Tim Bouquet - 617: Going to War with Todays Dambusters

Going to War with
Todays Dambusters

TIM BOUQUET

To Ella and Milo
And for my father
Christopher Bouquet
(19252010)

Physically flying is strange. The world is frequently upside down, your body often weighs four or five times its normal weight or less than nothing. Great distances are consumed in seconds. Into that environment warfare intrudes. Or at least a tiny upside-down frogseye glimpse of warfare intrudes. Overcoming disorientation, both spatial and situational, is at the heart of military flying.

David Knowles DFC (former 617 Tornado pilot and Squadron Leader) Meeting the Jet Man (Two Ravens Press, 2008)

I am often asked if I was scared, exhilarated, excited, focused; yes, all of those and none of those. Your training is such that you are aware of those feelings but you bring them all in from the edges and have them under control so everything in the cockpit is pretty calm even if there are missiles going off all around you. If you are hyped up you wont operate and if you are too chilled you wont operate. It is exciting but its not thrilling.

Group Captain S.P. Rocky Rochelle OBE, DFC
Officer Commanding, 617 Squadron, 20062008

CONTENTS

Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire,
Remembrance Sunday, 14 November 2010

The final autumn leaves were falling in the tree-lined streets of Woodhall Spa, an Edwardian village of imposing villas in the centre of Lincolnshire, as the 300-strong congregation clutching poppy wreaths filed out of St Peters Church and formed up in a parade to honour the fallen. They marched at a sedate pace down The Broadway, flanked by an arcade of shops, estate agents and tearooms. Woodhall Spa, its healing waters a distant memory, was no different from any other community on Remembrance Sunday, except in one respect. Where most towns and villages have a single war memorial, Woodhall Spa has two.

The clue as to why was in the military uniforms marching behind the clergy and the Royal British Legion banners. Nearly all of them were of Royal Air Force blue. Alongside them silver-haired men of a certain age had decorated their civilian suits with DFCs and instinctively remembered how to march in time.

The Royal Air Force, particularly Bomber Command, is in Lincolnshires DNA. During the Second World War there were close to fifty airfields in this flattest of counties as the RAF and the US Air Group pounded German industry. Most of them have gone the way of history but from the air it is still possible to see the outlines of hangars and runways lurking like ghosts under cultivated fields and golf courses.

After a few minutes the parade stopped first at the traditional cross at the crossroads of the village, where community wreaths were laid. A few yards away in Royal Square there is an altogether more imposing structure. Twelve feet high, it is cast in the shape of a dam and is inscribed with 205 names on six slate plates which are set into its arches. The centre of the monument has been ruptured and the central slab representing the escaping water has carved into it a coat of arms depicting three lightning bolts, a smashed dam and an unforgiving motto: Aprs Moi Le Dluge.

This is the monument to 617 Squadron, which on the night of 16 to 17 May 1943 took off from RAF Scampton near Lincoln, a few miles away, to carry out a daring night-time raid known at the time as Operation Chastise. Specially formed for a unique task, nineteen customised four-engine Avro Lancaster bombers, led by 617s first commanding officer, 24-year-old Wing Commander Guy Penrose Gibson, were to fly just 60 feet above marble black water at 190 knots (220 mph) to attack three massive dams which provided the water that powered Germanys heavy industry and main armaments factories in the Ruhr Valley.

Four hundred and fifty yards out from their targets they would launch a revolutionary back-spinning cylindrical bomb known as Upkeep, designed by inventor Barnes Wallis. It would bounce three times across the water like a skimming stone, clearing the torpedo netting. Then it would hit the dam wall and sink to 30 feet where it would explode, causing a massive shockwave that would breach the mighty structures, thereby unleashing millions of gallons of water.

Many, including Bomber Commands irascible chief Sir Arthur Bomber Harris, who was wedded to the nightly blanket bombing of Nazi industry, were sceptical that this kind of precision targeting with an unproven weapon would ever work and they tried to stop it. Harris was prepared to bet my shirt that Upkeep would be a costly disaster. Putting aside Lancasters and reducing our effort [was a] wild goose chase, he warned Air Staff. But 617 Squadron, flying in three waves and hugging their bombs in the stripped-out bellies of specially adapted Lancasters, did launch their weird munitions, which duly bounced down on to the water. Spinning backwards at 500 rpm, they skimmed across the surface until they hit concrete, where they sank and blew a massive 60-yard fracture in the Mhne Dam, which was holding back some 330 million tons of water. They also breached the Eder Dam, sending forth a Dluge to further disable Germanys war machine. The third dam, the Sorpe, a huge structure made of earth and rock, suffered only minor damage.

The British press had a field day. The Daily Telegraph ran a triumphant three-deck headline on 18 May.

DEVASTATION SPREADS DOWN THE RUHR VALLEY. BRIDGES AND POWER PLANTS ENGULFED. BERLIN ADMITS HEAVY CASUALTIES.

With one single blow the RAF has precipitated what may prove to be the greatest industrial disaster yet inflicted on Germany in this war, the newspaper proclaimed, as the floods continued to spread fast for about fifty miles.

After a partial post-raid reconnaissance the Air Ministry issued a statement. Railways and road bridges are broken down. Hydro-electrical power stations are destroyed or damaged; a railway marshalling yard is under water.

Revisionist historians argue that more than 1200 civilians, and a number of prisoners of war, were killed and that German industry was back up and running in five months. This conveniently sidestepped the fact that it took huge amounts of cash, equipment and materials and 20,000 labourers to rebuild the countrys biggest dams and destroyed factory plant, which Germany could not afford. This left gaps in Hitlers Atlantic Wall, under construction along the Normandy coast and through which the D-Day invasion would pour the following year. Revisionism also overlooks the shockwave that the Dams Raids caused to German confidence.

In Britain, Operation Chastise had the opposite effect on morale. The audacity of the Bouncing Bomb and the adulation that pursued the airmen who had dropped it was sealed for ever. After the war, as Britain struggled with the economic cost of conflict, 617 Squadron was enshrined in a morale-boosting book and movie, The Dam Busters, which gave it the name by which it is known to this day: The Dambusters.

To the general public the Dambusters who were recruited in such secrecy that initially none of them knew what they had been selected for, including Guy Gibson are the most famous bomber squadron in the Royal Air Force. They are as synonymous with heroic aviation as the Spitfire is with the Battle of Britain. But in 1943 617 was simply known as the Suicide Squadron. This squadron will either make history or be completely wiped out, Gibson said with unemotional accuracy. Gibson, a small, driven man and the best bomber pilot of his generation, won a VC. Thirty-three others were awarded between them five Distinguished Service Orders ten Distinguished Flying Crosses and four Bars, eleven Distinguished Flying Medals and one Bar and two Conspicuous Gallantry Medals.