[Like
many men of my age, I have been fascinated by Operation Chastise, the May 1943
Dams Raid, at least since seeing the 1955 movie about it.[1] From my late father I inherited copies of Guy
Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead (London: Michael Joseph, 1946) and Paul
Brickhill’s The Dam Busters (London:
Evans, 1951). To mark the sixtieth anniversary of the raid, I wrote a largely
unresearched piece for my LiveJournal (remember that!), followed a year later
(April 2004) by a piece in a mailing of the APA Acnestis, in
which I read all the Dam Busters[2]
literature I owned or could get through the local library, and commented on it.
To mark (just) the eightieth anniversary of the raid, I present below, in
somewhat modified form, that piece, which incorporated my original Live Journal
entry. Whilst revising the piece, I revisited Brickhill and John Sweetman
(with David Coward and Gary Johnston), The Dambusters (London: Time Warner
Books, 2003). I also consulted Sweetman’s The Dambusters Raid (London:
Arms and Armour, 1990), his more scholarly account, The Dambusters Raid, which in 2004 I had not read, but was
available in the Cassell’s Military Classics series, and the shorter Dambusters (London: Carlton
Books 2013), as well as Max Hastings’ Chastise
(London:
William Collins 2019), as well as his Bomber Command (London: Joseph, 1979), and the June 2023 issue of Flypast. I was going to write all that
reading up as well, but this piece is already chapter-length, so I have decided
not to make it even longer. Other than some editing, I have tried
to largely leave the original piece untouched. Where my views have changed, I
generally, though not always, have indicated this in a footnote. Though matters
of history will be touched on in what follows, this is not intended as a
historical study of either the Dams Raid or No. 617 Squadron, but as a survey
of some of the literature around both. If you wish to read a full account, then
I would direct you to one of the books by John Sweetman, either The
Dambusters Raid, or the shorter Dambusters, for the raid itself; there is also James Holland, Dam
Busters: The Race to Smash the Dams, 1943 (London: Penguin, 2012), which I
have not read. For the subsequent wartime operations of 617 Squadron, I suspect
the go-to text now is John Nichol, Return of the Dambusters: What 617
Squadron Did Next (London: William Collins, 2015), which again I haven’t
read. Nevertheless, Brickhill’s, The Dam Busters, for all its faults, is still worth a read for the casually interested.
This whole piece is
dedicated to the memory of all aircrew of 617 Squadron who have died on active
service, 1943–2023, and to the many more
people who died as a result of the bombs they dropped.]
Back in 2003–2004, I had been doing quite a bit of reading around the Dam Busters raid, and watched the 1955
movie again. The origins of this activity lie in the following, largely
unresearched piece that I wrote in my LiveJournal, and later reprinted in the
August 2003
(I’ve added a few more notes, where what I
originally wrote may well be wrong).
Sixty years ago tonight [16th May 1943],
nineteen specially-modified Lancasters took off from RAF Scampton, and flew
into legend. Their mission that night in 1943 has become the single most
celebrated operation in the history of RAF Bomber Command.[3]
It has become fashionable in recent years to denigrate
Operation Chastise, the Dams Raid, to suggest that it was only a propaganda
success, that its effects on German production were minimal. I have even seen
it stated that the main result of the raid was the loss of fifty-six
experienced aircrew (617 Squadron was recruited from men who had completed
their standard tour of duty;[4] eight of the Lancasters
failed to return).
Some years ago, Channel 4’s myth-debunking series Secret
History took a look at the Dams Raid, and reached much that conclusion.[5] However, as often with the Secret History series, I felt that enthusiasm
for debunking had resulted in an unbalanced historical picture. The raid was undoubtedly costly. A near-50% loss rate
(to say nothing of the aircraft that returned damaged) was unsustainable, and
this is why no subsequent attack was ever mounted on the Ruhr dams.[6]
To view the raid as ‘only’ a propaganda success is hardly
telling the whole story, however. In Spring 1943, Bomber Command was suffering
punishing losses in the night campaign against German cities (they could lose
in a single night more aircrew than were killed in the whole of the Battle of
Britain). The US Eighth Air Force was on the verge of being driven from the
daylight skies over Germany. Neither part of the strategic bombing offensive
was having an appreciable impact on the Germans’ willingness or ability to
carry on the war. Joseph Stalin, as ever, was questioning the western Allies’
commitment, due to their failure to open the Second Front. A spectacular
propaganda victory was exactly what was needed, and the Dams Raid, which made
front pages across the world and was described by Joseph Goebbels as a ‘disaster’,
delivered that in spades. As the US proved in the Second Gulf War with the
rescue of Jessica Lynch, there is nothing like a daring mission widely-reported
to restore the faith of one’s people, media, and allies.
Undoubtedly the Dams mission did not have the
catastrophic effects on industry in the Ruhr that had been hoped for, partly
because only two dams out of five targets for the night were successfully
breached; one which escaped destruction was the Sorpe, most important of the
lot.[7]
But it did have effects. Production was disrupted, and electricity supply not properly
restored until the end of the year.[8]
That this did not have more of an impact is down to the same reason that
contributed to area bombing of industrial targets not crippling Germany—unlike
Britain, in 1943 German industry was not working at anything like full
capacity. And, as Secret History conceded, slave labour that
might have been more profitably employed on the Atlantic Wall was diverted to
rebuilding the dams, and anti-aircraft guns taken from elsewhere to defend
targets that were never attacked again.[9]
What the Channel 4 programme did not look at was what
I consider to be two of the most significant outcomes of the raid; the
subsequent history of Barnes Wallis, designer of the ‘bouncing bomb’, and that
of 617 Squadron itself. Wallis only worked on the bouncing bomb because he had
been unable to raise any Air Ministry interest in what he really wanted to
design, a ten-ton ‘earthquake’ bomb.[10] With the success of Operation Chastise, official attitudes to Wallis changed,
and he was able to develop, first the 12,000-pound ‘Tallboy’, and then the
22,000-pound ‘Grand Slam’.[11] These weapons were used with great effect against railway tunnels and viaducts,
U-boat pens, and canals. They were a significant addition to the RAF’s arsenal,
which might not have existed without the Dams Raid.
Of course, these weapons required more accurate
techniques than the area bombing usually practised by the RAF. To be
effectively employed, they needed a squadron trained and experienced in
precision attacks. As a result of the Dams Raid, the RAF now had such a
unit—617 Squadron. I do not believe it to be an exaggeration[12] to say that the RAF strike tactics standard in the twenty-first century,
low-level precision attacks, have their origins in the formation of that unit
and their first operation in May 1943. (The USAF, meanwhile, keeps alive the
tradition of indiscriminate area bombing, in the shape of the B-52.)
The Secret History programme ended by saying
that 618 Squadron, formed at the same time as 617, but equipped with De
Havilland Mosquitos employing ‘Highball’, a smaller version of the bouncing
bomb, never got to attack its intended target, the battleship Tirpitz.
The Tirpitz was sunk by other means. True, but unfairly the programme
left it there, and did not tell the whole story. For what finally sunk Tirpitz
were Tallboys, dropped by aircraft of 617 and 9 Squadrons. Thus, even though
Barnes Wallis’ bouncing bomb was not employed, nevertheless the sinking of this
ship was[13] a direct result of the
success, sixty years ago this night, of the attacks on the Möhne and Eder dams.
The crest of 617 Squadron.
Actually, it’s not quite true that my thinking on 617 was first prompted by
the sixtieth anniversary. I’d already started mulling over the Dams Raid in
summer 2002, as a result of reading
Unsurprising
Stories 7, one of science fiction author Christopher Priest’s contributions
to
Acnestis.[14] In
this, when talking about the research conducted for his 2002 novel
The
Separation (London: Simon & Schuster), he talked about Paul Brickhill’s
The Dam Busters (he and I had the
same 2/6 Pan edition),[15] and
a 1959 novel by actor Robert Shaw,[16]
The Hiding Place (filmed in 1965 as the comedy Situation
Hopeless… But Not Serious, changing
the British bomber crew for an American one).[17] The
central part of what Priest was talking about was a passage in Shaw that
plagiarises an account in Brickhill of Wing Commander Guy Gibson’s Lancaster
crossing the Dutch coast on the night of the raid. But Brickhill himself
plagiarizes in this account, which is at least partially fictionalized, as none
of the aircrew concerned survived the War to be interviewed by him.[18] An
exchange in Brickhill where Gibson asks his wireless operator to turn the heat
off is taken directly from
Gibson’s
own Enemy Coast Ahead, but in the latter book the conversation
took place on Gibson’s last op
before the Dams Raid.
What really set my mind in motion was Priest’s view of the effect of the
raid—‘most of the damage was superficial.’ That reminded me of the
Secret History programme, and my
reaction to that, and I was waiting for an opportunity to set my views down.
The sixtieth anniversary of the raid gave me that chance. I then returned to
the topic, reading what books I had in my collection and could borrow from the
local library.
Even before seeing the movie,[19] I probably first encountered the Dams Raid in
the pages of Airfix Magazine, which in August 1973 ran ‘Dambuster Lancaster’, a piece by Gerry Preece showing how to
convert an Airfix Lancaster model into the modified version used by 617 on the
raid.[20] When
I originally wrote this article in 2004, all my old copies of Airfix Magazine had long been thrown
away, but in 2023 the magic of eBay means that I can get hold of a copy.[21] The
article details how to convert the Airfix Lancaster to a B. III (Special)[22] (and, along the way, how to improve the overall standard of the Airfix Lanc).
However, by the time the article was published, it had been overtaken by
Revell’s 1971 release of kit of a Dam Buster Lanc. I myself built one of these
(or more probably got my father to make it). I was forever puzzled by the twin
machine guns in a ventral turret (a ‘dustbin lid’ style mounting rather than a
full glazed turret such as elsewhere on the aircraft), which I never saw on any
other Lancaster plans, pictures or models. (Though I can now see it in the
drawings that accompany the Airfix
Magazine article.)
The box artwork for the Revell 1:72 scale Dam Buster Lancaster. The artist
has made the dam wall convex, rather than concave (most dams are concave in
order to better resist the weight of water, though convex dams do exist).
Consequently, at first glance it appears as if the plane is suicidally flying
below the top of the dam. Also missing are the sluice gates both the Möhne and
Eder dams possessed. Note also the ventral turret, depicted by the artist
inaccurately with two machine guns rather than one, but not actually fitted on
the mission.
I finally discovered in the early 2000s that early Lancasters had single or
twin ventral machine guns as a factory fitting, with a periscope to allow a
gunner to see to operate it. This was generally removed in operational service
(due to the lack of a gunner dedicated to this position, and the difficult in
operating it through the periscope), and later discontinued. The ventral turret
appears on blueprints outlining the modifications to be made for the B. III
(Special). To save weight and gain power, the mid-upper turret was removed, but
the ventral turret seems to have been retained, though reduced to just one
machine gun.[23] In the end, since this
particular operation was intended to be conducted all the way at very low
level, opportunities to engage the enemy below the aircraft would be
non-existent. Moreover, the mid-upper gunners, who would have operated the
ventral turret, for this mission flew in the front turret, normally operated by
the bomb aimer. This left the ventral turret with no-one to operate it, and
meant that it was dead weight with no benefit. So it made sense to remove it,
whatever the merits or otherwise of leaving Lancasters in general with no
downward-firing weaponry.
My 2004 reading started with
John
Sweetman (with David Coward and Gary Johnston) The Dambusters (London: Time Warner Books, 2003), written to
accompany a Channel 4 series. It is a book of two halves; one, by Sweetman, is
a history of the raid (based upon his more scholarly account,
The Dambusters Raid; indeed, some of the
text is identical), and the other, presumably by Coward and Johnston, describes
Channel Four’s assembly of a modern crew to replicate the Dams mission. In my
2004 notes, there is no mention of this second part of the book, and I wonder
if I just didn’t read those chapters (most unlike me), or decided that they
were irrelevant to what I wanted to write about. I did discuss the series
itself, as you can read later.
The prefaces of this book, one by Sweetman and one, a producer’s preface,
by Johnston, led me to suspect some of what I said in the LiveJournal piece
reprinted above was repeating commonly-held myths, and might need correction.
For instance, I wrote that the
crews were all recruited from personnel who had completed their standard tour
of duty of thirty missions—this turns out to be true of many, and others were
near completion, but some of the aircrew had flown as little as seven missions.
This myth has its origins in Enemy Coast Ahead, where Gibson claims to have hand-picked all the
pilots from people who met the qualifications; he certainly hand-picked some
pilots, but not all of them.[24]
Many myths have
their origin in the movie. For example, there is the story that Air Ministry
officials, resistant to Wallis’ request for a Wellington, were surprised to
find he designed it; I first came across this in what was supposedly a factual
account, albeit one aimed at children, the first proper account of the raid I
read (which I have long since lost). Another myth the movie promoted was that
the idea of using spotlights to judge the aircraft’s height came from Gibson’s
watching a show in the theatre. The truth is that the Royal Aircraft
Establishment, Farnborough, came up with the idea, based on experiments already
carried out with Coastal Command Sunderlands. The way Gibson tells this story
in Enemy Coast Ahead (subsequently
reported by Brickhill in The Dam Busters)
is that his crew claimed, when the solution was presented to them, to have had
the idea already from watching spotlights at a strip show—but they may have
been winding their CO up. Nevertheless, a variation on this was thought to be
better cinema than the truth. Other myths, such as Gibson’s entire crew
following him from 106 Squadron into 617 (only his wireless operator did)[25] come from Brickhill’s book.
However,
Sweetman’s book is not as myth-shattering as it first appears. Barnes Wallis’
activities up until early 1943, around which many of the myths have arisen
(fostered by the movie) are skimped over pretty quickly—they warrant better
attention. The book does, though, have sensible things to say in its
conclusions, noting that the Dams Raid was not as ineffectual as a number of
post-war assessments have stated. Sweetman makes the entirely sensible point
that the raid’s success needs to be judged against the expectations of those
who planned it, not the exaggerated claims of the contemporary pro-Allied and
neutral press. But I wanted to see more on the post-raid careers of Wallis and
617 Squadron, both of which, as I stated before, were given a serious boost by
the success of Operation Chastise. Sweetman’s book is a very thorough account
of the raid itself and the eight weeks of intense preparation that led up to
it. Sweetman also makes the less well-known crews, those who didn’t survive the
raid, come alive in a way other accounts haven’t.
Sweetman is, however, also not entirely free of
error; he asserts in his preface that the movie fails to cover the Eder, which
is not true, as the movie includes the Eder attack, and even mentions the
Sorpe, albeit briefly, the third target. In a television documentary on the
bombing offensive as a whole, Sweetman says sixteen Lancasters took part in the
raid, instead of nineteen—sixteen, however, is a number Gibson mentions,
apparently as the number that actually crossed into Germany, after two planes
had been forced to turn back and one shot down in the sea, and Sweetman may
have meant this.[26]
I had to get from a completely different source[27] the
information that illuminates Sweetman’s comment about Flight Lieutenant (F/Lt)[28] Les
Knight. Knight was killed (on a later raid against the Dortmund-Ems Canal) after keeping
his stricken aircraft in the air long enough for his crew to get out; he got a
Mention in Dispatches, when his crew thought he should have got a Victoria
Cross. It seems unjust that such an act of bravery should only be rewarded with
a humble Mention in Dispatches, but apparently, that was the next highest award
after the VC that could be given posthumously.
To understand the legend of 617 Squadron, however, I still think Brickhill’s The Dam Busters (1951), which I read in
parallel with Sweetman,[29] is a
good starting point. (So it seems odd that this was the first time I had read
the book cover-to-cover, having owned it for nearly thirty years). The Dam Busters was Brickhill’s third
book, after Escape to Danger (London:
Faber & Faber, 1946, co-written with Conrad Norton), and The Great Escape (London: Faber, 1950).
Both of those were about prisoners-of-war in Germany; Brickhill had been a POW
himself, and been barred from the Great Escape from Stalag Luft III due to his
claustrophobia, a decision that probably saved his life.
The Dam Busters was
fifty-two years old when I read it, and reading it in the twenty-first century,
the prose seems incredibly archaic. Today, there’s no way you could get away
with saying things like: ‘Memory is like a woman; it was only when he put it
out of his mind that it sneaked insidiously back to him.’ Nor can you describe
someone as a ‘gay, chunky little navigator’ and have it mean what Brickhill
meant.
An ‘Upkeep’
bouncing bomb loaded on AJ-G for George, Gibson’s Lancaster. This photo was
taken on 30 April 1943, and shows a practice Upkeep, filled with inert
material, for a test drop on the beach at Reculver in the Thames Estuary.
Upkeep was originally spherical, with the central cylinder surrounded by wooden
staves; wood was used because of a shortage of steel. The outer casings
invariably disintegrated on hitting the water, and the cylinder bounced
perfectly well without them, so they were abandoned.
Two points strike me about the book. First, the
degree to which Brickhill was bound by official secrecy. When he wrote, details
of the ‘bouncing bomb’ were still classified, and were to remain so for another
two decades. His book therefore contains no illustrations of the weapon. There
are odd circumlocutions; an unnamed character is described as ‘a great
scientist who had access to Churchill’. Clearly this must be Frederick Lindemann,
Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s chief scientific advisor, but Brickhill leaves him
in anonymity, because he was lukewarm at best to Wallis’ scheme (there is no
mention of Wallis or the Dams Raid in Adrian Fort’s 2003 biography of
Lindemann, Prof). Brickhill couldn’t even use the true codename for the
attack, Operation Chastise—he calls it ‘Operation Downwood’. This term is still
found in some online sources, no doubt derived from Brickhill, and originates
in Gibson’s account, where it is the codeword for both the operation and the
weapon; presumably, unable to use the actual codeword while the war was still
going on, Gibson came up with ‘Downwood’ as a variation on the actual codename
for the bouncing bomb, ‘Upkeep’. Still, overall The Dam Busters is considerably
less restricted in what it can say than Gibson’s own Enemy Coast Ahead, which
could not even name Barnes Wallis.
The second observation is that Brickhill appears
to be giving more weight to personal anecdote than official record. I noted
above how he claims that all of Gibson’s own crew joined him in 617, when it
was only the wireless operator. A simple check of records, you might have
thought, would have put him right. Things are said that don’t match up with
Sweetman’s account. When the Lancaster of F/Lt Bill Astell (whose mother, I
have discovered from Alan Cooper’s book mentioned below, lived in
Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire, where I was brought up) was lost on the raid,
Brickhill writes: ‘They [the crews of the two Lancasters in formation with
Astell] did not see him again.’ Yet Sweetman includes a description of Astell
being shot down by flak, as reported by a crew member of one of the other
bombers[30] (Gibson too includes a description of Astell’s Lancaster going down, perhaps
drawn from the same eyewitness). The mystery is compounded by Brickhill placing
Astell in a different formation from that in which he actually flew, an error
corrected by the time of the movie, but which derives from Gibson’s own
account. To further confuse the issue, the Channel 4 series that Sweetman’s The
Dambusters accompanies states that Astell hit an electricity pylon, as do
Jonathan Falconer’s and Alan Cooper’s books mentioned below, as well as Tobin
Jones, 617 Squadron: The Operational
Record Book 1943–1945 (Bicester: Binx
Publishing, 2002), though Jones also reproduces the view held by the RAF at the time that Astell was shot
down.[31]
Possibly what happened was that Astell was hit by flak, and then hit the pylon
on the way down. A similar fate may have befallen F/Lt Norman Barlow, where
again there are differing accounts, the British saying he was shot down, the
Germans either that he hit a pylon or crashed while trying to crashland his
aircraft.
Max Hastings’ helpful timeline of the raid in Chastise illuminates a comment in
Brickhill. The latter writes that, on his way back from the dans, Gibson saw a
Lancaster going down in flames near Hamm. ‘It may have been Burpee. Or Ottley.’
Both of these were shot down on their way out to the Dams, but they were part
of the reserve wave, which had taken off more than ninety minutes after Gibson,
and some of the first and second wave were already on their way home before the
reserves reached Germany. From Hastings’ timeline, it must have been P/O Warner
‘Bill’ Ottley’s C for Charlie that Gibson saw; he went down near Hamm,[32] and when P/O Lewis Burpee’s S for Sugar was hit, Gibson was still over the
Eder. (Sweetman’s The Dambusters Raid
already makes this point.)
There were aircrew Brickhill did not talk
to—there were, for instance, survivors from two of the lost Lancasters, but their accounts do
not inform anything Brickhill wrote. On the other hand, there’s Brickhill’s
report that Squadron Leader (S/Ldr) ‘Dinghy’ Young sent a message that he was
ditching before his plane ended up in the North Sea (Falconer’s book includes a
photograph of the wreckage of a Lancaster washed up on the Dutch coast,
probably Young’s aircraft). Sweetman makes no mention of this, but nor does he
explicitly deny it, and I am inclined to accept that this might be true.
Brickhill covers the entire history of 617 at
war, including the Tirpitz raids, and other attacks. For the period
after the Dams Raid itself, I had in 2004 no corrective to him readily to hand.
So I had to take what is said at face value, but with the knowledge that
Brickhill is not wholly reliable.
On the morality of bombing, Brickhill certainly
feels that area bombing of civilian targets should be avoided, where possible,
but accepts that some civilian deaths are an inevitability of war. There’s no
serious criticism of Air Chief Marshal ‘Bomber’ Harris’ policies, bar Harris’
reluctance at first to accept Wallis’ ideas.
Brickhill makes up in readability for a lot of
his lapses in accuracy. I remember as a boy starting Reach for the Sky
(London: William Collins, 1954), his biography of Douglas Bader. I got no
further than his account of Bader’s mother’s childhood in north-west India,
because Brickhill’s evocative tales of mysterious maybe-burglars and faces
appearing at windows terrified me.
Jonathan
Falconer’s The Dam Busters: Breaking the Great Dams
of Western Germany 16–17 May 1943 (Stroud: Sutton 2003) is a short,
but heavily illustrated, popular account. It includes a chapter on the 1955 movie.
The cover cunningly airbrushes off the mid-upper turret of the Battle of
Britain Memorial Flight’s Lancaster, so that it resembles a 617 Squadron
machine. This book adds further alternative versions of events. In Brickhill’s
account, as Young made his attack on the Möhne, Gibson and F/Lt Harold ‘Micky’
Martin, who had already dropped their bombs, flew either side of him to
distract the German flak. This is how it is portrayed in the movie (albeit with
Gibson and Martin flying together above and to the right of Young), and in
other popular versions, such as a painting Falconer reprints. According to
Falconer’s text, however, Martin alone accompanied Young in this fashion, while
Gibson engaged the flak from beyond the dam wall. Falconer must be correct, as
his text tallies with Gibson’s account. For the final attack on the dam (that
of F/Lt D.J.H. Maltby), however, both Gibson and Martin came in from ov>er the lake to provide cover. (Martin, incidentally, survived the war, and
went on to become an Air Marshal in the RAF.)
Falconer’s account doesn’t add too much new, but
the archive illustrations are fascinating, including German drawings of the
Upkeep weapon after they had captured an example, and an impressive aerial
reconnaissance mosaic showing the almost-empty Möhne lake. There is Gibson’s VC
citation, which notes that he attacked first ‘thus taking the full brunt of the
anti-aircraft defences while still at their best’. This may well have been
Gibson’s intent, but in fact he made his run when the Germans were too
surprised to even shoot in the right direction—when the second plane, F/Lt John
‘Hoppy’ Hopgood’s AJ-M for Mother, attacked, the flak gunners had woken up, and
shot him down.[33]
Too many details of illustrations, however, disappear into the join between
pages on double-page spreads. Oh, and Falconer reports that his aircrews called
Harris ‘Butch’, without adding that civilian press reports called him
‘Butcher’.
I said earlier that I didn’t have access to
another history of 617 post-Dams Raid with which to judge the later chapters of
Brickhill. Tom Bennett’s 617
Squadron: The Dambusters at War (Wellingborough: Stephens, 1986)
is not that book. It does deal solely with events after Operation Chastise, but
it is not a history, but a collection of anecdotes concerning individual
aircrew, assembled in no particular order, by someone who served briefly with
the Squadron when they had their own Mosquitos. It’s a good source of material
for anyone wanting to write a history of the Squadron, as the anecdotes are
plainly drawn from direct interviews with the personnel concerned. But Bennett is
a rather dull writer. He is probably more accurate than Brickhill, though. An
instance: Flying Officer (F/O) ‘Billy’ Duffy, who joined 617 after Chastise, was killed, together with his
navigator, in one of the squadron’s target-marking Mosquitos, when it broke up
in mid-air during a non-combat flight. According to Brickhill, Duffy and his
crew had just been taken off operations, and this was one last flight for Duffy
and his navigator before they left the squadron. According to Bennett, however,
Duffy had been regularly flying ops with the Mosquito (leaving most of his
regular Lancaster crew behind), and practising target-marking techniques on the
bombing range at Wainfleet. And on the day of the fatal flight, his regular
navigator cried off the practice flight, and it was another navigator who
perished. There is no mention of the crew having completed their tour of
operations. Bennett is almost certainly correct here (for one thing, he had
actually spoken to the regular navigator concerned), and it highlights again
the issue of Brickhill’s diligence (or rather lack of it) with sources.
Alan W.
Cooper, Born Leader: The Story of Guy Gibson V.C. (Bromley:
Independent Books, 1993) does exactly what it says on the cover (which,
incidentally, actually depicts Martin’s Lancaster over the Möhne, with Gibson’s
in the background), telling the story of Gibson. Unfortunately, it too is very dull, due to the inclusion of
just about every single detail you could imagine. The result is more like a
catalogue than a biography. At times, it also gets close to being a
hagiography, both of Gibson himself, and of Bomber Command and all its works.
Excessive respect for various senior officers leads Cooper to mishandle
documents. When Gibson was recommended for a Bar to his Distinguished Service
Order, Cooper states that this was endorsed by both the Air Officer Commanding
(AOC) 5 Group, Air Vice-Marshal the Hon. Ralph Cochrane, and by Air Marshal Arthur
Harris, who remarked that any officer with Gibson’s record deserved two DSOs,
if not a VC. The documentation Cooper actually prints tells a different story.
Whilst commending Gibson’s record, Cochrane felt that it was too soon after the
first award of a DSO to give Gibson another, and instead recommended a second
Bar to his Distinguished Flying Cross. Harris in his remark was actually
over-ruling Cochrane in re-instating the original recommendation. Whether this
disagreement had any role in Gibson’s selection to command 617 (Cochrane’s
suggestion in Cooper, Harris’ in Brickhill) can never be determined. (Also,
Cooper clearly knows more about the RAF than the army, suggesting at one point
that Brigadier Orde Wingate led the 14th Army, rather than merely
being part of it.)
The book displays its small-press origins in the
way it is somewhat carelessly laid out, most obviously in the presentation of
two air combat reports from Gibson’s time as a night-fighter pilot, where the
second pages are attached to the wrong first pages. It also has the most unintentionally
ironic line that I came across in my reading: ‘whenever the story of the
Dambusters and Guy Gibson is told the name “Nigger” will always be part of it.’
This was disproved in an early twenty-first century ITV showing of the movie,
where all references to the dog’s name were excluded.[34]
The author has apparently written widely on
Bomber Command and on 617, including The Men who Breached the Dams: 617 Squadron ‘The Dambusters’ (London: Kimber, 1982), Beyond the Dams to the Tirpitz: The Later Operations
of 617 Squadron (London: Goodall, 1991), and The Dambusters
Squadron: Fifty Years of No. 617 Squadron RAF (London: Arms and Armour, 1991).[35] But, as a review of Born Leader by Lloyd Brodrick in Sabretache
37 (1996) identifies, Cooper is not much of a critic or historian—rather he is
a storytelling enthusiast. This makes him blind to some of Gibson’s
faults—for instance, though popular with the people with whom he flew, Gibson could be a
martinet to ground crews, and was unloved by them as a result.
A frame from a
cine film showing a Lancaster B. I (Special) piloted by F/O P. Martin,
releasing a ten-ton ‘Grand Slam’ against the Arnsberg Viaduct in 19 March
1945; the first such bomb had been dropped on the Bielefeld Viaduct five days
previously. In order to accommodate the bomb, a great deal of equipment was removed,
including the bomb bay doors, front and mid-upper turrets, and two of the guns
in the rear turret (Allied air superiority by this stage of the war was such
that Lancasters did not need as much defensive armament, even in daylight), and
uprated Merlin engines with wide ‘paddle-blade’ propellers were fitted. Even
then the bomb-laden aircraft barely got into the sky. 617 was the only squadron
to deploy this weapon. 617’s usual squadron code was AJ, but Grand Slam
carrying aircraft had the code YZ.
A brief diversion now, to consider some science-fictional versions of Guy Gibson. First, Christopher Priest, The Separation (2002).
Christopher Priest briefly postulates that Gibson went into politics after the
war, becoming an MP and then a PPS in the Home Office. It is true that the real
Gibson was, briefly, prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for
Macclesfield. However, it seems to me that he was pushed into accepting the
candidacy because the Conservatives felt his fame would be an electoral asset.
Gibson decided in the end he didn’t like politics, and forced his way back onto
operations (where he swiftly got himself killed). His pre-war ambition was to
be a test pilot, and he had joined the RAF as a means to that end. Harris, in
his introduction to Enemy Coast Ahead, says that ‘Gibson was not a
professional airman’, but what he means by that is that Gibson was not a
professional serviceman. A professional flyer was exactly what Gibson wanted to
be, and his short-service RAF commission was intended as the first step in his
career. I can see a Gibson who
survived the war and became famous as a result of it going into politics.
However, I suspect a Gibson who was not made famous would have pursued his test
pilot dream.
Secondly, in issue 10 of The Ultimates (July
2003), a dark and cynical take on the
Marvel superhero group the Avengers, there is a flashback to 1945, and Captain
America attending a secret briefing. Part of that briefing is given by an RAF
officer. The officer is not named, but from the artwork it is clearly Gibson. It seems that
either writer Mark Millar or artist Bryan Hitch are suggesting that Gibson’s
death in September 1944 was faked (there are some odd aspects to Gibson’s
death, of the sort that appeal to conspiracy theorists) in order for him to undertake
top secret work.
I did some related television and video
watching. The Channel 4 series The
Dambusters spent more time on putting a crew of modern RAF personnel
through a computer simulation of the raid than it did telling the full story. However,
the reconstruction and the historical account did complement each other, and led
to a greater understanding on my part. The Dambusters was considerably more
successful in this respect than Spitfire Ace, an earlier attempt to do
the same for the Battle of Britain, where the footage of veterans and
historians describing the Battle and that of modern flyers learning to fly
Spits tended to get in the way of each other. Moreover, The Dambusters did have some nifty CGI
reconstructions of the raid itself—even if I could have done without the
accompanying music.
In November 2003, I also caught another documentary, The Dam Busters: The True Story,
on the History Channel, but as I was working from home, and then had to leave
to properly observe the two minutes’ silence for Armistice Day, I wasn’t able to concentrate on
it as fully as I’d like. However, I was able to note that it dated from 1993,
and interviewed two of the then-surviving pilots, David Shannon and Ken Brown
(both sadly now deceased). I thought at first that it was the Secret History
documentary I originally referred to, but this isn’t actually the case, as its
conclusions were much more favourable to the operation, noting the enhanced
credibility given to Wallis and the resultant development and effective
deployment of the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs.
The 1955 movie is still the form in which most people are familiar
with the raid. As noted throughout this piece, it gives rise to a number of
myths about what actually happened, and is stirringly heroic (if largely
unsentimental). What struck me in particular is how British it is. America had been in the war over a year by the time
of Chastise, yet the USA is hardly mentioned. I don’t think even ten or fifteen
years later the movie could have been made in this way, and certainly not
today. Today there would have to be more emphasis on Joe McCarthy, the American
pilot in the Squadron, and I can imagine Hollywood producers being unable to
accept that all he achieved was to damage the parapet of the Sorpe, while Brits
and Aussies breached the Möhne and Eder. (But perhaps they would make more of
Young’s Californian heritage. Assuming, of course, that they just didn’t make the whole thing an American operation anyway, cf. 2000’s U-571.)
Still from The Dam Busters (1955). Note the mock bomb carried; because Upkeep was
still classified in 1954, the movie-makers had to come up with something that
conveyed the idea of the bouncing bomb. Ironically, it looks more like Wallis’
original idea for a spherical bomb.
I also note how anonymous everybody is. It’s sometimes difficult to tell the aircrew from one another. Even the
actors who later became well-known, George Baker as F/Lt David Maltby, pilot of
AJ-J, Robert Shaw as Gibson’s flight engineer, Sgt John Pulford (fifteen years
later Shaw would be in a Spitfire in Battle
of Britain), and Nigel Stock as Gibson’s bomb aimer, P/O Fred ‘Spam’
Spafford (thus playing an Australian!), are sufficiently young as to blend into
anonymity. There are scenes of empty rooms the morning after the raid; one really has to have been paying attention to know that these are the rooms of Young, Hopgood, and S/Ldr Henry Maudslay, and we saw them in their rooms before the raid. And by ‘aircrew’, I realize that I’m actually mostly talking about
the pilots. In most of the literature mentioned above, the pilots get much more
coverage than the other aircrew. Usually, only Gibson’s crew emerge with any
individual personalities, and that is the case in the movie as well. (An exception to this is Bennett’s book, since each
of his anecdotes usually concerns a single aircraft, so the reader gets to know
the crew of that aircraft.)
I also glanced at the Internet in 2004, but the quality of information soon
went into a sharp decline, such that even a BBC feature could suggest that
F/Sgt. Bill (or Peter in Gibson—perhaps some editorial confusion with the
fighter pilot who was later Princess Margaret’s suitor?) Townsend’s mission on
the Dams Raid was to fly over minor dams to distract the Germans from the true
targets. It was nothing of the sort. Townsend belonged to the mobile reserve,
to be directed to primary or secondary targets as felt appropriate. He attacked
what he thought was the Ennerpe (but was probably actually the Bever), dropping
his bomb successfully, but not breaching the dam. The inaccurate version
probably is a distortion of something Gibson wrote, when he suggested that the
prime task of those aircraft assigned to attack the Sorpe was to act as a
diversion. Again, this is not true—the importance of the Sorpe as a target is
shown not only by the five aircraft assigned to it, but also the fact that any
mines left from the Möhne/Eder force were designated for the Sorpe. But Gibson
was writing after only two aircraft had managed to reach the Sorpe, and failed
to breach it, but when the war was still on and public admission of failure bad
for morale. Better to suggest that it wasn’t that important after all.
And so, finally, to Enemy Coast Ahead(1946), Gibson’s own account of his war
service up to Chastise. It has been demonstrated, by Richard Morris in Guy Gibson (London: Viking, 1994, with Colin
Dobinson),[36] who saw the original manuscript) that this volume was Gibson’s own work,
without the aid of a ghost-writer, though some of what he wrote was toned down
in the editing process. Even so, he was a little coarse for the mores of 1950s
Britain. Before the raid, Young asked Gibson if he could have Gibson’s next egg
if Gibson didn’t return. In the movie, Gibson’s response is to say, ‘Okay, I’ll
have yours if you don’t.’ What he actually said, as Gibson makes clear through
some transparent circumlocutions, was, ‘Bugger off and go fuck yourself.’
One actually gets a better idea of what Gibson might have been like as a
person from this book than from Cooper’s; as Max Hastings later notes in Chastise, Gibson reveals a remarkable
sensitivity in these pages. Of course, anyone writing their autobiography may
slant things in their favour, and not be fully aware of how other people see
them, but a personality leaps out at the reader far more here than from
Cooper’s dull record. Though Gibson’s upbringing inclined him naturally towards
Conservatism, had he pursued that career he would have been very much on the
left of the party. Early on he complains about how mistakes in British
leadership have led to the War, and makes the following plea: ‘in order to
protect our children let the young men who have done the fighting have a say in
the affairs of State.’ One can imagine Ted Heath thinking that, but not Maggie
Thatcher.
One also gets an impression that Gibson was a man often on the edge of
great events, even if he were not always in the thick of it himself. For instance,
Gibson’s squadron took part in the attack on the Dortmund-Ems Canal that earned
Bomber Command its first VC (Gibson himself was on leave at the time.)
There is of course, much that Gibson cannot tell, and much that he does not
know—he seems, for instance, to have no idea of the appalling casualty rates of
the USAAF’s daylight bombing offensive. (And odd mistakes—e.g. Martin flew AJ-P
for Popsie, not AJ-T for Tommy, which was McCarthy’s plane.) Much of what he
includes are anecdotes, possibly apocryphal stories of the sort servicemen
always tell. But, refreshingly, Gibson’s well aware of this, and one suspects
that many of the stories he includes that don’t concern him personally are not
just there to fill out the account of a man who was not a habitual diarist, and
so suffered from a shortage of material about himself. Gibson wants to give an
impression of the sort of tales that would be heard around an airbase.
When he considers Bomber Command policy, he has no doubts about its
morality. The ‘Hun’ deserves this, as repayment for all the times in the last
150 years they have taken war to other nations. (That 150 years is an odd
figure, as from when Gibson was writing it takes one back to Napoleonic times,
when the German states were Britain’s allies against the French.) But he is
firmly of the belief (in contrast to Harris) that bombing cannot win the war on
its own—it is a necessary precursor to a land invasion. Gibson is also capable
of presenting an imagined ‘typical’ raid in which he shows both the RAF and the
Luftwaffe side, and reveals himself more sympathetic to the enemy’s point of
view than in his more forthright statements. (His view of the night defence of
Germany is no doubt partly informed by his own time as a night fighter pilot.)
Local connections raise themselves. For me, it’s the mention of Ringway, to
where Gibson is sent in the winter of 1939, which later became Manchester
International Airport, with which I was once quite familiar, and West Malling,
where he served part of his time as a night fighter pilot, which is near to
where my wife’s mother lives. For you it may be something different.
This is a
lost world that these books and programmes describe. Even when I first read of
the Dams Raid, in the early ’70s, the crews had seemingly outrageous names:
Burpee, Ottley, Maltby, Astell, names you no longer seem to come across.[37] I
wonder what this says about the generation that fought the war, and those
following. At the end of all this, I come away with a renewed respect for the
men of 617 Squadron, their bravery and professionalism, and their achievements.
It occurred
to me on 2004 that there needed to be a definitive and well-written wartime
history of 617, covering the Dams Raid and subsequent operations, that also
deals with Wallis and his special weapons, including ‘Highball’, the
Mosquito-borne anti-shipping version of Upkeep, hardly ever touched upon in
these works.[38] I’m not
sure if Alan Cooper’s other works might fit the bill—I suspect they would be
good reference material, but too meticulous and stylistically boring to provide
the popular history that is needed.
However, Chris Ward, Andy
Lee & Andreas Wachtel, Dambusters: The definitive history of 617
Squadron RAF at war 1943–1945, published in 2003, looks much more likely to fill that role, and
certainly, from its publicity, thinks it does—but sadly I haven’t seen a copy.
As noted earlier, I would now turn to John Nichol’s Return of the Dambusters.
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