Page 30 Daily Mail, Monday, August 19, 2019
But it wasn’t. The bomb bounced
once... twice... three times — then
vanished beneath the surface.
A
huge explosion sent a
column of water shoot-
ing high into the night
sky and the lake surface
boiled, yet as minutes passed and
the lake calmed, the dam
still stood.
Disappointment was crushing
for gibson. The evidence suggests
that his bomb was dropped early,
causing it to sink before striking
the dam wall. After his extraordi-
nary exertions, not least to over-
come exhaustion, his personal
effort had failed. But it now
became his task to rally and sup-
port the other attacking crews.
hopgood was next in M-Mother
but his attack went disastrously
awry. Cannon shells thrashed
the aircraft and it erupted
into flames.
The dropped bomb sprang over
the top of the dam as the burning
Lancaster struggled to gain
height and hurtled 200ft
downwards, to explode on the
power station below.
hopgood somehow cleared the
forested ridge behind the dam but
then ordered his crew: ‘For Christ’s
sake, get out of here!’
In those terrible seconds aboard
the blazing M-Mother, three were
able to escape before it ploughed
into the ground and dissolved into
flames, killing the four men
still aboard.
‘Poor old hoppy,’ said an
unidentified voice among the
crews still circling the target,
stunned by the horror of the
spectacle they had witnessed.
It was now Mickey Martin’s turn
in P-Popsie. ‘Come in number
three, you can go in now,’ called
gibson, who had decided to fly
alongside P-Popsie as he
approached, to divert german
fire. he would invite his own
destruction, the fate that had just
befallen John hopgood and his
men, to improve another crew’s
chance of success.
gibson had been an exhausted
man even before he took off. Only
iron strength of will could be
keeping him airborne.
The ruse didn’t work. As the two
Lancasters roared up the lake,
P-Popsie was hit in the starboard
wing, jolting the aircraft just
as its bomb fell away, bounced
across the water and exploded a
critical 50 yards off the central
aiming point.
As Martin banked away, his rear-
gunner saw a gigantic waterspout
as the bomb exploded — and left
the dam standing. The three
outstanding fliers of 617 Squadron
had now failed in attempts to
breach the Möhne.
From the pack circling overhead,
Melvin Young — nicknamed ‘Din-
ghy’ because he’d twice been shot
down over the sea and survived —
in A-Apple was called in next.
P-Popsie took station on his port
wing, matching his approach as
A-Apple flew in low, low, lower, up
the lake. Then their load was gone,
skipping over the water while the
two bombers banked and climbed
steeply away.
The bomb bounced three times,
struck the dam wall and vanished.
The positioning was perfect.
Three seconds later, 6,600lb of
Torpex exploded, inflicting upon
the Möhne a pulverising
earthquake shock.
As a new column of water soared
upwards, Young cried exultantly
over the VhF: ‘I think I’ve done it!’
Yet as the lake calmed, still the
wall appeared unbroken.
So at 0049, it was the turn of
J-Johnny, piloted by David Maltby,
who had celebrated his 23rd
birthday a week earlier and had a
wife back in Lincolnshire expect-
ing a baby any day.
he made a perfect run, dropped
his bomb and even as his aircraft
crossed the dam wall, he saw its
crown already crumbling.
Water soared into the sky, this
time accompanied by mud and
fragments of masonry, then gently
fell back to reveal a colossal
breach opening in the midst of the
dam. gibson banked towards the
wall and saw the lake surface
looking ‘like stirred porridge...
gushing out and rolling into the
Ruhr Valley towards the
industrial centres of germany’s
Third Reich’.
There was a thrilled yell over the
VhF: ‘It’s gone! It’s gone!’ The
desperation that had overtaken
the fliers, the sense of humiliating
failure, was replaced by exhilara-
tion, wonder, relief, triumph.
In every watching cockpit there
were cheers and roars across the
intercoms as these very
young men succumbed to a
schoolboy joy. ‘I can hardlydescribe the atmosphere in the
plane,’ said Maltby. ‘The yelling,
the pure excitement.’
There has since been debate
about whose bomb breached the
dam. It seems almost certain that
Young’s had achieved a decisive
fracture, which became apparent
even as Maltby’s exploded.
Now gibson watched the tidal
wave sweeping down the valley,
the clouds of spray that became a
fog, the irresistible weight of water
racing through the breach in
the dam.
‘Down in the foggy valley we saw
cars speeding along the roads in
front of the great wave of water
which was chasing them and going
faster than they could ever hope
to. I saw their headlights burning
and... water overtake them, then
the colour of the headlights under-
neath the water changing from
light blue to green, from green to
dark purple, until there was no
longer anything except the water,
bouncing down in great waves.’T
he codeword indicating
success was received at
operations hQ back in
england at 0056. There,
Barnes Wallis had been burying
his head in his hands at the earlier
news of casualties and of failure.
The young men, the fliers, were
doing their parts with wondrous
courage. The old ones, like him,
who had sent them, appeared to
have got it wretchedly, tragically
wrong. And now despair was
replaced by success. he jumped
up, pumping his arms like a
triumphant athlete. every face inthe operations room broke into
beams of relief and
congratulation.
Back at the Möhne, gibson
ordered home those Lancasters
whose bombs had gone, while he
turned towards the eder dam, 45
miles away, to mastermind the
next phase of Operation Chastise.
he stood off in g-george issuing
instructions as, one by one, four
Lancasters took a tilt at what was
an even more terrifying objective
than the Mohne. Surrounded by
wooded hills, attacking it required
a sudden dog-leg turn at the last
minute, release of the bomb and
then an instantaneous violent
climbing turn, to gain height over
the towering dam.
The first dozen passes were
unsuccessful, the Lancasters
failing to drop their bombs or
missing the target. One exploded
in mid-flight and was lost. The last
hope now rested on N-Nuts,
piloted by Les Knight.
On his second attempt, the
bomb-aimer made a perfect drop
at 240mph, 450 yards from the
dam. The bomb bounced three
times, hit the wall, sank and
exploded. For a moment the dam
remained intact but then, as one
of the crew reported, ‘as if some
huge fist had been jabbed at the
wall, a large, almost round black
hole appeared and water gushed
as if from a large hose.’
‘We could see the water gushing
out,’ said N-Nuts’s navigator Sid
hobday, ‘and all the masonry
coming down. It really was fantas-
tic, a sight I shall never forget.’
A similar attack on the third tar-
get, the Sorpe dam, was made by
a sole Lancaster — all thatremained of the five-plane third
wave — but failed to breach it. A
second plane later had a go but
with the same result.
however, the main aim of the
mission had been achieved.
gibson called up his crews and
told them: ‘good show, boys. Now
let’s all go home and get pie,’ —
though the last word may in truth
have been more vulgar.
And so they headed back to
Scampton, the first arriving at
0319, the last at 0615, many of the
Lancasters holed and limping.
eight out of the 19 did not return
at all. Fifty-six of the 133 men who
had set out on Operation Chastise
were dead.
Barnes Wallis lingered in the
debriefing room, devastated by 617
Squadron’s losses, a price for the
fulfilment of his vision such as he
had naïvely never contemplated.
Those who made it, however,
were ecstatic. ‘Absolutely marvel-
lous,’ was the verdict of one pilot.
‘Water, water everywhere — won-
derful, wonderful. A terrific show.’
A few of the exhausted young
men went to bed, but many
partied for hours, with beer and
whisky freely available in the offic-
ers’ mess. Some Waafs were
dragged from their beds to join a
conga. Around the piano, remem-
bered one airman, ‘stubble-
chinned, bleary-eyed aircrew
types croaked out dirty songs
about the germans’ before
collapsing into unconsciousness.
Their spirits revived after sleep
and the grant of seven days’ leave.
They were young, and thrilled by
the blaze of publicity and indeed
adulation that descended upon
them. ‘We were treated like bloody
gods,’ said wireless operator
george Chalmers in wonder.BuT what gibson and his men
had achieved would come to
trouble the ‘WingCo’. In his
memoirs, he wrote: ‘We destroyed
a legitimate industrial objective
so as to hinder the Ruhr Valley
output of war munitions.
‘The fact that people were in the
way was incidental.
‘The fact that they might drown
had not occurred to us. Nobody
likes mass slaughter, and we did
not like being the authors of it. It
brought us in line with himmler
and his boys.’
It was — and still is — a fair
point, and one often overlooked.
In 1948 a Norwegian Resistance
hero, Knut Lier-hansen, wrote
words 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.’
In tomorrow’s extract, I shall
consider whether the extraordi-
nary tale of Operation Chastise —
its impact upon World War II set
against its human consequences
— is redeemed by glory.
O ExtractEd from chastise:
the dambusters Story 1943 by
Max Hastings, to be published
by William collins on
September 5 at £25. © Max
Hastings 2019. to order a copy
for £20 (offer valid to 1/9/19;
p&p free), call 0844 571 0640.supreme athletic challenge, it does not seem
frivolous to compare gibson’s predicament
with that of a cricket captain.
under the eyes of his team, he was opening
the bowling. It would betray everything that he
represented if he let them down, muffed the
moment, made a hash of his run.
The hydraulic motors were started on the
bombs to spin them at the required speed of
500rpm. gibson announced: ‘I am going to
attack. Stand by to come in to attack in your
order when I tell you.’ Then he dived g-george
towards the lake, the airframe vibrating as the
four-and-a-half ton cylinder packed with
explosive spun beneath the bomb bay.
As g-george lost height the crew could clearly
see everything under the brilliant moonlight —
the dam wall, twin towers, sluices. One called
from the nose: ‘good show. This is wizard’,
before suffering a moment’s panic about the
proximity of fir trees a few feet beneath him.
Then came the vital 45 seconds as they raced
at 230mph above the surface of the lake.
The navigator switched on the spotlights,
saying ‘Down — down — down’, then ‘Steady —
steady.’ Incoming tracer from the dam wall
whipped past and each man braced for a brutal
collision between german shells and the thin
alloy of the Lancaster.
At the wheel, gibson felt almost overwhelmed
by the vastness of the dam looming, his
Lancaster suddenly so small.
‘Left — little more left,’ called out the naviga-
tor. ‘Steady steady — steady — coming up.’
Then: ‘Mine’s gone!’ The first of Barnes Wallis’s
‘bouncing bombs’ was on its way.
g-george surged sharply upwards with the
loss of weight, then gibson heaved back on the
yoke and climbed away.
A voice over the radio called from another
aircraft: ‘good show, leader. Nice work.’
Heart of the Reich: Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer visited the Mohne damTOMORROW: How the raid
killed hundreds of the
Nazis’ female slaves
FROM PREVIOUS PAGE
derful,
A few
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Their
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They wpWater soared into the sky
— and fell back to reveal a
colossal breach in the dam
Picture: ALAMY