Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943. Max Hastings

Introduction

      There were dams; a dog with an embarrassing name; a movie; a march composed by Eric Coates. These memories of Operation Chastise, the ‘bouncing bomb’ attack which burst open north-western Germany’s Möhne and Eder reservoirs on the night of 16/17 May 1943, cling to the consciousness of millions of people of all ages, both sexes and many nations, who may know little else about the Second World War. Wing-Commander Guy Gibson’s biographer Richard Morris has written: ‘The story of 617 Squadron’s breaching of the dams has joined that group of historically-based tales – like King Arthur, or Robin Hood – which defy all efforts at scholarly revision.’

Much that we think we know is wrong. Those of us who read Paul Brickhill’s 1951 book, then watched its 1955 screen progeny, the most popular British war film of all time, should blush to remember that we embraced The Dam Busters with special enthusiasm because the raid seemed victimless, save for the fifty-three dead among the gallant young men who carried it out. In truth, however, something approaching 1,400 people – almost all civilians and more than half French, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian mostly female slaves of Hitler – perished in the Möhnekatastrophe, as modern Germans call it; more than in any previous RAF attack on the Reich. That tragic outcome deserves emphasis, alongside our awe at 617 Squadron’s achievement. It is fascinating that Guy Gibson afterwards reflected uneasily about this, as his superiors never did, writing in 1944: ‘The fact that people … might drown had not occurred to us. But we hoped that the dam wardens would warn those living below in time, even if they were Germans. No one likes mass slaughter and we did not like being the authors of it. Besides, it brought us in line with Himmler and his boys.’

      This book represents an emotional journey from my own childhood; from the day when, at boarding school, I first thrilled to Richard Todd’s portrayal of the twenty-four-year-old Gibson, who led 617 Squadron on that fateful May night. Many legendary feats of courage have been performed by warriors who clung to some bleeding piece of earth: the Three Hundred at Thermopylae; Horatius on the bridge before Rome; the Guards’ defence of Hougoumont at Waterloo; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s 20th Maine on Little Round Top at Gettysburg; C Company of the 24th Foot holding Rorke’s Drift.

By contrast, the deed attempted in May 1943 by 130 British, Canadian, and Australian airmen, together with a single American and two New Zealanders, required qualities of a different order. Almost all were of an age with modern gap-year adolescents, or students at university. They embarked in cold blood on a mission that many recognised was likely to kill them, and that would require exceptional courage, skill and luck to succeed. They lifted their big, clumsy bombers from the tranquillity of a summer evening in the midst of the Lincolnshire countryside, barely four decades after the Wright brothers initiated heavier-than-air flight. For two and a half hours they raced through the moonlit sky towards Germany, at a height that made power cables as deadly a menace as anti-aircraft fire. They then attacked Hitler’s dams, flying straight and level at 220 mph, much lower than the treetops and less than a cricket pitch’s length from the lakes below, to unleash revolutionary four-and-a-half-ton weapons created by the brilliance and persistence of Barnes Wallis, a largely self-taught engineer. Half of 617’s aircraft which got as far as Germany failed to return, but two of the biggest man-made structures in the world collapsed into mud and rubble, releasing hundreds of millions of tons of water upon the Reich.

      The Allied bomber offensive has become one of the most controversial aspects of the Second World War. Some critics, not all of them German or Japanese, denounce the Western Allied assaults upon cities and their inhabitants as a war crime. The 1945 fire-bombing campaign by American B-29 Superfortresses killed far more people in Tokyo and other Japanese cities than did the atomic bombs later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The concept of air bombardment of civilians causes many twenty-first-century people discomfort, indeed repugnance. Contrarily, it is a source of bitterness to some descendants of the RAF’s wartime bomber crews that the public prefers to lavish legacy adulation on the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of the Battle of Britain – defenders – than on their comrades the attackers, who bombed Germany at the cost of enduring losses much greater than those of Fighter Command. Australian Dave Shannon of 617 Squadron denounced in old age ‘sanctimonious, hypocritical and grovelling criticism about things that were done in a total war’.

Where, in all this, does the saga of the dambusters rightfully belong? The fliers contrived a feat that caused all the world to wonder – the Allied nations with pride, the German people and their leaders with horror and apprehension. Rumours swept the Reich that thirty thousand victims had perished beneath the floods. Though the Lancaster crews were drawn from the RAF’s Bomber Command, the force that nightly rained fire and destruction on Germany’s cities, few even among its critics failed to perceive a nobility about the bravery displayed that night. In the spring of 1943, after nearly four years of austerity, unpalatable food, family separations and spasmodic terrors, only lately ameliorated by a thin gruel of successes, the British people were weary. The dams raid lifted their spirits, revived flagging confidence in their own nation’s powers, as had few events since the desert victory at El Alamein six months earlier. We shall discuss below its effects on the Nazi war machine, which RAF planners aspired to cripple.

      I was born at the end of 1945, and thus was five when Paul Brickhill’s best-selling account of Chastise was published, nine when the film was released. Both book and movie made a profound impression. I memorised the names of almost every one of 617’s pilots; assembled and painted plastic models of the Avro Lancasters they flew; became intimately familiar with Enemy Coast Ahead, Gibson’s posthumously published memoir. As an adult, I began to study wars, first as a correspondent and eyewitness in faraway places, then as an author of books. Although my ideas became much more nuanced than those of childhood, I was well served by familiarity with a host of World War II memoirs and histories.

In 1977 I was commissioned to write Bomber Command, a study of the British strategic offensive. In those days, thousands of former aircrew were still alive, together with some commanders. I interviewed at length Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, 1942–45 C-in-C of Bomber Command; Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, ex-AOC of 5 Group, to which 617 Squadron belonged; former senior staff officers including Air Vice-Marshal Syd Bufton, director of bomber operations at the Air Ministry; Marshal of the RAF Lord Elworthy, who served as a pilot, station commander and staff officer at Bomber Command HQ; together with the inventor of the ‘bouncing bomb’, Sir Barnes Wallis, and wartime bombing adviser Lord Zuckerman. Among former 617 aircrew, I met Group-Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, and Air Vice-Marshal Sir Harold ‘Micky’ Martin. Many of these disagreed profoundly with my conclusions, but their testimony was invaluable.

      The RAF’s Battle of Britain Flight flew me as a passenger from Farnborough to Coningsby in its only surviving Avro Lancaster, an unforgettable experience. I explored every crew position, and occupied the rear turret – albeit with most of my long back protruding through its sliding doors – while an accompanying Spitfire and Hurricane made passes, to give me a gunner’s-eye view of an attacking fighter. As a war correspondent I saw more than a few aircraft shot down, and have myself dangled from a parachute, though happily not as a ‘bailed out’ airman. In 1994 I spent an airsick afternoon in the rear seat of an RAF Tornado of the latterday 617 Squadron, over Lincolnshire and the North Sea.

All these memories have informed my thoughts and stirred my imagination as I wrote this book. Among many previous accounts of Chastise, the 1982 groundbreaker was that of John Sweetman, who performed prodigies of research to transform and much enhance the picture created by Paul Brickhill. I cherish unstinting admiration for Richard Morris, and especially for his 1994 biography of Guy Gibson, which contributed much to Gibson’s portrait in my own 2005 book Warriors. In Germany, Helmuth Euler has devoted most of his life to interviewing survivors of the breaching of the dams, as well as assembling images and documentation: I have made a free translation from some of his witnesses’ testimony, in pursuit of colloquial English. In 2012, James Holland published an exhaustive new account of the raid.

      Robert Owen, official historian of the 617 Squadron Association, possesses encyclopaedic knowledge, which he is generous enough to lend to