Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943. Max Hastings

than admit to being a member of the RAF. Even after hostilities began, while many British aristocrats enlisted in the army and some in the Royal Navy, very few became pilots. The aircrew of 617 Squadron eventually included several public schoolboys and one Etonian, but none were authentic ‘toffs’.

In Gibson’s case, after a few months the RAF relented and accepted him for pilot training. This was indisputably exciting, but also perilous: during the inter-war years sixty-two cadets at Cranwell, the service’s elite college, were killed in flying accidents. In November 1936, aged just eighteen, three months after leaving St Edward’s, Gibson reported for instruction to the airfield at Yatesbury in Wiltshire. He graduated the following year, with a rating of ‘average’. He ranked lower than that as a companion, however, being widely viewed, in the schoolboy slang of the period, as ‘bumptious’. Perhaps to compensate for a lack of physical stature, he was gauchely assertive and immodest. His determination to make a mark, to get on, was not in doubt. But his manner of setting about this, and especially his condescension to lower ranks, including ground crew, did not make him popular. He wrote later: ‘I was no serviceman; I joined the Air Force in 1936 purely to learn to fly. I was due to leave the RAF [in April 1940] to become a test pilot – a good job with plenty of money in it.’

      At the coming of war his squadron commander said wryly: ‘Now’s your chance to be a hero, Gibbo.’ The young bomber pilot indeed welcomed the opportunity for advancement, as did many career warriors in all three services, but realised how slight were his chances of survival. He sought to stop his elder brother buying him a wristwatch as a present: ‘Don’t do it,’ he said. ‘I’m a dead man.’