Insight into dam and blast pilots
CHASTISE – The Dambusters Story 1943 ★★★★★ by Max Hastings William Collins, £25
FOR 76 years it has rested in the annals of glorious victory – a feat of British engineering that overcame the odds to hit the Nazi war machine at its heart.
But the 1943 Dambusters raid merits a forensic retelling. Did it deliver what it set out to, asks Max Hastings, and were the civilian casualties, so easily overlooked in the tale of derring-do, justified?
There is little here in terms of new hard data. On May 16, 1943, 133 airmen flew below tree level at 220mph across a moonlit sky to Germany’s RuhrValley to destroy dams which harnessed water for Hitler’s war machine.
The Möhne and Edersee dams were destroyed, while the Sorpe was only partially damaged.
It was an accomplishment made possible only by the invention of BarnesWallis’s bouncing bomb.
Bomber Command’s commander-in-chief Arthur Harris had been dismissive of the idea: “This is tripe of the wildest description... there is not the smallest chance of it working”. But Churchill needed to show to both the US and “embattled Russians” that Britain “was carrying the war to the enemy”.
Bomber Command had the most to prove. In 1941 a damning report “showed that the average RAF crew on an average night was incapable of identifying any target smaller than a city”.
The raids are given lavish attention, as are the personalities of those who flew them, particularly
Wing Commander Guy Gibson. Equal measure is given to their effect.
Hastings dismisses claims that Operation Chastise, intended to halt Hitler’s war effort, was a mere “conjuring trick” because Germany built the dams up again within weeks.
But water shortage disrupted smelting works and armament factories while coal production fell by more than 800,000 tonnes. Added to that “a significant cost was imposed by the mobilisation of workers, some diverted from fortifying Hitler’s Atlantic Wall”.
However it was not victimless. Between 1,300 and 1,500 people, half of whom were PoWs or foreign female workers, are thought to have perished under a “wall of water as black as coal”.
Following the raids, Gibson admitted: “The fact that people... might drown had not occurred to us”.
Hastings’ conclusion, therefore, is conflicted. “I retain the awe of my childhood for the flyers who breached the Möhne and the Eder… yet in the 21st century it also seems essential to confront the enormity of the horror that the unthinking fliers unleashed upon a host of innocents.”
This volume is worthy of any history enthusiast’s library.