Last Flight to Berlin: The Search for a Bomber Pilot

Filmmaker Robert Linnell never knew his father.  His father never knew him.  Robert was but two months old when his father Lloyd Martin Linnell, the pilot of a heavy bomber, was shot down in the night skies over Germany in 1944.  Sixty years later Linnell, the son, sets off on a quest to honor the memory of his father, to document his war story on film, and to visit the very place where he died.  Little did he know that his quest would end in a face-to-face meeting with the German fighter pilot who shot down his father’s plane.

The story begins far away, on the Canadian Prairies. Robert’s grandfather was the Postmaster of Summerberry Saskatchewan. His mother was a Norwegian immigrant; his father was a homesteader in southern Saskatchewan. Lloyd Martin Linnell was born in Glentworth on November 27, 1917. When the war began he was studying aeronautics in Regina and on March 31, 1940 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).  After he learned to fly he was posted to Calgary as an instructor, and it was there he was married. When he was posted overseas, Linnell took his young wife with him to Halifax. They had a last holiday in New York before he sailed for England. It was there he learned that his wife was pregnant. He later told his godfather that his one worry was that he left her behind, expecting a child. He knew he might never return.

He arrived in Britain in March and began the very short conversion process to fly heavy bombers, first Wellingtons, and then the four-engined Halifax. On August 24, he and his crew were posted to 434 Squadron at Tholthorpe in Yorkshire. Even during the war, 434 Squadron was known as the “chop” squadron — for some reason it sustained much higher casualties than any other squadron in Bomber Command. The Command studied it, replaced its commanding officer, but the losses continued. The problem could have been with their equipment. They flew the Handley Page Halifax Mark V. The Halifax was not a perfect aircraft — in fact it had serious design problems. Air Marshall Harris disliked the Halifax intensely; he wanted to replace it with Lancasters.

Linnell’s operational career began with raids on Montlucon in France, and the industrial cities of Hanover, Frankfurt, and Dusseldorf. On the night of November 3, 1943, while attacking Dusseldorf, an incendiary bomb dropped from above struck his wing. Fortunately, it did not ignite. Twice he came back on only three engines. Once he bombed the wrong city. His logs recorded other mishaps, often navigational.  Accurate navigation was absolutely crucial for the safety of a bomber. Like fish in a school, there was less chance of attack when a plane stayed with its squadron’s formation. There was only an allowance of one minute more or less for the time an aircraft should be over the target. An isolated bomber outside the stream could be much more easily picked up by the German radar, and deadly nightfighters directed towards it.

But this was war.  Lloyd Linnell, and other young men like him, flew into the darkness each night, knowing that they might not return, and with a 50% casualty rate in the night skies over Europe the odds were very much against them.  In the most horrific war in human history, their bravery and endurance was taken for granted. It was simply their duty.

Finally, Linnell’s squadron was set to bomb “the Big City” – Berlin.  On the night of January 28/29, 1944, his Halifax “V” LK-740, was shot down by a nightfighter 50 kilometers north of Berlin. A witness, Irmgard Naujoks, was eleven years old at the time. She remembers how the plane circled the town in flames before its wing broke off.  It crashed and burnt two hundred meters from her house, and the bombs and ammunition exploded all night long.  None of the crew survived. The wreckage of the Halifax was hauled away and the crew was buried in the village cemetery. After the war they were exhumed and re-buried in the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in the Grunewald in Berlin.

Hauptmann Friedrich Tober, the German fighter pilot, was flying a Junkers Ju-88 that night. He shot down two Halifaxes north of Berlin. He tells Robert Linnell that he remembers making seven attacks on one Halifax until its wing caught on fire. His crew watched it burning until it hit the ground.

There is an enormous crater in a pine forest in northern Germany. It is twenty feet across and ten feet deep. It was made when Lloyd Martin Linnell’s Halifax bomber struck the ground.  Sixty years after the crash, no grass grows in this spot. Robert Linnell’s very personal documentary ends here, as he unearths pieces of twisted aluminum and a piece of rubber hose from an oxygen mask, and stands alone on the scorched earth where the father he never knew gave his life, in battle.

Details

LENGTH: 1 x 50 Minutes
FORMAT: Special
CAMERA: Digibeta
INTERNATIONAL TRACK: Yes
TEXTLESS: No
CLOSED CAPTIONS: No
ASPECT RATIO: 4:3
PRODUCTION YEAR: 2005
RELEASE YEAR: 2009
SUPPLIER: Nightfighters Productions Inc.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Canada
RIGHTS TERRITORY: Worldwide