Pilot was the go- to Guy

WING Commander Guy Gibson gets off fairly lightly tonight in episode one of THE DAMBUSTERS

( Channel 5, 9pm), Dan Snow’s new documentary series.

Gibson, after all, was one of Britain’s greatest war heroes.

A label which nowadays is more than enough to have hordes of enraged simpletons take to the streets, demanding your erasure from history.

Refreshingly, the most controversial comment about this man, who led one of the Second World War’s most audacious bombing raids, comes from contributor Sir Max Hastings.

“A lot of the men who served under him hated his guts,” he remarks of 617 Squadron’s charismatic leader. But even this should be taken in context, because Sir Max’s own view is that Gibson is a “legend”. ( And bear in mind he’s using the word “legend” here in its correct sense, to mean what it used to mean before it was adopted by football fans to mean “someone who used to play for my club and who tapped in a late winner for us against Plymouth in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy.”)

“Some so- called war heroes, you can be a bit iffy about whether they were the real thing,” he continues. “Gibson was the real thing.”

And Dan himself clearly agrees, judging by the passion he brings to the telling of this story.

The Dambuster raid of May 1943, focusing on strategically crucial targets in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, evidently needed a guy like, er, Guy at its helm. Someone who, statistically speaking, ought to have already been dead – even though he was still only 24 years old – given how many missions he’d flown, but who didn’t hesitate when asked if he’d be willing to lead one more, in this case potentially “one of the most devastating of all time”.

It needed Guy and it also needed Barnes Wallis, of course – one of Britain’s most respected aircraft designers. Key to the whole mission, other than the sheer guts of the men who undertook it, was Wallis’s revolutionary bouncing bomb, ingenuously designed to skim over the water towards its desired destination. By all accounts, Wallis came up with the idea while skimming stones at Chesil Beach in Dorset.

The Dambusters is yet another reminder that Channel 5 does history tremendously well, giving important stories enough airtime to breathe. As has become customary, this one is stripped over three successive nights.

With Snow throwing himself into the documentary with his usual gusto, it makes for a fantastically immersive experience.

And if you ever catch me using the expression “immersive experience” again, I hereby grant you permission to slap me.