The Night the Dams Burst Read online

  *

  It was far into Sunday morning before Barnes Wallis woke up. It was a balmy, sunny day such as seldom comes in May. He breakfasted late, and spent the afternoon fussing round the special Lancasters. Each crew wanted him to see if their bomb was spinning properly. At mid-day, the last of the special Lancasters arrived, brand-new from Avro's. Nineteen aircraft and crews were now ready.

  At three o'clock, the clattering fingers of the teleprinters at Scampton slammed into the paper roll, repeating a signal from No. 5 Bomber Group Headquarters:

  CODE NAME FOR FIVE GROUP OPERATION ORDER B.976 IS “CHASTISE”

  Ten minutes later the die was finally cast for that night:

  EXECUTIVE, OPERATION “CHASTISE,” 16 MAY 1943, ZERO HOUR 11.48.

  Three hours later, behind locked doors, Wallis again briefed the bomber crews. They looked tired and strained, and small wonder: in two months of intensive training for “Chastise” they had completed nearly two thousand hours of nerve-racking low-level cross-country flight, most of it in darkness.

  As they trooped out of the Briefing Hall, Wallis turned to Gibson, his voice strained. “I hope that you all come back,” he said.

  “It won't be your fault if we don't,” came the reply.

  GIBSON’S SECOND IN COMMAND, twenty-three year old Flight Lieutenant John Hopgood, captain of Lancaster AJ–M, called out:

  “Hey, Gibby. If you don't come back, can I have your egg tomorrow?”

  It was the oldest of the RAF's aircrew gags. It masked Hopgood's own special anxiety. Before his crew climbed into their Lancaster, he explained to them, “The first aircraft to attack the dam will probably catch the flak gunners with their pants down. But the second won't be so lucky – and that's us.”

  He tugged at Dave Shannon's sleeve and held him back for a final cigarette together behind a hangar.

  Shannon, commander of AJ–L, liked Hopgood. He was a sensitive, compassionate, and brave Englishman who had once wept openly after accidentally killing a pigeon while doing target practice with some bottles and his Webley service revolver. The bird had been so innocent and harmless. Before No. 617 Squadron, he and Shannon had come from the same bomber squadron, No. 106, where he had been Shannon's flight commander.

  For a few minutes Hopgood puffed his cigarette silently, then he blurted out in his soft voice: “I think this is going to be a tough one, David. I don't think I'm coming back.”

  It shook his friend to hear it said in such a matter-of-fact way.

  “Come off it, Hoppy!” he said. “You'll beat these bastards! You've beaten them for so long, you're not going to get whipped tonight.’

  Hopgood stubbed the cigarette out, and they walked over to their planes.

  Medics were issuing cod-liver oil and tablets, “tablets to help you stay awake,” they said (they were caffeine and the stimulant Benzedrine).

  Heavy with flying gear and equipment, the rest of the men walked down to the flight line. Tony Burcher also had a premonition, and briefly turned back to fetch one of the bottles of Horlicks tablets his mother routinely sent from Australia, believing that Britain was starving. He now had an unused store of this malted milk in a drawer in his quarters. He tucked the bottle into an inside pocket, and never regretted it.

  At nine-thirty p.m. Wallis stood on the airfield and watched as the heavy bombers, pregnant with his top-secret bombs, lumbered down the runway like a herd of elephants, trunk to tail, and waited for their signals to blink from the control tower. None but the crews knew that this was the real thing. There was not even the usual farewell party of WAAFs and ground crew to wave them off.

  Soon the last aircraft had lifted into the moonlight air. “We stood silently until the final sounds of their engines died away,” described one WAAF aircraftwoman. “Then we all drifted away to our duties. “There was no sleep for anyone that night, our hearts and minds were in those planes. We WAAFs just sat waiting, we had laid out the tables and a hot meal would be ready on their return.”

  As the night wore on, they twice heard the roar of Merlin engines and rushed outside. Two of the Lancs were returning early. The girls wandered back in once more to wait. The WAAF sergeant made them coffee and calmed them down: “It will not be long now before our boys start to come back” she said. The Lincolnshire mist of late spring rolled across the almost-empty airfield.

  BARNES WALLIS WANDERED into the Officers Mess, but his appetite for dinner was almost gone. He wondered how many of these young men would return. By the time he had finished his meal, seven had already died – obliterated in a sheet of flame as Lancaster K for Kite, flown by Sergeant G W Byers, struck the Waddenzee lake in Holland, brought down by a Nazi flak battery based on one of the offshore Dutch islands. He had been flying at three hundred feet instead of the sixty feet ordered, and perhaps that proved his undoing.

  At two minutes past eleven, the first two waves of No. 617 squadron's bombers swept in across the enemy coast at points widely separated, so as to divide the Luftwaffe fighter forces.

  As Guy Gibson's own little group, the three Lancasters in the vanguard – Gibson, Hopgood, and Micky Martin – reached the lakes near Haltern, they ran into an unexpected nest of searchlights and flak guns. Within seconds, all three aircraft were caught in a dazzling cone of searchlight beams.

  Gibson threw his aircraft to one side and got out unscathed. Tony Burcher, rear gunner in Flight Lieutenant Hopgood's M for Mother, cheerfully rattled his machine guns at the searchlights.

  This may have provoked retaliation – Burcher always fretted about that afterwards – as the bomber suddenly shuddered as light flak shells tore into the port wing.

  “Anyway,” reflected Burcher guiltily afterwards, “regardless of what may or may not have happened had I fired or not, John Hopgood was hit.” The cannon shells exploded in the cockpit, and over the intercom the rest of the crew heard Hoppy's flight engineer Sergeant Charlie Brennan gasp, “Bloody Hell… !”

  Their front gunner George Gregory was evidently already dead. Hoppy had been hit in the face, and blood was pumping out of the open wound. Hoppy's grim prediction was coming true. Clutching the control column, he shouted to Charlie, “Don't worry. Hold your handkerchief against it.”

  Minutes passed. Forbidden by intercom etiquette to inquire what was happening, and cramped in the rear gun turret, Burcher listened in anguish to the grunts of pain and metallic voices ringing in his earphones.

  “Right. Well, what do you think?”

  That was Hopgood again. “Should we go on? I intend to, because we have only got a few minutes left. We've come this far.”

  More minutes passed without answer, then: “There's no good taking this thing back with us,” and Burcher could imagine Hoppy jerking a bloody thumb down at the special bomb hanging motionless beneath them. “The aircraft is completely manageable. I can handle it okay. Any objections?”

  Charlie Brennan, normally a level-headed chap, responded, “Well, what about your face? Its bleeding like –”

  Hoppy cut off the rest of the words and ordered: “Just hold a handkerchief over it.”

  Burcher could imagine Charlie standing next to Hopgood, holding the bandage to staunch the bleeding and keep the blood out of his eyes. It was obviously a head injury and a severe one at that.

  Anyone else would probably have turned around at that point, said Burcher later, and headed for home – but not Hopgood. That was the kind of guy he was. It was what heroes were made of.

  Hoppy switched on the VHF radio, and called up Gibson: “We've been hit, Sir. But we're carrying on. see you on target.”

  He checked on his crew one by one: there was no reply from the front gunner.

  So Gregory must have bought it, thought Burcher.

  THE AIRCRAFT WERE now flying so low that accidents were bound to happen. One Lancaster dropped so low over the Zuyder Zee that the bomb suspended beneath its bomb bay was torn off by a wave. The plane actually swallowed a huge gulp of salt water but the pilot, Flying O
fficer Geoff Rice, managed to stay aloft and brought it back to Scampton with his rear-gunner half-drowned by the flood. That was one plane the WAAFs had heard returning. Still the remaining aircraft swept on across the moonlit plains.

  The noise on the ground must have been deafening. Through a reddening cloud of pain Flight Lieutenant Hopgood saw that he was heading straight for a line of pylons. He was only sixty feet up. He took a split-second decision. He eased his column forwards, and swooped beneath the cables; as the tail of the bomber went up, rear gunner Pilot Officer Tony Burcher thought they had had it. He saw the shadows of the cables whip across the top of his turret, and then the danger was past.

  The leader of the second wave, Flight Lieutenant Bill Astell, lost his way soon after midnight: it was only for a moment, but it was long enough to kill him and his crew. After crossing a canal he had to turn south briefly to try to find a landmark, and he was shot down almost at once by machine-gunners on Gilze-Rijen airfield. Out of control, his Lancaster Mark III, B for Baker, crashed into a block of barracks on the airfield's edge and blew up in a slow red glare that momentarily swelled to light up the whole sky. The other Lancaster crews saw the clouds of smoke, but these faded into the distance until they were out of sight of the rest of the formation.

  In G for George, Wing Commander Guy Gibson risked a glance at his watch. Quarter past midnight. “Well, boys, we'd better start the ball rolling!”

  He meant it literally. The flight engineer flicked a switch on the two-stroke motor driving the mechanism, and with gathering momentum the special bomb suspended between powerful calliper jaws in the bomb bay began to revolve. A few minutes later, the flight engineer reported: “Five hundred revs, Sir.”

  Gibson switched on his transmitter: “All aircraft switch over to radiotelephone control.”

  Ahead of him he could see the rolling hills of the Ruhr coming towards them. He lifted the Lancaster up and cleared the first with feet to spare. There was a shout from his bomb-aimer.

  “We're there!”

  There ahead of them was the Möhne lake, and at its far end, silhouetted against the moonlight, was the Dam, 2,100 feet long. The lake was so full that its parapet barely showed above the water's mirrorlike surface.

  “Good God – can we break that?” gasped Gibson.

  With its low freeboard and two stone towers the Möhne Dam looked like an enormous and impregnable battleship, and the battleship was angry: it was firing a broadside at them from twelve or fifteen guns, and there were more guns on the lake's north shore. The glowing onion-strings of deadly tracer fire streamed across the lake, aimlessly as yet because the aircraft were hard to see and echoes were reverberating from every hill.

  Gibson called up each of his force's Lancasters in turn. All but Bill Astell reported in.

  Astell had been dead twenty-five minutes by now.

  “Hullo all aircraft. I'm going in to attack. Stand by to come in to attack in your order when I tell you… ”

  It was precisely twenty-eight minutes past midnight. Gibson brought his Lancaster round, and dived over the woods fringing the lake. His bomb-aimer “Spam” Spafford shouted, “You're going to hit those trees.”

  “That's all right, Spam – I'm just getting my height.”

  His navigator Terry Taerum switched on the two spotlights, nose and underbelly. This was when things could get really dangerous. He watched the two short lines projected onto the lake just in front of the plane. They were still some way apart.

  “Down … down … down…” he directed.

  Gibson shifted in his seat nervously, as water came up toward the thundering plane. “That's it!” came Terry's voice. “Steady now.”

  They were just sixty feet up. “Spam” clicked the bomb's fusing switches into the “On” position.

  A mile ahead of them, one of the German gunners shouted, “They've switched on their landing lights! They must be mad!”

  A hail of fire swept out from the crest of the dam, converging on the advancing aircraft. Crouched behind his controls, Gibson thought, In another twenty seconds we shall all be dead.

  Spafford hit the bomb release and yelled, “Bomb gone!”

  The black cylinder slipped out of its clamps. Engines thundering, the bomber lurched upwards as its load fell away. The bomb struck the lake, bounced once … twice … three times, covering a hundred yards with each enormous bound. The weapon slammed into the dam's parapet, right between the valve towers – a magnificent shot. The bomb ricocheted backwards, and sank into the lake.

  The seconds began to tick away.

  Gibson's wireless operator had fired a red Verey cartridge as they crossed the dam. As the flare soared up into the sky, there was a colossal explosion and a column of water and spray mushroomed up into the sky, towering above the dam. It was the most fantastic spectacle they had ever seen – this silver moonlit column of water, lit a lurid red on one side by the red signal flare.

  But the dam was still holding.

  Gibson ordered his radio operator to signal England using the prearranged code, that they had released the special bomb; that it had exploded only five yards from the dam; and that the dam had not been broken.

  *

  Shortly before midnight, a large black saloon car swept up to the guardroom at No. 5 Group's headquarters at Grantham. The driver flashed special recognition lamps at the sentries. The sentries stood back and allowed the car to pass at once.

  This was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the fearsome Commander in Chief of Bomber Command – best known as “Butcher” Harris.

  He strode into the Headquarters Operations Room. Barnes Wallis was already there. He had been driven over from the Scampton airfield an hour before.

  “Any news yet?” barked Harris. He was a gruff Rhodesian.

  “Apart from an early flak warning from Gibson there's nothing at all,” answered Air Vice-Marshal Cochrane, the Group commander. “But they should be attacking at any moment.”

  One of the room's long walls was dominated by a chalkboard listing the bombers taking part, like horses in a race. On a dais running along the opposite wall sat the operations officers, in telephone contact with the wireless room.

  Barnes Wallis had long ceased pacing up and down, and was now sitting in a dejected heap on the little staircase leading up to the dais.

  John Fraser

  Joe McCarthy

  Hoppy Hopgood

  Terry Taerum, RCAF

  The Eder dam was well known to British Intelligence, from its collection of holiday postcards – now marked up with target identifiers by RAF Bomber Command

  Below. The theory behind the Bouncing Bomb

  On May 17, 1943, a plane of No. 542 Squadron brought back photographs of the Möhne Dam showing the result of the night's attack

  A grim sight greeted locals on the morning of May 17, 1943 – millions of tons of water cascading from the breached Möhne Dam.

  Harris joined the Group commander at the other end of the room, underneath the map of Europe.

  Suddenly there was a shout.

  “There's a signal just coming through, Sir.” The Chief Signals Officer had a telephone to his ear. “It's from Wing Commander Gibson: goner – bomb exploded five yards from dam, no apparent breach.”

  He waited. Then he added: “That's all.”

  So Gibson's bomb had been correctly placed, but the dam was still standing. An icy chill gripped Wallis: all those lives, he thought.

  He buried his head in his clammy hands; out of the corner of his eye he could see the two air marshals at the far end of the room, and there was a perceptible look of vexation invading “Butcher” Harris's features.

  ALONE IN THE 6,000-kilowatt powerhouse below the Möhne Dam, there was a look of fear on 52-year-old foreman Clement Köhler's face. Now there was no doubt at all. The British were attacking his dam.

  A look-out on the Bismarck Tower had raised the alarm at twenty minutes past midnight, just as the first Lancaster had begun circling
the lake. At first the small but wiry foreman had not been afraid – air-raid warnings were not uncommon in the Ruhr by 1943.

  But suddenly something clicked in his mind: tonight there was a full moon, and the RAF did not normally venture over the Ruhr on moonlight nights. And tonight the lake's level was higher than it had ever been before.

  Soon his fears were confirmed. The British bombers were not droning past high overhead – they were swarming like stray bees around the distant end of his lake, and one was coming nearer.

  Köhler's hand reached for the telephone. With trembling fingers he dialled the number of the United Electricity Company of Westphalia offices in Nierderense and Neheim – the little towns just down the valley. The noise of aircraft engines was very loud now.

  Hoarse with fear, he shouted: “This time they are attacking the dam!”

  The voice at the other end was sleepy at first, and downright disbelieving. Köhler slammed the phone down, and ran for the door.

  As he tore the door open, he caught the sound of the guns on both towers firing wildly and then Guy Gibson's Lancaster thundered over him, barely a hundred feet up, the whole valley vibrating to the thunder of its four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines. A huge explosion tore at Köhler's lungs, and water cascaded over the top of the dam.

  Drenched to the skin, Köhler began to run – he ran as he had never run before until he had reached the side of the valley hundreds of yards away; and then flopped down underneath a larch-tree half-way up the slopes. He turned round, and gazed as though hypnotised at the enormous dam wall's moonlit face. It was still not cracked.

  GIBSON WAS RADIOING the second of his aircraft to go into the attack.

  “Hello, M for Mother. Make your attack now. Good luck!”

  Hoppy Hopgood, his face numb from loss of blood, grunted: “Okay, attacking.”