Never-seen film footage has been released of the Feb 8th night-time bombing raid carried out on a Limoges aero-engine factory in 1944.

A Lancaster bomber flown by Group Captain Leonard Cheshire made three dangerously low-level passes over the factory in a French valley, dropping marker flares rather than bombs, to give the factory workers a chance to escape before the factory was destroyed. All did, save for one man who went back for his bike.

Cheshire, the most decorated pilot in Britain’s Bomber Command, received the Victoria Cross in 1944, and founded the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity in 1948 when he offered his own home for disabled people. He died in 1992, age 74.