Synopsis
This very personal and moving film documents filmmaker Robert Linnell's attempt to make sense of his father's death in combat during World War II. Linnell never knew his father. His father never knew him. Robert was but two months old when his father Lloyd 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. "I was two months old when my father died. Sixty years later I met the man who killed him." And so Robert Linnell's story begins. Last Flight to Berlin follows the journey of Lloyd Martin Linnell from the day he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force to his time spent with the Bomber Command doing battle in the night skies over Europe, to the fateful night in January, 1944, when his Halifax was shot down by a German nightfighter north of Berlin. But Linnell's story is also the story of all the young men who flew into the darkness each night, knowing that they might not return. In the most horrific war in human history, their bravery and endurance was taken for granted. It was simply their duty. This very personal and poignant film captures first-hand accounts from eyewitnesses. Linnell eventually visits the crash site where the wreckage of the Halifax was hauled away and the crew buried in the village cemetery, and even meets Hauptmann Friedrich Tober, the fighter pilot who shot down his father's plane.