The mantle ‘hero’ not a comfortable one
Alberta veteran part of famed operation to bomb three German dams
ROCKY MOUNTAIN HOUSE
Areluctant hero and piece of Canadian history, Fred Sutherland sits in a chair in his living room in the foothills of the Rockies in central Alberta. The night before, while lying in bed and recalling events from the Second World War, he could not sleep.
Sutherland is 90 and the last surviving Canadian to participate in one of the most dangerous and daring air raids into Nazi Germany.
On a subsequent mission he parachuted out of a plane after it crashed on a bombing run, and spent three months hiding in barns and attics to elude capture across the European countryside.
“I am hesitant to tell people my story,” Sutherland says of his role as one of the Dambusters. “It seems so impossible … I don’t know if they will believe me or not.”
Born and raised in Peace River, he enlisted at 18 after seeking a relative’s advice. It was 1941, and times were hard.
“The Depression was just ending and nobody had work,” Sutherland says. “My uncle told me, ‘Oh, these people who are joining up now, they will never see any action.’
“I thought I would miss the war.”
Two years later, Sutherland found himself in England as a Royal Canadian Air Force sergeant posted with an elite multinational unit assembled by the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron. For six weeks, he and 132 other airmen trained for a mission without knowing what it would entail.
“We didn’t have a clue. We figured that maybe they were going to send us to the coast of France to chase submarines.”
It wasn’t until the evening of May 16, 1943, under the light of a full moon and just hours before half of their planes would go down in flames, that their target was disclosed.
Walking into a briefing at Air Force Base Scampton, north of London, Sutherland saw a scale model of the Mohne, a hulking hydroelectric dam in the heart of Germany’s industrial heartland, on the table at the front of the room.
“The first thing I noticed was that there were 20-millimetre gun posts at either end of the dam,” he recalls seven decades later. “I immediately thought we didn’t have a hope.”
The squadron — later immortalized by the 1955 British film The Dam Busters — undertook Operation Chastise to cripple dams in the heart of industrial Germany, flooding factories and hampering the Nazis’ war effort.
The assignment required flying lumbering Lancaster fighter planes 18 metres off the ground at a speed of 373 km/h. Each aircraft would drop one newly invented “bouncing bomb,” specifically designed to skip across the surface of the water and over protective antitorpedo netting before sinking at the wall of the Mohne, Eder and Sorpe dams.
That night, 19 seven- man crews took off from the base in Lincolnshire, but three turned back before reaching Germany, one after losing its bomb over the ocean, another because of a crew member’s illness and a third because of a radio malfunction.
Led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the other 16 plodded on and flew directly into the glare of spotlights and the teeth of gunfire at the fiercely protected Mohne dam.
Sutherland — a gunner at the front of an aircraft piloted by Flight Lieut. Les Knight, an Australian ace who never smoked, drank or chased girls — watched the plane directly in front of his burst into flames.
“It was so close I could almost reach out and touch it,” he says, emotions welling. “Your friends are getting killed and you are scared as hell but you can’t let it bother you because if you did, you could never do your job.
“All you can do is think, ‘Thank God it wasn’t us.’”
The Mohne was breached by a fellow Dambuster as Sutherland’s plane was flying in formation and getting ready to drop one of its 4,200-kilogram bombs. At that point, the squadron headed for the Eder dam, 100 km away.
By then, eight of the 16 planes taking part in the sixhour, 21-minute offensive had been shot down, and 53 airmen had been killed. On the ground, the death toll was estimated at 1,600, including French, Belgian, Dutch and Ukrainian prisoners of war.
“I actually don’t think the Germans had much practice beforehand or we would have all been dead.”
Unlike the Mohne, the Eder dam was unprotected, primarily because the Germans never dreamed anyone would try to attack it.
Nearly the length of four football fields and 13 storeys tall, it sat in a short, steep valley surrounded by hills and power lines.
To approach it, Knight flew over a hill, made a sharp left and cut his motor until the plane glided down to a height of 18 metres.
Restarting the Lancaster, he then barrelled toward the dam at 373 km/h, ascending quickly at times to climb over electrical wires.
“The worst part was the hightension wires,” Sutherland said. “You couldn’t see them until you were almost on top of them. Somebody would yell and Les would suddenly hit the throttle and we’d go right over them, engine screaming.
“When the Germans shot at you from the ground, you could at least shoot back at them. The wires we had no defence for, and if you hit them, you were gone.”
Flying in a corridor with only about three km to manoeuvre, Knight then dropped a bomb that skipped across the surface three times and penetrated the base of the dam, punching a hole 70 metres wide and 22 metres deep.
Water flooded into the narrow valley below, producing a wave eight metres tall that roared 30 km downstream, leaving widespread destruction in its path.
“The older I get, the more I think about what we did. I don’t think we could have ever done it again. … We had to be at a perfect height and travelling at a perfect speed and we had to drop the bomb from the perfect distance. A few feet either way and it wouldn’t have worked.”
In the end, the tally was two dams breached, the Mohne and Eder, and the third, Sopre, damaged. Long before smart bombs and surgical strikes, it was a world-famous coup.
While their blow did not cripple Nazi Germany — full water and power output were restored within months — the bombings provided a boost to British morale.
Operation Chastise was even noted in Albert Speer’s book, Inside the Third Reich, where he questioned why the Allies failed to launch other raids during the reconstruction. But the German architect and armaments minister did acknowledge:
“That night, employing just a few bombers, the British came close to a success which would have been greater than anything they had achieved hitherto with a commitment of thousands of bombers.”
Four months after flying the mission that made the Dambusters famous, Sutherland’s plane clipped trees while flying in dense fog during a bombing run over Germany.
Knight was able to steer the badly damaged aircraft into the Netherlands, at the last minute climbing to an altitude that allowed his crew to jump out. Moments later, Sutherland watched the aircraft crash into a ditch, killing Knight.
For three months, Sutherland hid in hay lofts and the houses of strangers who risked their lives to offer him refuge.
At times, he travelled by rail using forged documents provided to him by the underground, once duping a German officer who inspected his fake passport aboard a train between Belgium and France. Suspicious, the officer held the passport up to the light and scrutinized it painstakingly, trying to determine if it was forged.
“I had to ball up my fists to keep him from seeing how much my hands were shaking,” Sutherland says.
After sneaking through the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, Sutherland returned to Canada in 1944.
Greeted in Edmonton by his beloved girlfriend, Margaret Baker, he proposed immediately.
In January, they’ll celebrate 70 years of marriage.
She sits in a sunroom read- ing quietly as he recounts the events that shaped his life. Of the 133 airmen who participated in Operation Chastise, only two others are alive today — George “Johnny” Johnson, a British squadron leader, and Les Munro, a pilot from New Zealand.
Following the war, Sutherland served for a dozen years more in the air force, achieving the rank of Flying Officer.
He also went back to school, earning a forestry-related degree from the University of British Columbia, and landed a job with the forestry service in B.C.
In 1964, he accepted a job in Rocky Mountain House with the provincial government and became forestry superintendent. He and his wife raised three children, and have been blessed with six grandchildren.
Sutherland has no Remembrance Day plans, saying he has never been interested in glorifying war and usually doesn’t even attend cenotaph ceremonies.
Several years ago, he was invited to visit the Eder dam as part of a German film project. He declined. “I was really embarrassed at the thought of going there. A lot of people were killed in the flooding. … At the time we blew up the dam, we never thought or worried about anything like that. But I think about it a bit differently now. I don’t feel like a hero at all.
“I was just there.”