Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943. Max Hastings

on the spot much that was previously obscure about the hazards facing the attackers. Charles Foster has recently published an invaluable new work of reference, The Complete Dambusters, providing images and details of all 133 aircrew who flew the raid. For my own narrative I have drawn heavily upon the researches of all the above writers. Richard Morris and Rob Owen, especially, have saved me from egregious errors. As in all my books, I seek to emphasise the human dimension and the ‘big picture’, making no attempt to match the admirable technical detail about Wallis’s weapons, of which Sweetman and Holland display mastery.

An enigma overhangs the personalities of the men of 617 Squadron. Almost all were very young when they attacked the dams, and few survived the war. Records detail what they did; there is much less evidence, however, about what sort of people they were. With the notable exception of Gibson, their stories rely heavily upon adolescent correspondence and anecdotes. They were unformed in almost everything save having been trained for flight and devastation: many still thought it the best joke in the world to pull off a man’s trousers after dinner. In describing them, an author cannot escape surmise and speculation. Much reported dialogue, especially relating to the hours of action over the dams, relies upon later personal memories, probably more reliable in spirit than wording. On such a matter as – for instance – the sporadic affair between Gibson and WAAF nurse Margaret North, historians depend on North’s unsupported oral testimony to Richard Morris.

      Since starting this book, I have been repeatedly asked whether it is an embarrassment to acknowledge the name of Gibson’s dog, which became a wirelessed codeword for the breaching of the Möhne. A historian’s answer must be: no more than the fact that our ancestors hanged sheep-stealers, executed military deserters and imprisoned homosexuals. They did and said things differently then. It would be grotesque to omit Nigger from a factual narrative merely because the word is rightly repugnant to twenty-first-century ears.

      I have been moved to retell, and to reconsider, the Chastise story, in hopes of offering a new perspective which almost represents a paradox. I retain the awe of my childhood for the fliers who breached the Möhne and the Eder. In my seventies, I muse constantly upon the privilege of having attained old age, whereas the lives of most of those British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and American fliers became forfeit before they knew maturity, fatherhood or, in many cases, love or even sex.

Yet in the twenty-first century it also seems essential to confront – as many past British writers have been reluctant to confront – the enormity of the horror that the unthinking fliers unleashed upon a host of innocents. A Norwegian Resistance hero, Knut Lier-Hansen, wrote words in 1948 that linger in my mind whenever I compose narratives of conflict: ‘Though wars can bring adventures which stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.’ We shall consider below whether the extraordinary tale of Operation Chastise – its impact upon the Second World War set against its human consequences – is ‘redeemed by glory’.

      MAX HASTINGS

       Chilton Foliat, West Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia

       May 2019

Prologue

      Let us begin this story where he began it: in the cockpit of an Avro Lancaster heavy bomber, callsign G-George, forging through the darkness towards Germany on the night of 16 May 1943, amid the roar of four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that drowned out conversation save over the intercom. ‘The moon was full; everywhere its pleasant, watery haze spread over the peaceful English countryside, rendering it colourless. But there is not much colour in Lincolnshire anyway. The city of Lincoln was silent – that city which so many bomber boys know so well, a city full of homely people.’ Guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead, written in 1944, a few months before his death, is one of the great wartime warriors’ memoirs, despite its cavalier attitude to facts and dates. Those who edited the typescript for publication after its author perished softened harshnesses: for instance, Gibson originally characterised Lincoln as ‘full of dull, unimaginative people’, perhaps because his own experiences were beyond their imaginations, and those of most of us.

The book reveals a sensitivity that few of the squadron commander’s men recognised in him, together with a consciousness of his own mortality, derived from completion of an astounding seventy-two previous bomber operations, together with ninety-nine sorties as pilot of a night-fighter. He describes the fate of an aircraft hit over Germany, plunging steeply out of the sky for an interminable minute, ‘then it is all over and you hit the ground. Petrol flames come soaring up into the sky, almost reaching to meet you as though to rocket your soul to heaven.’ He knew. Unlike some heroes who are bereft of fear, Gibson anticipated his own almost certain destiny. Only its hour remained to be fixed, and this May night seemed more plausible than most.

      He was leading 617 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command to unleash upon the dams of north-western Germany a revolutionary new weapon, requiring an attack at extreme low level. Nineteen crews were committed to Operation Chastise, and the eight proven in training to be most proficient now accompanied Gibson himself towards the Möhne. Off his port wingtip flew the dashing Australian Harold ‘Micky’ Martin in P-Popsie, while a few yards to starboard was ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood’s M-Mother, its pilot a twenty-one-year-old who still began his letters home ‘Dear Mummy’.

      Gibson again: ‘We were off on a journey for which we had long waited, a journey that had been carefully planned, carefully trained for’ – only eight weeks, in truth, since inception, but such a span represented an eternity to very young men, crowding what should properly have been a lifetime’s experience into a fraction of a natural span: Gibson considered entitling the later memoir of his career as a bomber pilot Four Years Lifetime – ‘a mission which was going to do a lot of good if it succeeded’. The chiefs of the RAF had promised the aircrew of 617 Squadron that breaching the dams would inflict damage upon Germany’s war industries greater than any previously achieved by an air force.

Among the sharpest contrasts between the environment of twentieth-century war and that of twenty-first-century peace is colour. We live in a world of reds and whites, blues, silvers, oranges. Allied airmen bombing Europe in 1943 existed by day under sunshine and bright skies, then fought their battles in a universe that was darkened, shaded, shadowed, unless or until it erupted into flame. The undersides and flanks of night bombers were painted matt black; their upper surfaces disrupted foliage-greens and earth-browns. Once airborne, Gibson and his kin inhabited cramped, stunted workspaces, crowded with technology and control mechanisms, black or green save where paint had been worn away by human friction and hard usage to reveal streaks of dull metal.

      He wrote: ‘The pilot sits on the left on a raised, comfortably padded seat … usually flies the thing with his left hand, resetting the gyro and other instruments with his right, but most pilots use both hands when over enemy territory or when the going is tough. You have to be quite strong to fly a Lancaster. The instruments sit winking. On the Sperry panel, or the blind-flying panel as bomber pilots call it, now and then a red light, indicating that some mechanism needs adjusting, will suddenly flash on … The pilot’s eyes constantly perform a circle from the repeater to the Air Speed Indicator, from the ASI to the horizon, from the horizon to the moon, from the moon to what he can see on the ground and then back to the repeater. No wonder they are red-rimmed when he returns.’

Gibson himself had much to be red-rimmed about. Since 1940, he had been almost continuously making war. Two months earlier he completed a tour as 106 Squadron’s commander, during which he flew its most hazardous operations. He was now among the most decorated pilots in the RAF, holding two Distinguished Service Orders, two Distinguished Flying Crosses. In the seven weeks since he began to form 617 Squadron he had grappled with relentless administrative and personnel problems; directed specialised crew training; raced between Scampton, Weybridge and Reculver to discuss the dam-busting bomb with its creator and to witness the mixed fortunes of its trials. He had flown low-level tests by day and night; hastened to and from the Grantham headquarters of 5 Group for tactical conferences;