User Reviews

I found this show super engaging and an emotional roller coaster. Colin and Ewan McGregor were a fantastic brother tandem. Ewan as the well known and articulate actor but his brother, Colin being an RAF pilot. While the nuts and bolts of the show revolved around the Lancaster bomber/flying fortress platform, the journeys vehicle you might say is Colin's training regimen of moving through various WW2 era heavy steel and cable plane models to be allowed to fly the RAF's last remaining flyable Lancaster in an annual air show. The engine of that "vehicle" was the role of that plane and the thousands of teenaged-to-twenties crew who flew for Bomber Harris in WWII, the controversy of the What the show called "area bombing" (aka carpet bombing) and the literal firestorms that some of this created in Hamburg and Dresden, as well the delayed recognition of the 50,000 air crew that gave their lives in the process of fighting the only war that the Allies were capable of at the time. Peppered throughout with vintage combat footage, last surviving crews, interviewed before they've passed on into history, was endearing, sobering and sometimes chilling for what is usually thought of as steely eyed combat veterans, to the young men flying into terror that they truly were. This juxtaposed with the personal beliefs of Ewan and the hindsight view from a modern fighter pilot in his brother Colin, was truly intriguing watching their overall views change as they got to examine evidence and documents through history and how flashy words like "area bombing campaigns to hinder the German gears of industry" and how that could translate directly into "40,000 civilians killed in Hamburg in a week so they couldn't rebuild the factories". Up until this point the bombings were only a temporary stoppage of work but the heavy mixing of incendiary bombs and the devastation they added was the two edged sword of effective and horrific. I highly recommend this show especially if you're in any way interested in history OR airplanes.