An early (interim) Handley Page Halifax BII powered by 4 Bristol Hercules engines, due to a shortage of the usual Rolls Royce Merlin units, which were in great demand for the Lancaster, Spitfire, and the impending launch of the Mosquito. Far more powerful than the Merlin, crews found that the Hercules engines meant that their aircraft had a far higher ceiling than the Merlin version, and got up to it far more quickly. The trade off was a higher fuel consumption, which caused a few embarrassing emergency landings when flight engineers used to the Rolls Royce thirst failed to monitor their fuel gauges! (N.B. 300 Lancaster BII’s were also fitted with the Hercules engines, with the same fuel consumption issues. Pictures of BII Lancasters are relatively rare, and look awful to fans of the aircraft!) The shape of the port vertical stabiliser (just visible here) marks this aircraft out as a very early III, this design caused considerable instability, and a larger, more rectangular design was subsequently fitted, which cured the problem. This was a relatively rare marque of the Halifax, and judging from the photo, there was very nearly one less on the previous night in late 1941! A sleepy bomb aimer in the stream directly above obviously failed to see this plane wandering into the cross hairs of his bomb sight! This is what a 500 lb general purpose bomb does when it falls straight through the fuselage of another ‘heavy’ which was probably no more than 500 feet below. It hadn’t fallen far enough to arm itself, which was probably why it didn’t explode….but I bet that mid upper gunner needed a change of underwear!