Dambuster who tried
WAR AFTER THE FLOOD by John Nichol (William Collins £20)
The Dam Busters film made 617 Squadron the bestknown in the wartime RAF. Sadly, the last of the pilots, Les Munro, died this week. Though the raids, which breached the eder and Mohne dams, flooding the Ruhr valley, were duly celebrated at the time, the excitement was soon forgotten in other crises.
In the RAF, 617 was known, damningly, as the ‘Suicide Squadron’. The cost of the Dambusting raid had been high: eight Lancaster bombers and 56 crew were lost.
But, by the end of the war, the overall loss of 617 Squadron was a brutal 75 per cent — the highest in Bomber Command, which itself suffered the highest loss (55,000 killed) of any military arm in World War II.
This is not just another tale of heroism in the skies — even though Bomber Command has never had a fair share of those.
The author, John Nichol, was an RAF pilot shot down in his Tornado bomber during the first Gulf War.
he knows from the inside what bomber crews feel and has extracted arresting testimony from the Squadron’s survivors or their widows. There isn’t a single gung-ho boaster among them, but a great deal of sobering reflection on the high cost exacted among flyers and civilians alike.
The Dambuster raids were carried out at very low level. After this, the next missions for 617 Squadron were carried out from 10,000 ft or above. But it maintained its accuracy by first marking the target using flares dropped at low level.
This was thanks to i ts remarkable commander, Leonard Cheshire, already at 26 a group captain and heavily decorated. he came down a rank to wing commander in order to take on the Squadron.
he was entirely different in character from the previous CO, Guy Gibson, who was awarded the VC for the dams raid.
Cheshire was approachable: quiet, modest but firm, and far more of a companion to his crews. One of them, Mick Martin, who said he could hit a lump of seaweed by dive-bombing in his Lancaster. Cheshire asked Martin to teach him.
From then on, the pair marked the targets on raids over occupied France. Flying a manoeuvrable Mosquito at 50 ft, Cheshire braved the flak barrages to place his marker of coloured flares right on the bull’s-eye.
No one was as cool and determined. he seemed to have a charmed life.
he was also a humanitarian. Attacking a factory with a civilian workforce, he would make several dummy runs above the roof to warn them to evacuate before he called in the bombers waiting at 10,000 ft above.
Many veterans of 617 Squadron admit that their keenness to join it was partly to concentrate on industrial targets, not on the obliteration of German cities.
Bomber Command’s Sir Arthur harris controversially maintained that this would break German civilian morale and end the war.
No lesser authority than Albert Speer, hitler’s armaments minister, told me that Germany would have collapsed sooner if our bombing offensive had concentrated on industries and communication instead of the inaccurate bombing of whole cities.
The Squadron’s main targets were the
heavily camouflaged and protected Vweapon sites in North-East France, from which V1s and V2s were launched.
One, a mystery site near Calais, was buried deep in underground tunnels protected by concrete that was impenetrable to ordinary bombs.
Dr Barnes Wallis, who i nvented the bouncing bomb that destroyed the dams, now came up with the Tallboy, a huge, 12,000 lb b o mb shaped like a torpedo with fins to spin it as it fell.
A hardened steel nose enabled it to penetrate deep into the Earth before its delayed detonation.
Dropped from 18,000 ft, it could penetrate 15 ft of concrete. So it proved. Tallboy finished off the V- weapon bunkers. When it was over-run later, the mystery target turned out to house the V3 — a bunker of 50 superguns which f i red booster-accelerated shells that could have hit London in two minutes.
Thanks to Tallboy, they were never launched.
After that raid, Cheshire, with 100 missions to his credit, stood down. He was awarded the first VC given for ‘sustained bravery’.
Then, late in 1944, the Squadron was assigned t he task of s i nki ng Germany’s biggest, fastest and most modern battleship — the Tirpitz — which sheltered in Norwegian f j ords, menacing our arctic convoys.
Tallboys were what finished the Tirpitz, but Barnes Wallis had an even bigger bomb up his sleeve. This was Grand Slam, weighing 10 tons. It was so heavy that a Lancaster could barely lift it off the ground. It, too, exploded deep underground like an earthquake. An underground U-boat factory was one of its victims.
This is both an exciting book and a saddening one.
As each new man is introduced to join the 617 crews, you wonder how long he is going to last. More of them are lost than survive. If a body was recovered, the dead men’s fellow crew members were not allowed to attend his funeral. Other Squadron members represented them.
Visiting the few survivors alive today, Nichol finds all of them still mourning the loss of their friends. Some still feel guilt that they hadn’t managed to save them, from a burning aircraft, for example.
This is a tale of victory, in the end, magnificently told in lip-biting detail.
But I shall remember most keenly being made to live the horrors of the last minutes of a doomed bomber and the white faces sometimes glimpsed at the Perspex window of a crippled aircraft before i t took i ts l ast corkscrewing plunge.