Wellingtons over the Bay of Biscay, through which every U-boat leaving the French bases had to pass. A boat that surfaced at night to charge batteries could now be blinded and attacked before it could dive, and the Biscay transit — previously the safest part of a patrol — became one of the most dangerous.

The Wellington fought in every theatre the RAF did. From Egypt it bombed Tobruk, Benghazi and the ports feeding the Afrika Korps through the desert war; it served in Greece, Italy and the Far East; and it ended the war as a trainer and transport when it was too old for anything else.

It also flew one of the war’s odder missions. The DWI version — the initials were deliberately meaningless for security — carried an enormous magnetic ring around the airframe, energised in flight, and flew low over harbours and estuaries to detonate German magnetic mines from the air. An aircraft made of fabric and metal lattice, flying at fifty feet to blow up mines beneath it, is not a use anyone had in mind in 1936.

With 11,461 built the Wellington was the most-produced British bomber of the war, and one of very few aircraft on any side that was in front-line service on the first day of the war and still flying operationally on the last. Crews called it the Wimpy, after the hamburger-eating character in the Popeye cartoons, which is roughly the level of affection the name implies.

It is remembered less than the Lancaster because it did the unglamorous half of the job: the years when Bomber Command was small, inaccurate and losing, and the long anti-submarine patrols that no one filmed. Its real legacy is the lesson of December 1939, learned at the cost of half a formation, and a structural idea so good that it kept aircraft flying home in a condition that should have killed everyone aboard.

• Ken Delve, Vickers Wellington (Crowood Press).
• Max Hastings, Bomber Command (Michael Joseph).
• Norman Franks, Search, Find and Kill: Coastal Command’s U-boat Successes (Grub Street).