The Dam Busters (9 page)

They had bacon and egg and stood round the bar with pints, drinking and waiting for the others. It was an hour since the last aircraft had landed. Shannon said Dinghy Young had ditched, and someone said, “What, is the old soak going to paddle back again? That’s the third time he’s done it. He’ll do it once too often.” Young
had
done it once too often. He was not in his dinghy this time.

Wallis was asking anxiously, “Where are they? Where are all the others?”

Summers said, “Oh, they’ll be along. Give ‘em time. They’ve probably landed somewhere else”: but after a while it was impossible to cover up any longer and Wallis knew they were all standing round getting drunk for the ones who were not coming back. Except himself; he didn’t drink. Martin made him take a half pint but he only held it and stood there blinking back tears and said, “Oh, if I’d only known, I’d never have started this ! “Mutt and Charles Whitworth tried to take his mind off it.

Gibson left the party early, but not for bed; he went over to the hangar to give Humphries and Chiefy Powell a hand with the casualty telegrams to the next of kin. Fifty-six beardless men out of 133 were missing, and only three had got out by parachute at a perilously low height to spend the rest of the war miserably in prison camp. Gibson had expected to lose several over the Moehne, where those sinister installations had been spotted by the recce aircraft, but they had lost only one there. (It was not till after the war that they discovered that those dark shapes on top of the Moehne had been—trees… ornamental pine trees. In the middle of the war the Germans would not send extra guns but had gone to the trouble of decorating it.)

Around lunchtime the party survivors transferred to Whit-worth’s house and Whitworth’s best port. Wallis came tiredly downstairs in a dressing-gown, distressed about the losses, and after a while he left to fly back to Weybridge with Summers. Martin gave him a sleeping-pill as he was leaving so he would sleep that night. He slept all right. The weary scientist swallowed the pill sitting up in bed at home and went out like a light.

About two o’clock even the durable Martin and Whittaker were ready for bed, but they were all up again at five o’clock and drove over in buses to a party at Woodhall Spa. On the way back David Shannon and Anne were sitting close together, and Shannon leaned closer so the others couldn’t hear and asked her to marry him.

“Oh, David,” she said, and there was a pause, “n-n-not with that moustache.”

Shannon fingered the growth defensively. It was a dear possession; made him look years older—at least twenty-two. He groaned. “What is it?” he said. “My moustache or you?” There was only silence and he sighed, “All right, I’ll whip it off.”

In the morning 617 Squadron went on leave, three days for the ground crew, seven days for the aircrew survivors— except Gibson, who stayed on two days to write to the mothers of the dead. He wrote them all out in his own hand, different ones each time, fifty-six of them.

In London and in their homes the crews found they were famous, though the headlines in Germany were not so flattering. A recce Mosquito arrived back from over Germany with the first pictures of the damage, and they were breath-taking. The Moehne and Eder lakes were empty and 330 million tons of water were spreading like a cancer through the western Ruhr valleys, the bones of towns and villages showing lifeless in the wilderness.

The Ruhr, which had been enduring its ordeal by fire, was having it: now by water. For fifty miles from the Moehne and fifty miles from the Eder coal mines were flooded and factories collapsed. At Fritzlar one of Hitler’s largest military aerodromes was under water, the aircraft, the landing ground, hangars, barracks and bomb dumps. Roads, railways and bridges had disappeared. The Unterneustadt industrial suburb of Kassel, forty miles from the Eder, was under water, and the flood ran miles on down the Fulda Valley. Canal banks were washed away, power stations had disappeared, the Ruhr foundries were without water for making steel. A dozen waterworks were destroyed as far away as Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund, Hamm and Bochum. The communications system feeding raw materials to the Ruhr and taking away the finished weapons was disrupted. Some factories were not swept away but still could not work because there was no electricity. Or no water.

In the small town of Neheim alone 2,000 men, including 1,250 soldiers, were diverted to repair damage. Another 2,000 men were trying to repair the dams. And in the months ahead, in the Battle of the Ruhr, there was not enough water to put the fires out.

The official German report said it was “a dark picture of destruction.” By the next autumn they might know how much industrial production would be ultimately affected, but estimated it was going to mean the equivalent of the loss of production of 100,000 men for several months.

A hundred and twenty-five factories were either destroyed or badly damaged, nearly 3,000 hectares of arable land were ruined, 25 bridges had vanished, and 21 more were badly damaged. The livestock losses were 6,500 cattle and pigs.

There was a moral price to pay too; there always is. 1,294 people drowned in the floods, and most were civilians. Most were not German—there were 749 slaves and prisoners among the dead. There had been a Russian P.O.W. camp in the valley below the Eder.

Gibson spent his leave quietly with his wife, Eve, who had had a shock when she had opened the papers and found Guy’s name and photographs splashed over the front pages. All the time he had been at 617 he had told her he was having a rest at a flying training school.

Micky Martin was summoned to Australian Air Force Headquarters, where a dark, pretty girl called Wendy tried her hardest to get him to talk about the raid for a story for Australia, but all the incorrigible Martin would say was, “Come and have lunch with me,” and kept it up until she did.

Then the decorations came through—thirty-three of them. Gibson was awarded the Victoria Cross. Martin, McCarthy, Maltby, Shannon and Knight got D.S.Os. Bob Hay, Hutchison, Leggo and Danny Walker got bars to their D.F.Cs. There were ten D.F.Cs., among them Trevor-Roper, Buckley, Deering, Spafford and Taerum. Brown and Townsend got the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, and there were twelve D.F.Ms., among them being Tammy Simpson, Sumpter, Oancia and Pulford.

When he heard the news Gibson rang for Flight Sergeant Powell. “Chiefy,” he said quietly, “if I ever change, tell me.”

On May 27 the King and Queen visited the newly famous squadron, and the crews pressed their uniforms and stood in front of their aircraft to be presented, though Martin overlooked one point and was standing there smartly to attention with an orange sticking out of his pocket.

Gibson had had a competition for a design for a squadron badge, and after the parade he showed the King the roughs and asked if he would choose one. The King called the Queen, and unanimously they picked a drawing showing a darn breached in the middle with water flowing out and bolts of lightning above. Underneath, the motto was
“Apres nous, le deluge”

CHAPTER IX THE BLACKEST HOUR

WEEKS passed placidly. The squadron got new aircraft and did a lot of training flying, both high and low level, finding it boring, and the crews, who were supposed to be the pick of Bomber Command, became “browned off.” Men of other squadrons who were doing several ops. a week took to ragging them as the “One op. squadron”.

Cochrane told Gibson he had done enough operations and would not let him fly again. Squadron Leader George Holden, D.S.O., D.F.C., arrived to take over, but Gibson stayed on for a few days. Holden was slight and youthful with fair wavy hair but a brusque manner. Before the war he had worn a bowler and carried a rolled umbrella, but was a very tough young man. He had felt very sick once but kept flying on ops. for over a week till he nearly collapsed after landing one night and went to the doctor, who examined him and said, a little startled, “Well, I think you’ve had pleurisy, but you seem to be nearly all right now.”

617 went to war again on July 15, against power stations in Northern Italy. It was a long way, the aircraft would arrive with tanks two-thirds empty and there was no hope of flying back to England. Yells of joy when they were told they would fly on to Blida, an airfield in North Africa, near Algiers. The only glum one was Gibson, categorically forbidden to go. It was a “cissy” trip; no opposition on the way, but they found the targets cloaked in haze and bombed largely by guesswork. Several aircraft were hit and Allsebrook lost an engine, but they all landed safely at Blida. At the de-briefing McCarthy threw his parachute down disgustedly and said, “You know, if we’d only carried flares tonight we could’ve seen what we were doing.” No one took much notice just then, but it was that remark, remembered later, that was partly responsible for the history they made.

On the flight home they called at Leghorn to deliver some bombs over the docks, but again there was haze and they were not pleased with the bombing.

Martin flew back over the Alps at 19,000 feet, to the dismay of Tammy Simpson in the rear turret, who had thought they were returning low over France and had worn only his light tropical kit. Back at Scampton they thawed him out with rum.

Gibson was not there to meet them. He had gone. Harris and Cochrane had put a definite stop to his flying by asking Winston Churchill to take him with him to America for a “show the flag” tour, and Gibson had had no option. He’d been so upset he had not been able to face the farewells.

In August they were back to boredom. No ops., but training all and every day.

It was about this time that disturbing reports were coming out of Germany about a mysterious new weapon. Apparently Hitlers notorious “secret weapon”. Agents could not say what it was but sensed it was something special. A couple of escaped prisoners of war reached England with information that hinted at rockets and indicated an area north-east of Luebeck. In the Pas de Calais area thousands of workmen were swarming about monstrous new concrete works. A recce aircraft brought back a photograph of a strange new factory at Peenemunde, north-east o
^f
Luebeck. Lying on the ground were pencil-shaped objects that baffled the interpretive men, but little by little they began to connect the rocket reports with the pencil-shaped objects and the concrete structures, which would obviously be impervious to any R.A.F. bombs. The 12,000-pounder thin-case bomb was nearly ready
,
but it was purely a blast bomb, to explode on the ground and knock over buildings. It would not dent masses of concrete half embedded in earth.

The spies were right. Seventy miles from London, just behind Calais., Hitler was building his secret-weapon blockhouses, fantastic structures which would bombard London and the invasion ports nonstop in spite of anything we could do. They were all of reinforced concrete, walls 16 feet thick and roofs 20 feet thick! No known bomb would affect them. The Todt Organisation promised Hitler that.

At Watton, Wizernes and Siracourt the blockhouses were to be assembly, storage and launching sites for rockets and flying bombs. Twelve thousand slaves were working on them, and deep under the concrete they were carving tunnels and chambers in the chalk and rock where Germans could live and fire their rockets without interruption.

But the greatest nightmare of all was the grotesque underworld being burrowed under a 20-foot thick slab of ferro-concrete near Mimoyecques. Here Hitler was preparing his
F.J.
Little has ever been told about V.3, probably because we never found out much about it. V.3
was the most secret and sinister of all
—
long-range guns with barrels
500
feet long!

The muzzles would never appear above earth; the entire barrels would be sunk in shafts that dived at
50
degrees
500
feet into the ground. Hitler was putting fifteen of these guns in at Mimoyecques, five guns, side by side, in each of three shafts. They were smooth-bore barrels, and a huge slow-burning charge would fire a 10-inch shell with a long, steady acceleration, so there would be no destructive heat and pressure in the barrel. In that way the barrels would not quickly wear out as Big Bertha did in World War I. These were more monstrous in every way than Big Bertha; they fired a bigger shell, could go on firing for a long time and, more important than that, they had a rapid rate of fire. Thick armour-plate doors in the concrete would slide back when they were ready, and then the nest of nightmare guns would pour out six shells a minute on London, 600 tons of explosives a day.

They would keep that up accurately day after day
₃
so that in a fortnight London would receive as much high explosive as Berlin received during the whole war. But that fortnight would be only the start of it.

The War Cabinet did not know this, but they
did
know enough to be extremely worried. There were anxious (and very secret) conferences (which coincided with the fact that Cochrane was strongly pressing for renewed interest in Wallis’s shock-wave bomb—he wanted to use it on the Rothensee ship-lift). Soon the Chief Executive of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfred Freeman, sent for Barnes Wallis, who was now held in esteem and some awe. Freeman said:

“Wallis, do you remember that crazy idea of yours back in 1940 about a bomb?”

“I seem to have had a lot of crazy ideas then,” Wallis said wryly.

“I mean about a
big
bomb, a ten-tonner and a six-tonner. You wrote a paper about it. To penetrate deep into the earth and cause an earthquake.”

“Ah, yes,” said Wallis, his eyes lighting up.

“How soon can you let me have some?”

It was so sudden that Wallis was staggered. He thought a while.

“About: four or five months,” and he added quickly, “that is, if I get facilities. There’s a lot of work to it, you know.”

“Right. Will you go and see Craven right away, please. I’ll ring him and tell him you’re coming over.”

Sir Charles Craven, head of Vickers, was also a Controller of the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Wallis was shown into his office near Whitehall ten minutes later, and before he could say a word Craven was booming at him :

“What d’you want the services of twenty thousand men in Sheffield for?” Apparently Freeman had already been on the phone.

Wallis explained and got a promise of full support. He had little time to relax in the next few weeks. First he held a “Dutch auction” with Roy Chadwick the Avro designer.

“Roy,” he said, “can your Lanes carry seventeen thousand pounds for two hundred and fifty miles?”

“Oh yes,” Chadwick said. “Easily.”

“Could they carry nineteen thousand?”

“Oh… er… I think so.”

“Well now, Roy,” Wallis said persuasively, “how about going to the full ten tons?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“Now come on… if you tried more powerful engines and strengthened the undercarts.”

“Well… Oh, I suppose it
could be
done.”

“Thanks,” said Wallis and went off to Sheffield to iron out more of the problems that seemed endless. The bomb had to be made from a
very
special steel; there were only two foundries in the country capable of casting the casings, and both were fully occupied on other vital work.

On August 30, 617 Squadron moved to Coningsby, another bomber airfield in Lincolnshire. Scampton had been a grass field, but Coningsby had long bitumen runways, more suitable for aircraft carrying very heavy loads. Flying was still confined to training, high and low level, aimlessly it seemed, and suddenly they were switched to low level. Cochrane told Holden that they had to be as good as they had been for the dams raid, and there were some new crews to train.

Cochrane and Satterly had long conferences with Holden and Group Captain Sam Patch, the station commander at Coningsby. There was a new verve about the squadron, a feeling of expectancy. At nights the aircraft hurtled low over the flat country and heavy lorries drove in to the bomb dump, their loads hidden under heavy tarpaulins. But it was not to be quite like the dams raid : that was obvious because they were still using the orthodox Lancasters. A flight of Mosquito night fighters arrived at Coningsby, and stayed. Apparently they were going to have fighter escort.

On September 14, Holden drew up a battle order for that night; a short one, eight crews, the pilots being Holden, Maltby, Knight, Shannon, Wilson, Allsebrook, Rice and Divall. Target was the Dortmund Ems Canal, the freight link between the Ruhr and central and eastern Germany, including the North Sea.

It was to be another very low-level raid, partly for bombing accuracy and partly because they thought the flak low down was less of a risk than fighters high up, concentrating on eight lonely aircraft. Cochrane saw that it was one of the most carefully planned raids of the war. As in the dams raid, the route curled delicately between the known flak. A specially designed beacon would be dropped near the canal as a pin-point and night fighters would engage the flak which guarded the most vulnerable points on the canal, although not the point chosen for the attack, which was some two miles from the nearest guns. A weather recce plane would check the visibility in the canal area before the Lancasters arrived. Most important of all they were going to drop the new 12,000-lb. light-case bombs for the first time. (Not to be confused with Wallis’s developing earthquake bomb.)

They took off at dusk with no illusions; memories of the dams losses were too fresh and they had a human yearning for the placid if less stimulating days of the Italian trips.

They were an hour out, low over the North Sea, when the weather Mosquito found the target hidden under fog and radioed back. Group recalled the Lancasters and as the big aircraft turned for home weighed down by nearly 6 tons of bomb David Maltby seemed to hit someone’s slipstream; a wing flicked down, the nose dipped and before Maltby could correct it the wing-tip had caught the water and the Lancaster cartwheeled, dug her nose in and vanished in spray. Shannon swung out of formation and circled the spot, sending out radio fixes and staying till an air sea rescue flying boat touched down beneath. They waited up at Coningsby till the flying boat radioed that it had found nothing but oil slicks.

Maltby’s wife lived near the airfield, and in the morning Holden went over to break the news, dreading it because it had been an ideally happy marriage. Maltby was only twenty-one. The girl met him at the door and guessed his news from his face.

“It was quick,” said Holden, who did not know it was his own last day on earth. “He wouldn’t have known a thing.”

Too stunned to cry, the girl said, “I think we both expected it. He’s been waking up in the night lately shouting something about the bomb not coming off.”

Holden came back looking tired and got out another battle order. If the weather was right the raid was on again. Martin came back from leave that morning and demanded to take Maltby’s place. Tammy Simpson, who had been flying with Martin for two years now, noted philosophically and a little querulously in his diary: “Mick’s a fool volunteering. This is going to be dangerous.” Shannon was hoping the weather would be right this time. Moustacheless, he was to marry Anne in a week and was supposed to have left for London that morning to arrange the wedding. Anne had already wangled a posting for herself to Dunholme Lodge, an airfield near Coningsby.

At dusk in the control tower McCarthy watched the heavy aircraft lift off the runway and head east. Over the North Sea the Lancasters kept loose formation in two boxes of four. It felt like the dams raid all over again; they were down to 50 feet to fox the radar and on strict radio silence. The faster Mosquitoes would be taking off now to pass them somewhere on the way in and set about the flak as the bombers arrived. Over the canal itself the weather Mosquito radioed back that it was perfectly clear.

The bombers crossed the Dutch coast and there was no sign of flak. Holden seemed to be flying a perfect course, which was just as well because the moon was up and it was full, throwing soft light over the fields as they moved towards Germany and Ladbergen.

Ahead of them a small town loomed up and high chimneys and a church steeple seemed to be rushing at them. Martin waited for Holden to swing to one side, but Holden elected to bore straight across and climbed to clear the steeple till he was about 300 feet. The more low-flying-wise Martin dropped right down to roof-top height and, on the other side of Holden, Knight and Wilson did the same, till even from the ground they were nearly invisible against the horizon. Holden was limned against the moonlight.

There was one light gun in Nordhoorn and its crew had been alerted. Holden was half-way across when a procession of glowing red balls streamed up, and in a shaven fraction of a second Toby Foxlee was firing back, so that only about five shells pumped up before Foxlee’s tracer was squirting down and the gun promptly stopped.