Charles Foster - Breaking the dams : the story of dambuster David Maltby and his crew

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First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Pen and Sword Aviation
An imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
S70 2AS

Copyright Charles Foster 2008

9781783033577

The right of Charles Foster to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

Designed and typeset in Scala and Today by Charles Foster
Printed and bound in England
By CPI UK

Pen & Sword Books Ltd incorporates the Imprints of Pen & Sword Aviation,
Pen & Sword Family History, Pen & Sword Maritime, Pen & Sword Military,
Wharncliffe Local History, Pen & Sword Select, Pen & Sword Military Classics, Leo Cooper,
Remember When, Seaforth Publishing and Frontline Publishing

For a complete list of Pen & Sword titles please contact
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Further information about this book on www.breakingthedams.com

Table of Contents

In memory of

David Maltby DSO DFC
John Fort DFC
William Hatton
Victor Hill
Vivian Nicholson DFM
Harold Simmonds
Antony Stone

of the 1,394 people who died on the night of 16 17 May 1942

of the 55,000 other members of RAF Bomber Command
who died between 1939 and 1945

and of my mother Jean Maltby,
her sister, Audrey,
and their parents, Ettrick and Aileen

R I P

Note: The 1955 film and the Paul Brickhill book on which it is based, published in 1951, are both called The Dam Busters . However, the term Dambuster is more commonly seen these days, and I have chosen to use that in this text (except in specific references to the film or book title).

Prologue

Young, Happy and Beautiful

T heres nothing glorious or noble about dying in war. Its a terrible tragedy which also affects, in many different ways, those who survive. But amongst those who took part in the Second World War, especially those who volunteered to fly in the RAF, there was a certain fatalism an acceptance that death might come. It was well expressed by the Battle of Britain fighter-pilot Richard Hillary who survived severe burns after being shot down and wrote one of the best books about the war, The Last Enemy, while recuperating. Against medical advice he returned to flying and was killed in an accident. He wrote in a letter:

...we were not that stupid ... we could remember only too well that all this had been seen in the last war but, in spite of that and not because of it, we still thought this one worth fighting.

This casualism the ritual of the letter standing on the locker for the Committee of Adjustment Officer to post if you were killed was hard for the families left behind to bear.

Mrs Elizabeth Nicholson, the mother of Flt Sgt Vivian Nicholson, soon after her son had been killed in the same tragedy as David Maltby, wrote movingly to David Maltbys father about a photograph taken in London on the day when the boys had both been decorated, three months earlier: It is indeed a terrible and deep wound for us when we look at them so young, happy and beautiful. Words that are strikingly similar to those of the writer Iris Murdoch, in her novel The Red and The Green , describing the dead as being made young and perfect for ever. Murdochs close friend Major Frank Thompson was killed in a Special Operations Executive (SOE) operation in Bulgaria in 1944 and, as her biographer notes, she was surely thinking of him as she wrote those words.

Most of the seven young men who feature in this book were still teenagers, young, happy and beautiful, when they went to war. They werent much older when they dropped the bomb which caused the final breach in the Mhne Dam on a moonlit night in May 1943, and then when they died just four months later. Each of them left a mother, a father, a brother or a sister; two of them had an infant child. This is their story.

Chapter 1

Introduction

I ts a piece of music thats as familiar as Rule Britannia or Over the Rainbow (and like them now downloadable as a ringtone for your mobile phone) but to us, growing up in the Home Counties in the late 1950s, it was indisputably and slightly embarrassingly our tune. If you sing that famous descending melody daah-da-da-da-da out loud in company, someone is bound to complete it... da, da-dee-da-da-da-da. It instantly evokes an image: clean-shaven, bright-eyed young men putting one across the Jerries in a daring night-time raid. Or, perhaps, football fans in too-tight England jerseys urging their country on in another doomed penalty shoot-out. It is, of course, Eric Coatess music The Dam Busters March first used in the 1955 film of the same name.

I cant remember when I first heard it we had a scratchy 78 rpm record at home, played by the RAF Band, and it was often on the radio in the late 1950s. I know, however, that I didnt see the film itself until about 1961, when I was 11. During one school holiday my brother George and I were staying with my Aunt Audrey and Uncle Johnnie near Oxford. Together with our cousin, David, Audrey had driven us to some obscure cinema miles away (was it Abingdon? Aylesbury? Banbury?) because she had noticed that the film was showing. This time, instead of leaving us to sit through the screening on our own and collecting us afterwards, which was her usual practice when she took us to the pictures, Audrey came in with us. She paid sharp attention. Here it is, she whispered to us as the scene began where Wg Cdr Guy Gibson, played by Richard Todd, and Gp Capt Charles Whitworth, played by Derek Farr, are shown leafing through an album full of photographs of aircrew, looking for pilots for the special mission. Oh yes, David Maltby, says Whitworth and they pass on to the next page.

The film tells the rest of the story: a new RAF squadron is formed, 617 Squadron, led by Gibson. Their Lancaster bombers are specially adapted to carry a secret new weapon, the so-called bouncing bomb, designed to attack several large dams in the Ruhr valley, the heart of Germanys industrial region. But when they attack the first dam things dont go exactly to plan. Four aircraft attack, one crashes in flames, but the dam is still in place. David Maltby is piloting the next plane. Hello J-Johnny are you ready? asks Gibson. OK Leader, says the actor George Baker, playing David. Then there is silence as his aircraft approaches, two others flying ahead of him to draw the flak. The bomb is dropped, bounces four, five, six times then a pause, followed by an explosion at the base of the dam. Still the soundtrack remains silent, but, just as the next aircraft is lining up, someone shouts out, Its gone, look, my God! A rush of water through the dam and a blast of music.

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