The Dam Busters (6 page)

Gibson said he had thought of them a long time ago but they were not sensitive enough.

Time was getting short. Gibson got a call from Satterly. “They’ve finished the first two prototypes of the new bomb.” Satterly said. “Fly down to Herne Bay tomorrow and watch the test drops. Take your bombing leader with you.” That was April 15.

Wallis met them and next morning they drove out to a bare beach near Reculver. Half a mile back from the sea M.I.5 had cordoned the area off.

“I’m sorry to get you up so early,” said the ever-courteous Wallis, “but the tide is up and that is the right time. We want to walk out at low tide and see how the bomb stands up to the shock of dropping.”

In the east came two specks which grew into Lancasters, heading low over the shallows towards two white buoys bobbing on the water. “The other one’s the camera aircraft,” Wallis said as they watched them, and as the noise of engines filled the air Wallis was shouting above the roar, “He’s high. He’s too high.” He sounded agitated. They swept up side by side and a great black thing dropped slowly away under the nearer one. It hit and vanished in a sheet of spray that hissed up towards the plane. For a moment there was nothing but the spray, and then out of it the fragments came flying.

“Broken,” Wallis said and stood there very still. He took a deep breath. “They said it wouldn’t work. Too big and heavy and the case too light. We’ve got another in the hangars. We’ll try it this afternoon. The aircraft was too high.”

Men worked hard that afternoon to strengthen the case of the second bomb while Wallis stripped to his underpants and waded to his neck in the freezing water, feeling with his feet for the fragments of the broken one. A launch took the broken bits on board and Wallis climbed in shivering, oblivious of everything but the ragged edges where the metal had burst.

They were on the dunes again as the sun was going down and the two aircraft came in sight, lower this time. Mutt Summers in the bomb plane was holding her steady at 50 feet. The suspense was painful. The black monster dropped away below, and again the water gushed skywards as it hit and out of the foaming cloud came the flying fragments as it broke.

Wallis said “Oh, my God! “And then out of the spray the jagged bulk of the main body of the bomb lurched into the air and skipped erratically for a hundred yards or so before it rolled under the water. Wallis stared in silence for a few seconds with the look of a man who has lost a shilling and found threepence. He sighed, and said, “Well, it’s a bit better than this morning.”

(In the Lancaster, Summers was not happy. A lump of the casing had hit the elevators and one of them had jammed. The plane could just hold its height while Summers was holding his breath. He did a wide gentle turn and made a heart-stopping landing on the long runway at Manston with the trimmers.)

Wallis told Gibson : “We’ve still got a lot of work to do on the bomb j but don’t worry, it’s going to be all right.” Gibson and Hay took off in a little plane for Scampton and a few hundred feet up the engine coughed and died. There was only one way to go and that was down, but all the good fields were still covered with poles so the Germans could not land troops in an invasion. Gibson did his best to steer between them but a wingtip hit a pole, and as the aircraft slewed the other wing hit and they finished up sitting in a ball of crumpled duralumin, but were able to climb out.

A man came haring across the field, and when he saw they were not badly hurt he said severely, “I think they teach you young fellows to fly too early” and then a policeman arrived and said unemotionally, “I’m glad to see our landing devices work.”

Gibson and Hay went back to Scampton by train, and on the way Gibson thought up a scheme to overcome the height problem: to dangle a long wire under the aircraft with a weight on it so it would skim the water when the aircraft was exactly at 60 feet. Full of hope, he tried it in G for George, but it didn’t work. At speed the line trailed out almost straight behind.

Cochrane set the “back-room boys” to work on the problem and a day later Ben Lockspeiser, of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, arrived at Grantham with an idea. It was absurd to think how simple it was—and how effective. “Put a spotlight under the nose,” he said, “and another one under the belly, both pointing down and inwards so they converge at sixty feet. When the two spots come together on the water, there you are ! “

Maudslay flew a Lancaster down to Farnborough and they fitted two spotlights on it the same day. Coming back he made test runs across the aerodrome and it worked beautifully. Maudslay said it was easy to get the circles of light together and keep them there. The idea was that they should touch each other, forming a figure “8.” He had Urquhart, his navigator, leaning his head out of the perspex observation blister behind the pilot, looking down at the ground and saying, “Down, down, down… up a bit… O.K.,” and that was the procedure they adopted. They all tried it over Derwent Water using the same drill, and could fly to within 2 feet with wonderful consistency. Everyone was pleased but not exactly in ecstasy, because the same thought was in all their minds. An aircraft pelting up to a defended target at 60 feet did not make the crew very good insurance risks. And when it was showing lights too…

Down at Weybridge Wallis was still trying to strengthen the bomb and things were not going well. On April 22 they flew the first new model over to Reculver and dropped it; it didn’t break up, but the case crushed on Impact once more and, after two erratic hops, the bomb went straight to the bottom. The tormented Wallis had a pretty problem now. There was no time to re-design the casing. Three weeks to the date for the raid and if they couldn’t make the time it would have to be put off for another year; probably, in view of official scepticism, for ever. The water in the dams was rising. In the next week Wallis got little sleep while he spent long hours working to find little ways of making the casing just that much stronger. He was living on hope.

On April 29 they finished another modified bomb and Vickers test pilot Shorty Longbottom flew it to Reculver for the drop. It was pouring with rain and Wallis, out on the dunes, did not even notice it as he eyed the Lancaster diving out of the east towards the markers. Longbottom had her tucked down neatly to 60 feet at 258 indicated air speed, squinting through the rain squalls to hold his height and see the markers. The bomb fell slowly, and then out of the usual shower of spray it came bounding in majestic and perfect flight—and went on bouncing for half-a-mile. Down on the dunes, Longbottom, banking round, saw a white dot bobbing about. Wallis had taken his hat off and was waving it in the air, dancing and shouting while the rain ran down his face.

CHAPTER VI TAKE-OFF

EARLY in May a strange-looking aircraft flew over Scampton, the first of the modified Lancasters. It looked like a designer’s nightmare ; the bomb doors were gone and the mid-upper turret and some of the armour, and there was a lot of queer junk sticking out underneath. It looked better for walking than flying. The rest of the modified aircraft arrived in the next few days. The pilots found they flew all right, though they had lost a little performance.

A couple of days later, on May 8, Gibson, Martin and Hop-good flew three of them down to Manston, and Martin and Hopgood watched goggle-eyed while a bomb was loaded into each. Two dummy towers had been put up on the water at Reculver, and the three aircraft had a run at them, dropping the bombs with the quaint plywood bombsights. It was beautiful to watch. Three enchanting direct hits. Three times in a row the great spheres skipped between the dummy towers along the surface of the water.

The worry and rush were telling on Gibson now; he was irritable and a carbuncle was forming painfully on his face so that he could not get his oxygen mask on. Not that he was going to need oxygen on a low-level raid, but his microphone was in the mask. He went to the doctor, and in his detached professional way the doctor said, “This means you’re overworked. I’m afraid you’ll have to take a couple of weeks off”; and Gibson stared at him ludicrously and laughed in his face.

He planned to control the raid by plain-language radio, and Cochrane got them VHF fighter sets. Hutchison, squadron signals leader, set them up first in the crew room so they could have dummy practices on R/T procedure.

The stage was nearly set, but at Bomber Command and at Grantham there was secret dismay. For three days the Mosquito had been bringing back photographs that showed mysterious activity on top of the Moehne Dam. The dark shapes of some new structures had been appearing, growing from day to day. There were about five sets of them, visible as short black rectangles. The interpretive experts puzzled over them for hours, blowing up the photos as large as the grain would take, examining them under strong light and through magnifying glasses nearly as strong as microscopes. The structures threw shadows across the dam top, and they measured the shadows but still were baffled. There seemed to be only one answer—new gun positions. There must have been a security leak somewhere.

At midnight on May 13 a convoy of covered lorries rolled round the perimeter track to the bomb dump at Scampton; a cordon of guards gathered round and the bombs were trollied into the dump and hidden under tarpaulins. They had only just been filled and were still warm to the touch.

Gibson drove off to see Satterly and plan the routes for the raid, taking with him Group Captain Pickard (of “F for Freddy”) because he was a “gen” man on German flak positions, and on a low-level raid there is nothing more important than plotting a track between the known flak. They spread their maps out on the floor and carefully pencilled in two separate tracks that wound in and out of the red blotches of the known flak. They plotted two more widely differing routes for the trip home so that any flak aroused on the way in would watch out in vain for the return.

The attack would be in three waves, Gibson leading nine aircraft on the southern route, Munro leading others on the northern, and five aircraft taking off a couple of hours later to act as a reserve. If the Moehne, Eder and Sorpe were not smashed by the first two waves, Gibson would call up the reserves. If they
were
smashed the reserves would bomb three smaller dams in the same area, the Schwelm, Ennerpe and Dieml.

Accurate navigation was going to be vital or there were going to be sudden deaths. The pencilled tracks had to go perilously near some of the red flak areas.

“Doc” Watson and his armourers were loading the bombs into the Lancasters. Martin watched Watson winching the bomb up into his aircraft, “P for Peter” (or, as Martin always insisted, “P for Popsie”). “Just exactly how
do
these bombs work, Doc?” he asked.

“I know as much as you do, Micky,” Watson said busily. “Nothing!”

“Ar, what do they pay you for?” Half an hour later the bomb was in position and he and Bob Hay, Leggo, Foxlee, Simpson and Whittaker were crawling about inside the aircraft seeing that everything was in order when a fault developed in the bomb release circuit, the release snapped back and there was a crunch as the giant black thing fell and crashed through the concrete hardstanding, embedding itself 4 inches into the earth below. Relieved of the weight, “P for Popsie” kicked a little from the expanding oleo legs of the under-carriage.

Martin said, “What’s that?” There was a startled yell from an armourer outside and Martin yelled, “Hey, the thing’s fallen off!”

“Release wiring must be faulty,” Hay said professionally, and then it dawned on him and he said in a shocked voice, “It might have fused itself.” He ran, yelling madly, out of the nose. “Get out of here. She’ll go off in less than a minute.” Bodies came tumbling out of the escape hatches, saw the tails of the armourers vanishing in the distance and set off after them. Martin jumped into the flight van near by and, with a grinding of gears, roared off to get Doc Watson. He had his foot hard down on the accelerator and swears that a terrified armourer passed him on a push-bike. He ran into Watson’s office and panted out the news and Watson said philosophically, “Well, if she was going off she’d have gone off by this.”

He got into the flight van and drove over to the deserted plane. Pale faces peeped out, watching him from deep shelters round the perimeter track hundreds of yards away, and Watson turned and bellowed, “O.K. Flap’s over. It’s not fused.”

The squadron was fused though; painfully aware that something tremendous was about to happen. The aircraft were there, the bombs were there, both had been put together and crews were trained to the last gasp,. Now was the time, Gibson knew, nerves would be tautening as they wondered whether there was going to be a reasonable chance of coming back or whether they would be dead in forty-eight hours. (And it was not only the aircrews who were tensed. Anne Fowler was too; she was a dark slim W.A.A.F. officer at Scampton, and in the past few weeks she and the boyish David Shannon had become a most noticeable twosome.)

Perhaps the least affected was the wiry and rambunctious Martin. Aged twenty-four, he had already decided that he was going to die, if not on this raid then on some other. Before the war was over anyway. During his first few “ops “he had often had sleepless nights or dreamed of burning aircraft. He saw all his friends on his squadron get “the chop” one after the other till they were all gone and knew it would only be a question of time before he would probably join them. So finally he had accepted the fact that in a fairly short time, barring miracles, he was going to die, not pleasantly. That was his strength and largely why he was so boisterous. Having accepted that, the next step was automatic: to fill every day with as many of the fruits of life as possible. He did so with vigour.

It was a corollary, more than a paradox, that he was not suicidal in the air but audacious in a calculating way, measuring every risk and if it were worth while, taking it, spinning it out as long as he could, but making every bomb tell. He did not believe in miracles.

* * *

On the morning of May 15, you could clearly sense the tension, more so when word spread that the A.O.C. had arrived. Cochrane saw Gibson and Whitworth alone and was brief and businesslike.

“If the weather’s right you go tomorrow night. Start briefing your crews this afternoon and see that your security is foolproof.”

After lunch a little aeroplane landed and Wallis and Mutt Summers climbed out; ten minutes later they were with Gibson and Whitworth with a guard on the door. Gibson could not take his beloved Nigger on the raid but could not bear to leave him out altogether, so he gave him the greatest honour he could think of… when (or if) the Moehne Dam was breached he would radio back the one code word “Nigger.”

In the hangars, messes and barracks the Tannoy came loudly and dramatically to life : “All pilots, navigators and bomb aimers of 617 report to the briefing room immediately.” At three o’clock there were some sixty of them in the briefing room on the upper floor of the grey-and-black camouflaged station headquarters. They sat silently on the benches, eyeing the familiar maps, aircraft identification and air-sea rescue posters on the walls, waiting. Whitworth, Gibson and Wallis filed down the centre to the dais and Whitworth nodded to Gibson : “Go ahead, Guy.” The room was still.

Gibson faced them, feet braced apart, flushed a little. He had a ruler in one hand, the other in his pocket, and his eyes were bright. He cleared his throat and said :

“You’re going to have a chance to clobber the Hun harder than a small force has ever done before.” Outside his voice, no sound. “Very soon we are going to attack the major dams in Western Germany.” A rustle and murmuring broke the silence—and some deep breaths. They were going to have a sporting chance. Gibson turned to the map and pointed with his ruler.

“Here they are,” he said. “Here is the Moehne, here the Eder and here is the Sorpe. As you can see, they are all just east of the Ruhr.” He went on to explain the tactics, told each crew what wave they would be on and what dam they were to attack.

Wallis took over and described the dams and what the queer bombs were supposed to do, how success would cripple the Ruhr steel industry, how other factories would be affected and bridges and roads washed away.

Gibson stood up. “Any questions?”

Hopgood said: “I notice, sir, that our route takes us pretty near a synthetic rubber factory at Huls. It’s a hot spot. I nearly got the hammer there three months ago. If we go over there low I think it might… er… upset things.”

Gibson looked thoughtfully at the map. Huls was a few miles north of the Ruhr. Satterly and he had known about the Huls flak: when they were planning the route but had taken the track as far away from the Ruhr as they could. Better the flak at Huls than the Ruhr.

“If you think it’s a bit too close to Huls we’ll bring it down a bit,” and he pencilled in a wider curve round the little dot. “You’d better all be careful here. The gap isn’t too wide. Err on the Huls side if you have to, but watch it you navigators.”

He crossed the room to a couple of trestle-tables where three dust covers were hiding something, pulled the covers off, and there were the models of the dams.

“All of you come over and have a look at these,” he commanded., and there was a scraping of forms as sixty young men got up and crowded round,.

“Look at these till your eyes stick out and you’ve got every detail photographed on your minds, then go away and draw them from memory, come back and check your drawings, correct them, then go away and draw them again till you’re perfect.”

They were two hours doing that; each crew concentrated on its own target, working out the best ways in and the best ways out. The known flak guns were marked and they took
very
special note of them. Martin’s crew were down for the Moehne with Gibson and Hopgood, and they stood gazing down at the model.

“What d’you reckon’s the best way in?” Leggo asked.

“First thing is to get the final line of attack,” Martin said. “There’s the spot!” He put his ringer on the tip of a spit of land running out into the Moehne Lake and ran his fingertip in a straight line to the middle of the dam wall, right between the two towers. It met the wall at right angles. “A low wide circuit,” he said; “come in over the spit and we’re jake.”

It was eight o’clock before Gibson was satisfied they knew it all and said, “Now buzz off and get some grub. But keep your mouths shut. Not even a whisper to your own crews. They’ll find out tomorrow. If there’s one slip and the Hun ‘gets an inkling you won’t be coming back tomorrow night.”

They all drank shandy and went to bed, taking little white pills that the doctor had doled out so they would sleep well. As Gibson was going along to his room Charles Whitworth came in looking worried and buttonholed him quietly.

“Guy,” he said, “I’m awfully sorry, but Nigger’s just been run over by a car outside the camp. He was killed instantaneously.”

The car had not even bothered to stop.

Gibson sat a long time on his bed looking at the scratch marks that Nigger used to make on his door. Nigger and he had been together since before the war; it seemed to be an omen.

The morning of May 16 was sunny. Considering the scurry that went on all day it was remarkable that so few people at Scampton realised what was happening. Even after the aircraft took off hours later the people watching nearly all thought it was a special training flight.

It was just after 9 a.m. that Gibson bounced into his office and told Humphries to draw up the flying programme.

“Training, sir ? “—more of a statement than a question. “No. That is yes—to everyone else,” and as Humphries looked bewildered he said quietly: “We’re going to war tonight, but I don’t want the world to know. Mark the list ‘Night flying programme,’ and don’t mention the words ‘battle order.’”

Watson, the armament chief, was dashing around busily. The pilots were swinging their compasses. Trevor-Roper was seeing that all guns were loaded with full tracer that shot out of the guns at night like angry meteors and to people on the receiving end looked like cannon shells. That was the idea, to frighten the flak gunners and put them off their aim. Each aircraft had two .303 Brownings in the front turret, and four in the tail turret. Each gun fired something like twelve rounds a
second;
each rear turret alone could pump out what looked like forty-eight flaming cannon shells a second; 96,000 rounds lay in the ammunition trays.

Towards noon a Mosquito touched down with the last photos of the dams. The water in the Moehne was 4 feet from the top. After lunch “Gremlin” Matthews, meteorological officer at Grantham, spoke to all the other group met. officers on a locked circuit of trunk lines for half an hour. Such conferences rarely found agreement but this time they did. The lively bespectacled figure of “The Gremlin” walked into Cochrane’s office as soon as he had put the receiver down.