It was a cool spring evening in Lincolnshire, England, with the last light of dusk fading from an overcast sky, when an Avro Lancaster III pierced the silence with the roar of four Merlin V-12 engines, accelerated down the tarmac at RAF Fiskerton, and ponderously lifted off at 9:36 p.m. At the controls was Bryan Esmond Bell, 24-year-old son of Percy and Marjorie, born and raised in the outer London suburb of Harrow. With him in the thrumming ship were six men, ranging from 20 to 28 years old. It hadn’t been certain the flight would go, for ceilings had lingered at only 100 feet for most of the day, but throughout the evening the weather improved and the mission was on for the 21 Lancasters of Royal Air Force Squadron No. 49. Bryan Bell and the crew of Lancaster ND533 didn’t know it, but they had just left their home soil for the last time.
It was June 9, 1944, only three days after the greatest seaborne invasion in history, and Allied troops clung to a perilously slender strip of French coastline after failing to achieve the bulk of their D-Day objectives. Fighting for their lives against a tenacious and skilled enemy that was beginning to flow into Normandy, the Allied armies were depending on air superiority to slow the stream of German reinforcements. That night, as one of five RAF heavy bombing missions against French rail centers, 108 Lancasters were scheduled to attack the railyard at Étampes, south of Paris. Six aircraft would not return. If their crews didn’t have any particular sense of impending doom, if a milk run to northern France seemed preferable to interminable hellish hours over the heart of Germany, they nevertheless set out across the English Channel with eyes wide open. In five years of war, Bomber Command had absorbed staggering losses of airplanes and men, and Squadron No. 49 had few “old hands” left from the early days.
