Say “four-engine British heavy bomber” to almost anyone and you will get the same answer: the Lancaster. The Avro Lancaster is the one that flew the Dambusters raid, the one still cruising over air shows on a summer afternoon, the one bolted into the national memory. But it was never the only heavy in the fight. Beside it, in roughly equal numbers and for the entire war, flew a bomber that did the unglamorous graft and got almost none of the credit: the Handley Page Halifax.

Here is the number that ought to end the argument before it starts. Some 6,178 Halifaxes were built, the last delivered in April 1945, making it the second most-produced British heavy bomber of the war, behind only the Lancaster. It first flew on 25 October 1939, entered RAF service in November 1940 with No. 35 Squadron, and flew its first operation on the night of 10–11 March 1941. It was there at the start, and it was there at the end. This is not a footnote aircraft. It is half the story we forgot to tell.

The plane that wasn’t the Lancaster

Part of the problem is that the Halifax has a genuinely rough opening act, and reputations set early. The first marks were, to put it kindly, a handful. Overloaded as the design was tinkered with, underpowered, and fitted with a tail that could stall the aircraft mid-manoeuvre, they were dangerous to fly and suffered heavily, in combat and in training accidents alike. Sir Arthur Harris, chief of Bomber Command and the Lancaster’s greatest fan, loathed the thing and lobbied to have production scrapped. He did not get his way, and thank goodness, because the aircraft he wanted to bin was about to be transformed.

The engine that fixed everything

The fix was, largely, the engine. The early Halifaxes ran on four Rolls-Royce Merlins, the same superb V12 that powered the Spitfire and the Lancaster, but the marriage never quite worked; the Merlin left the Halifax underpowered and unable to climb to the altitudes where it might have been safe. So from 1943 the definitive B Mk III did something bold: it ripped out the Merlins and bolted on four Bristol Hercules radials instead. The transformation was total. Top speed climbed to around 282 mph, the ceiling rose, and the aircraft that had been a liability became a genuinely good bomber. The Mk III was the most numerous version of all, and crews who flew both marks noticed the difference immediately.

The redesign paid for itself in survival, too. Thanks to its sectional construction and larger escape hatches, a Halifax was statistically easier to bail out of than a Lancaster: on average around a quarter of Halifax crews got out of a stricken aircraft, against roughly 15% for the Lancaster. If you were a nineteen-year-old with a burning bomber and thirty seconds to live, that gap was not academic.

The missions the Lancaster couldn’t fly

This is where the case for the Halifax stops being about numbers and starts being about breadth. The Lancaster was a magnificent bomb-lorry; the Halifax was a Swiss Army knife. As a glider tug it was actually superior to the Lancaster, and it hauled the gliders and dropped the paratroops for the great airborne operations. Specialised variants carried paratroopers and their kit. Others, stripped of turrets with a hole cut in the belly, flew for the Special Operations Executive, parachuting agents and arms into occupied Europe and running supplies to the Polish Home Army during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.

And it went to sea. Coastal Command took large numbers for anti-submarine patrol, reconnaissance, meteorological flights and minelaying off enemy ports. Later still it turned freighter, and civilian Halifaxes went on to fly thousands of sorties in the Berlin Airlift, hauling freight and bulk diesel into the blockaded city. The Lancaster did one job superbly. The Halifax did a dozen.

Canada’s bomber

Nowhere is the Halifax loved more than in Canada, and for good reason. When the RCAF’s No. 6 Group came into its own, the Halifax was its aircraft; a large majority of the Canadians who flew with Bomber Command flew Halifaxes. For a generation of Canadian aircrew, this was the bomber, and the affection has never faded. In total the Halifax force flew tens of thousands of operations and dropped more than 200,000 tons of bombs; over 1,800 aircraft were lost. Those are not the numbers of a supporting act.

The memory is being physically rebuilt, too. Only three complete Halifaxes survive. One, NA337, was hauled up from around 750 feet down in Norway’s Lake Mjosa in 1995 and painstakingly restored over nine years at the National Air Force Museum of Canada in Trenton, Ontario, the only Halifax in North America. In England, the Yorkshire Air Museum’s aircraft wears the colours of LV907 “Friday the 13th,” a Mk III that thumbed its nose at superstition by completing 128 operations. A fuselage that had spent decades as a chicken coop went into that rebuild. The Halifax, it turns out, is very hard to kill.

Giving the workhorse its due

The Halifax’s afterlife tells you something as well. The RAF retired the type around 1952; the very last examples soldiered on with the Pakistan Air Force until 1961. Two decades of service, on every front from the Ruhr to the Bay of Biscay, and still it lost the fame contest to its stablemate.

None of this is an argument that the Halifax was better than the Lancaster; the later Lancaster carried a heavier load, and history is written by the bomber that survives to fly at air shows. But “worse than the Lancaster” and “forgotten” are two very different verdicts, and the Halifax has been handed both when it deserves neither. It was the bomber that towed the gliders, dropped the spies, hunted the U-boats, carried Canada’s war and, when the shooting stopped, fed a besieged city. Give the workhorse its due. It earned it the hard way, one unglamorous sortie at a time.

Inside the "Friday the 13th" Halifax and the men who flew her.

Sources: Wikipedia (Handley Page Halifax); Hush-Kit (Jane Gulliford Lowes); Elinor Florence (RCAF navigator Tony Cashman); National Air Force Museum of Canada; Yorkshire Air Museum; Wikimedia Commons.