by John Nichol
As he made his bomb-run, Hopgood’s aircraft was again hit by flak and burst into flames. Although his bomb was released, it was dropped too close and bounced clean over the dam wall. Although it destroyed the electricity power station at its foot, sending a column of thick, black smoke high into the air, it did no damage to the dam itself. Hopgood managed to coax his stricken and burning aircraft up to 500 feet, giving his crew a slim chance of survival, but as he shouted ‘For Christ’s sake, get out!’5 the flames reached the main wing fuel tank, which exploded. Two crewmen did manage to bale out, and survived, to see out the war as PoWs. His badly wounded wireless operator also baled out, but his parachute did not open in time. Hopgood and the other three members of his crew were trapped in the aircraft as it crashed in flames, and all were killed instantly.
The twenty-five-year-old Australian pilot Harold ‘Mick’ Martin was next to make a bomb-run, with Gibson now bravely flying almost alongside him to distract the flak gunners and draw their fire. Martin’s bomb was released successfully, but two flak shells had struck a petrol tank in his starboard wing and, though it was empty of fuel and there was no explosion, the impact may have thrown their bomb off course. As Martin flew on between the stone towers of the dam, the bomb hit the water at an angle and bounced away to the left side of the dam, before detonating in the mud at the water’s edge. However, the force of the mud and water thrown up by the blast dislodged one of the flak guns on the southern tower from its mounting and the gun-crew of the battery in the northern tower were now also forced to change their red-hot gun-barrels.
In the lull in the firing, Melvin ‘Dinghy’ Young – so named after surviving two ditchings at sea – made his bomb-run. His Upkeep was released perfectly, bouncing in smooth parabolas along the surface of the water. It struck the exact centre of the dam and sank deep below the surface before detonating against the dam wall. The explosion sent up another huge waterspout, but once more it appeared to have failed to breach the dam.
The op looked to be heading for a disastrous failure, and the bouncing bombs’ designer, Barnes Wallis, waiting in the operations room back in England – the basement of a large house on the outskirts of Grantham – was almost beside himself as the succession of coded signals came through, announcing the failure of each bomb-run. He had tested his original concept by bouncing his daughter’s marbles across a tub of water, and had endured obstruction and ridicule before his ideas were accepted, but three bombs had already failed, and now the fourth bomb had also been dropped, once more without apparent effect.
Gibson now called up David Maltby, just twenty-three and, like Mick Martin, already the holder of the DFC and DSO. He was the fifth to make his approach, flying in at 60 feet above the water, with Gibson and Martin both acting as decoys to draw off some of the anti-aircraft fire. They even switched on their navigation lights to distract the flak-gunners, while their own forward gunners poured fire into the enemy positions, but although the raiders did not know this, all the anti-aircraft guns had now been put out of action and the gunners could only fire rifles at the Lancaster roaring across the lake towards them.
As he skimmed the surface of the water, his attention focused on the massive grey wall spanning the gap between the two towers, Maltby suddenly realised that the crest of the parapet was beginning to change shape. A crack had appeared, growing wider and deeper by the second as a section of masonry began to crumble and pieces of debris tumbled into the water. Close to his own bomb-release point, Maltby realised that Dinghy Young’s bomb had made a small breach in the dam which was already beginning to fail.
As a result, Maltby veered slightly to port to target a different section of the dam just as his bomb-aimer dropped the Upkeep bomb. It was released perfectly, bouncing four times, before striking the dam wall and then sinking below the surface right against the dam face. Moments after Maltby’s aircraft passed over the parapet, the bomb erupted in a huge column of water mixed with silt and fragments of rock.
It was still not clear at first if even this bomb had actually breached the dam, and, moments later, Barnes Wallis and the others listening in the operations room in England heard the terse radio signal: ‘Goner 78A’. ‘Goner’ meant a successful attack, ‘7’ signified an explosion in contact with the dam, ‘8’ no apparent breach, and ‘A’ showed the target was the Möhne dam.
However, as the debris from the waterspout spattered down, Maltby could see that the dam – its masonry fatally weakened by the repeated bomb-blasts – was now crumbling under the monstrous weight of water it held, and as the raiders watched, the breach gaped wider. The torrent pouring through the ever-growing gap, dragging the anti-torpedo nets with it, hastened the Möhne dam’s complete destruction. As it collapsed, widening into a breach almost 250 feet across, a wall of water began roaring down the valley, a tide of destruction sweeping away villages and towns in its path. Tragically, among the countless buildings destroyed were the wooden barrack blocks housing hundreds of East European women that the Nazis had compelled to work as forced labourers. Almost all of them were drowned, and they formed by far the largest part of the 1,249 people killed by the raid, one of the highest death tolls from a Bomber Command operation at that time.
Maltby sent a one-word radio transmission: the name of Gibson’s black Labrador dog, which told all those waiting in the operations room that the Möhne dam was no more. Air Marshal Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, turned to Barnes Wallis, shook his hand and said, ‘Wallis, I didn’t believe a word you said when you came to see me. But now you could sell me a pink elephant.’6
Gibson told Maltby and Martin, who had both used their bombs and sustained flak damage, to turn for home, while he, old Etonian Henry Maudslay, the baby-faced Australian David Shannon – only twenty, but another pilot who was already the holder of the DSO and DFC – and yet another Australian, twenty-two-year-old Les Knight, who ‘never smoked, drank or chased girls’,7 making him practically unique in 617 Squadron on all three counts, flew on to attack the next target, the Eder dam. Thirteen storeys high, it was virtually unprotected by flak batteries, since the Germans believed that its position in a narrow, precipitous and twisting valley made it invulnerable to attack.
The approach was terrifying, a gut-wrenching plunge down the steep rocky walls of the valley to reach the surface of the lake, leaving just seven seconds to level out and adjust height, track and speed before releasing the bomb. Shannon and Maudslay made repeated aborted approaches to the dam before, at 01.39 that morning, Shannon’s bomb-aimer finally released the Upkeep bomb. Shannon’s angle of approach sent the bomb well to the right of the centre of the dam wall, but it detonated successfully and he was convinced that a small breach had been made.
Maudslay was next. Guy Gibson later described him pulling up sharply and then resuming his bomb-run, and other witnesses spoke of something projecting from the bottom of his aircraft, suggesting either flak damage or debris from a collision with the tops of the trees on the lake shore. Whatever the cause, Maudslay’s bomb was released so late that it struck the dam wall without touching the water and detonated immediately, just as Maudslay was overflying the parapet. The blast wave battered the aircraft, and although Maudslay managed to give the coded message that his bomb had been dropped, nothing more was heard from him or his crew. He attempted to nurse his crippled aircraft back to England but was shot down by flak batteries on the banks of the Rhine near the German-Dutch border. The Lancaster crashed in flames in a meadow, killing Maudslay and all the other members of his crew.
Knight now began his bomb-run. Like Shannon, he made his approach over the shoulder of a hill, then made a sharp turn to port, diving down to 60 feet above the water, counted down by his navigator who was watching the twin discs of light thrown onto the black water by spotlights fitted beneath the fuselage, waiting until they converged into a figure ‘8’ that showed they were at exactly the right height. Knight’s bomb – the third to be dropped, and the last one the first wave possessed �
� released perfectly, hit the dam wall and sank before detonating. The blast drilled a hole straight through the dam wall, marked at once by a ferocious jet of water bursting from the downstream face of the dam. A moment later the masonry above it crumbled and collapsed, causing a deep V-shaped breach that released a tsunami-like wall of 200 million tons of water.
The remaining aircraft of the second and third waves were now making for the third and last target of the night, the Sorpe dam. It was of different construction from the other two – a massive, sloping earth and clay mound with a thin concrete core, rather than a sheer masonry wall – making it a much less suitable target for Wallis’s bouncing bombs. Pilot Officer Joe McCarthy, a twenty-three-year-old New Yorker, was the only pilot of the second wave of five aircraft to reach the dam. Pilot Officer Geoff Rice had hit the sea near Vlieland, tearing his Upkeep bomb from its mounting and forcing him to abort the op and return to base. Like Astell, Flight Lieutenant Bob Barlow had collided with some electricity pylons, killing himself and all his crew, and Pilot Officer Vernon Byers had been hit by flak over the Dutch island of Texel. His aircraft crashed in flames, killing all seven men aboard.
New Zealander Les Munro was also hit by flak as he crossed the Dutch coast. As he reached his turning point approaching the island of Vlieland, he could see the breakers ahead and the sand dunes rising above the level of the sea, and gained a little height to clear them. He was, he recalled, flying ‘pretty low, about thirty or forty feet, and I had actually cleared the top of the dunes and was losing height on the other side when a line of tracer appeared on the port side and we were hit by one shell amidships. It cut all the communication and electrical systems and everything went dead. The flak was only momentary, we were past it in seconds, but one lucky or unlucky hit – lucky it didn’t kill anyone, or do any fatal damage to us or the aircraft, but unlucky that one shot ensured we couldn’t complete the op we’d trained so long for’ – had forced them to abort the op and turn for home.
For those who did make it to the target, the steep terrain and dangerous obstacles close to the Sorpe dam – tall trees on one side and a church steeple on the other – made it difficult to get low enough over the water for a successful bomb-drop. ‘All that bombing training we’d done,’ McCarthy’s bomb-aimer, Johnny Johnson, recalls, ‘we couldn’t use because, as the Sorpe had no towers, we had nothing to sight on. Also, it was so placed within the hills that you couldn’t make a head-on attack anyway. So we had to fly down one side of the hills, level out with the port outer engine over the dam itself so that we were just on the water side of the dam, and estimate as nearly as we could to the centre of the dam to drop the bomb. We weren’t spinning the bomb at all, it was an inert drop.’
McCarthy made no fewer than nine unsuccessful runs before Johnson, to the clear relief of the rest of the crew, was finally able to release their bomb. Had the dam been as well defended by flak batteries as the other dams, it would have been suicidal to make so many passes over the target, but at the Sorpe, the main threat was the precipitous, near-impossible terrain surrounding it. It was an accurate drop and the bomb detonated right at the centre of the dam, blasting a waterspout so high that water hit the rear gun turret of the Lancaster as it banked away, provoking a shocked cry of ‘God Almighty!’ from the rear gunner.8 McCarthy circled back but, although there was some damage to the top of the dam, there was no tell-tale rush of water that would have signalled a breach.
Two of the five aircraft from the third wave had already been shot down on their way to the target. Pilot Officer Lewis Burpee, whose pregnant wife was waiting for him at home, was hit by flak after straying too close to a heavily defended German night-fighter base and then hit the trees. His bomb detonated as the Lancaster hit the ground with a flash that his horrified comrades described as ‘a rising sun that lit up the landscape like day’.9 All seven members of the crew were killed instantly. Bill Ottley’s Lancaster also crashed in flames after being hit by flak near Hamm. Ottley and five of his crew were killed, but by a miracle, his rear gunner, Fred Tees, although severely burned and wounded by shrapnel, survived and became a prisoner of war.
Ground mist spreading along the river valleys as dawn approached was now making the task of identifying and then bombing their target even more difficult, and the third aircraft of the third wave, flown by Flight Sergeant Cyril Anderson, was eventually forced to abort the op and return to base without even sighting the target.
Flight Sergeant Ken Brown, leading an all-NCO crew, did find the Sorpe, and after dropping flares to illuminate the dam they succeeded in dropping their bomb, once more after nine unsuccessful runs. Like McCarthy’s, the Upkeep struck the dam wall accurately and also appeared to cause some crumbling of its crest, but the dam held.
Although the Sorpe still remained intact, for some reason the last aircraft, piloted by Bill Townsend, was directed to attack yet another dam, the Ennepe. Although he dropped his bomb, it bounced twice and then sank and detonated well short of the dam wall. Townsend’s was the last Lancaster to attack the dams, and consequently so late in turning for home that dawn was already beginning to break, making him a very visible target for the flak batteries. A superb pilot – on his way to the target he had dodged flak by flying along a forest firebreak below the level of the treetops – he was at such a low level as he crossed the Dutch coast and flew out over the North Sea that coastal gun batteries targeting him had the barrels of their guns depressed so far that shells were bouncing off the surface of the sea, and some actually bounced over the top of the aircraft.10
Although the Sorpe dam remained intact, the destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams had already ensured that Operation Chastise was a tremendous success, but it had been achieved at a terrible cost. Dinghy Young’s crew became the last of the night’s victims. An unusual character with an interest in yoga, who used to ‘spend much of his time during beer-drinking sessions, sitting cross-legged on tables with a tankard in his hand’,11 Young had reached the Dutch coast on his way back to base when he was shot down with the loss of all seven crew. His was the eighth aircraft to be lost that night, with a total of fifty-six crewmen killed or missing in action. Those waiting back in Lincolnshire for news, including Gwyn Johnson in her fitful sleep at her billet, faced a further anxious wait before the surviving Lancasters made it back. Townsend, the last to return, eventually touched down back at 617’s base at Scampton at a quarter past six that morning, almost nine hours after the first of the Dambusters had taken off.
As usual, Gwyn Johnson had heard the aircraft taking off before she went to sleep the previous night and had woken up again as they were coming back. For reasons of security – and for Gwyn’s peace of mind – Johnny hadn’t told her about the op before taking off, and he didn’t tell her he’d been part of the Dams raid at all until months after the event. ‘I didn’t really want to tell her I’d been on that particular op,’ he says, ‘as I suspected she might be annoyed I’d never mentioned it previously. Sure enough, when she did find out, she gave me an earful for not telling her in the first place!’
On the night of the raid, there had been ‘no sleep for anyone’ waiting back at Scampton as the hours ticked by. ‘Our hearts and minds were in those planes,’ said one of the WAAFs who were waiting to serve them a hot meal on their return. As the night wore on, twice they heard aircraft returning and rushed outside to greet crews who had been forced to turn back before reaching the target and were nursing their damaged aircraft home.
When they again heard engines in the far distance, the WAAFs were ordered back to the Sergeants’ Mess to start serving food to the first arrivals. They waited and waited, but no aircrew came in. Two hours later, their WAAF sergeant called them together to tell them the heartbreaking news that out of nineteen aircraft that had taken off that night, only eleven had returned, with the presumed loss of fifty-six lives. (In fact fifty-three men had died; the other three had been taken prisoner after baling out of their doomed aircraft.)
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��We all burst into tears. We looked around the Aircrews’ Mess. The tables we had so hopefully laid out for the safe return of our comrades looked empty and pathetic.’ Over the next few days, the squadron routine slowly reasserted itself and the pain of those losses began to diminish, but ‘things would never, ever be the same again’.12
The ground crews shared their sense of loss. ‘The ground crews didn’t get the recognition they deserved,’ one of 617’s aircrew says. ‘Without them we were nothing. They were out in rain, snow and sun, making sure the aircraft was always ready, always waiting for us to come back. And when one didn’t come back, it was their loss as much as anyone’s.’13
The aircrews of 617 felt the deaths of their comrades and friends as keenly as anyone, of course. ‘We had lost a lot of colleagues that night and there was a real sense of loss,’ Johnny Johnson says. ‘There were so many who didn’t make it home – just a mixture of skill and sheer luck that it didn’t happen to us as well.’ However, most of the aircrews were veterans of many previous ops and, if not on this scale, had experienced the loss of friends a number of times before and developed ways of coping. It wasn’t callousness, far from it, but with deaths occurring on almost every op they flew, men who dwelt on the deaths of comrades would not survive long themselves.