by David Irving
Of the nineteen No. 617 Squadron Lancasters which had lifted off at Scampton, eight had failed to return – Hopgood, Young, Astell, Maudslay, Byers, Barlow, Ottley, and Burpee. Altogether fifty-three young men “went for a Burton” that night, as Bomber Command's young airmen used to remark with well-feigned indifference in these air force messes in Lincolnshire.
Barnes Wallis listened in horror to their stories. His genius, his invention, had been so costly in young British Empire lives. Dave Shannon said: “He was in tears… and a more distressing sight and anguished figure I have never seen to this day.”
First the crews that had return had to be debriefed. It took ages. Shaken and still rocky from their long hours in the air, they trooped back to the mess afterwards. They opened the bar, and started to drink – “heavily,” said Shannon. Even those who had never touched a drop until now hit the bottle.
“They got well and truly smashed that day. The beer started flowing until late in the morning, when we struggled off to our beds, and managed to get a few hours sleep. Then there was a stand down of seven days for the raid's survivors.”
ONLY THREE OF THE missing airmen survived to reach prison camps: Hopgood's bomb-aimer John Fraser and rear-gunner Tony Burcher, and another rear-gunner Fred Tees.
Burcher and Fraser ended up in Stalag Luft III, the famous officers’ prison camp at Sagan in Lower Silesia. The bomb-aimer told Burcher that he had pulled open his escape hatch as the ground tore past at two hundred miles an hour, only a few feet below the Perspex, and in desperation unfurled his parachute inside the plane. It was again something they had been warned never to do; after that he remembered only hitting the tail-wheel well as he leapt out out. He landed unscathed and without a mark upon him. In peacetime it would probably have gone down as being the lowest freefall parachute jump in history.
Flight Sergeant Fred Tees was the sole survivor after twenty-millimetre shells from light flak took out an engine of Warner Ottley's Lancaster Mark III, C for Charlie, north of Hamm. He had lost all hydraulic power, and Ottley knew he could not halt the bomber's descent. She was going down out of control. Tees heard him gasp five last words over the intercom just before they hit the ground – “Sorry boys. They got us.”
Miraculously the tail was torn off on the first impact. The Germans found Tees alive three miles from the final crash site where his comrades died, but with burns over seventy percent of his body.
After hospital treatment, he was sent to Stalag Luft VI at Heydekrug on East Prussia's border with Lithuania. He never really recovered from the trauma of the night; as much still stricken by the death of all his comrades as perplexed by his own survival, he ultimately took his own life nearly forty years later.
OPERATION CHASTISE had been costly on the side of its enemies too, in terms of what is now glibly termed collateral damage. In World War II however it was not collateral, it was intentional. As the tidal waves writhed and crashed down the valleys of the Ruhr, one thousand six hundred and fifty people were killed – most of them, in fact one thousand five hundred and seventy-nine, along the Möhne and Ruhr river valleys; the other seventy-one were killed downriver from the Eder dam. Only about a third of the victims were Germans; no fewer than 1,026 of the victims were foreign workers in a hutted labour camp beneath the Möhne Dam, and of these at least 526 were Russian women captives.
While newsreel cameras whirred, His Majesty King George VI visited Scampton and awarded his country's highest medal for valour, the Victoria Cross, to Wing Commander Guy Penrose Gibson. His comrades won high decorations too, and the men of No. 617 Squadron were fêted for weeks after as national heroes. Air photographs of the raid's devastation gave a fillip to British morale. The squadron went on to even greater acts of heroism and precision bombing, including the “Tallboy” earthquake-bomb attacks on the battleship Tirpitz and on railroad viaducts and the V-weapon launch sites and the V–3 supergun site in France.
The destruction of the dams was bound to affect German morale as much as it boosted the British. From the Gestapo surveys, Adolf Hitler learned that there was a creeping resignation among his people, an awareness that the British bombers would always get through. Every night that summer of 1943 “Butcher” Harris was leaving his deadly calling card at some town or other in the Ruhr, as his bombers unloaded thousands tons of explosives into the streets and houses. Soon it would be the turn of Hamburg and Berlin.
SOME DAYS PASSED after the dams raids before Bletchley Park could decode the police signals transmitted by the units rushed into action that night. The Germans, it seemed, had moved with their legendary efficiency to repair the damage. By nine-fifty a.m. on the morning after Gibson's attack the police had already set up an emergency disaster headquarters at Arnsberg, Einsatzstab Möhne/Ruhr, the Möhne Operational Headquarters.
The Germans were seized with jitters for weeks after the dams raid. At 11:55 a.m. on May 20 the British code-breakers monitored a signal from Fröndenberg reporting panic briefly sweeping the Sorpe valley at rumours that the dam there had now been hit. A police company asked the Einsatzstab: “Request confirmation whether Sorpe Dam breached. Panic here.” Twenty-one minutes later the Einsatzstab responded: “Report of dam breach Sorpe false.”
Analysts at Bletchley Park concluded that notwithstanding some evidently exaggerated press reports to that effect: “Nothing in any of the material seen suggests public disturbance or rioting on a large scale.” The Germans were not a people prone to rioting.
The actual physical effects of the raid were equally disappointing. On June 3 Military Intelligence commented that their “most secret source,” as they referred to code-breaking, was finding a disappointing lack of chaos caused by the attacks on dams. Two police battalions, from Cologne and Essen, each numbering four officers and about three hundred men, were trucked into the disaster area with the task of cordoning off areas, redirecting traffic, disposing of corpses, rescuing survivors, and supervising foreign labourers; the deputy chief of police, Major-General Hans-Dietrich Grünwald came from Berlin to confer with local dignitaries at Neheim-Hüsten.
In fact, the police units had already begun withdrawing four days after the attack, on May 21, and the few Ruhr river bridges which had been closed were reopened to traffic on the twenty-third and twenty-fourth. “It is perhaps also of interest,” reported the codebreakers, “to note that up to and including May 23 no message about the dams was reported by the ordinary most secret police source [i.e., decoding], although most air raids have been reflected in requests from German policemen on active service to come home on compassionate leave or, if at home, to have leave extended.”
By June 27 the Germans had restored their full water production, thanks to an emergency pumping project inaugurated in 1942, and the generator stations were feeding power at full capacity into the electricity grid. Examined in the harsh light of day, the raids caused only a minor flutter to the heartbeat of the Ruhr armaments industries. Under international law, since 1977 such raids on dams are now deemed to be war crimes anyway.
“Butcher” Harris had meanwhile assigned his bomber squadrons to his more customary bludgeon, the area attacks on cities: upon Churchill's return to England from Washington, where he had been at the time of the attack, Harris called at Chequers, bringing with him the famous Blue Books – bound volumes of maps, pie-charts, histograms, bomb-plots, and damage-photos – pictures by now not just of the flooding resulting from “Operation Chastise,” the dams raid, but also of the horrors inflicted on the night of May 29–30 by his 791 bombers in a saturation bombing raid on the Ruhr valley town of Wuppertal-Barmen. It was the first such air raid to kill people in their thousands – over 2,450 civilians died within thirty minutes, most of them burned alive.
Inevitably Mr Churchill saw the other side of the coin too. Now the British had to fear similar attacks on their dams, and on June 7, 1943 he told Professor Lindemann (Lord Cherwell) to report on precautions to protect Britain's reservoirs from similar attacks.
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sp; THE DAMAGE TO the dams was repaired in double-quick time, far faster than Barnes Wallis and British Intelligence had estimated. Hitler's munitions minister Albert Speer oversaw an unprecedented effort to rebuild them. Twenty thousand construction workers were drafted in from Holland and France for the task.
While Ministry of Information propaganda officials kept up a drumbeat of propaganda on the heroism and ingenuity of the dams raids, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris disparaged the effort – though not of course the men themselves.
Aside from the morale effects, “Chastise” failed to achieve what Barnes Wallis had anticipated, and Harris was privately scathing. As his bombers began a three-month-long and ultimately no more successful attempt to end the war by repeating in Berlin what he had meanwhile done to Hamburg, he wrote in December 1943 to his superiors at the Air Ministry to remind them that he had warned all along against the dams raids:
“For years,” he reminded them, “we have been told that the destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams alone would be a vital blow to Germany.” But, he continued, “I have seen nothing in the present circumstances or in the Ministry of Economic Warfare reports to show that the effort was worthwhile.”
Maintaining a constant battle against what he called such “panacea targets” in his correspondence with Sir Charles Portal, the Chief of the Air Staff, Harris returned to the attack in January 1945: “The destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams was to achieve wonders,” Harris complained. “It achieved nothing compared with the effort and the loss.” He concluded: “The material damage was negligible compared with one small area attack” – a reference to his saturation bombing raids with incendiaries and heavy “blockbuster” blast bombs.
THE BRITISH air chief marshal's anger was matched however by the fury of the Nazi leaders at this renewed triumph against the Luftwaffe. Their night fighter defences had not scored a single success that night; the losses were all inflicted by anti-aircraft gunfire.
Luftwaffe chief Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring made no secret of his admiration for the brave British airmen: “I have to admit,” he told his generals at a Reich air ministry conference, “my respect for those gentlemen grows with every hour… One has to admit, what dash and courage on the one hand, and what contempt for our own fighter defences on the other!”
The next day he heaped mockery on his own feeble bomber forces: “My own men say, ‘We are not quite sure whether we will be able to find London in bad weather.’ But the gentlemen on the other side come over and find a dam lying swathed in mist at night, and whack right into it!”
Field Marshal Erhard Milch, his deputy, discussed the one rotating bomb found intact after the raid; it had come from Flight Lieutenant Barlow's Lancaster E for Easy. Milch ordered German industry to copy it, but for some reason they could not get their cloned version to work.
They would not bounce. In fact, they were spinning the bomb the wrong way.
Perhaps the Germans should have learned to play cricket. But then there might never have been a war. It was the back spin that did the trick.
© David Irving 1973 and 2011
Operation Chastise Aircraft Losses (No. 617 Squadron) May 16–17, 1943
Lancaster III ED887. AJ-A
Squadron Leader H M “Dinghy” Young. Took off 2147 hrs from RAF Scampton and headed for the Möhne Dam and dropped its weapon as briefed. Set course as deputy leader for the Eder Dam before heading for base. Shot down by anti-aircraft fire while clearing the Dutch coast and crashed 0258 hrs off Castricum aan Zee.
Lancaster III ED864. AJ-B
Flight Lieutenant W Astell. Took off 2159 hrs and headed for the Möhne Dam. Crashed 0015 hrs after flying into high voltage power lines near Marbeck, three miles south-south-east of Borken.
Lancaster III ED910. AJ-C
Pilot Officer W H T Ottley. Took off 0009 hrs, briefed to bomb the Lister Dam. Hit by light anti-aircraft fire on outbound leg. Crashed at 0235 hrs on the Boselargerschen Wald near Heessen, two miles north-north-east of Hamm.
Lancaster III ED927. AJ-E
Flight Lieutenant R N G Barlow. Took off 2128 hrs and headed for the Sorpe Dam. Crashed at 2350 hrs after colliding with high voltage power lines at Haldern, 2.5 miles east-north-east of Rees. (The Germans salvaged the “Upkeep” bomb from this aircraft intact).
Lancaster III ED934. AJ-K
Pilot Officer V W Byers. Took off 2130 hrs and headed for the Sorpe Dam. Hit by anti-aircraft fire from batteries on Texel, while flying at three hundred feet outbound, and crashed into the Waddenzee west of Harlingen.
Lancaster III ED925. AJ-M
Flight Lieutenant J V Hopgood. Took off 2139 hrs, briefed to bomb the Möhne Dam. Hit by anti-aircraft fire approaching the target before being crippled by the blast from its own weapon which overshot and exploded beyond the parapet destroying the powerhouse. Crashed at 0034 hrs at Ostonnen, four miles east-south-east of Werl.
Lancaster III ED865. AJ-S
Pilot Officer L J Burpee. Took off 0011 hrs and set course for the Sorpe Dam. Strayed off course and still at very low level, it was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed at 0200 hrs near Gilze-Rijen airfield, Holland.
Lancaster III ED937. AJ-Z
Squadron Leader H E Maudslay. Took off 2159 hrs and set course for the Eder Dam. Crippled by the detonation of its own bomb, it was hit by light anti-aircraft fire while trying to return to base, crashing at 0236 hrs at Netterden, two miles east of Emmerich.
Notes and Sources
THE GENESIS OF THIS SHORT book was three chapters written by David Irving for The Sunday Express, London, and published in May 1973. They were based on the private diaries and papers of Barnes Wallis, and lengthy interviews with him, and (with H M Government permission) on the papers of Lord Cherwell at Nuffield College, Oxford, and the operational record books of Royal Air Force units including No. 617 Squadron, the “Dambusters.”
The author interviewed many officers including Sir Arthur Harris, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, AOC-in-C of No. 5 Bomber Group, and participants in the famous raid including Tony Burcher and Mickey Martin. He was also permitted to use Air Ministry files at the Air Historical Branch, which are now held at the Public Records Office (the PRO, now confusingly rechristened the National Archives). Some research at the German end was conducted by his colleagues of Neue Illustrierte of Cologne. The author transferred all his research papers, including copies of relevant pages from the Barnes Wallis Diaries, to the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) but following his arbitrary banning from Germany and specifically from those archives in 1993, the files were returned to him at his insistence and form part of the Irving Collection.
There are many files on Operation Chastise in the Public Records Office including AIR 14/840 (Operation Chastise, Feb–Jun 1943) and AIR 14/844 (Operation Chastise, May 1943). See too the diagrams produced by Wallis to explain how the bouncing bomb “Upkeep” worked: AVIA 53/627. For Guy Gibson see AIR 27/839. For a letter setting out the “dambusting” plan see AIR 14/817.
The codebreaking files are now in the PRO: the quotations on page 123 come from MI14(d)/0/161, a “most secret source” report dated June 3, 1943 (located in a PRO file of “German police reports, unnumbered,” file HW 16/9). [There are also three pages of decodes relating to clearing up damage and recovering bodies after the dams raid in HW 16/37, part 2. For the scattered signals intercepted over following days see HW 16/32, part 2: GPD 1496 German Police Decodes No. 1 Traffic on May 18, 1943, decoded on May 21, and GPD 1498 which has a batch of intercepted signals about German sapper (Pioniere) operations. The signals about the brief panic resulting from rumours of the breaching of the Sorpe Dam (Page 123) are in German Police Decodes No. 8 Traffic: May 20, 1943, in PRO file HW 16/37 part 2.
Letters between Harris and Portal are quoted from files in the PRO and the Arthur Harris papers archived in the RAF Museum at Hendon. This museum has a good website on the operation, at http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/online-exhibiti
ons/dambusters
Many papers and personal reminiscences are now available on the Internet and due acknowledgment is made here to this source. Sites include http://dambustersblog.com and http://www.dambusters.org.uk (for example the operational record book of No. 617 Squadron is now reproduced at http://www.dambusters.org.uk/docs/recordbook.pdf). Excellent source material is now also available on http://operation-chastise.co.tv
David Shannon's account quoted on page 41 dates from 1993– and is now part of an audio collection made for the BBC. See http://www.felixdk.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=2746208
Similarly the WAAF quoted on Page 63 was Aircraftwoman 2nd Class Morfydd Gronland; she was stationed at Scampton at the time. See www.rafmuseum.org.uk/online-exhibitions/dambusters/16_waaf_memoir.cfm
Some of the intercom dialogue on board John V Hopgood's doomed Lancaster Mark III M for Mother, as reported on page 64, comes from letters written by Shannon (pilot of AJ–L) and Tony Burcher (rear gunner in AJ–M, piloted by John Hopgood). See dambustersblog.com/2010/05/27/dams-raid-first-hand-accountsby-david-shannon-and-tony-burcher
Page 102: Clement Mols was interviewed in October 1945 about the events of May 17, 1943. See http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/online-exhibitions/dambusters
Page 122 collateral damage. Reliable casualty figures have been more recently researched by Ralf Blank: Die Nacht vom 16. auf den 17. Mai 1943 – “Operation Züchtigung: Die Zerstörung der Möhne-Talsperre, published by Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, May 2006. Quoted in http://operation-chastise.co.tv
Page 126 Churchill's warning to Professor Lindemann is referred to in John Martin's minute to Sir Archibald Sinclair and Herbert Morrison, June 7, 1943 (Cherwell papers).
For the reference on Page 125 to International law: Protocol I was added to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949 relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts; dated June 8, 1977, the Protocol I outlawed attacks on dams “if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population”