Transcript
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E (2:21)
On the night of the 16th and 17th of May 1943, there was a full moon. It was an unusual night for a bombing raid. Usually British bombers avoided a full moon because they could be seen. But this was a highly unusual raid. 133 men in 19 heavily modified aircraft carrying huge Untested bombs that bounced. The target was some of the biggest and most important dams in Germany. In today's episode I'm going to tell you the story of the Dam Busters, one of the greatest British stories from the Second World War. The so called Dam Busters raid, or Operation Chastised given its official name, was vital for the British not just because it disrupted German war production, but predominantly, I think, for morale. It came at a time when the Allies were really on the back foot and the bravery and ingenuity of this raid gave a much needed boost to the public and the fighting forces. It was also important because it's a turning point, I think, in strategic warfare. It shows that bombs were no longer a clumsy aerial weapon, but they could be dropped from fast moving aircraft with extraordinary precision. For all those reasons, this was a raid that mattered. An extraordinary tale. You're listening to Dan Snow's history and this is my version of the Dam Busters story. It's the 16th of March 1943. About two months before the Dambusters raid, a 24 year old pilot was summoned to the headquarters of RAF Bomber Command's 5 Group in Lincolnshire. It's a funny looking building, it's called St. Vincent's Hall. I've been there. And it's a sort of Gothic revival mansion in Grantham. Today it's in private hands, but much of the downstairs still feels like a slightly strange 19th century stately home. It was the nerve center of Britain's bombing effort against occupied Europe. As I sat there in the echoing columned, high ceilinged marble hall, I could imagine that young man also sitting there, waiting to be summoned to see a bigwig. I think mostly he was wondering why the hell was he there? That young pilot was called Guy Gibson. He'd already survived two tours of duty. He'd flown over 150 missions. So the fact that he's still alive at this point of war is pretty surprising. He's finally called in to meet probably the second most important RAF Bomber Command officer in the country, Sir Ralph Cochrane, who says, how do you feel about one more flight? Gibson replied, what kind of trip, sir? And Cochrane said simply, a very important one. Possibly the most devastating raid of all time. I can't tell you anymore. So it's like the beginning of every single heist film. One last gig. Gibson noted down later that he thought he was being asked to go on a raid that night. And so despite all his reservations and concerns, he just said simply, I haven't got my flying kit with me. Cochrane said, no, it's not tonight. You've got two months and you have to form your own squadron. Gibson asked about the target and Cochrane replied, I can't tell you any more than that at the moment, I'm afraid. So. Guy Gibson now had a mission. He just needed planes and he needed men. Three days later, Gibson arrived at the RAF base at Scampton in Lincolnshire. Now, I've been there many times, it's closed now, unfortunately, and it has changed a lot recently. It was one of those heritage sites that the time I just took for granted, I was able to see Gibson's office, it was still there now it's been demolished, but it had the same sort of wartime construction that you can recognize on airfields right across the uk. Those same mowed lawns, those same iconic type of hangars. And that's the place where Gibson had to build his squadron. 21 aircraft, 21 crews, that's 147 aircrew. It was so secret, it didn't have a name. It was known simply as Squadron X. One of the myths about the Dambusters is that it was a sort of elite unit. It was a sort of Avengers endgame of all the best crews in the raf. And that's not exactly true. Some of them were certainly, no question, Les Munro, he was a New Zealander with 17 missions under his belt. He arrived and he looked at all the gallantry medals on people's chests and he saw that there were a lot of very good aviators there. But lost people, while they didn't necessarily want to sign up, their jobs were dangerous enough without volunteering for a super special secret mission. And so some other squadrons sent crews that they were actually trying to get rid of. They were volunteered by their squadron leaders. And so you get a bit of a mix. Some of them, like George Leonard Johnson, known in classic RAF fashion as Johnny Johnson, he had plenty of operational experience. He'd completed a tour of 30 flights. He'd been given time off after that, but during those flights he had experienced engine failure, enemy night interceptions and of course, anti aircraft fire. So many of these men had been through a lot, they'd seen it all. The RAF did eventually assign a number to this new squadron, 6 1, 7. It was about to become the most famous squadron number in RAF history. Gibson, like his squadron, has become the stuff of legends. He was definitely an extraordinary aviator, but he was a very hard man as well. He seemed to manage up slightly better than he managed down. People above him, well, they loved him, commanders, politicians, but some of those who worked for him thought he could be an overly harsh taskmaster. One veteran reported that he was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut to tell you your buttons are undone. Another described to me once that they were on a drunken night and sometimes Gibson would get bundled out of the bar in a kind of military form of industrial action. He'd had a very difficult childhood. To be fair to him, he'd been abandoned by his father. His mother was an addict, she was imprisoned briefly and she died when he was pretty young in a terrible alcohol related death. But his single mindedness was clearly vital to the formation of this squadron and their ability to carry out that raid. Six days after agreeing to lead this mission, and with no idea still about where he was heading off to, Gibson was driven to a gulf course and a requisitioned vehicle. There he met a scientist. He was one of Britain's most respected aircraft designers. Just a classic archetypal boffin. His name was Barnes Wallace. He was in his 40s and he'd made a career working first on airships and then on aircraft. Now he was particularly interested in bombs. And Gibson reports that Barnes Wallace sort of looked around to make sure no one was listening. And then he said, but I'm very glad you've come. I don't suppose you know what it's for. Gibson replied, no idea, I'm afraid. To which Barnes Wallace said, what do you mean you haven't been told the target? Well, that makes things awkward, very awkward. So Guy Gibson cannot be told what the target is, but he does have the security clearance to learn about the weapon that he's going to use. Barnes Wallace tells him about that weapon. He thinks he's invented a new kind of bomb. He shows Gibson some film. It shows a bomb skimming across the surface of a lake before coming to a stop next to its intended target. Barnes Wallace has watched his kids skimming stones on a beach. And then the idea struck him. He'd taken his kids back home and he'd done some experiments with them. One of the classic experiments, in fact, in British history. He'd skimmed marbles along the surface of a paddling pool. The problem he faced is that those marbles, and indeed his prototype bomb, had been launched from surface level from a static platform. They'd been shot or fired from elastic bands, for example. He now had to deal with the fact that he had to get an aircraft to deliver that bomb. And that meant getting the aircraft ridiculously low. Wallace asked Gibson if he could do it And Gibson said it was difficult, but it was worth a try. Gibson left that meeting assuming that there was going to be an attack against the fortified U boat pens on the French coast, where German submarines were operating from, with such devastating effect in the Atlantic. Or perhaps the target might be the mighty well defended battleship Tirpitz in the Norwegian fjords. Either of those operations would be very dangerous indeed. Gibson got back to Scampton. He jumped on the bonnet of a car. He gathered his men around him and he announced that they had been chosen for a very dangerous mission. Anyone who didn't want to come was free to pull out. They could return to their own squadrons. There would be no stigma at all attached to it. Not a soul moved. They all stayed where they were. Shortly after this, Gibson was summoned back to Cochrane's headquarters at Bomber Command. He found three large crates in Cochrane's office. In them, he was told, are models of the target. So they all got their screwdrivers out and they opened up the crates. Gibson actually says he experienced a wave of relief when he found not models of the Tirpitz, but of some dams. He reports 617 Squadron were going after the dams of the Ruhr Valley, Germany's industrial heartland. And that's because that industrial heartland, with its factories and it needed lots and lots of water and lots of power. Those reservoirs held in place by those hydroelectric dams provided both. The biggest was called the Mona Dam. 130ft high, half a mile long, it had been the biggest dam in Europe when it was built just before the First World War. The problem with those dams is that they might be very long, but they're very, very thin indeed. They're very hard to hit. If you're flying a bomber horizontally from thousands of feet up in the air, which is traditionally how you bomb targets on the ground in this period. And that's why an entirely new approach had to be invented for this raid and invented fast. They had to strike them in May, just under two months away, because that's when they'd be absolutely full after the winter rains. And breaching them any later just wouldn't have the same effect. Barnes Wallace was certain these dams were the choke point of the German war industry. He calculated that it took 150 tons of water to create a ton of steel. So he thought, let's go for the water, not the steel. Now, one of the most remarkable dam Buster related adventures that I ever went on was when I was staggering through some reasonably thick woodland in Hertfordshire. I was looking for an extraordinary wartime relic. It had been built in the winter of 1940-41, and all I had to do was listen for running water. And I found is a miniature dam blocking a stream. And it's still doing that job today, little pond behind it. Amazingly, that dam is a perfect scale model. It's 1/50 of the size of one of those target dams. And then through that winter of 1940-41, they tried blowing it up over and over again. And they calculated that £30,000 of high explosives near the damn wall might do the job. The only problem was that the heaviest bomber then in service in operation, the Lancaster bomber, could only carry about £4,000 worth of bombs at that point in the war. So way off. But the scientists discovered that if the bomb could be delivered at the right place, snug against the wall of the dam, 30ft down underwater, then 7,000 pounds of explosives might do the trick. And now you're getting nearer what the Lancaster could conceivably carry. The problem, though, is you've got to get that bomb right next to the wall of the dam. And the Lancaster's accuracy at this point of the war, well, it is, it's not good. So Barnes Wallace had to come up with a way of getting that bomb to exactly the right place. He created a four ton bomb. Three of those tons were high explosives. It would be the heaviest bomb ever dropped from an aircraft. But now he'd have to modify the Lancaster to carry it. He'd have to strip a lot of weight out and you'd have to sling that bomb beneath the Lancaster because it wouldn't fit up inside the bomb bay. They got rid of the upper turret. They had to strip away a lot of armor plating, which the crews were absolutely thrilled about. As you can imagine, the bomb, codenamed Upkeep, was so big that half actually hung outside the fuselage. Now, the man actually in charge of the strategic bombing campaign, the commander in chief, was Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris. He was sick of scientists coming up to him, promising him silver bullets to win the war, shortcuts, clever little hacks. And he wasn't actually super impressed with this raid. It was a suggestion for a raid using a bomb that hadn't been fully tested, that didn't really yet exist, carried from an aircraft that hadn't really been designed for that purpose. And he called the dam buster's plan tripe beyond description and said there was not the smallest chance of it working. But in the end, he was talked into giving it a go. Gibson, for his part, well, he didn't have to worry too much about that high politics, but he did have to worry about how his crews were going to get this bomb to the target, dropped in exactly the right place. They would have to learn to fly the lancaster not at 20,000ft, but at treetop height. And they started this process on 31st March 1943. There are just endless stories of close scrapes, of farmers going crazy as animals go mad in the fields below, with terror aircraft arriving back at the base with undercarriages festooned with the branches of trees. By early April, the crews were practicing over water and they chose the Derwent reservoir in Derbyshire in particular because it was similar to the dams and some of the topography of the German targets. The locals were in for quite a shock. It was a quiet part of the world and suddenly they found their roof tiles were coming dislodged. A drop in milk and egg production happened because animals got spooked and of course no one could tell them anything about why their little valley, their reservoir and dam, had been selected for this training purpose. Now, I've been lucky enough to fly from bomber country, so flat Lincolnshire up to the Derwent water, flown at very low level and you move from very flat east coast country and you suddenly hit the uplands, the so called Peak District, that's at the southern extremity of the Pennines, which I can tell you is a sort of range of mountains. We could say, well, certainly a very hilly country that divides England in half like a spine. And the big challenge back then, and the big challenge for me when I was in the small aircraft, was navigation, because when you're very low down, you can't see very much. The towns and the lakes and the roads, the features, they actually blast past you. They come and then they're gone. So you have to keep your finger right on the map all the time and your eye constantly on the ground, otherwise you just lose touch with where you are. That's one of the great advantages of flying high. You can see more of the earth below you. So the job of these air crews was to try and find their way there and then to try and hit a raft in the lake. And largely they failed to do so. Their bomb aiming gear is set to work for horizontal bombing from 20,000ft. It's pretty useless when you're blasting along at 240 miles an hour on the surface of a lake. You try and release your bomb on top of a small raft bobbing about below you. It's hard, it's very, very hard. And it was about to get much harder because they were going to switch to doing it at night. Guy Gibson went first. He always led by example. He navigated his way to Derbyshire. He did a few runs down the valley. He couldn't tell where the water was. He very nearly crashed. He had to pull up at the last minute. Had Gibson crashed, it would have been, I think, clear. The raid would have been pulled off. It would have had huge repercussions. So we got six weeks to go until the raid. Guy Gibson's almost killed himself and his crew and really no one has any idea how they're going to pull this off. Then, in early April, Gibson gets a knock on the door. It's Nala Boffin, a scientist who's come to help Wing Commander Charles Dan. He says he's got a way of helping with aiming, trying to get the bouncing bombs to really work. Not only would they have to be dropped from a height of 150ft, according to Barnes Wallace, but they had to be exactly 1350ft from the dam. But fear not, says Wing Commander Charles Dan, he'd invented a new sight and it's an extraordinary, simple invention. It's really just a few bits of woods knocked together. You can make one at home for yourself, if you like. If you find yourself needing one, who knows? It's a sort of Y shape and then at the end of each branch, the Y, there's an upright, so that when you look along it and you line up those two uprights with the towers of the dam, well, that means at that exact second, you're in the right place and you have to drop the bomb. Now, I had been flown down that reservoir by a former RAF Red Arrows pilot at about 180 miles an hour. So slower than the Lancasters were going, and actually even a Muppet like me, I was able to use that wooden sight and I was able to drop my notional bomb correct, to within about 10 metres of exactly where it needed to be dropped. So in terms of getting the bombs to drop at exactly the right distance from the dam, that site did go a long way to solving that particular problem. There were more problems, though. The next one was even trickier. How on earth do you judge when you're flying 150ft above the surface, above the water, when all your instruments have that lack of precision, they cannot possibly give you that level of accuracy again? They came up with a pretty elegant, simple, clever solution to their seemingly insuperable problem. So although in this story we Sort of remember the air crew, their tenacity, their heroism, their sacrifice. We do also need to remember the scientists, the engineers who made this possible. And we need to celebrate something in that human spirit that allows us to turn our brain to problems and overcome them. Something we need plenty of. Today, a scientist from the Ministry of Aircraft Production came up with a neat idea. Two spotlights mounted on either side of the Lancaster at very carefully calculated angles. And that meant as the plane got lower and lower to the ground, they would form a figure of eight. When the plane was was exactly 150ft off the water, which was the altitude they thought they needed to drop the bomb at, it worked. So you've got the height sorted, they've got the distance from the dam at which they need to drop the bomb sorted. But they don't actually have a bomb that works yet. On 13 April, there was a test at Culver in Kent. I've been to that spot. I stood on the beach where Barnes, Wallace and Gibson watched in a state of nervous tension as a prototype bomb was dropped from an aircraft. Would it hit the white floating buoys, or buoys, as you might say in North America, as it bounced along the sea? No, it didn't. The bomb completely shattered on impact. Wallace groaned. A few days later, they were back on that same stretch of beach on the north coast of Kent. There's actually the remains of a 12th century church there. It's rather handsome and some of it's eroded into the sea, but that church was built itself within the confines of a Roman fort and there's a Saxon enclosure there as well, so it's a great place to go. So as they made history on that day, they were standing in the shadow of millennia of history. But this time they made history in the wrong way again. The bombs all went wrong. They either sank immediately or their casings shattered. But there was some hope on one of the bombs. The cylindrical core of the bomb skimmed and that gave Wallace an idea. Originally, he thought the bomb would have to be a perfect sphere, like his children's marbles. But now he thought he would try and work with this cylindrical shape. It might skim more easily when it was dropped from an aircraft. There was another test in mid April. A cylinder was dropped this time and it sunk immediately. There were 23 days until the raid. Wallace asked Gibson for a meeting. Wallace has got a further request and it can't have been easy for him to ask this. He shows Gibson some maths that he's been doing. He's come to some shocking conclusions. For the bomb to skim properly, it can't be dropped from 150ft. That's too high. It has to be dropped instead from 60ft. He says to Gibson, can you fly 60ft from the water? Gibson thought about it. He knew that this was ridiculously low. I mean, just one false move and they would be straight in the water. But he replied coolly, we'll have a crack at it tonight. So this is probably the bit we remind ourselves that the Lancaster had a wingspan of around 100ft. So this is a crazy flying height. Gibson uses those spotlights. They are set up to optimize for 60ft. And he discovers that the system still works. So he thinks his men can fly at 60ft over the surface of the reservoirs. The plan can be made to work if the bomb responds better to being dropped from that height. On 29 April, with just 18 days to go before the May full moon, the date on which the raid was supposed to take place, Gibson and Wallace go back to North Kent. They stand on that beach just a stone's throw away from that Roman fort, and they watch the Lancaster coming in. At 60ft, the bomb is released and it bounces. It bounces six times. It travels 2,000ft. Barnes Wallace, the quiet, staid British engineer, goes absolutely bonkers. He starts waving his handkerchief around and dancing. Gibson is so surprised, he decides to join in the dancing, too. The bomb works. Now they have to build enough of them. More dam busters coming up after this. This episode is brought to you by Ethos. My experience of life insurance has honestly been overwhelming. Long phone calls, stacks of paperwork, and the stress of medical exams, all just to get basic coverage. It can feel slow, invasive, confusing. That's where Ethos stands out. They make getting life insurance fast and easy. 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