by Peter Rees
Gibson ordered his wireless operator to send the message ‘Nigger’ back to Grantham. A torrent of water around ten metres high and travelling at around twenty-four kilometres per hour swept through the Möhne and Ruhr valleys, flooding underground mines, destroying eleven small factories and nearly 100 houses, and damaging another 114 factories and 971 houses. The floods washed away about twenty-five roads, railways and bridges as the waters spread around eighty kilometres from the source.
Relief and joy broke out at Grantham. Sir Arthur Harris, who had not long before called Wallis’s bouncing bomb idea ‘tripe of the wildest description’, now shook his hand and exclaimed, ‘I didn’t believe a word you said when you came to see me, but now you could sell me a pink elephant.’
While Grantham celebrated that success, the planes flew on to their next target, the much larger Eder dam, about fifteen minutes away. By now, early summer fog was beginning to set in, making it difficult to navigate. The dam lay deep in a fold of hills, surrounded by ridges a thousand feet high, making it no place to dive a heavy aircraft at night. Because of this location, however, the Germans were complacent: they believed the Eder dam would be almost impossible to attack. Unlike the Möhne dam, it had few defences when Gibson, Dave Shannon, Les Knight and Henry Maudslay arrived.
The approach here was difficult, because the dam had two arms. Coming in over water at sixty feet was possible only after the steepest and most hair-raising of dives. Gibson told Dave Shannon to start his attack. Dave soon realised there was a problem: he had run down the wrong arm of the lake. ‘Sorry, Leader,’ he said, ‘made a mess of that. I’ll try it again.’ Five more attempts also failed, and Dave radioed to Gibson that he thought he had ‘better circle and try to get to know this place’.
Gibson told him to wait while Henry Maudslay made his run, but his first two attempts failed. On the third run, the bomb dropped, hit the top of the wall and bounced over. As with Hoppy Hopgood, the bomb destroyed the power station on the dry side of the dam. But it exploded almost directly below the aircraft. Damaged by the blast, the Lancaster was shot down over Emmerich forty minutes later as it limped home. There were no survivors.
Gibson called Dave Shannon back in for another attempt. Dave missed the first run but thought the second one was ‘pretty satisfactory’ and dropped the bomb on target. Hopes rose as an explosion followed, but as Dave climbed almost vertically, it was soon clear that the wall had not moved.
Now only Les Knight’s Lancaster remained. He made two practice runs—one so hair-raising that Canadian rear gunner Harry O’Brien said he ‘never thought they would get over the mountain’ on the other side of the dam. For the third and final run, Dave Shannon guided Les on the radio telephone.
‘Come on, Les,’ he said. ‘Come in down the moon; dive towards the point and then turn left.’
‘OK, Digger,’ Les replied. ‘It’s pretty difficult.’
‘Not that way, Dig,’ Dave said. ‘This way.’
‘Too right it’s difficult,’ Les responded. ‘I’m climbing up to have another crack.’
The bomb bounced three times and hit the dam wall right on target. Les Knight climbed steeply and, as the aircraft reached a safe height, saw a tremendous explosion shake the base of the dam and smash a large hole through the wall. The breach was almost ten metres below the top of the dam but left the top intact. ‘Good show, Dig!’ Dave Shannon called out.
Wireless operator Bob Kellow had his head up in the astronavigation dome, looking backwards at the explosion. It seemed, he said, ‘as if some huge fist had been jabbed at the wall, a large almost round black hole appeared and water gushed as from a large hose’. Dave heard Gibson ordering them to ‘get the hell out of it’, because there was now no more they could do. They had no more bombs and were low on fuel. As Dave put it, ‘The Eder dam was a bugger of a job.’
Down below, they saw a car racing to get clear of the huge wave, its headlights suddenly engulfed by the surge of water. An estimated 8.2 million litres of water per second cascaded through the dam wall and down the valley. As the Eder valley was steeper, the tidal wave was even more spectacular than at the Möhne. Guy Gibson signalled Dinghy back to Grantham announcing the successful breach. Attacks by other Lancasters on the Ennepe and Sorpe dams inflicted only minor damage.
The loss of men and aircraft on the ‘Dambusters’ operation was exceptionally high—eight of the nineteen Lancasters that left Scampton did not return. Only seventy-seven of the 133 airmen returned to base, and just three of the fifty-six airmen who did not return survived to become prisoners of war. Those who did land back at Scampton were met by a tremendous reception. They had proved that Barnes Wallis’s bombs would work, but Dave Shannon remembered that Wallis was in tears. ‘A more distressing sight and anguished figure I have never seen to this day. He really felt for all those letters that were going to be sent in the morning to the aircrew his idea had claimed. I suppose we had become hardened to loss, we could shrug it off. We had to, otherwise we could never have flown again.’
After being debriefed, all the crews went back to the mess and opened the bar and started drinking heavily. ‘Even people who had been non-drinkers up to this time got well and truly smashed that day. The beer started flowing ’til late in the morning, when we struggled off to our beds, and managed to get a few hours’ sleep,’ Dave remembered. He himself did not retire until he had asked his WAAF girlfriend Anne Fowler to marry him. She agreed—on condition that he shave off his moustache.
As the celebrations continued, Tony Burcher and Jim Fraser were desperately trying to avoid capture. While Jim was picked up the same day and tortured by the Gestapo, Tony remained free for three days, sustained by his mother’s malt tablets—the ones he had gone back to get at the last minute. Because he was picked up so long after the raids, his captors did not associate Tony with the operation. He was treated for his injured back and sent to Stalag Luft III. Before his arrival there, he was interrogated by a German officer who hailed from Sydney.
He was a major, spoke absolutely perfect English with the Australian accent, ‘G’day sport, how are you?’ and I couldn’t understand what it was all about. He said, ‘Cigarette?’ and handed me a packet of Australian Turf cigarettes. He said, ‘I understand you’re from Vaucluse.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I’m from Waverley myself.’ I said, ‘Well, what are you doing with this bloody mob then?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m a German national. I was recalled by the German authorities just before the outbreak of war to fight for the [Fatherland] and, incidentally, we should both be fighting together against the common enemy, the Bolshevists. We shouldn’t be fighting each other.’ He tried to soft soap me, so I clamped up straightaway, and I said, ‘Well, you’re a bloody traitor as far as I’m concerned, get out.’ But he did concentrate on me for a couple of days but he gave up after a while. But it shows you—he tried to talk about cricket, about football, anything.
After the dams raid, Gibson was awarded the Victoria Cross, to go with his DSO and bar and DFC and bar, in recognition not just of the raid but of the leadership and valour he had demonstrated as master bomber on many sorties. All told, five Distinguished Service Orders, ten Distinguished Flying Crosses and four bars, two Conspicuous Gallantry Medals, and eleven Distinguished Flying Medals and one bar were awarded to the survivors of the operation. Overnight, 617 Squadron became immortalised as the Dambusters.
The pictures of the broken dams proved to be a propaganda and morale boost to the Allies, especially the British, who were still suffering under German bombing. After the operation, Barnes Wallis wrote, ‘I feel a blow has been struck at Germany from which she cannot recover for several years.’ But Wallis was deeply frustrated that Bomber Command did not send a high-level bombing force to hit the Möhne dam while the Germans were struggling to repair it.
Two dams had been wiped out, releasing more than 116 million cubic metres of water from the Möhne reservoir and 154 million cubic metres from the Eder. The swathe of de
struction extended for 160 kilometres and included twenty-five bridges destroyed and another twenty-one damaged. Many coal mines, waterworks, pumping stations and power stations were either destroyed or put out of action. The effect on food production was also significant, with hundreds of square kilometres of farmland being washed away.
While most power stations were operational again within weeks or months, the loss of hydroelectricity hit armaments production in the Ruhr. Both dams were rebuilt during 1943, but this caused a large diversion of manpower.
The floods caused by the dam bursts killed at least 1650 people, including about 750 French, Belgian, Dutch and Ukrainian prisoners of war and labourers housed in barracks a few kilometres below the Möhne dam.
It was not until the night of 15–16 September 1943, when eight aircrews were sent to attack the Dortmund–Ems canal near Münster, that the 617 Squadron flew over Germany again. While searching for the canal, Les Knight’s aircraft hit trees on a ridge, damaging the two port engines and tail unit. The 12,000-lb bomb was jettisoned, and Les and RAF Flight Engineer Ray Grayston managed to coax the aircraft to 1400 feet to allow the crew to bail out.
With the Lancaster crippled, Les called his fellow Aussie Micky Martin, who had assumed command: ‘Two port engines gone. May I have permission to jettison bomb, Sir?’ The word ‘Sir’ irritated Micky. ‘For God’s sake, Les, yes!’ he yelled. As the bomb was not fused, Les told his bomb aimer to let it go. Relieved of the weight, the aircraft slowly started to climb. But the controls were failing, and soon, even with full opposite rudder and aileron on, Les could not stop the Lancaster turning to port. It was clear the aircraft would not make it home. He ordered his crew to bail out and held the plane steady while they did.
Ray Grayston was the second-last man out, and when he had gone it seems Les too tried to bail out. But as soon as he took pressure off the stick and rudder, the aircraft flicked on its back and plunged towards the ground. Les would have known that once he slipped out of his seat he would have mere moments to get clear before the plane crashed. He didn’t make it to the hatch.
10
THE POACHER
When Noel Eliot arrived in England in November 1942, he and his brother Bill quickly settled into life in Bournemouth. ‘We could hear guns firing at times so we knew there was a war going on, but this place looked further from the war than Perth did. All the shop windows there were sand-bagged and there was a strict black-out. Shop windows here were open, though there was a black-out,’ Noel recalled. In March 1943, he was finally posted to a pre-Advanced Flying Training School. The flying program was regularly interrupted by bad weather and poor visibility. When he did get airborne, Noel, by his own admission, put in ‘some pretty rough efforts’. ‘One problem was getting lost in this unfamiliar terrain—so much of everything that all looked the same, so unlike the wide-open countryside at home.’
In June, Noel was posted to No. 11 Operational Training Unit near the Buckinghamshire village of Waddeston. Brother Bill, now a Flight Sergeant, was already there. It was the first time since they had been in England that they had been on the same station together. They hired horses and went riding in the summer-green countryside, enjoying some rides together for the first time since leaving the farm in Western Australia. Noel also crewed up, assembling an English navigator, Jack Hassett; an Australian bomb aimer, Jack Lynch; an English flight engineer, Ted Hawkins; and two gunners, a Scot, Jock Weir and a young Englishman, Johnny Grantham. As the course progressed, the new crew members joined him in flying Wellington bombers. The Wellington was an aircraft that Noel never really liked, not least after an early flight with an unpleasant instructor.
I made a rather wild loop to port across the airfield on takeoff, and he said to me, ‘Are you trying to kill me, Eliot?’ Though the idea appealed to me, it was found that the throttle cable to the port engine had jammed. We changed to another aircraft and the same thing happened again. One benefit from the incident was that he must have thought it was too risky to fly with me again.
At the end of June, while Bill stayed at Waddeston, Noel and his crew moved to the satellite field at Oakley, about twelve kilometres closer to Oxford. The two brothers were granted leave, and they arranged to meet at the Boomerang Club, in Australia House. The break also allowed them to spend a couple of days billeted with a rural family: under the Lady Frances Ryder Scheme, short stays with families were arranged for service members in cities, towns or farms around the United Kingdom.
Noel and Bill visited the family of an English labourer who had worked on their farm in Western Australia during the Depression. They enjoyed two pleasant days together, roaming around the countryside and visiting Busbridge Hall, their ancestral home. Their leave over, Noel travelled to a conversion unit for the four-engined Stirling bomber at RAF Woolfox Lodge, in Lincolnshire, while Bill headed for a similar course at RAF Waterbeach, near Cambridge. The first two Stirlings Noel saw were on their bellies on the airfield. ‘I was to learn that they were brutes to swing on take-off and landing, with the resulting collapse of their elongated undercarriage,’ he recalled.
Four days later, as Noel contemplated the challenges involved in flying the Stirling, another Australian, Tom Bradley, asked him, ‘Have you heard from your brother lately?’ Noel replied, ‘Not for a while—why?’ Tom said a friend of his who was in Bill’s crew had reportly been killed in an accident. Noel was alarmed.
I went straight to the Adjutant, Flight Lieutenant Liddell, and asked if I could have a phone call to RAF Waterbeach . . . spoke to the Adjutant there, gave him my name and said, ‘I heard that my brother had been in an accident—was he injured?’ A cheery young voice replied, ‘All killed—funeral one-thirty this afternoon!’ All I could say was, ‘Oh God.’ He sounded like one of the ‘Six Week Wonders’—healthy looking young men who did a six-week Administration Course and was then granted a commission.
The accident, near Cambridge, had claimed seven lives. Flight Lieutenant Liddell phoned Noel’s Flight Commander, Wing Commander Crompton, and told him the story. Crompton said he would fly Noel and any of his friends to the funeral in a Stirling and pick them up again that night. Two of Bill’s friends, John Newton and Tom Bradley, went with Noel. An RAAF padre who knew Bill conducted the service:
As the principal mourner I walked behind the trailer carrying the seven flag-draped coffins and John Newton and Tom Bradley walked beside me. I had good talks with the Padre and Bill’s C.O. who told me he had a high opinion of Bill’s work and his commission was on the way. Wing Commander Crompton picked us up at nine p.m. and flew us back to base. Never have I known such heartfelt gratitude as I had for Flight Lieutenant Liddell and Wing Commander Crompton. Back at base my crew overwhelmed me with their sympathy and were a great consolation to me. For the first time in my life I suffered from homesickness.
Noel made his diary entry for 6 September 1943 with a heavy heart. ‘This is the saddest day of my life, and the first time I have experienced personal tragedy,’ he wrote. Bill had been just thirty-one.
Having finished his training in Canada, Ted Pickerd arrived in England in late 1942 and waited in Bournemouth for a placement as the RAF built up its Halifax and Lancaster squadrons. There were already more recruits available for operations than aircraft. Ted was offered a posting as a navigator to a Mosquito night-fighter squadron. He didn’t want it. ‘I had set my mind on the Lancaster. It was the glamour bomber aircraft or strike aircraft of the war,’ he recalled.
While he waited for a Lancaster posting, he went on attachments flying Ansons over the Irish Sea to keep his navigation skills honed. The fledgling aircrews were farmed out to small grass airfields for flying and map reading with pilots who were in the same situation as all the other aircrew. While on one of these attachments, Ted met pilot Keith Schultz, a former fruit farmer from South Australia. ‘You couldn’t have got two people so totally unlike as Keith Schultz and myself,’ Ted said. But it was a case of opposite poles attracting. Sent to the same OTU, the
y decided they would crew up together. By now, Ted was gaining confidence—and feeling calm: ‘I was starting to develop a bit, I wasn’t sick any more there—perhaps I was too frightened to be sick!’
Wireless operator John Holden also did training flights over the Irish Sea, from Stranraer, on the Scottish coast. Arriving at the base, he was sent to a hut for his stay. As he walked in an Australian voice yelled, ‘There’s a bunk here, mate!’ John grabbed the top bunk and discovered that the voice belonged to a bomb aimer from New South Wales. They soon decided that, if they were posted to the same OTU, they would try and crew up together.
And this was accomplished. We were NCOs, sergeants, and we were waiting for our dental inspection, and a flying officer, an Australian flying officer pilot came along with a flying officer air gunner, and they both said in one voice, ‘Are you two crewed up yet?’, and we said, ‘No.’ ‘Would you like to join us?’ And we said, ‘Yes, providing you take us together.’ And it was assessed that they already had the navigator lined up, and the pilot was delighted to meet us. But I was a bit dubious because he and I found we’d got two more members of the Australian Air Force from New South Wales, and then after discussion found that the navigator was from New South Wales, and I was the only Viccy-ite amongst the other four—so you can imagine the trials and tribulations of Melbourne-versus-Sydney.