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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Max Hastings 2019

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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

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Source ISBN: 9780008280529

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008280543

Version: 2019-08-01

Dedication

In memory of the aircrew who achieved the almost impossible on the night of 16/17 May 1943; and of the men, women and children on both sides who perished

Contents

1  Cover

2  Title Page

3  Copyright

4  Dedication

5  Contents

6  List of Illustrations

7  Epigraph

8  RAF Ranks and Army Equivalents

9  Abbreviations Used in the Text

10  Introduction

11  Prologue

12  1 Grand Strategy, Great Dams 1 THE BIG PICTURE 2 HARRIS 3 THE ‘PANACEA MERCHANTS’

13  2 The Boffin and His Bombs 1 WALLIS 2 GESTATION 3 FIRST BOUNCES

14  3 Command and Controversy 1 TARGETS 2 GIBSON 3 ‘A DISASTER OF THE FIRST MAGNITUDE’

15  4 Men and Machines 1 FLIERS 2 FLYING

16  5 The Brink of Battle 1 SIXTY FEET 2 ‘NO NEWS THAT WOULD INTEREST YOU FROM HERE’

17  6 Chastise 1 TAKE-OFF 2 GETTING THERE

18  7 At the Dams 1 THE MÖHNE AND THE SORPE 2 THE EDER AND AFTER

19  8 The Möhnekatastrophe 1 ‘A WALL OF WATER, BLACK AS COAL’ 2 ‘CLOSE TO A SUCCESS’

20  9 Heroes 1 GARNERING THE LAURELS 2 SQUANDERING THE SACRIFICE

21  10 Landings 1 ‘GOODNIGHT, EVERYONE’ 2 RECONCILIATIONS

22  Appendix I: 617 Squadron’s Crews Who Flew on the Night of 16/17 May 1943

23  Appendix II: Landmark Dates in the Evolution of Chastise

24  Appendix III: A Chronology of Operation Chastise 16/17 May 1943

25  Picture Section

26  Acknowledgements

27  Notes and References

28  Bibliography

29  Index

30  Also by Max Hastings

31  About the Publisher

LandmarksCoverFrontmatterStart of ContentBackmatter

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Illustrations

The Möhne, the Eder and the Sorpe.

Barnes and Molly Wallis in 1925. (Estate of Mary Stopes-Roe)

The Wallis home in Effingham, Surrey. (Cambridge University Library/MS Vickers)

Wallis in his study with an assistant. (Cambridge University Library/MS Vickers)

1940 cartoon showing the Wallis-designed Wellington bomber.

The scaled-down model of the Möhne at Nant-y-Gro in Powys, eight minutes after a test explosion in 1942. (The National Archives/AVIA 10/369)

Recording apparatus attached to scale-model dam at Watford. (The National Archives/DSIR 27/43)

Test explosion at Nant-y-Gro. (The National Archives/AVIA 10/369)

Cherwell, Portal, Pound and Churchill watching a display of anti-aircraft gunnery, June 1941. (Imperial War Museum/H 10306)

Air Vice Marshal the Hon. R.A. Cochrane. (Imperial War Museum/CH 14564); Sir Charles Craven. (Cambridge University Library/MS Vickers); Sir Norman Bottomley. (National Portrait Gallery, London/Howard Coster); Arthur Collins; Air Marshal Sir John Linnell. (Imperial War Museum/CM 5259); Gp. Capt. F. W. Winterbotham. (Barry James Gilmore/Fairfax Media/Getty Images)

Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris. (Imperial War Museum/CH 13020)

Harris with his wife Jill and daughter Jackie. (Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Getty Images)

Avro Lancaster ED932 (G-George) being flown by Guy Gibson during tests at Reculver. (Imperial War Museum/FLM 2343)

An Upkeep bounces onto the seafront during tests at Reculver. (Imperial War Museum/FLM 2343)

Tests at Reculver. (Imperial War Museum/FLM 2360; FLM 2362; FLM 2363)

Melvin Young in the victorious 1938 Oxford Boat Race crew. (The Times/News Licensing)

Young’s miraculous October 1940 Atlantic rescue. (Trinity College Oxford, with help from Arthur G. Thorning)

Young with his rescuer’s captain. (Trinity College Oxford, with help from Arthur G. Thorning)

Melvin and Priscilla Young. (Trinity College Oxford, with help from Arthur G. Thorning)

John ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood. (Hopgood family)

Hopgood with his sister Marna and his mother. (Hopgood family)

Hopgood with Marna. (Hopgood family)

Aircrew of 106 Squadron. (Imperial War Museum/HU 91941)

Henry Maudslay at Eton. (Maudslay family)

Maudslay as squadron leader. (Lincolnshire County Council Archives)

Guy Gibson and his wife Eve. (Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy)

Gibson in 1944. (Imperial War Museum/CH 13618)

Gibson with Nigger. (Associated Newspapers/Rota/Shutterstock)

Gibson, Spafford, Hutchison, Deering and Taetum at Scampton. (CNP Collection/Alamy)

Bill Astell and his family on a pre-war outing in Derbyshire. (Ray Hepner)

Gibson with Dave Maltby. (CNP Collection/Alamy)

Australian crew members on leave in London after the raid. (Imperial War Museum/CH 9942)

F/Lt. Bill Astell. (Lincolnshire County Council Archives)

F/Lt. Joe McCarthy and his crew. (CNP Collection/Alamy)

P/O John Fraser at his wedding, a week before Chastise. (Cavendish Press)

F/Lt. David Shannon. (Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty)

F/Lt. Les Munro.

The aircrew who took part in Operation Chastise. (Imperial War Museum/CH 11049)

Lancaster taking off from Scampton for Chastise. (Imperial War Museum/CH 18006)

Wreck of a 617 Squadron Lancaster on a Dutch beach. (The National Archives/AIR 20/4367)

Harris and Cochrane at the debriefing of Gibson’s crew. (CNP Collection/Alamy)

WAAF intelligence officer Fay Gillon with survivors of the raid, including Maltby, Munro, Trevor-Roper and Shannon. (Fay Gillon)

King George VI at Scampton, with Gibson and Whitworth. (CNP Collection/Alamy)

Some of the survivors of the raid: Sutherland, Kellow, O’Brien, Hobday, Johnson, Knight, Grayston.

Fred Tees, sole survivor of C-Charlie’s crash. (Tees family)

Letter from Gibson to Tees’s mother, informing her that her son is missing in action. (Tees family)

Flooding in Neheim after the raid. (Werner Buehner)

Victims of the flood in Fröndenberg.

Women attempting to salvage household goods after the Möhnekatastrophe.

Albert Speer assessing the damage at the Möhne. (akg-images/Alamy)

Reconstruction work on the Möhne. (Werner Buehner)

Harris with his wife and daughter after the war. (Imperial War Museum)

Barnes Wallis at Teddington during the filming of The Dam Busters. (SWNS)

Wallis with Michael Redgrave, who played him in The Dam Busters. (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

Epigraph

Boffin/bofin/n.chiefly Br. informal, a scientific expert; esp. one involved in technological research [origin unknown]

Longman’s Dictionary of the English Language

‘It is proposed to use this weapon … against a large dam in Germany which, if breached, will have serious consequences in the neighbouring industrial area … The operation … will not, it is thought, prove particularly dangerous, but it will undoubtedly require skilled crews … Some training will no doubt be necessary.’

Air Vice-Marshal Robert Oxland, Bomber Command HQ, to Air Vice-Marshal Ralph Cochrane, AOC 5 Group, on 17 March 1943

‘One thing,’ said Dim, ‘if we do go and attack … one of us might possibly get a posthumous VC.’

‘Who wants that?’ said Taffy.

‘Not me,’ said one of the boys. ‘All I want is a Peace and Victory Medal.’

Most of us agreed.

Guy Gibson, Enemy Coast Ahead

After Hollywood mogul Daryl Zanuck was shown the movie The Dam Busters in 1955, he demanded disbelievingly, ‘Is that a true story?’ Yes, he was told. ‘Then why doesn’t it say so?’

RAF Ranks and Army Equivalents

Marshal of the RAF – Field-Marshal

Air Chief Marshal (ACM) – General

Air Marshal (AM) – Lieutenant-General

Air Vice-Marshal (AVM) – Major-General

Air Commodore (A/C) – Brigadier

Group-Captain (Gp. Capt.) – Colonel

Wing-Commander (W/Cdr.) – Lieutenant-Colonel

Squadron-Leader (S/Ldr.) – Major

Flight-Lieutenant (F/Lt.) – Captain

Flying Officer (F/O) – Lieutenant

Pilot Officer (P/O) – Subaltern

Flight-Sergeant (F/Sgt.) – Warrant Officer

Sergeant (Sgt.) – Sergeant

Corporal (Cpl.) – Corporal

Leading Aircraftman (LAC) – Lance-Corporal

Aircraftman (AC) – Private

Air Officer Commanding (AOC)

Ranks attributed to personnel mentioned in the text are those held at the time of incidents or conversations described.

Abbreviations Used in the Text

AOC – Air Officer Commanding

ATS – Auxiliary Territorial Service; women’s branch of the army

CAS – Chief of the Air Staff; head of the RAF

C-in-C – Commander-in-Chief

CO – Squadron commanding officer

Gee – Electronic navigation aid, detecting a grid of radio signals transmitted from the UK, fitted to all Bomber Command aircraft but jammed by the Germans over continental Europe

HCU – Heavy Conversion Unit

IFF – Identification Friend or Foe: electronic radar-pulse identification device fitted to all British aircraft

MAP – Ministry of Aircraft Production

MEW – Ministry of Economic Warfare

OTU – Operational Training Unit

RAAF – Royal Australian Air Force

RAFVR – Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve

RCAF – Royal Canadian Air Force

RNZAF – Royal New Zealand Air Force

SASO – Senior Air Staff Officer; comparable to an army or divisional commander’s chief of staff

USAAF – United States Army Air Force

WAAF – Women’s Auxiliary Air Force; thus a woman serving at an RAF station would be described as a ‘Waaf’

w/op – Wireless-operator

Narrative of operations uses a twenty-four-hour clock, while the twelve-hour civilian clock is used for other timings.

Bomber Command in February 1943 comprised around two thousand aircraft including trainers – the number varied daily, and significantly fewer were immediately serviceable – of which six hundred were ‘heavies’. Each of seven operational Groups was commanded by an air vice-marshal, and contained variously five to ten squadrons. A squadron was composed of eighteen to twenty-four aircraft, confusingly led by a wing-commander, and subdivided into two or three flights, each commanded by a squadron-leader.

Introduction

There were dams; a dog with an embarrassing name; a movie; a march composed by Eric Coates. These memories of Operation Chastise, the ‘bouncing bomb’ attack which burst open north-western Germany’s Möhne and Eder reservoirs on the night of 16/17 May 1943, cling to the consciousness of millions of people of all ages, both sexes and many nations, who may know little else about the Second World War. Wing-Commander Guy Gibson’s biographer Richard Morris has written: ‘The story of 617 Squadron’s breaching of the dams has joined that group of historically-based tales – like King Arthur, or Robin Hood – which defy all efforts at scholarly revision.’

Much that we think we know is wrong. Those of us who read Paul Brickhill’s 1951 book, then watched its 1955 screen progeny, the most popular British war film of all time, should blush to remember that we embraced The Dam Busters with special enthusiasm because the raid seemed victimless, save for the fifty-three dead among the gallant young men who carried it out. In truth, however, something approaching 1,400 people – almost all civilians and more than half French, Polish, Russian and Ukrainian mostly female slaves of Hitler – perished in the Möhnekatastrophe, as modern Germans call it; more than in any previous RAF attack on the Reich. That tragic outcome deserves emphasis, alongside our awe at 617 Squadron’s achievement. It is fascinating that Guy Gibson afterwards reflected uneasily about this, as his superiors never did, writing in 1944: ‘The fact that people … might drown had not occurred to us. But we hoped that the dam wardens would warn those living below in time, even if they were Germans. No one likes mass slaughter and we did not like being the authors of it. Besides, it brought us in line with Himmler and his boys.’

This book represents an emotional journey from my own childhood; from the day when, at boarding school, I first thrilled to Richard Todd’s portrayal of the twenty-four-year-old Gibson, who led 617 Squadron on that fateful May night. Many legendary feats of courage have been performed by warriors who clung to some bleeding piece of earth: the Three Hundred at Thermopylae; Horatius on the bridge before Rome; the Guards’ defence of Hougoumont at Waterloo; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s 20th Maine on Little Round Top at Gettysburg; C Company of the 24th Foot holding Rorke’s Drift.

By contrast, the deed attempted in May 1943 by 130 British, Canadian, and Australian airmen, together with a single American and two New Zealanders, required qualities of a different order. Almost all were of an age with modern gap-year adolescents, or students at university. They embarked in cold blood on a mission that many recognised was likely to kill them, and that would require exceptional courage, skill and luck to succeed. They lifted their big, clumsy bombers from the tranquillity of a summer evening in the midst of the Lincolnshire countryside, barely four decades after the Wright brothers initiated heavier-than-air flight. For two and a half hours they raced through the moonlit sky towards Germany, at a height that made power cables as deadly a menace as anti-aircraft fire. They then attacked Hitler’s dams, flying straight and level at 220 mph, much lower than the treetops and less than a cricket pitch’s length from the lakes below, to unleash revolutionary four-and-a-half-ton weapons created by the brilliance and persistence of Barnes Wallis, a largely self-taught engineer. Half of 617’s aircraft which got as far as Germany failed to return, but two of the biggest man-made structures in the world collapsed into mud and rubble, releasing hundreds of millions of tons of water upon the Reich.

The Allied bomber offensive has become one of the most controversial aspects of the Second World War. Some critics, not all of them German or Japanese, denounce the Western Allied assaults upon cities and their inhabitants as a war crime. The 1945 fire-bombing campaign by American B-29 Superfortresses killed far more people in Tokyo and other Japanese cities than did the atomic bombs later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The concept of air bombardment of civilians causes many twenty-first-century people discomfort, indeed repugnance. Contrarily, it is a source of bitterness to some descendants of the RAF’s wartime bomber crews that the public prefers to lavish legacy adulation on the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of the Battle of Britain – defenders – than on their comrades the attackers, who bombed Germany at the cost of enduring losses much greater than those of Fighter Command. Australian Dave Shannon of 617 Squadron denounced in old age ‘sanctimonious, hypocritical and grovelling criticism about things that were done in a total war’.

Where, in all this, does the saga of the dambusters rightfully belong? The fliers contrived a feat that caused all the world to wonder – the Allied nations with pride, the German people and their leaders with horror and apprehension. Rumours swept the Reich that thirty thousand victims had perished beneath the floods. Though the Lancaster crews were drawn from the RAF’s Bomber Command, the force that nightly rained fire and destruction on Germany’s cities, few even among its critics failed to perceive a nobility about the bravery displayed that night. In the spring of 1943, after nearly four years of austerity, unpalatable food, family separations and spasmodic terrors, only lately ameliorated by a thin gruel of successes, the British people were weary. The dams raid lifted their spirits, revived flagging confidence in their own nation’s powers, as had few events since the desert victory at El Alamein six months earlier. We shall discuss below its effects on the Nazi war machine, which RAF planners aspired to cripple.

I was born at the end of 1945, and thus was five when Paul Brickhill’s best-selling account of Chastise was published, nine when the film was released. Both book and movie made a profound impression. I memorised the names of almost every one of 617’s pilots; assembled and painted plastic models of the Avro Lancasters they flew; became intimately familiar with Enemy Coast Ahead, Gibson’s posthumously published memoir. As an adult, I began to study wars, first as a correspondent and eyewitness in faraway places, then as an author of books. Although my ideas became much more nuanced than those of childhood, I was well served by familiarity with a host of World War II memoirs and histories.

In 1977 I was commissioned to write Bomber Command, a study of the British strategic offensive. In those days, thousands of former aircrew were still alive, together with some commanders. I interviewed at length Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, 1942–45 C-in-C of Bomber Command; Air Chief Marshal Sir Ralph Cochrane, ex-AOC of 5 Group, to which 617 Squadron belonged; former senior staff officers including Air Vice-Marshal Syd Bufton, director of bomber operations at the Air Ministry; Marshal of the RAF Lord Elworthy, who served as a pilot, station commander and staff officer at Bomber Command HQ; together with the inventor of the ‘bouncing bomb’, Sir Barnes Wallis, and wartime bombing adviser Lord Zuckerman. Among former 617 aircrew, I met Group-Captain Leonard Cheshire, VC, and Air Vice-Marshal Sir Harold ‘Micky’ Martin. Many of these disagreed profoundly with my conclusions, but their testimony was invaluable.

The RAF’s Battle of Britain Flight flew me as a passenger from Farnborough to Coningsby in its only surviving Avro Lancaster, an unforgettable experience. I explored every crew position, and occupied the rear turret – albeit with most of my long back protruding through its sliding doors – while an accompanying Spitfire and Hurricane made passes, to give me a gunner’s-eye view of an attacking fighter. As a war correspondent I saw more than a few aircraft shot down, and have myself dangled from a parachute, though happily not as a ‘bailed out’ airman. In 1994 I spent an airsick afternoon in the rear seat of an RAF Tornado of the latterday 617 Squadron, over Lincolnshire and the North Sea.

All these memories have informed my thoughts and stirred my imagination as I wrote this book. Among many previous accounts of Chastise, the 1982 groundbreaker was that of John Sweetman, who performed prodigies of research to transform and much enhance the picture created by Paul Brickhill. I cherish unstinting admiration for Richard Morris, and especially for his 1994 biography of Guy Gibson, which contributed much to Gibson’s portrait in my own 2005 book Warriors. In Germany, Helmuth Euler has devoted most of his life to interviewing survivors of the breaching of the dams, as well as assembling images and documentation: I have made a free translation from some of his witnesses’ testimony, in pursuit of colloquial English. In 2012, James Holland published an exhaustive new account of the raid.

Robert Owen, official historian of the 617 Squadron Association, possesses encyclopaedic knowledge, which he is generous enough to lend to other writers. Rob was a perfect companion on my 2018 visit to the dams, which enabled me to understand on the spot much that was previously obscure about the hazards facing the attackers. Charles Foster has recently published an invaluable new work of reference, The Complete Dambusters, providing images and details of all 133 aircrew who flew the raid. For my own narrative I have drawn heavily upon the researches of all the above writers. Richard Morris and Rob Owen, especially, have saved me from egregious errors. As in all my books, I seek to emphasise the human dimension and the ‘big picture’, making no attempt to match the admirable technical detail about Wallis’s weapons, of which Sweetman and Holland display mastery.

An enigma overhangs the personalities of the men of 617 Squadron. Almost all were very young when they attacked the dams, and few survived the war. Records detail what they did; there is much less evidence, however, about what sort of people they were. With the notable exception of Gibson, their stories rely heavily upon adolescent correspondence and anecdotes. They were unformed in almost everything save having been trained for flight and devastation: many still thought it the best joke in the world to pull off a man’s trousers after dinner. In describing them, an author cannot escape surmise and speculation. Much reported dialogue, especially relating to the hours of action over the dams, relies upon later personal memories, probably more reliable in spirit than wording. On such a matter as – for instance – the sporadic affair between Gibson and WAAF nurse Margaret North, historians depend on North’s unsupported oral testimony to Richard Morris.

Since starting this book, I have been repeatedly asked whether it is an embarrassment to acknowledge the name of Gibson’s dog, which became a wirelessed codeword for the breaching of the Möhne. A historian’s answer must be: no more than the fact that our ancestors hanged sheep-stealers, executed military deserters and imprisoned homosexuals. They did and said things differently then. It would be grotesque to omit Nigger from a factual narrative merely because the word is rightly repugnant to twenty-first-century ears.

I have been moved to retell, and to reconsider, the Chastise story, in hopes of offering a new perspective which almost represents a paradox. I retain the awe of my childhood for the fliers who breached the Möhne and the Eder. In my seventies, I muse constantly upon the privilege of having attained old age, whereas the lives of most of those British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and American fliers became forfeit before they knew maturity, fatherhood or, in many cases, love or even sex.

Yet in the twenty-first century it also seems essential to confront – as many past British writers have been reluctant to confront – the enormity of the horror that the unthinking fliers unleashed upon a host of innocents. A Norwegian Resistance hero, Knut Lier-Hansen, wrote words in 1948 that linger in my mind whenever I compose narratives of conflict: ‘Though wars can bring adventures which stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.’ We shall consider below whether the extraordinary tale of Operation Chastise – its impact upon the Second World War set against its human consequences – is ‘redeemed by glory’.

MAX HASTINGS

Chilton Foliat, West Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia

May 2019

Prologue

Let us begin this story where he began it: in the cockpit of an Avro Lancaster heavy bomber, callsign G-George, forging through the darkness towards Germany on the night of 16 May 1943, amid the roar of four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that drowned out conversation save over the intercom. ‘The moon was full; everywhere its pleasant, watery haze spread over the peaceful English countryside, rendering it colourless. But there is not much colour in Lincolnshire anyway. The city of Lincoln was silent – that city which so many bomber boys know so well, a city full of homely people.’ Guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead, written in 1944, a few months before his death, is one of the great wartime warriors’ memoirs, despite its cavalier attitude to facts and dates. Those who edited the typescript for publication after its author perished softened harshnesses: for instance, Gibson originally characterised Lincoln as ‘full of dull, unimaginative people’, perhaps because his own experiences were beyond their imaginations, and those of most of us.

The book reveals a sensitivity that few of the squadron commander’s men recognised in him, together with a consciousness of his own mortality, derived from completion of an astounding seventy-two previous bomber operations, together with ninety-nine sorties as pilot of a night-fighter. He describes the fate of an aircraft hit over Germany, plunging steeply out of the sky for an interminable minute, ‘then it is all over and you hit the ground. Petrol flames come soaring up into the sky, almost reaching to meet you as though to rocket your soul to heaven.’ He knew. Unlike some heroes who are bereft of fear, Gibson anticipated his own almost certain destiny. Only its hour remained to be fixed, and this May night seemed more plausible than most.

He was leading 617 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command to unleash upon the dams of north-western Germany a revolutionary new weapon, requiring an attack at extreme low level. Nineteen crews were committed to Operation Chastise, and the eight proven in training to be most proficient now accompanied Gibson himself towards the Möhne. Off his port wingtip flew the dashing Australian Harold ‘Micky’ Martin in P-Popsie, while a few yards to starboard was ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood’s M-Mother, its pilot a twenty-one-year-old who still began his letters home ‘Dear Mummy’.

Gibson again: ‘We were off on a journey for which we had long waited, a journey that had been carefully planned, carefully trained for’ – only eight weeks, in truth, since inception, but such a span represented an eternity to very young men, crowding what should properly have been a lifetime’s experience into a fraction of a natural span: Gibson considered entitling the later memoir of his career as a bomber pilot Four Years Lifetime – ‘a mission which was going to do a lot of good if it succeeded’. The chiefs of the RAF had promised the aircrew of 617 Squadron that breaching the dams would inflict damage upon Germany’s war industries greater than any previously achieved by an air force.

Among the sharpest contrasts between the environment of twentieth-century war and that of twenty-first-century peace is colour. We live in a world of reds and whites, blues, silvers, oranges. Allied airmen bombing Europe in 1943 existed by day under sunshine and bright skies, then fought their battles in a universe that was darkened, shaded, shadowed, unless or until it erupted into flame. The undersides and flanks of night bombers were painted matt black; their upper surfaces disrupted foliage-greens and earth-browns. Once airborne, Gibson and his kin inhabited cramped, stunted workspaces, crowded with technology and control mechanisms, black or green save where paint had been worn away by human friction and hard usage to reveal streaks of dull metal.

He wrote: ‘The pilot sits on the left on a raised, comfortably padded seat … usually flies the thing with his left hand, resetting the gyro and other instruments with his right, but most pilots use both hands when over enemy territory or when the going is tough. You have to be quite strong to fly a Lancaster. The instruments sit winking. On the Sperry panel, or the blind-flying panel as bomber pilots call it, now and then a red light, indicating that some mechanism needs adjusting, will suddenly flash on … The pilot’s eyes constantly perform a circle from the repeater to the Air Speed Indicator, from the ASI to the horizon, from the horizon to the moon, from the moon to what he can see on the ground and then back to the repeater. No wonder they are red-rimmed when he returns.’

Gibson himself had much to be red-rimmed about. Since 1940, he had been almost continuously making war. Two months earlier he completed a tour as 106 Squadron’s commander, during which he flew its most hazardous operations. He was now among the most decorated pilots in the RAF, holding two Distinguished Service Orders, two Distinguished Flying Crosses. In the seven weeks since he began to form 617 Squadron he had grappled with relentless administrative and personnel problems; directed specialised crew training; raced between Scampton, Weybridge and Reculver to discuss the dam-busting bomb with its creator and to witness the mixed fortunes of its trials. He had flown low-level tests by day and night; hastened to and from the Grantham headquarters of 5 Group for tactical conferences; delivered the most important briefings of his life; and now, taken off for Germany in the dying light of a lovely English spring Sunday.

Exhaustion most conspicuously manifested itself in an inflamed foot condition which caused pain on the ground, worse in the air. In a conversation with Gibson that morning, the station medical officer felt unable to prescribe medication, lest it impair the pilot’s reflexes. Meanwhile Gibson’s three-year marriage to an older showgirl had become a poor thing. His only relaxation in weeks had been a snatched trip to a Grantham ‘flickhouse’ with a WAAF girlfriend to see Casablanca. Like a host of young men of all the nations engaged in the Second World War, he had aged years beyond the twenty-four cited in RAF records.

That night of 16 May, he wrote of himself and John Pulford, the flight-engineer on the folding seat beside him in the Lancaster’s ‘glass house’: ‘two silent figures, young, unbearded, new to the world yet full of skill, full of pride in their squadron, determined to do a good job and bring the ship home. A silent scene, whose only incidental music is provided by the background hiss of air and the hearty roar of four Merlin engines.’ He described Pulford as ‘a Londoner, a sincere and plodding type’. He embraced Fred ‘Spam’ Spafford, the bomb-aimer, as ‘a grand guy and many were the parties we had together’. His rear-gunner, Richard Trevor-Roper, silent in the remoteness of the tail, was ‘Eton, Oxford’, to which his pilot added that ‘Trev’ ‘was probably thinking what I was thinking. Was this the last time we would see England?’

Gibson wrote of his crew as if he knew them intimately, yet in truth this was the first operation that any save wireless-operator Bob Hutchison had flown with him, and it would also be the last. Most of what he stated about the others was wrong. Trevor-Roper attended Wellington College, not Eton, and never Oxford; Pulford, dismissed in the author’s original as ‘a bit of a dummy’, was a Yorkshireman, not a Londoner. Like all 617’s engineers, he was a former ‘erk’, a ground crewman, maid of all work: monitoring the throttles and dials, moving around the aircraft to deal with small problems, check on the rear-gunner or investigate an intercom failure. Every twenty minutes it was his job to log engine temperatures, fuel state. That morning, Sgt. Pulford had received extraordinary permission from Gibson to attend his father’s funeral in Hull, an hour’s drive from Scampton, to which he had been accompanied by two RAF policemen to ensure that he said not a word to anyone about what he was to do that night.

The pilot described ‘Spam’ Spafford as a great bomb-aimer, ‘but he was not too hot at map-reading’. ‘Hutch’, the wireless-operator, was ‘one of those grand little Englishmen who had the guts of a horse’, despite being often airsick. George Deering, the Canadian front-gunner who was a veteran of thirty-five operations, was ‘pretty dumb, and not too good at his guns, and it was taking a bit of a risk taking him, but one of our crack gunners had suddenly gone ill and there was nobody else’. If pilot and bomb-aimer had ever caroused together, there is no record of it. For all the ‘wingco’s’ leadership skills, to most of his comrades, and especially to subordinates, little Gibson – on the ground, it was impossible to fail to notice his lack of inches – was a remote figure, respected but not much loved, especially by humbler ranks. A gunner said sourly, ‘He was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut and telling you that your buttons were undone.’ By the time Gibson wrote his book, however, both he and Chastise had become legends. Thus, he described a close relationship with his crew as a fitting element of the story.

Reality was that five of the six young men sharing G-George with their squadron commander that night were bleakly aware that they were committed to one of the most hazardous missions of the war, in the hands of a pilot with whom they had never flown over enemy territory. More than that, he was an authentic hero; and heroes are immensely dangerous to their comrades.

Now they were over the North Sea: ‘Our noses were going straight for the point at which we had to cross the Dutch coast. The sea was as flat as a mill-pond, there was hardly a ripple … We dropped lower and lower down to about fifty feet so as to avoid radio detection … After a time I tried to light a cigarette. In doing so we again nearly hit the drink and the boys must have thought I was mad. In the end I handed the thing to Pulford to light for me.’ Gibson was flying in shirtsleeves, wearing a Luftwaffe Mae West, spoils of war that he had picked up in his fighter days. Although they were operating far below the height at which oxygen was necessary, they were still obliged to wear masks, because these contained microphones for the intercom and VHF link between aircraft – Gibson hankered in vain for throat mikes such as the USAAF employed.

He wrote in 1944, looking back to that unforgettable night: ‘One hour to go, one hour left before Germany, one hour of peace before flak. I thought to myself, here are 133 boys who have got an hour to live before going through hell. Some of them won’t get back … Who is it will be unlucky? … What is the rear-gunner in Melvin Young’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? What’s the bomb-aimer in Henry Maudslay’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? … One hour to go, one hour to think of these things, one hour to fly on a straight course and then it will be weaving and sinking to escape the light flak and the fury of the enemy defence.’ A few months later, he chose as one of his favourite records on BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’: ‘it’s exciting, it’s grandiose, it’s … rather terrible. It reminds me of a bombing raid.’ Then Guy Gibson thought about his dog, which was newly dead; and about the epic experience ahead, which would make him one of the most famous fliers in history. ‘This was the big thing,’ he wrote. ‘This was it.’

1
Grand Strategy, Great Dams
1 THE BIG PICTURE

In May 1943 the Second World War was in its forty-fifth month. While it was evident that the Allies were destined to achieve victory over Germany, it was also embarrassingly obvious to the British people, albeit perhaps less so to Americans, that the Red Army would be the principal instrument in achieving this. The battle for Stalingrad had been the dominant event of the previous winter, culminating in the surrender of the remnants of Paulus’s Sixth Army on 31 January. The Russians had killed 150,000 Germans and taken 110,000 prisoners, in comparison with a mere nine thousand Axis dead, and thirty thousand mostly Italian prisoners taken, in Montgomery’s November victory at El Alamein.

Day after day through the months that followed, newspapers headlined Soviet advances. To be sure, British and American forces also made headway in North Africa, but their drives from east and west to converge in Tunisia embraced barely thirty divisions between the two sides, whereas in the summer of 1943 two million men of Hitler’s and Stalin’s armies would clash at Kursk and Orel. Axis surrender in North Africa came only on 13 May, months later than Allied commanders had expected.

Almost four years after Britain chose to go to war, and eighteen months after America found itself obliged to do so, the bulk of their respective armies continued to train at home, preparing for an invasion of the continent for which no date had been set. The Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy, assisted by the Ultra codebreakers and latterly by the US Navy, had performed prodigies to achieve dominance over Dönitz’s U-Boats: the Atlantic sea link was now relatively secure, and a vast tonnage of new shipping was pouring forth from American shipyards. But this was a defensive victory, its importance more apparent to Allied warlords than to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s peoples.

Among the latter, even after its North African successes the standing of the British Army remained low: memories lingered, of so many 1940–42 defeats in Europe, North Africa and the Far East. Many Americans viewed their Anglo-Saxon ally with a disdain not far off contempt. A July 1942 Office of War Information survey invited people to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37 per cent answered, the US; 30 per cent named Russia; 14 per cent China; 13 per cent offered no opinion. Just 6 per cent identified the British as the hardest triers. ‘All the old animosities against the British have been revived,’ wrote an OWI analyst. ‘She didn’t pay her war debts for the past war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland, while her outposts are lost to the enemy … Phrases such as “The British always expect someone to pull their chestnuts out of the fire” and “England will fight to the last Frenchman” have attained considerable currency.’

Thoughtful British people saw that in almost three years since Dunkirk in June 1940 their army had accomplished relatively little, while the Russians endured the most terrible and costly experiences in the history of war. In 1942 Winston Churchill’s reputation as a war leader fell to its lowest ebb, in the face of new British humiliations. The sister of RAF pilot John Hopgood, a future dambuster, was an ATS officer who wrote to her mother in August that she had been cheered by the proclaimed success of the recent Dieppe raid: ‘the feeling that at last we were taking the offensive and that my uniform would mean something. A feeling I had very strongly at the beginning of the war, but it has gradually diminished since we have been on the defensive. This is not the talk of a defeatist, but I think it is the truth which most of us have experienced lately. I hope that [Dieppe] was a dress rehearsal and that the performance [D-Day in France] will follow shortly.’ Which, of course, it did not.

Belated successes in North Africa delivered Churchill from a real threat of eviction from his post as minister of defence. It was plain that the German flood tide on the Eastern Front was ebbing; that the Russians had survived the decisive crisis of their struggle. But the British people had seen little about their own war effort in which to take pride since the RAF’s sublime triumph in the 1940 Battle of Britain. An unusually reflective young airman afterwards looked back upon an early-1943 conversation with friends: ‘It was pleasant to sit there and rest a while and think that the worst was behind … The evening had been pleasant and we had practically “won” the war. But we wouldn’t have been so pleased if we had known of the big battles that were to be fought; the heavy casualties to be borne … The tide had turned, but it was a leap year tide.’ This was Guy Gibson, who in those days led 106 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command.

It is hard to overstate the impatience felt by millions on both sides of the Atlantic for action against Hitler on a scale to match the efforts and sacrifices of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin’s Red Army. The Western Allied leadership was prosecuting the war at a pace that suited themselves, their countries’ immunity from invasion from 1941 onwards conferring the luxury of choice, such as the Russians never had, about where and when to engage the Wehrmacht. British caution exasperated US chief of the army George Marshall and his peers. Yet the old prime minister and his chiefs of staff recognised fundamental truths: that Britain and America were sea powers, confronting a great land power. It would be madness to attempt an amphibious return to the continent without command of the air, which could not be secured any time soon. The voice of Churchill, backed by the intellects of his professional military advisers, Portal and Alanbrooke foremost among them, was decisive in delaying D-Day until June 1944, saving hundreds of thousands of American and British lives. Meanwhile, it was vital to the prestige and morale of the Western Allies, and especially those of Churchill’s nation, that Britain should be seen to be carrying the war to Germany by any and every means within its power.

2 HARRIS

A consequence of the Western Allies’ cautious grand strategy, rendered necessary by their slow industrial build-up, was that the Anglo-American air forces, and especially heavy bombers, constituted their most conspicuous military contribution to the defeat of Germany between the fall of France in June 1940 and the invasion of Normandy. Bomber Command’s pre-war estate of twenty-seven British airfields had by 1943 expanded to over a hundred stations, while the RAF’s overall strength grew from 175,692 personnel to over a million men, including a significant proportion of the nation’s best-educated adolescents.

Some senior officers, including the USAAF’s Gen. Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, believed that air attack on Germany could render redundant a land invasion of the continent. 1943 was the year in which British warmakers drafted plans for Operation Rankin, whereby troops would stage an unopposed deployment to occupy Germany in the event that some combination of bombing, Russian victories and an internal political upheaval precipitated the collapse of the Nazi regime, an abrupt enemy surrender.

Yet, while Winston Churchill committed a lion’s portion of Britain’s industrial effort to the air offensive, he never shared the airmen’s extravagant hopes for it. For a season in 1940, when Britain’s circumstances were desperate, he professed to do so. Once the threat of invasion receded, however, he recognised that, while bombing could importantly weaken the German war machine, it could not hope to avert the necessity for a continental land campaign. The airmen’s most critical contribution until June 1944 was to show Churchill’s people, together with the Americans and – more important still – the embattled Russians, that Britain was carrying the war to the enemy. The prime minister recognised, as his chiefs of staff often did not, the value of ‘military theatre’ – conspicuous displays of activity that sustained an appearance of momentum, even when real attainments were modest. As the author has written elsewhere: ‘There must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved.’ Through those apparently interminable years between Dunkirk and D-Day, again and again the BBC prominently featured in its news bulletins the words ‘Last night aircraft of Bomber Command …’ followed by a roll call of industrial targets attacked in France, Italy, and above all Germany.

In 1940–41 the RAF caused mild embarrassment to the Nazi leadership, which had promised to secure the Reich against such intrusions. Bombing nonetheless inflicted negligible damage upon Hitler’s war effort. Although more aircraft became available during the winter of 1941, poor weather, navigational difficulties and German fighters inflicted punitive casualties upon the attackers, who still made little impact on the enemy below. Thereafter, however, a succession of events took place which progressively transformed the offensive.

In December 1941 the prime minister and the Air Ministry received an independent report from the Cabinet Office, commissioned by Churchill’s personal scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, the former Professor Frederick Lindemann, analysing the effectiveness of British bombing through a study of aiming-point photographs returned by aircrew. This devastating document showed that the average RAF crew on an average night was incapable of identifying any target smaller than a city. In consequence, and after a vexed debate in which practical issues dominated and moral ones did not feature at all, British strategy changed. By a decision for which Cherwell was prime mover in concord with Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, since October 1940 head of the air force, it was agreed that instead of pursuing largely vain efforts to locate power stations, factories and military installations, the RAF would assault entire urban regions.

The principal objective would be to ‘de-house’ and frankly terrorise the German industrial workforce – break the spirit of Hitler’s people – even though the Luftwaffe had conspicuously failed to achieve this against Churchill’s nation. The new policy, known as ‘area bombing’, was never directly avowed to the public, nor indeed to Bomber Command aircrew, who were told that the RAF continued to strike at military and industrial targets, with civilian casualties an incidental, and implicitly regrettable, by-product. This was a falsehood. Between 1942 and 1945, the civilian population of Hitler’s cities was the target of most British bombing.

America’s entry into the war in December 1941 made eventual Allied victory seem certain. Until a continental land campaign began, US air chiefs were as eager as their British counterparts to demonstrate their service’s war-winning capabilities. Daylight operations by American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators began slowly to reinforce the RAF’s night campaign. The British received early deliveries of a new generation of four-engined heavy bombers – Short Stirlings and Handley-Page Halifaxes, followed by Avro Lancasters – which progressively increased Bomber Command’s striking power. They also acquired ‘Gee’, the first of a succession of electronic aids which improved the accuracy of RAF navigation.

Finally, in February 1942 Sir Arthur Harris became commander-in-chief of Bomber Command. Britain’s inter-service wrangles and clashes of personality inflicted less damage than did those of the United States, and for that matter Germany, upon their own war efforts. They nonetheless absorbed time and energy. The Royal Navy and the RAF disliked and distrusted each other as a matter of course, rivals for resources in an ongoing struggle in which both were frequently rebuked by the prime minister. Many airmen also viewed soldiers with the disdain due to their serial record of defeats.

Harris became the most intemperate squabbler. He regarded with contempt Special Operations Executive, the covert warfare organisation for which a handful of bombers was grudgingly committed to drop arms to the Resistance in Occupied Europe. As for sailors, it was one of his favourite sayings that the three things one should never take on a boat were an umbrella, a wheelbarrow and a naval officer. He fought like a tiger against the diversion of heavy aircraft to support the Battle of the Atlantic, arguing that it was a far more economical use of force to bomb U-Boats in their German construction yards than to waste flying hours searching for them in the vast reaches of the oceans. He described the RAF’s Coastal Command as ‘an obstacle to victory’, despite the importance of its Very Long Range Liberator squadrons in countering U-Boats. Meanwhile the admirals, who had a good case in pleading for more aircraft, spoilt this by insisting that Bomber Command should repeatedly attack the Germans’ concrete submarine pens on the north-west French coast, which were invulnerable to conventional bombs, and heavily defended by flak and fighters.

Harris waged a further ongoing struggle with the Air Ministry, of which much would be seen in the debate about Germany’s dams. The C-in-C of Bomber Command was an elemental force, single-minded in his conviction that he, and he alone, could contrive the defeat of Nazism through the systematic, progressive destruction of Germany’s cities. Alan Brooke, chief of the British Army, recorded characteristic Harris testimony at a chiefs of staff meeting: ‘According to him the only reason why the Russian army has succeeded in advancing is due to the results of the bomber offensive! According to him … we are all preventing him from winning the war. If Bomber Command was left to itself it would make much shorter work of it all!’

Freeman Dyson, a brilliant young scientist who spent much of the war in the Operational Research section of Bomber Command at High Wycombe, characterised his chief as a ‘typical example of a prescientific military man … brutal and unimaginative’. Hyperbole was this glowering figure’s first choice of weapon in exchanges with those who crossed him. This became a kind of madness, and Harris a kind of madman, but in the unwelcome predicament of Britain for much of the Second World War, Churchill recognised that such a figure had important uses. Horace Walpole wrote in the mid-eighteenth century: ‘No great country was ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the lengths that may be necessary.’

Though Harris became the foremost exponent of ‘area bombing’, which has ever since been inseparably identified with his name, he was not its begetter, merely its obsessive implementer. It was widely believed, especially by soldiers and sailors, that Bomber Command’s C-in-C achieved an intimacy with Churchill, by exploiting the proximity of Chequers to his headquarters at High Wycombe, to secure support for his purposes. This view seems unfounded. The prime minister after the war described the airman as ‘a considerable commander’. He rightly judged that Harris instilled in the bomber offensive a dynamic, a sense of purpose, which it had previously lacked. He valued the airman’s skilful exploitation of public relations, conspicuously manifested in his May–June 1942 ‘Thousand Bomber raids’, of which the most famous, or notorious, was directed against Cologne.

Yet the prime minister never much liked ‘Bert’ Harris – as he was known to intimates. ‘There was a certain coarseness about him,’ Churchill observed, implicitly contrasting the airman, who set no store by social graces, with such officers as Sir Harold Alexander, a gentleman in every respect, who became Churchill’s favourite general. Harris, just short of fifty when he assumed command, was the son of an engineer in the Indian Civil Service. He spent much of his youth in southern Africa, and especially Rhodesia, which he came to love. The reverse of the coin of his force of character was a vulgarity of language and behaviour, exemplified by his observation that Britain’s generals would take tanks seriously only ‘when they learned to eat hay and fart’.

He experienced a lunatic moment in January 1943, when he became so incensed by the incidence of venereal disease among aircrew that he issued an edict, without consultation, that every diagnosed sufferer should be obliged to restart from scratch his tour of thirty ‘trips’ to Germany. This monstrous threat, rooted in a notion that shirkers were inviting infection in order to escape from operations, was withdrawn only in June, following the intervention of Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, who overruled the C-in-C.

Nonetheless, at a time when many others to whom Churchill entrusted high commands – for instance Dill, Wavell, Auchinleck – had proved weak vessels, despite their impeccable manners, Harris, a four-letter man in the eyes of most of his peers, possessed qualities that the prime minister valued. He said long afterwards of Bomber Command’s chieftain, in conversation with his last private secretary: ‘I admired his determination and his technical ability. He was very determined and very persuasive on his own theme. And the Prof. [Lord Cherwell] backed him up. You must remember that for a long time we had no other means than Bomber Command of hitting back. The public demanded action and rejoiced at our counter-blows at German cities after Coventry and so many other towns … Large numbers of German aircraft and vast resources of manpower and material were tied up in their air defence.’

Harris’s personal life was unorthodox. His recreation was driving ponies: he had been known to take the reins of his own trap to travel to Chequers to see the prime minister; if called upon, he could manage a four-horse team. His wife Barbara walked out on him in 1934, securing a contested divorce on grounds of his adultery. Thereafter, their three children as well as herself were ruthlessly written out of the script of his life, and even out of his subsequent official biography. Not long afterwards he proposed marriage, down the intercom of a Hornet Moth biplane in Rhodesia, to a very young woman to whom he was giving a joyride. ‘I think it would be very nice if you were to marry me – will you?’ Harris demanded of Polly Brooks, who – in P.G. Wodehouse’s phrase – turned him down like a blanket. Miss Brooks offered the reasonable excuse that the airman was old enough to be her father, though she added politely, ‘It’s very nice of you to ask me.’

Instead, in 1938 he married another very young woman, twenty-three-year-old Therese Hearne, a strong-minded Catholic always known as Jill, who gave birth to a daughter, Jackie, the following year. Thus, through the years during which Harris directed Britain’s bomber offensive from his High Wycombe headquarters, at his official residence in nearby Springfield House a wife more than twenty years his junior entertained a procession of Allied warlords while rearing a small child.

Conflict was Harris’s environment of choice, his feuds tempered only by a harsh wit. He once scrawled on a memorandum describing complex alternative means of destroying a target: ‘TRY FERRETS’. He enjoyed the joke against himself of being stopped for speeding in his Bentley – an offence which he revelled in repeating – and rebuked by a policeman who told him that he might have killed someone. ‘Young man,’ the air marshal replied, albeit surely apocryphally, ‘I kill thousands of people every night!’ His staff and close associates were unable to decide whether the chronic ulcers from which he suffered stimulated his ill-temper, or were precipitated by it.

During the year since the new C-in-C assumed direction of Britain’s strategic air offensive, he had transformed Bomber Command from a transport service dumping ordnance almost indiscriminately around the German countryside into a serious weapon of war. Sceptics, some of them within the RAF, sustained doubts about whether burning cities was doing anything like as much as Harris claimed to advance Allied victory. Sir Wilfred Freeman, Portal’s able vice-chief, wrote to the CAS on 16 September 1942 deploring the grossly exaggerated claims made by some commanders: ‘in their efforts to attract the limelight, they sometimes exaggerate and even falsify facts. The worst offender is C-in-C Bomber Command.’

Nonetheless, the RAF’s publicity machine made much of ‘Bomber’ Harris, as he was nicknamed by the press, and of the devastation that his aircraft inflicted nightly upon Germany. In 1940 Bomber Command dropped just 13,033 tons of bombs on enemy territory; in 1941, 31,704 tons. Thereafter, under Harris’s command, in 1942, 45,561 tons fell; in 1943, 157,457 tons; in 1944, 525,718 tons. By the war’s end, Bomber Command was capable of raining upon Hitler’s people in a single twenty-four-hour period as many bombs as the Luftwaffe dropped during the course of its entire 1940–41 blitz on Britain.

Autocratic is an inadequate word to describe Harris’s style of command. He considered himself to have been entrusted with a vast responsibility, and resisted any interference, criticism or even interrogation about his manner of fulfilling this. He regarded with contempt the Directorate of Bomber Operations, a cell within the Air Ministry which provided Portal with in-house advice that often ran counter to the convictions of Harris and his staff, few of whom dared to think for themselves, far less speak out. He especially loathed Gp. Capt. Syd Bufton, who had successfully championed the 1942 creation of an elite Pathfinder force – what became Bomber Command’s No. 8 Group – against the opposition of the C-in-C. ‘Morning, Bufton,’ he once greeted that officer on arriving at the Air Ministry for a meeting. ‘And what have you done to impede the war effort today?’

Among the terms of abuse Harris heaped upon his critics, that of ‘panacea merchant’ was intended to be the rudest, embracing Bufton, sometimes Portal, even the prime minister. The words meant that a given individual was advocating means of defeating the Axis, or more especially of bombing Germany, which did not require the systematic demolition of its urban centres. The relationship between Harris and Portal was extraordinary. Bomber Command’s C-in-C frequently defied direct instructions from the Air Ministry, and sometimes from Portal himself, to divert aircraft from attacking cities towards alternative objectives, of which dams came to be among the most contemptuously regarded, alongside ball-bearing factories, V-weapon sites, French railways, synthetic-oil plants, aircraft factories and U-Boat pens.

The head of the RAF was subjected to barrages of invective from his nominal subordinate, to which he was often driven to respond in the language of a headmaster rebuking an errant pupil. In April 1943 there was a characteristic Harris explosion, about a pamphlet circulating widely in British cities and allegedly also at some bomber stations, headed ‘STOP BOMBING CIVILIANS’, together with a demand from the C-in-C for the identification and indictment for treason of its authors, essentially for highlighting inconvenient truths.

Portal replied on the 9th: ‘It does not appear that prosecution of the authors for circulating [this pamphlet] among civilians would have the slightest chance of success. No court would be likely to hold that it was an offence to advocate that bombing should be confined as far as possible to military objectives. You suggest that this pamphlet comes under the heading of subversion when addressed to an individual in the Service. Even if this is technically correct I do not think it would be prudent to maintain in public that a pamphlet such as this, maintaining a moderately-worded statement of the case against civilian bombing, is likely to incite aircrew to disobey orders … We can however reduce the likelihood of such opinions gaining ground by emphasizing in our publicity industrial damage rather than the destruction of civilian dwellings.’ The RAF’s chief of staff replied to another incontinent note from the C-in-C of Bomber Command: ‘I feel bound to tell you frankly that I do not regard it as either a credit to your intelligence or a contribution to winning the war. It is in my opinion wrong in both tone and substance.’

How did Harris retain his job until 1945, when he displayed an unreason and insubordination that few other senior officers would have dared to indulge? He possessed in full measure the quality of ‘grip’ indispensable to successful commanders in war. Propaganda elevated Harris into a famous figure, and such people become ever harder to sack. He was a man of steel, certain of his purposes when many others, including Portal, wavered and doubted about how the air offensive should best be conducted. ‘Peter’ Portal, as he was known to intimates, possessed an intellect unusual among service officers of any rank, including chiefs of staff. He was a brilliant diplomat, especially in conducting relations with the Americans, whom Harris privately regarded with contempt. But he was also often indecisive. Portal did not oppose area bombing, indeed presided over its inception. He merely favoured leavening fire-raising attacks on cities with precision strikes whenever suitable targets could be identified, and means found to hit them.

Nobody in high places was sufficiently assured of the superior merit of any alternative strategy, or of any more effective commander at High Wycombe, to remove Harris. Later in the war, extraordinary though it may seem when hundreds of bombers continued to fly forth nightly to broadcast death and destruction, the prime minister lost interest in the air offensive: it is striking how little mention Bomber Command receives in the final volumes of Churchill’s memoirs. Once the great land campaigns got under way, armies and the fate of nations entirely eclipsed air forces as the focus of his attention. In the early months of 1943, however, Harris was near the zenith of his fame and importance. He was playing a role more conspicuous than that of any other British commander towards encompassing the destruction of Nazism. Without Harris, without Bomber Command, until June 1944 there would have been only Gen. Sir Bernard Montgomery and his Eighth Army, the North African and thereafter Italian ‘sideshows’.

In January 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt and the US chiefs of staff met Churchill and the British chiefs in newly liberated Casablanca, the British achieved one of their last diplomatic triumphs of the war, before American dominance of policy and strategy became explicit. The US team unwillingly accepted that there would be no Western Allied invasion of north-west Europe that year. Instead, there would be amphibious assaults on Sicily and probably thereafter Italy, together with a ‘combined bomber offensive’ on Germany by the two air forces. The consequent so-called Casablanca Directive ordered British and American air chiefs: ‘Your primary aim will be the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to a point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.’

In the event, no ‘combined’ offensive took place; instead, there was a competition between the US and British air forces. Sir Arthur Harris paid mere lip service to Casablanca’s emphasis on refined targeting. His aircraft continued to heap fire and destruction on Germany’s cities by night, while in daylight the USAAF claimed to pursue precision bombing of identified weak points in the Nazi war economy. Because, in reality, American bombing proved highly imprecise, especially in poor weather, hapless German civilians saw little distinction between the rival strategies. Moreover, intelligence about enemy industry remained a weakness of the strategic air offensive from beginning to end.

In February 1943, Harris stood on the brink of a new campaign to deploy almost the entire resources of his Command against the industrial cities of north-west Germany, which would become known as the Battle of the Ruhr. The enthusiasm of others – within the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the Air Ministry, the Admiralty and even Downing Street – for more selective targeting roused his scorn. Portal, Bufton and some other airmen regarded extremely seriously the Casablanca Directive: they strove to identify and attack choke points in the German industrial machine. Any such proposals, however, encountered savage resistance from Harris’s headquarters at High Wycombe to the diversion of aircraft from ‘area bombing’. Until the last weeks before Guy Gibson and his men set forth on what would become the most applauded operation of Bomber Command’s five-year campaign, its commander-in-chief wanted ‘his’ aircraft, ‘his’ offensive, to have nothing to do with it.

3 THE ‘PANACEA MERCHANTS’

As far back as October 1937, RAF planners identified Germany’s water resources – dams and reservoirs – as a vulnerability in the Nazi industrial machine. Bomber Command initially focused on nineteen Ruhr power stations and twenty-six coking plants, which its staff believed could be destroyed by three thousand bombing sorties. This would allegedly bring Nazi war production to a standstill, in return for an anticipated loss of 176 British aircraft. Then the Air Targets Sub-Committee of Major Desmond Morton’s Industrial Intelligence Centre took a hand, highlighting the dependence of electricity generation, mining and coking activities upon water supply. Morton’s cell urged that the mere breaching of two dams, the Möhne and the nearby Sorpe, could achieve the desired outcome, a prospective war-winner, for far less expenditure of effort.

It was meaningless, however, for planners to focus upon any target system unless means existed to attack it, which they certainly then did not. Destruction of the Möhne, composed of almost a million cubic feet of masonry, was admitted to be ‘highly problematic’ at a time when the RAF’s heaviest aircraft, the Heyford, carried only 500-lb bombs. In March 1938 it was agreed that the significance of the dams made it worth exploring ‘newly-developed weapons’ with which they might be attacked. But, as the engineer Barnes Wallis often later complained, while the RAF was doctrinally committed to strategic bombing, its planners gave negligible attention to the ballistic challenges involved in the demolition of large structures.

Britain’s airmen were imbued with a faith that the mere fact of subjecting an enemy nation to bombing would cause its people, and even perhaps its industrial plant, to crumble before them. ‘In air operations against production,’ wrote Gp. Capt. John Slessor, a future head of the RAF, in 1936, ‘the weight of attack will invariably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community – the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier.’ The intention of Britain’s airmen to play a decisive and independent role in achieving victory over Germany relied for fulfilment more on expectations of the havoc that terrorisation of civilians would wreak than on any rational analysis of the weight of attack necessary to cripple the Nazi industrial machine.

In the cases of the Möhne and the Sorpe, experts at the Air Ministry’s research department at Woolwich warned: ‘If the policy to attack dams is accepted, the [Ordnance] Committee are of the opinion that the development of a propelled piercing bomb of high capacity would be essential to ensure the requisite velocity and flight … Even then its success would be highly problematical.’ Subsequent debate concluded that, given the low standard of aiming accuracy achieved by RAF bomber pilots in peacetime, before they were even exposed to enemy fire, a successful attack on Germany’s dams was impracticable.

Yet British planners continued to nurse this dream, which was mirrored by a German nightmare. On the eve of war, 29 August 1939, Justus Dillgardt, chairman of the Ruhrtalsperenverein organisation responsible for regional water resources, suggested that a succession of bombs exploded sub-aquatically within a hundred feet of the base of his dams, the effects multiplied by the water mass – a scientific phenomenon identified by the British only three years later – might prompt dam collapses. If the Möhne was breached, Dillgardt warned that ‘this entire industrial area … would be completely paralysed … not only would the population of four to five millions be without water, but all mines and coking plants would suddenly cease work owing to lack of industrial water supply’.

Through the early war years, both the Air Staff and British economic warfare researchers sustained enthusiasm for striking at the enemy’s water resources. The Ruhr and its industries accounted for a quarter of the Reich’s entire consumption, much of this derived from the Möhne reservoir. The Air Targets Sub-Committee was told that its destruction would create ‘enormous damage’, affecting hydro-generating stations. The ‘low-lying Ruhr valley would be flooded, so that railways, important bridges, pumping stations and industrial chemical plants would be rendered inoperative’.

In June 1940, amid the crisis of the fall of France, Bomber Command groped for means of striking back at the victorious Nazis. Its senior air staff officer, Gp. Capt. Norman Bottomley, again urged the merit of breaching enemy dams. On 3 July, Portal, then Bomber Command’s C-in-C, wrote to the Air Ministry pinpointing a key target. Surely, he said, ‘the time has arrived when we should make arrangements for the destruction of the Möhne Dam … I am given to understand that almost all the industrial activity of the Ruhr depends upon [it].’ He suggested a possible torpedo attack by Hampden bombers, or high-level bombing attack against the ‘dry’ side of the Möhne’s wall.

But what realistic prospect could there be of such an operation’s success? Throughout the wars of the twentieth century, again and again it was shown that strategy must follow technology, and also required mass, whether in the matter of landing-craft for amphibious operations; radar to negate prime minister Stanley Baldwin’s warning – correct when it was delivered in 1932 – that ‘the bomber will always get through’; or attacks on German dams. It was useless to identify a purpose unless means to fulfil it existed, or might be created, as they certainly could not have been in 1940, when Bomber Command was weak, and Britain’s war effort was focused upon averting defeat.

The weapons available to pursue the airmen’s ambitions remained inadequate in quality as well as quantity. The Hampden bombers mentioned by Portal could carry nothing like heavy enough ordnance to dent, far less breach, the Möhne. A December 1940 study of German bombing of the UK concluded, a trifle ungrammatically: ‘comparison of the Results … with that obtained by [RAF] General Purpose bombs against similar enemy targets left no doubt as to the inefficiency of our bombs’. GP bombs contained too little explosive, yet until the end of the war Britain’s airmen continued to risk and sacrifice their lives to drop more than half a million of them. The 4,000-lb HC – High-Capacity – bombs introduced in 1941, and known to aircrew as ‘cookies’, were relatively efficient wreckers of urban areas: sixty-eight thousand were dropped in the course of the offensive. They were useless, however, against such huge structures as dams.

It was noted that during the Spanish Civil War, Nationalist forces with direct access to the Ordunte and Burguillo dams had failed in attempts to destroy them, using charges laid by hand. Winston Churchill urged the American people: ‘Give us the tools and we will finish the job.’ Where, now, were to be found tools such as might collapse the enemy’s dams? The Deputy Chief of Air Staff responded to Portal’s proposal to target the Möhne that to breach its concrete mass would require dropping a barrage of a hundred mines on the reservoir side, together with a huge bomb exploded on the ‘dry’ side. ‘The practical difficulties of this method are considered to be insuperable at present.’

The great dams of north-west Germany possess a beauty unusual among industrial artefacts, a majesty enhanced by their settings among hills and woodlands. They were created in the early twentieth century, to meet soaring demand for water from both a rising population and burgeoning regional heavy industries. Work on building the Möhne, then the largest structure of its kind in Europe, began in 1908, part of a construction marathon undertaken by the Kaiserreich in the decade before the First World War. Completed in 1913 at a cost of 23.5 million marks, it was opened by Wilhelm II. The flooding of its reservoir, which eventually held almost five thousand million cubic feet of water, interrupted the Möhne river, which flowed west into the Ruhr.

The new lake, the Möhnesee, displaced seven hundred rural inhabitants of the Sauerland. It became a focus of national pride, and also a tourist attraction. Floatplanes and pleasure craft plied its waters between the wars, as they did likewise on its near neighbour the Sorpetalsperre, constructed between 1926 and 1935 in the Sorpe river valley below the village of Langscheid. A narrow-gauge railway carried more than 300,000 tons of material to what became Europe’s largest construction site, where an earthen embankment was raised around a masonry core. On completion, this rose 226 feet above the river, and was 2,297 feet in length. Its lake held 2,520 million cubic feet of water.

The Eder, forty-five miles south-eastwards in Hesse, was a smaller structure, 157 feet high and 1,312 feet wide, damming the Eder river two miles from the towering old castle of Waldeck to create a reservoir seventeen miles long, holding just over seven thousand million cubic feet of water. It was another pre-World War I project, opened in 1914, and quite unrelated to the Ruhr system. The Nazis stocked all their big reservoirs with quantities of fish, especially pike and carp, as a strategic resource in anticipation of falling sea catches when hostilities began.

The German dams, and especially the Möhne, retained their fascination for British air and economic intelligence officers through the early war years. Many and many were the hours that experts pored over photographs and technical reports about wall thicknesses, surrounding topography, defences. W/Cdr. C.R. Finch-Noyes of the Government Research Department at Shrewsbury examined all available studies and assessments, and on 2 September 1940 reported that if ten tons of explosive could be detonated beneath the Möhne’s wall, ‘there seems a probability that the dam would go’. He suggested that if aircraft flying at 80 mph and very low altitude released a succession of one-ton units close to dams, natural momentum would propel them across the water to the walls, where they would sink, to be detonated by hydrostatic pistols. This was a fascinating notion, because it anticipated – quite unknowingly – Barnes Wallis’s ‘bouncing bomb’, in truth a depth-charge. Finch-Noyes indeed urged that a standard British naval depth-charge might fulfil the requirement. One of his old colleagues, a strange, erratic air pioneer named Noel Pemberton-Billing, suggested that the dam might be attacked using a ‘hydroplane-skimmer’ that would jump over its buoyed net defences.

The Admiralty showed an interest in these proposals, not to attack dams but instead to develop weapons that might destroy targets of its own, enemy warships prominent among them. Some serious research and tests were conducted. On 2 April 1941, a paper authored by Finch-Noyes – ‘Memorandum of proposed Methods of Attacks of Special Enemy Targets’ – highlighting dams, was circulated among service departments. After studying this document, however, Bomber Command’s senior operational staff officer wrote that Finch-Noyes’s ideas must founder because of the immense tonnage of explosive needed to breach a big dam, such as no existing or prospective British aircraft could carry. The project might be of more value to the Royal Navy, he said, because smaller versions of Finch-Noyes’s proposed weapon could be practicable for use against warships.

It is often the case with big ideas, especially scientific ones, that several individuals or institutions grasp the same one independently, sometimes continents apart. Both sides in the most terrible war in history recognised reservoirs as significant industrial targets. In 1940 the Luftwaffe considered attacking the Derwent and Howden dams near Sheffield. The German airmen eventually abandoned consideration of such a strike, for the familiar reason that the dams seemed too large to be breached with existing weapons. It required the advent of a white-haired fifty-five-year-old visionary to empower the Royal Air Force to address a challenge that had vexed and frustrated its leaders since 1938.

2
The Boffin and His Bombs
1 WALLIS

If Germany’s dams had been attacked with conventional bombs, rockets or shells, posterity – at least British posterity – might have taken little heed of the story. As it was, the means employed, and the man who devised them, confer enduring fascination. ‘Among special weapons,’ recorded a post-war study of RAF armament by the service’s Air Historical Branch, in language that reflects self-congratulation, ‘the “Dam Buster” must take pride of place … the story of its development and production is an epic in the history of aerial bombs.’

Barnes Wallis was the only ‘boffin’ – to be more accurate, he was an engineer – to achieve membership of Britain’s historic pantheon of World War II, behind Winston Churchill but alongside the Ultra codebreaker Alan Turing and the fighting heroes of the conflict. Until 1951, when Paul Brickhill’s book was published, scarcely anyone knew or remembered anything of Wallis. He had enjoyed some celebrity in the pre-war years, especially in connection with his work on the great airship R100. From 1939 onwards, however, he vanished behind a curtain of official security. He became famous only in the decades that followed, after the release of the film The Dam Busters, in which he was portrayed by Michael Redgrave.

The Wallis legend depicts a genius, seized with a potentially war-winning idea, fighting a lone battle against unimaginative bureaucrats to achieve fulfilment of his conception. The truth was almost entirely the other way around. What was extraordinary about the concept of what became known as the ‘bouncing bomb’ was that in the midst of an existential struggle in which Britain was striving with meagre resources, suffering repeated defeats and setbacks, some of the guiding lights of the war effort, both servicemen and civilians, grasped the potential of Wallis’s fantastic idea, supported its evolution, and within a few short weeks of securing command approval contrived the manufacture of workable examples. Moreover, officialdom proved astonishingly – indeed naïvely – willing to share the inventor’s extravagant hopes for the impact of such an assault upon the Nazi war machine. While scepticism had to be overcome about whether Wallis’s weapons would work and whether resources could be found to construct them, there was much less rigorous analysis of how drastically breaking dams would harm the interests of Hitler – except by Sir Arthur Harris, who had locked himself into a narrative of his own.

Even had Barnes Wallis failed to secure fame through breaching the dams, he would have deserved notice as a remarkable human being. He was the son of a doctor who practised in London’s humble New Cross area, hampered by having suffered polio. Barnes, born in 1887, attended a minor public school, Christ’s Hospital, only after winning a scholarship. He missed university, and instead became an engineering apprentice at a shipbuilding firm, then in 1913 graduated to working on airship development for the industrial giant Vickers. While he was adequately paid, his finances were chronically strained by his insistence upon aiding other members of his unlucky family. No stranger to pawnbrokers’ shops, he once sold a bicycle to pay for his parents to enjoy a holiday.

When World War I came, Wallis’s repeated attempts to join the army foundered because Vickers reclaimed his services. He served for a few months on airships, with the rank of sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service, but retained a lifelong guilt that he had not fought as did most of his contemporaries. In 1922, with the post-war run-down of the armed forces, Vickers abandoned airship production and made Wallis redundant. During the years that followed, somewhat unexpectedly he served as a part-time Territorial Army soldier in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. For a time he studied for an external degree at London University, and was reduced to seeking employment through the scholastic agency Gabbitas Thring, who found work for him as a mathematics teacher at an English school in Switzerland. It was from there, as a bachelor already thirty-five, that he began writing to his seventeen-year-old cousin by marriage, Molly Bloxam, to whom he explained mathematical formulae, then progressed to discussing technical and physics issues that fascinated him. Their correspondence developed into a romance. In that long-ago era before social telephoning, he wrote ten- to twelve-page letters to his beloved, signing himself ‘your affectionate cousin’.

Molly soon pledged her heart to Barnes, but her father was wary of this middle-aged ‘cradle-snatcher’, for a year restricting their correspondence to a letter apiece a fortnight. It was only in April 1925, three years to the day after they met, that they were finally married – to live happily ever after. The Wallises never became rich, but in 1930 they achieved chintzy middle-class comfort in a mock-Tudor suburban home at Effingham in Surrey which eventually hosted the rumpus generated by four noisy children. This largely self-taught polymath rejoined Vickers in the year of his wedding as assistant chief designer, working on the R100, then the largest airship ever built. While labouring at this day job he found time for bell-ringing in the village church and service on the parish council – he was a devout Christian and vegetarian. Until war came he practised Sunday observance, declining even to read a newspaper. A friend wrote of a conversation with Wallis in which he exuberantly expressed his admiration for God: ‘My dear boy, do you realise that the Almighty has arranged a system whereby millions of electric circuits pass up and down a single cord no bigger than my little finger, and each one most beautifully insulated. The spinal cord is an absolute marvel of electronics!’ So deep was Wallis’s attachment to family that for most of his life he subsidised, and indeed supported, first his father, then his grown-up sister and her husband.

All the Wallises were music-lovers, and Barnes played an occasional round of golf on the course adjoining his garden. He proved an ingenious handyman around the house, and an imaginative wood-carver. Though not teetotal, the family drank little, and never succumbed to extravagance. Barnes took a cold bath every morning. For all his devotion to Molly, he could be a stern paterfamilias. ‘We were used to my father isolating himself in his study at the top of the house,’ said his daughter Mary. ‘Always working, often abstracted, he was frequently absent from the daily round of chat, laughter and games which large families enjoy. But when he did join in it was lively and great fun. Even in the darkest days he would burst into cheerful, spontaneously made-up doggerel verse under the name “Spokeshave-on-Spur”, which delighted us all.’ Wallis relaxed discipline on annual family camping and walking holidays. Mary described how, on a Dorset beach, he taught his children to skim flat stones: ‘Mine went plop, plop and sank. His would slide smoothly with six or seven hops and quietly submerge.’ Barnes and Molly, their daughter added, ‘succeeded in protecting us from fear, anxiety, hunger or distress’, a notable achievement for any parents.

Yet Wallis’s stubborn, spiky eccentricities not infrequently engaged him in quarrels. There was a peculiar episode when Molly met, admired and brought home to Effingham the great birth-control evangelist Marie Stopes. She and Barnes disliked each other on sight, and continued to do so, though her son Harry eventually married the engineer’s daughter Mary. At the outset, Wallis and Stopes argued fiercely over his indulgence and indeed encouragement of Molly’s semi-overt breastfeeding of her baby of the moment, a practice which the visitor deemed barbaric.

Barnes’s favourite domestic relaxation was to read aloud to Molly from Dickens, Hardy or Jane Austen while she mended the children’s clothes. The Wallises were good people, if that is not an inadequate adjective, committed to the virtues of honesty, family and honourable behaviour. This tall, angular figure was also, of course, a workaholic. ‘He was a collision of times,’ observes Richard Morris. ‘In manners and values he was of the 1890s; in aerodynamic possibility, of the 2030s or beyond. He combined confidence, self-pity, vision, regret, hope, loyalty, disdain and ten-score other characteristics.’

To understand Wallis’s wartime experiences it is important to recognise that, while his talents and imagination were remarkable, he was very far from right about everything. All his life he pursued doomed projects with the same manic, obsessive commitment that he brought to those that prospered. Throughout a long association with airships, he failed to perceive that winged aircraft represented the future, writing to a colleague soon after World War I: ‘All my heart is in airships, and I have worked so hard.’ He championed their cause, and especially that of the R100, even after the 1930 incineration of the R101, together with similar disasters in the United States, had laid bare inherent limitations of the lighter-than-air concept.

In 1933 the M.1/30, a prototype torpedo biplane which Wallis designed, broke up in mid-air, though the structural failure was not his fault. Its test pilot, Captain Joe ‘Mutt’ Summers, took to his parachute successfully, but the plane’s observer had a close brush with death when his straps became entangled with the rear machine-gun as the wreck screamed earthwards. The man was fortunate to escape, and to deploy his canopy, before the plane spun into the ground. While Wallis was often applauded for creating the geodetic framework of the Wellesley and Wellington bombers – latticing derived from his wiring system for harnessing the gasbags of airships, which created exceptional fuselage strength – other nations concluded that it was too complex to be cost-effective, and the RAF spurned geodetic frameworks for its later heavy bombers.

Between 1941 and 1943 the foremost brains of Vickers-Armstrong were engaged in creating a new aircraft, christened the Windsor, armed with 20mm cannon, capable of carrying a bomb load of fifteen tons at a speed of 300 mph. Rex Pierson, Barnes Wallis – who held the title of Assistant Chief Designer (Structures) – and supporting teams of engineers and draughtsmen devoted countless hours to this project, which never advanced beyond the prototype stage. The ever-improving performance of the Avro Lancaster, which entered service in 1942, made the Windsor redundant, though work on it continued through 1944.

None of the above is intended to detract from Wallis’s achievements – merely to explain why it was not unreasonable for those in authority to greet with caution his higher flights of imagination. At one time and another of his life, large sums of public money were expended on the development of devices, weapons, and indeed aircraft which failed after he had proclaimed their virtues at Whitehall meetings with the same messianic fervour he deployed in advocating his winners.

Moreover, Wallis was only one among a host of enthusiastic inventors peddling ambitious schemes to the armed forces. Lord Cherwell, the prime minister’s favourite scientist, railroaded into the experimental stage an absurd scheme for frustrating enemy aircraft with barrages of aerial mines. Cherwell likewise promoted a CS – Capital Ship – bomb that was an expensive failure, as were early British AP – Armour-Piercing – bombs. Lord Louis Mountbatten, as director of combined operations, sponsored a scheme for creating aircraft-carriers contrived from ice blocks. Barnes Wallis attempted to persuade the Royal Navy to adopt a smoke-laying glider of his invention. The Americans conducted experiments in fitting incendiary devices to bats, to be dispatched over enemy territory, an abortive operation codenamed X-Ray. Evelyn Waugh’s description, in his satirical war novel Put Out More Flags, of Whitehall recruiting a witch doctor to cast spells on Hitler, did not range far beyond reality. Aircraft designer Norman Boorer said: ‘There were many, many crazy ideas being put forward by all sorts of scientists.’

Despite Wallis’s white hair and the faraway look that was often in his eyes, he was anything but unworldly – indeed, he might be considered a veteran ‘Whitehall warrior’. Over two decades of nurturing and supervising complex projects he had honed skills in haranguing committees; guile in exploiting personal relationships; boldness in bullying companies and institutions to assist him in pursuing his purposes. Like many brilliant men, he existed in a default condition of exasperation towards the failure of others to see things as he did. In 1940, when he was working on modifications to the Vickers Wellington and also on a six-engined ‘Victory’ bomber of his own conception, he wrote to an old World War I colleague: ‘Life is almost unrelieved gloom – worse than 25 years ago, except that this time I can feel that I am doing something useful whereas last war I certainly was not … Tremendously busy – on big developments, which if they had been put in hand two years ago would have won us the war by this time. Too late as usual.’

His ‘Victory’ bomber, claimed Wallis in July 1940, ‘is going to be the instrument which will enable us to bring the war to a quick conclusion’. Since these aircraft would operate at an altitude beyond the reach of German fighters, they could fly ‘at their leisure and in daylight … Irreparable damage could be inflicted on the strategic communications of the German Empire by … ten or twenty machines within the course of a few weeks.’

Here was characteristic Wallis fervour: he deserved full credit for conducting unfunded and unsupported research on the science of destroying large structures from the air, at a time when the RAF was institutionally indifferent to this vital issue. However, Wallis was as wrong as the ‘bomber barons’, and remained so throughout the war, in cherishing exaggerated expectations about what air power might achieve. He was as mistaken as Sir Arthur Harris, though from a different perspective, in believing that the RAF, or indeed the USAAF, could alone defeat Nazism, or even wreck the German economy. This objective was unattainable, regardless of which targeting policy the air forces espoused, or what bombs he might devise for Allied aircraft to carry. Yet Wallis cherished one remarkable idea, that would secure his place in history.

2 GESTATION

Barnes Wallis knew nothing about the Air Staff’s exploration of targeting dams when, early in the war, he himself began studying the vulnerabilities of German power supplies, and explicitly of hydro-electric plants, during spare hours snatched from his ‘proper’ work on a projected high-altitude Wellington, and later the Windsor. He spent months considering the possibility of breaching dams with ten-ton bombs dropped by his own proposed ‘Victory’ aircraft from an altitude of forty thousand feet – three times the operating height of contemporary RAF ‘heavies’. An early enthusiast for his ideas was Gp. Capt. Fred Winterbotham, head of air intelligence at MI6, and a pre-war pioneer of the exploitation of high-altitude aerial photography. He was introduced to Wallis by a mutual friend, City banker Leo D’Erlanger, who had endeared himself to the engineer’s children by once presenting them with a pink gramophone. In February 1940 D’Erlanger brought the air intelligence officer to lunch at Effingham, thinking that Wallis and Winterbotham had common interests. Winterbotham was much taken with the cheerfully bustling Wallis household and its noisy children, the exuberant piano-playing, the obviously blissful partnership of his host and wife Molly.

Winterbotham was something of a charlatan, who played a less important role both in the Second World War and the evolution of Wallis’s schemes than he himself later professed. He was no fool, however, and like many intelligence officers was a keen networker and intriguer. He invited Wallis to lunch at the RAF Club in Piccadilly, and was persuaded by him to lobby the good and great about the Victory bomber, with a wingspan of 160 feet (against the Avro Lancaster’s eventual 102 feet) and its accompanying ‘earthquake’ bomb. Desmond Morton, Winterbotham’s old intelligence colleague, responded to this proposal from his new office in 10 Downing Street on 5 July 1940: ‘My dear Fred … The view held [here] is that such a project as you describe could not come to fruition until 1942, even if then.’ This period was, of course, Britain’s darkest of the Second World War; only by straining every sinew could the Ministry of Aircraft Production create a bare sufficiency of fighters, never mind a speculative giant bomber.

Nonetheless, through Winterbotham again, Wallis secured an audience with Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, at which he pressed his Victory project. The gnome-like tycoon seemed more interested in persuading his visitor to travel to America to explore pressurised aircraft cabins, but their meeting yielded one positive result: it enabled Wallis to secure access to the government research facility at the former Road Research Laboratory at Harmondsworth, just west of London, together with the Building Research Station near Watford in Hertfordshire.

In August 1940 Wallis began tests related to the projected deep-penetration bomb, for which he was also admitted to the wind tunnel at Teddington’s National Physical Laboratory. In retrospect it seems astonishing, and yet also a triumph of official imagination, that even while Britain faced its darkest days, and Fighter Command was challenging the Luftwaffe against odds, a ‘boffin’ was able to undertake such futuristic research almost literally on the ground beneath which the Battle of Britain was being fought. From October onwards Wallis attended a series of meetings with the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s Air Vice-Marshal Francis Linnell, Controller of Research and Development, and Dr David Pye, the MAP’s director of scientific research, together with his deputy Ben Lockspeiser. The last, especially, would play a role in the Chastise saga which continued until the day the operation was launched.

In November the RRL’s Dr Norman Davey began construction of a 1:50 scale model of the Möhne, across a small stream in secluded woodland at the BRS in Hertfordshire. This project reflected the interest not merely of Wallis, but of the RAF’s most senior officers, who had identified the dam as a target. At the same period Wallis was granted access to the Air Ministry’s 1939 research on the Möhne, emphasising the fact that he and the uniformed planners had been thinking along parallel lines. This made Wallis all the more irritated that so many bureaucratic obstacles were placed in the way of what seemed to him an obvious war-winner. In November 1940 also, he wrote a testy note to AVM Arthur Tedder, then serving at the MAP: ‘As a result of the continuing opposition that we have met, it has been necessary to resort to these laborious and long-winded experiments, in order to prove that what I suggested last July [destroying targets with deep-penetration bombs] can in reality be done.’

Norman Davey’s team employed technical data on the Möhne dam’s construction published at the time of its opening in 1913, though the Watford modellers somewhat distorted their own outcome by treating metres as yards in the scaling exercise. Hundreds of thousands of hand-cast mortar blocks were made and laid in the freezing conditions that prevailed through that winter. The model was completed on 22 January 1941, and explosive tests began a few days later. The first results of these were felt by nearby ‘Dig for Victory’ vegetable allotment-holders, who found their plots at Garston suddenly flooded by an inexplicable onrush of water. This also bewildered the BRS testers, because while their dam was damaged by successive explosions, it was not completely breached.

In March 1941 Wallis circulated a long paper entitled ‘A Note on Methods of Attacking the Axis Powers’, in which he wrote about water and coal seams as targets. Such natural resources, he observed, had the great merit that they could not be moved or dispersed: ‘If their destruction or paralysis can be accomplished, THEY OFFER A MEANS OF RENDERING THE ENEMY UTTERLY INCAPABLE OF CONTINUING TO PROSECUTE THE WAR.’ He distributed a hundred copies of this paper, with its extravagant predictions, to his aviation contacts – several journalists received it, together with four Americans and Frederick Lindemann, soon to become Lord Cherwell. Wallis’s daughter later remarked on her father’s carelessness about security: ‘I can hear him now, describing to a friend some interesting feature of his work, laughing, “Frightfully secret, my dear fellow.”’

W/Cdr. Sydney Bufton, an officer with operational experience over Germany who had recently become deputy director of Bomber Operations at the Air Ministry, was sufficiently interested to visit Wallis in his office at Burhill Golf Club, near Weybridge, where the design team found a wartime home after the Vickers plant was bombed. A dams sub-committee was formed at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, which in the following month discussed the Möhne as an important target. Initial calculations suggested that a bomb weighing twelve tons would be required to destroy it.

On 11 April 1941, David Pye of the Road Research Laboratory convened a meeting about Wallis’s various advanced weapons concepts with the AAD – Aerial Attack on Dams – Advisory Committee, which was also attended by the great scientific civil servant Sir Henry Tizard. At this it was concluded that the science of Wallis’s ideas about destroying dams seemed sound: the intractable problem persisted, however, of devising a means of delivering to Germany a weapon such as might create the impact that he sought. This was no mere detail, but the core of the issue with which the Vickers engineer and the many technicians associated with his project would wrestle for the next two years.

Their progress was impeded, not by a mindless bureaucracy, but instead by practical difficulties which had to be addressed with severely constrained resources. Wallis scarcely helped his own case by arguing as if he, and he alone, held the key to winning the war. This was a vice to which bigger men were also prone. In September 1941 Churchill rebuked Portal, the chief of air staff, for submitting to him a paper which promised that if Britain built four thousand heavy bombers, the RAF could crush the Nazis within six months, without need for assistance from the other two services.

The prime minister responded in one of his most brilliant memoranda: ‘Everything is being done to create the bombing force on the largest possible scale … I deprecate, however, placing unbounded confidence in the means of attack, and still more expressing that confidence in terms of arithmetic … Even if all the towns of Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable, it does not follow that the military control would be weakened or even that war industry could not be carried on … The Air Staff would make a mistake to put their claim too high … It may well be that German morale will crack, and that our bombing will play a very important part in bringing the result about. But all things are always on the move simultaneously … One has to do the best one can, but he is an unwise man who thinks there is any certain method of winning this war, or indeed any other war between equals in strength. The only plan is to persevere.’

The prime minister would assuredly have said the same wise things to Barnes Wallis, had he been party to the correspondence about his putative wonder-weapons. On 21 May 1941 the engineer received a letter from Sir Henry Tizard, telling him that his ideas for both the Victory bomber and the deep-penetration bomb had been rejected by the Air Staff. Wallis was distraught. His fortunes had reached their lowest wartime ebb.

What followed, albeit painfully slowly in Wallis’s eyes, reflected an important contradiction about the conduct of the Second World War. As a fighting force, man for man, from beginning to end the Wehrmacht showed itself more professionally skilful than either the British or American armies. Yet the Western Allies nonetheless contrived to make better war than did the Axis powers. An important part of the reason for this was that they empowered many of the brightest people in their societies to deploy their talents, with an imagination which the dictatorships never matched. The codebreakers of the US Navy’s Op20G and the US Army’s Arlington Hall, together with Britain’s Bletchley Park, provided conspicuous examples of this phenomenon. So, too, did a host of projects commissioned and undertaken by scientists and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Although Barnes Wallis’s Big Plane, Big Bomb proposals had been formally rejected in May 1941, he nonetheless persuaded the MAP’s David Pye that he should retain access to government facilities, to continue his experiments on the ballistics of dam-breaking. Through that autumn tests continued, to determine the necessary weight of explosives, and the conditions in which they must be detonated, to contrive breaches in huge structures.

It was an elaborately formal age. Many of the papers in what became a mountainous correspondence between Whitehall’s civilian and service departments about the engineer’s infernal machines began as did this one to an under-secretary of state: ‘Sir, I have the honour to state that consideration has again been given recently to the possibility of breaching one or more of the important canals in North West Germany.’ The engineer concerned was referred to ‘as Mr B.N. Wallis of Vickers’. The writer signed himself ‘your obedient servant’.

From the £2,000 budget then allocated to Wallis’s activities by the MAP, money was found to buy from Birmingham City Council a small dam at Nant-y-Gro in Powys, North Wales, rendered redundant by the construction of a larger replacement. A key figure in the experiments that followed was Arthur Collins, a scientific officer in Harmondsworth’s ‘Concrete Section’, who made a breakthrough. For years it had been assumed, not least by Barnes Wallis, that an enormous explosive charge would be necessary to destroy a dam such as the Möhne. Yet experiments convinced Collins, who in turn persuaded Wallis, that a relatively small charge might achieve a wholly disproportionate result if it was detonated sub-aqueously and close to the target, using a timer or a hydrostatic pistol: it could thus harness the power of the water mass to channel the force of the blast. Here was the phenomenon identified as a threat back in 1939 by the German official responsible for his country’s north-western dams. Both Collins and Wallis became increasingly fascinated by the physics of explosions, and especially by the scope for harnessing the power of water, and indeed of earth, dramatically to increase the impact of underwater or underground explosions – the ‘conservation of suspended energy’ that would eventually make possible Operation Chastise.

In the course of 1941 and 1942, Wallis pursued enquiries about Germany’s dams through patent agents in Chancery Lane, and about hydro-electric control mechanisms via an engineering firm in Kilmarnock. In April 1942 – Holy Week, as it happened – experiments assisted by his children, using marbles projected into an old galvanised washtub on the terrace outside his home at Effingham, shifted his attention from deep-penetration ‘earthquake’ charges towards the notion of much smaller spherical bombs, bowled – in cricketing parlance – or ricocheted – to use Wallis’s original choice of word – towards German dam walls. Here, he was thinking in a fashion not dissimilar from Finch-Noyes and Pemberton-Billing. He envisaged two related, but different weapons: a larger model for attacking dams, later codenamed ‘Upkeep’, as it will hereafter for convenience be called; and a smaller version, to be codenamed ‘Highball’, for use against shipping.

Sir Charles Craven, a former Royal Navy submarine officer who was now chairman of Vickers, did not explicitly bar Wallis’s spare-time work on futuristic weapons. He emphasised, however, that it must not interfere with the engineer’s day job, developing the Windsor bomber. In post-war evidence to the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors, Wallis stated that ‘the inception of the [bouncing bomb] was the result of private experiment and work outside the scope of his normal employment and that this work was carried out against the wishes of his employers’. He subsequently expanded on this theme, saying that ‘had he not persisted in his efforts to interest the authorities in the face of continued discouragement and even contrary to the wishes of his own Directors, the attack on the dams would never have been made’. In the narrative that follows, it should not be forgotten that, until the last stage of the development of Wallis’s revolutionary weapons, his work on them represented, in the stern view of his employers, a spare-time indulgence.

3 FIRST BOUNCES

In the late spring of 1942, Barnes Wallis reported to the MAP and the Air Ministry that he believed he could overcome a critical problem – accurately to deliver a charge from a fast-moving bomber against a target protected with anti-torpedo nets – by bouncing a bomb across the water in the fashion he had explored with marbles on his terrace at Effingham. Moreover, a century and a half earlier Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson and his fellow Royal Navy commanders had shown the way, exploiting the technique of bouncing cannonballs across the sea to pummel French warships. At the end of May, Wallis set off with his secretary, former British ladies’ rowing champion Amy Gentry, for Silvermere Lake near Cobham to test the potential of using a catapult, much more sophisticated than a child’s toy, to bounce small projectiles down a test tank. In the course of these experiments they found that, if a golf-ball-sized object was backspun on release, it would ‘ricochet’ far more vigorously. Vickers’ experimental manager George Edwards, a keen cricketer, later claimed credit for this idea, but the evidence suggests that Wallis developed it himself, and merely had later conversations about it with Edwards.

The eventual form of Upkeep was that of a large, cylindrical naval depth-charge. Until late April 1943, however, Wallis envisaged its shape as almost or absolutely spherical, the huge canister containing the charge being encased in an outer shell of wood. It was also at times described as a mine, which became part of its cover story in official correspondence and later news coverage. Since legend, however, knows the dam-busting weapon as a bomb, that is how it will continue to be described in this narrative.

Wallis told Fred Winterbotham that he saw every reason to believe that the new weapon’s destructive principles would prove as applicable to enemy shipping as to dams, locks and suchlike. Thus, on 22 April 1942 Winterbotham accompanied the engineer to discuss the project with Professor Pat Blackett, the exceptionally enlightened physicist who was scientific adviser to the Admiralty. Blackett, in turn, lobbied Tizard, who despite his opposition to Wallis’s big-bomb project a year earlier was now sufficiently excited to visit him at Burhill on the 23rd. Tizard thereafter supported Wallis’s request for access to two experimental ship tanks at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington, where he began tests in June which continued over twenty-two days, at intervals until September. If the pace of progress appears slow, it must be remembered that Britain was still conducting its war effort on desperately short commons, while Wallis was earning his bread working on the Windsor bomber.

Although the Royal Navy was perhaps Britain’s most successful armed service of the war, the Fleet Air Arm was its least impressive branch. Despite the much-trumpeted success of a November 1940 torpedo attack on Italian capital ships in their anchorage at Taranto, carried out by antiquated Swordfish biplanes, thereafter British naval aircraft enjoyed few successes. Churchill more than once acidly enquired why the Japanese seemed much better at torpedo-bombing than was Britain’s senior service. Admirals were thus immediately attracted to a new technology which might make the Fleet Air Arm less ineffectual. For months after Wallis’s ‘bouncing bomb’ was first mooted, the RAF sustained institutional scepticism; sailors did more than airmen to keep the concept alive.

Tizard himself attended some tests at Teddington, as did Rear-Admiral Edward de Faye Renouf, a former torpedo specialist who was now the Admiralty’s director of special weapons. Renouf and several of his staff watched a demonstration in which a two-inch sphere was catapulted down a tank, bouncing along the water until it struck the side of a wax model battleship and rolled down beneath its hull. The admiral, a gifted officer recently recovered from a nervous breakdown after a succession of terrifying experiences while commanding a cruiser squadron in the Mediterranean, urged Sir Charles Craven of Vickers to give priority to Wallis’s weapons research. Renouf envisaged a projectile that might be released from the new twin-engined Mosquito light bomber.

That month, May 1942, Wallis produced a new paper incorporating all this research, entitled ‘Spherical Bomb, Surface Torpedo’. His thinking still focused entirely on round weapons, described in a note from Winterbotham to the Ministry of Production as ‘rota-mines’. Wallis’s paper cited earlier work by a German scientist, and also showed that for a bomb to get close enough to a dam to enable the principle of ‘Conservation of Suspended Energy’ to work, it needed to impact upon the water almost horizontally, at an angle of incidence of less than seven degrees, which meant that it must be dropped from an aircraft flying very low indeed: at that time, 150–250 feet seemed appropriate. Wallis envisaged its release from a range of around twelve hundred yards, to allow time for the attacking pilot to turn away and escape before flying headlong over the target and its defences. Not until months later was a requirement accepted for the aircraft to carry its bomb much closer, and thereafter to overfly the objective.

In a further demonstration of the validity of Churchill’s observation that ‘All things are always on the move simultaneously,’ at the Road Research Laboratory Arthur Collins had meanwhile been conducting a succession of tests on two 1:10 scale models of the Nant-y-Gro dam. On 10 May 1942 Wallis and his wife Molly travelled to Wales with Collins’s team to witness experiments on the full-sized dam. These established that if an explosion took place at any significant distance from its wall, the blast was too weak to precipitate a fracture. Collins wrote: ‘A solution to the problem was, however, found almost by chance shortly afterwards.’ His team needed to remove one of the damaged scale models at Harmondsworth, and used a contact charge to shift the concrete. The result was devastation, on a scale unmatched by any ‘near-miss’.

Further tests confirmed the result, and on 16 July Wallis received an invitation to attend a full-scale demonstration a week later. He was nettled by the short notice, and warned a little pompously that he was working under such pressure – presumably on the Windsor bomber – that he would probably be unable to get away. Nonetheless, he was present at Nant-y-Gro when, on the 24th, army engineers blew a 279-lb charge of which the effects were filmed with high-speed cameras brought to North Wales from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. The test explosion proved a triumph, blasting a breach in a masonry construct that was, for practical purposes, a small-scale version of a German dam.

In the following month, Collins submitted a report which concluded that if a charge weighing around 7,500 lb was exploded at a depth of thirty feet against the wall of a dam such as the Möhne, it should be capable of achieving a breach. Such a weapon would not require the creation of a new bomber to carry it, but was within the lifting capabilities of the new Avro Lancaster, subject to appropriate modifications. Thus, suddenly, the most intractable obstacle to an attack on Germany’s masonry dams was removed: it seemed feasible – in theory at least – to convey to the target sufficient explosive to destroy it. Credit for the principal scientific achievements that made possible Operation Chastise should rightfully be shared between Collins, who resolved the challenge posed by the physics of destroying a vast man-made structure, and Wallis, who conceived a technique whereby the necessary charge might be laid from the air with the exactitude indispensable to success.

In the late summer of 1942, a situation obtained wherein Barnes Wallis had devised a revolutionary weapon, of which the scientific principles were agreed by most of the experts who studied them to be sound. The Royal Navy was excited about its possibilities for use by the Fleet Air Arm. Widespread scepticism nonetheless persisted, shared by MAP’s David Pye and his deputy, Ben Lockspeiser, about whether the resources could be justified to pursue a speculative technology that could only be used over water, and which demanded superhuman courage and skill from aircrew who would have to launch it against an enemy. Moreover, every aircraft which carried such a bomb would require expensive modification.

Such reservations were fully justified. Lockspeiser wrote to Tizard on 16 June: ‘It is quite impractical and uneconomic to modify our bombers in large numbers for the special purpose of carrying any particular bomb.’ Nonetheless the Admiralty’s enthusiasm, and the uneasy acquiescence of MAP’s AVM Linnell, sufficed to secure a request for Vickers to fit a Wellington twin-engined bomber to carry a prototype Wallis bomb, of which on 22 July an order for twelve examples was placed with the Oxley Engineering Company. On 25 August Wallis attended a meeting at MAP at which arrangements were agreed for a series of trials to be conducted a month later, at Chesil Beach in Dorset.

It is striking to notice, at this stage, two camps in the service ministries and the defence scientific community about the whole project. One faction believed that Wallis’s weapons were fanciful; would never work. The other cherished wildly over-optimistic fantasies concerning their war-winning potential. Fred Winterbotham wrote to the parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Production on 14 September 1942, speculating about what Wallis’s bombs might achieve: ‘If this new weapon is intelligently used, e.g. for simultaneous attacks on all German capital ships and main hydro-electric power dams, there is little doubt but that Italy could be brought to a complete standstill and that industry in Germany would be so crippled as to have a decisive effect on the duration of the war … To attain this result much preparation and careful planning are clearly required and meanwhile I repeat nothing is being done.’ Here was a manifestation of a British yearning, characteristic of its time and place, for some dramatic stroke that might sidestep battlefield slaughter and bring the war to an early closure. Winterbotham’s note took no heed of the Alpine difficulties in the way of his fantasy, prominent among them that its fulfilment would require hundreds of bombers to be modified to carry Wallis’s weapons. Meanwhile its expectations about what these, or for that matter any, bombs might do to the Axis drifted into fairyland.

That autumn of 1942, the bomb project languished. Oxley Engineering experienced difficulties in constructing the test weapons, and in October Wallis was kept at home for several days by illness. Only on 2 December did he at last board a modified Wellington, piloted by veteran test pilot Mutt Summers – the very same who had parachuted more than a decade earlier from one of the engineer’s less successful prototypes – for a trial of the backspin technology. It worked, though no test bombs were dropped.

Two days later, on the afternoon of the 4th, the Wellington took off for Dorset, where on Chesil Beach a camera crew waited to record the trial bomb-dropping. The first two tests, with non-explosive fillings, resulted in the spheres bursting on impact. When a subsequent succession of droppings took place, Wallis watched from the shore. Outcomes suggested that the technologies for releasing the bomb from an aircraft, and for its subsequent bouncing progress, were viable. Yet repeated collisions with the sea at speeds of over 200 mph imposed enormous stresses on the projectile during its bouncing progress. Half-sized prototypes disintegrated. Their begetter undertook modifications and adaptations, still convinced that the principles of his creation – or rather, his instrument of destruction – were sound.

Following these further developments, Wednesday, 20 January 1943 found Wallis ensconced in Weymouth’s Gloucester Hotel, from which he wrote to Molly: ‘I do wish you could come & share this lovely room. It would be just perfect with you here. If you could come tomorrow by the mid-day train, do … Now we are scheduled to start [tests] at 10 a.m. … so I must go to bed. All my love little sweetheart, and come if you can …’

She came. Almost two decades of marriage had done nothing to cool the couple’s passionate romance. Molly, still only thirty-seven, was now responsible for six children, including a niece and nephew whose parents had been killed in the blitz. This brood was surrendered to their nanny while she set forth for Dorset. On 24 January she wrote to the children from Weymouth about her visit to their father:

… A lovely time it’s been. This morning I drove out with him and the others to the nearest point I was allowed [to the bomb tests] & then I got out and walked back. 8 miles of lovely road, high up with the Downs one side & the sea to other. It was sunny & clear. I did enjoy it. Of course it’s quite mad that they shouldn’t let me watch the proceedings seeing as I’ve lived with it since last February & probably know more about it than anyone save Barnes. But it’s quite true – policemen do bob up and turn you away. I suppose the others would say ‘If that wife why not my wife’ little knowing what a very special wife this one is.

Darling Barnes. You should see him among these admirals and air vice marshals patiently explaining and describing to them & they drinking it all in – or trying to. And he’s so quiet and un-assuming none of them could imagine what pain & labour it’s been. How he’s got up in the middle of the night to go up to the study & work summat out. No wonder he looks drawn and tired. I suppose if he were a self-advertiser he’d have been Sir Barnes in the New Year Honours. Oh well, it’d have been a nuisance. But it’s an exciting life & no mistake.

The contrast seems extraordinarily moving between the private domesticity and indeed passion within the Wallis family, and the devastating public purposes which its principal was pursuing. Some might find it repugnant, in the light of what later befell Upkeep’s victims, but it must never be forgotten that Barnes Wallis’s country was engaged in a war of national survival against one of history’s most evil forces. The engineer was straining every sinew, and all his own astonishing gifts, to assist the Allied cause. During that 24 January trial in Dorset which Molly Barnes was not permitted to witness, one dummy bomb achieved thirteen bounces. Next day, another managed twenty. Wooden test spheres, dropped from between eighty and 145 feet, travelled 1,315 yards across the water. Barnes once wrote down for Molly the closing lines of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, among his favourite poems: ‘One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

Returning to London, the white-haired evangelist now strode through the corridors of ministries proudly clutching a can of 35mm film, showing his weapon skimming the sea. Eagerly, he awaited authorisation to continue with development of both Upkeep – the dam-bursting version – and Highball, the smaller naval bomb. He chafed for a swift commitment, because for optimum effect an attack on the German dams needed to take place in May, when water levels in the reservoirs were at their maximum height after winter rains and snows.

Instead, however, on 12 February 1943 a blow descended. Ben Lockspeiser told Wallis that AVM Linnell had become concerned that the engineer’s labours on his bombs – nobody used the word obsession, but this was obviously in many service minds – was impeding his ‘proper’ work, development of the Windsor bomber. Linnell did not explicitly oppose the bomb scheme – he was too canny a service politician for that. He merely reported on its speculative character to AVM Ralph Sorley, assistant chief of air staff for Technical Requirements, further emphasising the drain that the project was imposing on resources. Once again, it seems worthy of emphasis that Linnell did not thus play the part of a myopic senior officer flying a desk, but was instead assessing Wallis’s project from the viewpoint of a department besieged by competing demands for facilities to develop new aircraft and weapons systems. Meanwhile Syd Bufton, deputy director of bomber operations, told a 13 February meeting at the Air Ministry that he, as an experienced operational pilot, considered it impracticable to drop Wallis’s bombs in darkness, at low level over enemy territory.

Gp. Capt. Sam Elworthy, a Bomber Command staff officer who attended the same meeting, was charged with reporting on its findings to Harris’s headquarters at High Wycombe, which he did on the following day. The consequence was a note on the ‘bouncing bomb’ drafted by AVM Robert ‘Sandy’ Saundby, senior air staff officer to his chieftain. This, in turn, prompted the C-in-C to scribble one of his most famous, or notorious, judgements of the war: ‘This is tripe of the wildest description … There is not the smallest chance of it working.’ And much more of the same.

Wallis now wrote an anguished personal note to Fred Winterbotham, expressing his frustration: ‘We have just worked out some of our results from the last experiment at Chesil Beach, and are getting ranges nearly twice those which would be forecast from the water tank, that is, with a Wellington flying at about 300 miles an hour and dropping from an altitude of 200 feet, we have registered a range of exactly three-quarters of a mile!!’ He said that the problems of constructing prototypes to be carried by a heavy bomber would be easily solved. ‘It follows that sufficient bombs for the Lancaster experiment (if, say, thirty machines were to be used, to destroy simultaneously five dams, that is, six machines per dam to make certain of doing it) can be completed within two or three weeks.’ He added that modifying the Lancasters would be a far more time-consuming process than manufacturing the weapons, and concluded ‘Yours in great haste,’ adding a handwritten scrawl: ‘Help, oh help.’ It was characteristic of the strand of naïveté in Wallis that in calculating the number of aircraft needed to destroy five dams in enemy territory he was heedless of the possibility that the German defences might remove from the reckoning some, if not all, of the attackers.

Winterbotham responded by writing on 16 February to AVM Frank Inglis, assistant chief of air staff for Intelligence. He extravagantly described the bouncing bomb as an invention ‘for which I was partly responsible’. He asserted that the chief of combined operations and the prime minister were enthusiastic, though there is no shred of documentary evidence of Churchill’s involvement at any stage. He then employed an argument often advanced by estate agents: if the Royal Air Force did not snap up this opportunity, the Royal Navy was eager to do so: ‘My fear is that a new and formidable strategic weapon will be spoiled by premature use against a few ships, instead of being developed and used in a properly coordinated plan.’ He urged ensuring that the chief of air staff was briefed, before it was too late.

Despite Harris’s attitude, and airmen’s continuing doubts about the tactical feasibility, on Monday, 15 February, Gp. Capt. Syd Bufton chaired a further meeting at the Air Ministry, attended by Elworthy, Wallis, Mutt Summers and others, in fulfilment of an Air Staff instruction ‘to investigate the whole [dams] operational project’. Wallis delivered a superbly eloquent sales patter. Upkeep, he said, could be released from a height of 250 feet, at a speed of around 250 mph, at a distance from the target of between three-eighths and three-quarters of a mile. Responding to Elworthy’s concern, expressed on behalf of Bomber Command, about a diversion of precious Lancasters for modification, he said that only one aircraft would be needed for full-scale trials, while those used for an Upkeep attack could be restored to normal operational mode within twenty-four hours. He suggested that while the Möhne dam was the most prominent target suited to Upkeep, the Eder – forty-five miles east-south-eastwards – was also vulnerable.

Most of this was debatable, and some of it flatly wrong. Nobody at the meeting pointed out that even if the Eder represented a suitable target for bouncing bombs, it was unrelated to the Ruhr water system, which was supposedly the strategic objective. The aircraft to carry Wallis’s weapons did not require mere modification, but would instead need fuselages purpose-built by Avro, and could not thereafter be readily returned to Main Force duty. Wallis’s persistence emphasised his gifts as a street-fighter. Where his professional passions were engaged, he was a much less gentle, more ruthless man than was sometimes supposed by those who met him casually. On this occasion, his reputation and conviction carried the day. Bufton changed his mind, renouncing the disbelief he had expressed on 13 February to report in the name of the committee: ‘It was agreed that the operation offered a very good chance of success, and that the weapons and necessary parts for modification should be prepared for thirty aircraft.’ It was thought that as long as the attack took place before the end of June, reservoir levels should be high enough to create massive flooding.

Bufton told AVM Norman Bottomley, assistant chief of air staff for Operations, ‘the prospects offered by this new weapon fully justify our pressing on with development as quickly as possible’. Bottomley, who would play an important role in securing the final commitment to the dams raid, was a veteran networker within the corridors of power. Syd Bufton said of him with wry respect: ‘Nobody could play the Air Ministry organ as skilfully as Norman.’ It was Wallis’s additional good fortune that Bufton and Elworthy – a thirty-one-year-old New Zealander of outstanding abilities who eventually became head of the RAF – were original thinkers, open to new ideas in a fashion that Harris was not. They grasped the terrific theatrical impact that the dams’ destruction would make, surely greater than that of yet another assault on German cities. Churchill once said grumpily, ‘I’m sick of these raids on Cologne,’ to which Sir Arthur Harris’s riposte – ‘So are the people of Cologne!’ – was not wholly convincing.

A weakness of the debate about Upkeep, however, was that it focused overwhelmingly on the feasibility of constructing and dropping the bombs; much less on the vulnerabilities of the water systems of western Germany, the Ruhr in particular. Throughout the Second World War, intelligence about the German economy and industries remained a weakness in Western Allied warmaking, and explicitly in the conduct of the bomber offensive.

Just three days after the Air Ministry meeting, on 18 February, following a telephone conversation with Linnell of MAP, who remained a sceptic, Harris wrote a testy note to Portal, his chief, head of the Royal Air Force. Linnell had told him, he said, ‘that all sorts of enthusiasts and panacea-merchants are now coming round MAP suggesting the taking of about thirty Lancasters off the line to rig them up for this weapon, when the weapon itself exists so far only within the imagination of those who conceived it. I cannot too strongly deprecate any diversion of Lancasters at this critical moment in our affairs.’ Wallis’s bomb, in Harris’s view, ‘is just about the maddest proposition … that we have yet come across … The job of rotating some 1,200 pounds [sic] of material at 500 rpm on an aircraft is in itself fraught with difficulty.’

But Wallis had acquired supporters more powerful even than Harris. After a screening of a new batch of films of his tests before audiences that included Portal, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound and Vickers chief Sir Charles Craven, Pound threw his weight behind the naval version of Wallis’s mine: ‘The potential value of Highball is so great,’ he minuted on 27 February, ‘… that not only should the trials be given the highest priority, but their complete success should be assumed now.’

It is hard to overstate the stress under which the bomb’s begetter existed in those days. He was still spending many hours on the design of the Windsor, Air Ministry specification B.3/42. In the mind of Sir Charles Craven, this was much more important than Upkeep and Highball: contracts for a big new bomber promised immense rewards for Vickers, contrasted with those to be gained from building a few bombs. Moreover, confusingly for Wallis and for the entire Whitehall hierarchy, Craven was intermittently seconded to assist and work in the Ministry, so that it was sometimes unclear to all concerned whether he spoke as the engineer’s employer, or as the voice of officialdom. On 18 February, Wallis worked until 7.45 p.m. at the National Physical Laboratory. Next morning, he met the Admiralty’s director of weapons development, then at 2.30 p.m. saw MAP officials to discuss unspecified aircraft de-icing problems. At 4 p.m. he was back at Vickers, where at 5.30 p.m. there was another screening of his bomb-test films, following which he drove to Dorking with Admiral Renouf. On the next morning, a Saturday, he worked in his office at Burhill, then attended more meetings in the afternoon. On Sunday he was confined to his home at Effingham with a migraine, such as he often and unsurprisingly succumbed to.

Next day, Monday the 22nd, he drove with Mutt Summers to High Wycombe for a personal audience with Sir Arthur Harris. Sam Elworthy claimed credit for persuading the C-in-C to meet the engineer. He wrote to Harris after the war, saying emolliently that ‘your scepticism of what seemed just another crazy idea was certainly shared by your staff’. But the clever group-captain had been impressed by what he heard about Upkeep – and he also saw which way the wind was blowing at the Air Ministry.

Harris was no fool. For all his bombast, he grudgingly acknowledged that he had masters who must sometimes be appeased. He knew that Portal had authorised the modification of three Lancasters to carry Upkeep. While the words ‘whether the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command likes it or not’ were never articulated, they were understood. The Chief of the Air Staff wrote to Harris on 19 February: ‘As you know, I have the greatest respect for your opinion on all technical and operational matters, and I agree with you that it is quite possible that the Highball and Upkeep projects may come to nothing. Nevertheless, I do not feel inclined to refuse Air Staff interest in these weapons.’

That morning of the 22nd at High Wycombe, Wallis was subjected to a predictable barrage of invective: ‘What is it you want? My boys’ lives are too precious to be wasted on your crazy notions.’ Yet it is unlikely that Harris would have received Wallis at all had he not already recognised that he would have to give way, and provide resources for an operational trial of Upkeep. Having viewed the films, he professed grudging interest.

Wallis succumbed to a brief surge of optimism. This was shattered, however, on his return to Weybridge. He received an order to present himself immediately at the London office of Vickers, his employers, for an audience with the company’s chairman. Craven, without inviting his visitor to sit down, declared brusquely that MAP’s Linnell had complained that Wallis had become a nuisance; that his bouncing bombs had become a serious impediment to the vastly more important Windsor project. The air marshal had explicitly demanded that Craven call a halt to Wallis’s ‘dams nonsense’.

This was what the Vickers chairman now did. A shouting match followed, in which the designer offered his resignation, and Craven shouted ‘Mutiny!’ They parted on terms of mutual acrimony. Moreover, while Wallis was not often a grudge-bearer, he never forgave AVM Linnell for the part he played in attempting to kill off Upkeep. He went home despondent to Effingham, sincerely determined upon resignation, as was scarcely surprising after the humiliation he had suffered. Craven, whose responsibility was to Vickers, can scarcely be blamed for his behaviour, after being told by the Ministry of Aircraft Production – upon whose goodwill his company depended for orders – that its chiefs were tired of his nagging, insistent assistant chief designer (structures). Why should such people as Linnell, Craven and indeed Harris have accepted at face value the workability of a new weapon which represented a marriage of technologies of extreme sophistication with others of almost childlike simplicity, which when fitted to a Lancaster caused it to resemble a clumsy transport aircraft with an underslung load?

Yet Wallis knew that, whatever Craven said about the MAP’s view of Upkeep, the Admiralty remained enthusiastic about Highball. On 26 February, by previous arrangement he drove to London to attend a meeting that was to be chaired by the now-detested Linnell, to discuss measures to improve the aerodynamics of what some described as ‘the golf mine’ – because of its resemblance to the shape of a golf ball. After Wallis was told that Roy Chadwick of Avro, designer of the Lancaster, would also be attending, he understood that Craven had got things all wrong the previous day: the RAF had not abandoned Upkeep.

When the delayed meeting finally convened at 3 p.m. that Friday, in Linnell’s office at MAP on London’s Millbank, it was to receive tablets from on high. Sir Charles Portal was not only chief of air staff and a former C-in-C of Bomber Command; he had also been among the first enthusiasts for attacking Germany’s dams. He was troubled by doubts about Sir Arthur Harris’s obsession with destroying cities. His reservations were founded not upon moral scruples – no senior wartime airman admitted to those – but instead on uncertainty about its war-winning potential. Portal never summoned the courage to sack Harris, even in the winter of 1944–45, when his subordinate directly defied targeting orders. But the CAS was always at heart a proponent of attacking precision objectives, if means existed to make such a policy work. Now, Barnes Wallis promised to provide these; to make possible fulfilment of the RAF’s 1937–38 dream, of an assault upon Germany’s dams.

The array of brass assembled at the MAP on the afternoon of 26 February 1943 was told that the chief of air staff had given his assent, or rather had issued an order, to proceed with immediate development of Upkeep. Portal wrote: ‘I think this is a good gamble.’ The reaction of Sir Charles Craven, who was also present, is unrecorded. He must have felt privately foolish, if not furious, following his ugly dressing-down of his designer four days earlier. What the CAS demanded, however, Vickers must seek to provide.

Linnell, too, can scarcely have enjoyed announcing – against his own strong personal conviction – the decision to prioritise Upkeep over the Windsor bomber. ‘The requirement for bombs,’ this MAP potentate now said, ‘has been stated as one hundred and fifty to cover trials and operations’ – one hundred and twenty were eventually made. It was further stated that studies of the German dams showed that 26 May – just three months ahead – was the latest date in 1943 on which they could plausibly be attacked. It would thus be necessary to build thirty ‘Provisioning’ Lancasters, as they had been codenamed, and to produce a sufficiency of bombs by 1 May, to provide reasonable time for aircrew training for the operation. The MAP’s budget for research on Upkeep, which in August 1942 had been raised from £2,000 to £10,000, was now further increased to £15,000, and later again on 1 April to a princely £20,000.

While Portal made a personal commitment that enabled Upkeep to be unleashed, it deserves emphasis that he placed a relatively modest bet. Only air-power fantasists could suppose that a single squadron of Lancasters, a maximum of twenty bouncing bombs, would cripple the entire water system of the Ruhr, an aspiration demanding a much larger force even if Wallis’s weapons were half-successful – almost no new weapons system in history has performed better than that. Yet a squadron was all that the Air Ministry would authorise, in the face of Harris’s virulent hostility, a limited supply of aircraft and uncertainty about the viability of Upkeep. British war-makers have for centuries displayed a weakness for ‘gesture strategy’ – deploying a disproportionately small force as a means of displaying interest in fulfilment of a disproportionately large objective. Mass matters, however, to the success of all military operations, and in this case it would be lacking. Though the RAF neither then nor later admitted this, its commitment to an assault on Germany’s dams was marginal, a tiny fraction of the forces that set forth upon almost nightly attempts to burn cities. To borrow a modern phrase, this would be a niche operation.

Wallis’s commitment to Upkeep, by contrast, was total, and now confronted him with a dramatic challenge. At breakneck speed he must convert his theoretical concept into a viable bomb, while work was simultaneously rushed forward on building the modified Lancasters. Avro, the plane’s manufacturers, agreed to fit the necessary electrical release gear, along with strongpoints where the bomb doors must be removed, and hydraulic power for backspin pulleys. Vickers would meanwhile make protruding retainer arms for the Upkeeps, to be attached to the strongpoints; a rotational driving mechanism; and the bombs themselves. All the latter work would be carried out at Weybridge, with Avro dispatching a team to work on the Vickers site. Wallis promised to provide working drawings of the latest version of Upkeep within ten days. Craven expressed concern about whether a revolutionary weapon of such size could be machined within the necessary time-frame.

Before the final decision, some minor obstacles had to be swept away. By coincidence Combined Operations, then headed by the frisky Lord Louis Mountbatten, was proposing an attack on the Möhne, which Mountbatten described as ‘one of the great strategic targets’. Special Operations Executive also suggested an assault by parachute saboteurs. Both bodies’ proposals were now quashed, fortunately for those who might have been charged with implementing them, in favour of what was designated Wallis’s ‘rolling bomb’. It would be the RAF which destroyed the dams of north-west Germany. Or nobody.

3
Command and Controversy
1 TARGETS

At the end of February 1943, more than six years after the RAF first discussed the feasibility of attacking Germany’s dams, and over three years since the war began, air chiefs and engineers embarked upon a ten-week dash to launch the operation that was shortly thereafter codenamed Chastise. The strategic planning – above all, about target priorities – took place within the Air Ministry. This was gall and wormwood to Sir Arthur Harris, who regarded his own headquarters staff as the only proper people to arbitrate on such matters.

Wallis, in a paper headed ‘Air Attack on Dams’ that had been circulated to a range of interested parties on the secret list back in January, identified six plausible targets – the Möhne, Eder, Sorpe, Lister, Ennepe and Henne – of which the reservoirs held a combined total of almost nine thousand million cubic feet of water, while seven other, smaller dams retained just 423 million. Breaching the Möhne alone, he promised, would cause ‘a disaster of the first magnitude’ extending to the lower reaches of the Ruhr. He appears to have intended this judgement to describe solely the industrial consequences, and to have given no consideration one way or another to the inevitable human cost among civilians caught in the path of the intended deluges, whom air-raid shelters would avail little. Thereafter, to a remarkable degree the Air Ministry made its Chastise targeting decisions on the basis of the assessment advanced by Wallis, a professional engineer but an amateur analyst of Ruhr industries.

From the Directorate of Bomber Operations, Gp. Capt. Syd Bufton* wrote to AVM Norman Bottomley, Portal’s deputy, urging the primacy of the Möhne over the Eder – also mentioned by Wallis: ‘The former is much more important, and tactically the more suitable. We should, therefore, ensure that an adequate effort is devoted to this objective before considering the possibility of an attack upon the Eder.’ He added in a covering note: ‘I feel a lot of time would be wasted if we go to the lengths of making a minute examination of all possible targets.’

Intelligence was a fundamental weakness of Britain’s strategic air offensive. Bomber Command’s decisions about targets were often made on the basis of their accessibility or vulnerability to attack, which had earlier in the war prompted an emphasis on relatively easily-located coastal objectives. Before an operation, immense effort was expended upon fixing routes, providing electronic aids and counter-measures, deciding bomb and fuel loads, and nominating diversionary landing fields. By contrast, examination of targets’ economic significance was often as superficial as post-attack damage assessment. In planning for Chastise, the Möhne and the Eder were prioritised because both were masonry structures, and thus most likely to succumb to Wallis’s bombs. Yet while the Möhne was a hub of the Ruhr industrial water system, the Eder was unrelated to it. At an early stage of the war, the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s experts had concluded that if the Möhne and the nearby Sorpe could both be breached, the effect on Ruhr water supplies might well be catastrophic. If only one was destroyed, however, stated the MEW, the Nazis could probably contain the threat to Ruhr industrial activity.

The Sorpe was an immensely thick earthen dam, which sloped steeply on the reservoir side in a fashion which ensured that a mine which was bounced up its lake towards the wall must roll away backwards on impact. On 18 March an Air Ministry ad hoc Chastise committee, chaired by Bottomley, agreed that the Sorpe’s construction thus ruled it out as a target. It was also decided that a strike with Highballs, carried by Mosquitoes of the RAF’s Coastal Command, should be attempted more or less simultaneously against Tirpitz or another German battleship in the Norwegian fjords. Bottomley reported to the chiefs of staff, outlining progress: ‘the speed with which [Highball and Upkeep] have been developed has been so high and the time available to complete them before the required date is so short, that there is a considerable element of gamble’.

A fierce division of opinion about scheduling now emerged between the RAF and the Royal Navy. The airmen had become committed to attacking the dams before the end of May. The sailors, however, recognised that the first use of bouncing bombs, whether Upkeeps or Highballs, could also prove the last, because the Germans would adopt counter-measures to protect vulnerable watery targets. Thus, the navy wanted Chastise deferred until Coastal Command was ready to attack German warships with Highballs, an operation codenamed Servant. It was acknowledged that the tri-service chiefs of staff might have to be asked to arbitrate on this knotty issue.

The airmen meanwhile reached an irrational compromise about the Sorpe dam, such as was typical of the entire bomber offensive. While acknowledging that it was unsuitable as an objective for bouncing bombs, it was restored to the target list because of its agreed strategic importance. Wallis thought that four or five of his Upkeeps might breach it without being bounced. He cited the precedent of the 1864 natural collapse of the Dale Dyke dam near Sheffield, which destroyed six hundred homes and killed at least 240 people. An earth dam with a concrete core, he claimed, would become ‘practically self-destroying if a substantial leak can be established within the water-tight core’.

This may have sounded persuasive, but it was in fact ill-founded: since the Dale Dyke dam had a clay rather than a cement core, it was not comparable with the Sorpe. The planners eventually decided that the Wallis bombs used against the Sorpe must be dropped following a lateral, overland approach, without backspin, to sink and explode on time fuses rather than by pressure upon a hydrostatic pistol. It seems remarkable that Wallis or anyone else supposed that Upkeeps would thus achieve their purpose-designed ballistic effect any more than might any other explosive charge of similar size – in other words, a conventional bomb. It is hard not to suspect that the engineer asserted the plausibility of destroying the Sorpe because he feared that if he did not do so, the entire commitment to Chastise would once more be thrust into doubt because of that dam’s strategic centrality.

On 25 March another meeting of the Air Ministry committee, attended by an array of brass representing both the Royal Navy and the RAF, including Saundby from Bomber Command, was told that construction of the ‘Type 464 Provisioning’ Lancaster variants was proceeding on schedule. Sixteen Mosquitoes were also being readied to carry Highball. Forty inert Upkeeps had been constructed for test purposes.

Two important, related tactical decisions were made. The first was that moonlight would be essential, to enable crews to drop their weapons with the necessary accuracy. Normal Bomber Command ‘ops’ did not take place under such conditions, which made aircraft of Harris’s Main Force easy prey for night-fighters, responsible for almost three-quarters of Luftwaffe ‘kills’ of British bombers. Thus, the Chastise attackers would fly all the way to their targets at very low level, below the German radar threshold, where they would be hard for fighters to spot or engage. The principal menaces to the Lancasters’ survival would be light flak – anti-aircraft gunfire – and such physical hazards as power lines.

Even as these issues were being thrashed out, at High Wycombe Harris made the only significant decision with which he, as a declared Chastise sceptic, was entrusted: which aircrew should fly the operation? The C-in-C determined that they should be drawn from 5 Group, an elite formation that he himself had commanded earlier in the war. He instructed its new AOC, Ralph Cochrane, that instead of diverting a line squadron to attack the dams he should form a new, special one. He also identified the officer who should lead it.

2 GIBSON

And so to Wing-Commander Guy Penrose Gibson, the man with the dog; the short, sad twenty-four-year-old with the brilliant smile who became a national hero. At the Air Ministry meeting of 15 February Saundby, newly promoted to become Harris’s deputy, asserted that ‘two weeks would provide sufficient time in which to train crews for this operation’ – which said more about his own and his chief’s insouciant attitude to Chastise than about their understanding of the supreme challenge their fliers were about to be invited to undertake. For years the vexed debate about an air attack on Germany’s dams had focused upon means – devising weapons that might make possible such a stroke. Now, however, the spotlight shifted: towards the very young men, still unknowing two months before they took off, who would be called upon to fulfil the vision of Barnes Wallis.

Gibson was about to go on leave to Cornwall, after receiving a second DSO for his distinguished tenure commanding 106 Squadron, when on the afternoon of 14 March 1943 he was summoned to Grantham to see 5 Group’s chilly, clever new AOC. The Hon. Ralph Cochrane, by common consent Harris’s outstanding subordinate, was an autocrat possessed of better manners and more imagination than his superior at High Wycombe, especially about means of attacking Germany from the air. He was a scion of a smart Scottish family – his father was an army officer turned Unionist politician, ennobled in 1919. Ralph, one of five children, entered the Royal Naval College, Osborne, aged thirteen in 1908, the year in which the Wright brothers made their first flights in Europe.

While flying airships on convoy escort duty during the First World War, he met Barnes Wallis. Cochrane once tried to sink a German submarine by dropping four 8-lb bombs on it, without convincing either himself or the enemy of the efficacy of air power. He was still an airship man when he encountered Sir Hugh ‘Boom’ Trenchard, wartime commander of the Royal Flying Corps and founding father of the RAF. ‘Young man,’ said Trenchard, ‘you’re wasting your time. Go and learn to fly an aeroplane.’ Within a few years, Cochrane was serving as a flight commander in Iraq, where Arthur Harris was converting Vernon troop-carriers into bombers on his own initiative, and experimenting with the prone position for bomb-aiming. In 1937 Cochrane became a founding chief of staff for New Zealand’s air force. By 1943 he was recognised as one of the RAF’s ablest senior officers, described by a navigator in one of his squadrons, later the offensive’s official historian, as ‘a ruthless martinet’.

A bewildered Gibson was kept hanging around for several days at St Vincent’s Hall, the rambling Victorian mansion boasting its own tower and spire in which 5 Group had its headquarters. He wrote: ‘Group headquarters are funny places. There is an air of quiet, cold efficiency. Waafs keep running in and out with cups of tea. Tired men walk through the corridors with red files under their arms. The yellow lights over the doors of the Air Officer Commanding and [his senior staff officer] are almost always on, showing that they are engaged.’ Gibson’s account of his encounter with Cochrane, which appears finally to have taken place on Thursday, 18 March, is probably roughly accurate: ‘in one breath he congratulated me on my bar to the DSO, in the next he suddenly said: “How would you like the idea of doing one more trip?”’

This was an extraordinary demand to make of an exhausted young officer who had already done more towards winning the war than could reasonably be asked of any man. Yet Harris did not hesitate to instruct Cochrane to make it. Whatever the C-in-C’s doubts about Wallis, Upkeep and dams, he possessed sufficient guile to be determined to ensure that, since Chastise was to happen, his own brand should be stamped upon it. It was thus logical that he should nominate a protégé to lead the special squadron to be formed to fulfil Portal’s fantasy. When Gibson was nominated for a second DSO, Cochrane – who appears previously to have met him only once or twice – queried the award, suggesting that a third DFC would be more appropriate. Harris sharply overruled him: ‘Any Captain who completes 172 sorties in an outstanding manner is worth two DSOs, if not a VC. Bar to DSO approved.’

Gibson wrote later about Cochrane’s proposal at St Vincent’s: ‘I gulped. More flak, more fighters. “What kind of trip, sir?” “A pretty important one, perhaps one of the most devastating of all time. I can’t tell you any more now. Do you want to do it?” I said I thought I did, trying to remember where I had left my flying kit.’ Gibson momentarily supposed that he was being invited to undertake the special mission that very night, or the next. Yet for such a man as himself, who had come to know no other life save bombing, who was justly proud of being the best, the defier of fate, it was unthinkable that he should have said no.

Some commanders might have hesitated to make the request, however, in the face of Gibson’s exhaustion, observed by all those who spent time with him, and manifested in severe attacks of pain in his feet. Immense labour was involved in recruiting, establishing and training a new squadron, comprising some five hundred men. In addition, its commander must meet Barnes Wallis; address technical issues with Vickers and Avro; discuss tactics with 5 Group staff officers; plan operational details; exercise in the air with whatever scratch crew he himself might assemble. Gibson did not yet know what he and his men would be asked to do, but Harris did, and Cochrane. The C-in-C and 5 Group’s AOC were indeed ruthless men. How could they have fulfilled their roles, towards both the German people and their own aircrew, had they been anything else?

Three days later Cochrane saw Gibson again, and told him somewhat more: he was to form a special unit to execute the special operation, which could not take place for two months. He introduced the airman to Gp. Capt. Charles Whitworth, base commander at Scampton, four miles north of Lincoln, where ‘Squadron X’ would be based. Secrecy would be vital. For the time being, however, all that Gibson need know about the target was that he must train his crews and prepare his aircraft to fly very, very low. On the afternoon of Sunday, 21 March Gibson drove through the gates of Scampton bomber station to embark upon two months of extraordinary exertion, which would define his short life.

Most human beings have their demons, but the new commander of the squadron that within days became 617, the number allocated by the Air Ministry in a natural succession, was tormented by more than most. He was born in the Punjab in 1918, third child of an unhappy marriage between Leonora, a nineteen-year-old Englishwoman, and Alex, a much older officer of the Indian Forestry Service, himself born in Russia. Guy spent his early childhood pampered by the tribe of domestic attendants customary among servants of the Raj, which some of his critics claimed influenced the abruptness with which he later treated comrades of a lower caste. He was only six, however, when his mother abandoned her husband and travelled to England to place Guy in an English school.

Once ‘home’, Nora Gibson became an alcoholic. Her son was a fifteen-year-old pupil at St Edward’s, a minor public school in Oxford, when his mother was given a three-month prison sentence for a series of offences involving dangerous driving and causing injury to pedestrians. A psychologist described her as prone to ‘erratic, impulsive and excitable behaviour’. Guy thereafter saw little of her; on Christmas Eve 1939, aged forty-four, she suffered a ghastly lingering death after her clothes caught fire on becoming entangled in an electric stove while she was drunk. It is unrecorded whether Gibson heard the news immediately, but that night he became paralytically drunk at a mess party, and hurled a succession of fire extinguishers through a glass window. He makes no mention of his mother’s death in his memoir, but it is impossible to doubt its impact upon him.

Ralph Cochrane once described Gibson as ‘the sort of boy who would have been head prefect in any school’, but at St Edward’s he achieved neither distinction nor notoriety, academically or as a sportsman. Like so many of his contemporaries, the ‘Lindbergh generation’, he forged an early passion to fly, but his first application to join the RAF was rejected. The Battle of Britain conferred supreme glamour on fliers as the ‘Brylcreem boys’, jealously mocked by soldiers and sailors after an airman’s image was adopted to advertise the hair cream. Before 1940, however, pilots lacked social cachet. Indeed, they had a rueful pre-war joke that a flier would sooner tell people he was a pianist in a brothel than admit to being a member of the RAF. Even after hostilities began, while many British aristocrats enlisted in the army and some in the Royal Navy, very few became pilots. The aircrew of 617 Squadron eventually included several public schoolboys and one Etonian, but none were authentic ‘toffs’.

In Gibson’s case, after a few months the RAF relented and accepted him for pilot training. This was indisputably exciting, but also perilous: during the inter-war years sixty-two cadets at Cranwell, the service’s elite college, were killed in flying accidents. In November 1936, aged just eighteen, three months after leaving St Edward’s, Gibson reported for instruction to the airfield at Yatesbury in Wiltshire. He graduated the following year, with a rating of ‘average’. He ranked lower than that as a companion, however, being widely viewed, in the schoolboy slang of the period, as ‘bumptious’. Perhaps to compensate for a lack of physical stature, he was gauchely assertive and immodest. His determination to make a mark, to get on, was not in doubt. But his manner of setting about this, and especially his condescension to lower ranks, including ground crew, did not make him popular. He wrote later: ‘I was no serviceman; I joined the Air Force in 1936 purely to learn to fly. I was due to leave the RAF [in April 1940] to become a test pilot – a good job with plenty of money in it.’

At the coming of war his squadron commander said wryly: ‘Now’s your chance to be a hero, Gibbo.’ The young bomber pilot indeed welcomed the opportunity for advancement, as did many career warriors in all three services, but realised how slight were his chances of survival. He sought to stop his elder brother buying him a wristwatch as a present: ‘Don’t do it,’ he said. ‘I’m a dead man.’

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