The Night the Dams Burst Page 5

  Over his aircraft intercom he ordered: “Stand by, rear gunner. They're putting up a terrific barrage ahead.”

  The German gunners on the dam knew just what to do now. They were throwing up a curtain of deadly fire between the two towers through which the attackers would have to pass. Facing aft, Pilot Officer Tony Burcher, M for Mother's rear gunner, couldn't see much yet, just the onion-strings of tracer fire flashing past him on both sides. His biggest worry was not of the enemy defences, but his fear that his mates might find out just how scared he was.

  In fact, there was too much going on all around now to be really scared. Their plane had sprung a glycol leak. It had lost power after the earlier shell-hit but somehow Hoppy had kept the defective port engine going; he had not feathered it, but he had reduced the revs to avoid worse.

  Burcher moistened his lips and watched the lake surface coming up towards his turret. Streams of tracer and cannon-shell flashed past as the Lancaster raced in towards the dam.

  He swung his turret round to one side, ready to open fire on the dam's gunners as soon as they came into his field of fire. George, the front gunner is not firing, Burcher now realised. He must be dead already.

  Over the intercom could hear the navigator telling the pilot to take her down lower – and then lower still.

  Suddenly there was a whummph, and sparks and flames streamed past Burcher's turret. A fuel tank had been hit.

  “Christ! The engine's on fire!” shouted the engineer.

  “Feather Number Two,” ordered Hopgood. He was going by the book. “Press the extinguisher.”

  The Canadian Pilot Officer John W Fraser, released the special bomb about a fifth of a second too late. Perhaps he was startled. Bounding across the lake it shot over the parapet of the dam and blew up in a vivid yellow flash.

  “Right. Prepare to abandon aircraft,” and shortly after that: “Right, everybody get out”. That was Hoppy's voice again. There was no hint of fear, no trace of emotion; he sounded calm and at ease, as though nothing was wrong. He was a professional to the end.

  Burcher heard the order and desperately tried to swing his turret round to the fore-and-aft position, but the hydraulics were powered by a pick-up on the port-inner engine and that engine was now dead, a mass of flames. The turret motor wouldn't budge. He felt a terrific shuddering going throughout the doomed aircraft. She was in her death throes.

  “I'm trapped.” His parachute pack was hanging inside the fuselage, and he could not get at it until the turret was fore-and-aft. Parachute! What use was a parachute at sixty feet?

  Like a man possessed he began to crank the Dead Man's Handle, inching the turret round by hand. Never had he operated that handle so fast in his life before, but now his life depended on it.

  Up front in the cockpit, mopping the blood away from his eyes, the Lancaster's commander clung grimly to the control column with his free hand. Both of the magnificent Rolls-Royce Merlin engines on the port wing were now dead. The plane was losing power and even with their bomb-load gone he could not gain real altitude. He would never get out alive himself.

  As for Charlie Brennan, calm until the very end, he kept pressing the bandage against his friend's head injury. There was one last service which these two men could perform for their crew: hauling on the control column, Hoppy banked the Lancaster steeply round to the right on their two good engines, away from the valley which was doomed to be drowned.

  GIBSON’S OTHER CREWS had seen the red Verey cartridge fired by Hopgood's radio operator Sergeant John W Minchin as the bomb went. Now they were transfixed by the horrifying sight of the Lancaster flown by Flight Lieutenant Hopgood, the gentle English boy they had all come to like so well, plunging on into the night, streaming a growing plume of flame.

  The plane was climbing steeply to the starboard, using her dying momentum. Somehow Hoppy hauled her up to about three hundred feet. Burcher had scrambled inside the main fuselage, and was struggling to strap on his parachute.

  The rear hatch flew open. He saw that Sergeant Minchin had opened it. His right leg shot away, the radio operator had dragged himself along the fuselage. He had even got over the main spar somehow.

  Burcher could have jumped now, but he saw that Minchin was dragging his own parachute by one hand. He grabbed the chute and fastened it properly onto the white-faced, dying man. He tore open the jump door and held on to the chute's D-ring as he hurled his comrade out into the roaring slipstream. He did not see any chute opening. He had nightmares for years afterwards about whether he had done the right thing.

  Still inside the plane, Burcher pulled his own ripcord and bundled as much of the silk parachute under his arm as he could. Then, in one final mechanical act – the act of an officer exceptionally well drilled – he plugged into the intercom socket by the rear hatch and gasped, “Rear gunner, abandoning ship now!”

  He heard Hoppy scream, “For Christ's sake, get ***** out of here!”

  They were the last words he spoke. M for Mother erupted in a sheet of flame as the fires reached back to the high-octane fuel in the main wing fuel tanks. Burcher was blasted up into the air, his back broken by the bomber's tail-fin. Less than three hundred feet below, the ground rushed up to meet him, and a painful darkness enveloped his consciousness.

  CHAPTER THREE: In which the Ruhr Dams are breached

  PILOT OFFICER ANTHONY BURCHER, Royal Australian Air Force and twenty-one years old, lay in a crumpled heap in the middle of what felt like a newly ploughed field. He opened his eyes, and saw the moon and stars.

  “Good God,” he thought. “I'm still alive!” Echoing around the valley he could hear the familiar growl of Lancaster bomber engines. He wondered what had happened to his own aircraft, M for Mother; not so many minutes ago, he had been crouching in its rear gun-turret, watching the sheet of water flash past sixty feet beneath him and the streams of tracer shells streak by on either side.

  He felt hungry. Instinctively, he thrust his hand inside his blue polo-neck sweater and felt for the bottle of Horlicks tablets. His mother, back in Goulburn, Australia, had heard that everybody in England was starving, and every month she sent her boy Tony a supply of the tablets to keep him going until he could return to the outback. His locker back at Scampton was full of them. Hell, he was glad of the impulse that had made him pick up a box of them on his way over to the briefing hall.

  The briefing hall … In a rush it all came back to him. His Lancaster had been one of nineteen sent out by No. 617 Squadron with the task of destroying five vital barrage dams that supplied the Ruhr arms factories with all their water. M for Mother had been the second to attack the first target, the biggest dam of them all – the Möhne dam. But they had been hit by flak, right over the dam, and blown up only about three hundred feet up. How had he survived?

  He remembered helping Johnny Minchin to jump – actually he had thrown him out – and then squatting on the step by the Lanc's open door. This was no height to parachute from. He had pulled the D-ring before jumping, which was a stupid thing to do at any other time than this. Then the plane had blown up – he had felt a great rush of air and then a hell of whack across his back. Normally he would have gone straight out beneath the bomber's tail fin but he must have been going up rather down, and the top of the tail fin had smashed into him.

  That broke his back, but it also saved him that night, because the jolt dragged his parachute right out after him, and part-filled the canopy. The doomed Lancaster was in a banking turn to starboard. He felt the familiar jerk as the chute opened and hit the ground at the same instant.

  Now Tony Burcher lay in the middle of a freshly ploughed field, which also cushioned his fall. If he felt lucky, it was not for long.

  With a dull sense of inevitable disaster, he realised that somewhere up the valley from where he lay there was the dam, which even now his comrades-in-arms were trying to breach. In a few minutes he was going to get very wet indeed, unless he could run. But his back felt as if it were broken, and he had smashed
one knee cap too.

  Man's instinct, if he has to die, is to die unseen. With enormous difficulty Burcher dragged his broken body across the field and hid in a culvert going under a road at its edge, and here he lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  “DINGHY” Young's plane, shot down near Castricum as he flew home.

  THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY: E for Easy's unexploded 9,500 pound “Upkeep” bomb was found near Haldern. The Germans built copies, but they didn't work: they were spinning the wrong way.

  PROPAGANDA The British press was jubilant at the news. The exploit gave a great boost to British public morale.

  In fact the damage to the dams and bridges was repaired far faster than Barnes Wallis and British Intelligence had estimated. Adolf Hitler's munitions minister Albert Speer (below, dining with the author in 1979) oversaw an unprecedented effort to rebuild the dams.

  AFTER US THE DELUGE The Eder dam after the attack – and before. Millions of tons of water engulfed the streets of little towns in the valley. Over a thousand people died.

  Just a mile away from him the 23,000 souls in the valley town of Neheim-Hüsten waited in their basements and air-raid shelters – waited for sirens to sound the All Clear, unaware that tonight the RAF was attacking the dams above them.

  THE BOMB DROPPED by Hopgood's Lancaster Mark III, M for Mother, just before she blew up had bounded right over the dam's parapet and crashed onto the roof of the powerhouse below. Smoke from the burning building mingled with the spray thrown up by the earlier detonations on the lake side of the dam, and obscured the whole target area. Some minutes ticked past before Wing Commander Guy Gibson felt it proper to continue the attack.

  A few minutes after half-past midnight, he ordered Flight Lieutenant Micky Martin to attack in P for Popsy, as Martin unofficially dubbed his aircraft. The night air was now heavy with spray, and it clung to the aircraft windshields; at first Martin's bomb-aimer Flight Lieutenant R C Hay could not see the target properly at all – just the distant blurred glow of M for Mother's wreckage burning in the hills about two miles beyond the dam.

  Even as the range closed to just over a mile, he could see only one of the dam's two distinctive valve-towers through the dense cloud of dust and smoke. He needed both to get the range right.

  Wing Commander Gibson realised that Martin's best hope of success was for the enemy gunners’ attention to be distracted. He switched on all his own aircraft's lights and flew alongside the attacking Lancaster, blazing away at the defences with the dazzling 100-per-cent night-tracer in his guns.

  At the very last moment Martin's bomb-aimer got a sight on both valve-towers. He pressed the bomb release, and the special bomb skipped across the lake towards the dam. The smoke did not seem to hamper the gunners at all, and Martin felt his aircraft shudder as they stitched a row of 20-millimetre cannon shells into his starboard outer fuel tank and ailerons. A streak of fast vaporizing fuel shot out behind the plane, but miraculously it didn't catch fire.

  A huge waterspout shot up eight hundred feet into the air behind them as Martin's bomb exploded, but the range must have been slightly misjudged as the base of the spout was not quite centred on the dam. The giant blast wave hurled two of the German gunners from their towers, and they lay senseless on the crown of the dam.

  Martin radioed Gibson, “Okay – attack completed.”

  WHEN THE NEWS of this third unsuccessful attack reached the Bomber Group's headquarters at Grantham, an air of depression gripped the operations room. Barnes Wallis, the special bomb's inventor, buried his head still deeper in his hands so as to avoid the black looks of the two air-marshals pacing up and down.

  But the foreman of the Möhne powerhouse, Meister Clement Köhler, could see something that none of the British airmen could yet see. Köhler had got out of the powerhouse just in time and was now sheltering beneath a larch-tree halfway up the valley. What he could see was this – fine cracks were forming, branching and spreading along the dam's parapet, and silver jets of water were issuing from them, glinting in the moonlight. He thought of his six nephews and cousins asleep in their house by the sawmill down the valley – they never paid any attention to air-raid warnings; he thought of the gamekeeper, old Wildening, and the thirty old-age pensioners that he boarded; he thought of the villages of Himmelpforten – “The Gates of Heaven” – and Niederense and the town of Neheim-Hüsten. Nothing could save them now.

  BARELY TWO MINUTES after Flight Lieutenant Martin's bombing run, Gibson sent in “Dinghy” Young. “Be careful of the flak,” Gibson warned him. “It's pretty hot.”

  Again Gibson deliberately drew the enemy gunners’ fire; he flew his Lancaster up and down the valley on the dry side of the dam with his landing lights blazing, taunting the gunners and firing his guns at them. Micky Martin did the same on the other side.

  Young got in his bomb run unhampered while the gunners’ backs were turned. Gibson thought that the bomb must have been accurately placed, because the column of water was far taller than after Micky Martin's attack.

  Hundreds of tons of water slopped over the crest of the dam, and Young shouted exuberantly, “I think I've done it, I've broken it!” Dave Shannon thought so too: “Christ! that must break the bloody thing!”

  As the spray cleared, Gibson saw that the enormous wall of masonry was still intact – but was his imagination playing tricks, or had it bulged slightly since the last two attacks?

  With fresh confidence, he called up the fifth aircraft on the radiotelephone, Flight Lieutenant Dave Maltby, and ordered him in to attack.

  Maltby's aircraft closed in fast. Two hundred and twenty miles an hour, Wallis had said. His bomb-aimer saw the dam very early, and got good sightings on both valve-towers when still two thousand feet away. The flak defences seemed more subdued. In the centre of the dam, there seemed to be something happening already – Malt-by swung his aircraft to port a little. At the precise moment that the towers lined up on the bomb-aimers's two sighting wires he released the bomb.

  It bounced three times, smacked into the dam's parapet and settled, still spinning furiously, down the dam's submerged face. At a depth of thirty feet, the hydrostatic fuses detonated the charge – four tons of the most powerful explosive the British had yet devised.

  It looked perfect.

  The dam was out of Gibson's sight for some minutes as he careered his Lancaster round the valley; his windscreen was still partly obscured by spray. But time was running out. Certain that the fifth attack too had failed, he called up the sixth, Dave Shannon, in AJ–L, and told him to go in.

  IN THE MEANTIME, between 12:50 and 12:55 a.m., the Lancasters had radioed to England the coded results of these last three attacks. “Dinghy” Young reported that his weapon had exploded in contact with the dam, Martin radioed that his had exploded fifty yards short, and Flight Lieutenant Maltby believed that his bomb had also failed to breach the Möhne Dam. Guy Gibson signaled the codeword, NO-GO, NO-GO back to England.

  HE HAD SIGNALLED too soon. One minute later, Gibson's aircraft thundered over the dam again and as he looked down an awesome, spine-chilling sight met his eyes. The centre of the dam had vanished – it had rolled over. A tidal wave had pushed aside the thousands of tons of masonry and was pounding down the valley. One brave German gunner on the crest of the dam, but only one, was still firing. Gibson swiftly called up Shannon.

  “It's gone! It's gone! For Christ's sake, Dave, hold off.”

  Probably Young and Maltby had between them planted their bombs in just the right place. Shannon too looked down on the tremendous spectacle moments later, as the whole immense lake began to move. Gathering speed and momentum the water cascaded out of the breach, taking everything in its path like a tsunami. An unstoppable avalanche of mud and water and trees and debris was tearing down the valley.

  The Möhne dam had ceased to exist.

  “NIGGER was the code word if we broke one,” said Shannon fifty years later, recalling the moment as Gibson triumphantly signalled back to Bomber C
ommand. “And after five runs and the loss of one Lancaster over the target, they eventually got their nigger.”

  FROM HIS SIDE of the valley Clement Köhler had watched, as if paralysed, as the masonry wall had suddenly bulged and then burst with terrible ferocity between the two valve-towers. A mighty wave of water had spilled out of the breach and plunged to the the valley floor, striking the ground with a colossal crash – a sight without parallel in most men's lives. The remains of the powerhouse vanished in a fraction of a second, and then the tidal wave settled down, the angry vortices and whirlpools vanished, and a wall of water began tearing down the moonlit valley at twenty feet a second, ripping everything with it. Shortly afterwards, a cloud of spray and water-vapour rose, and mercifully obliterated the rest of this infernal spectacle from Köhler's sight.

  At four minutes to one a.m., the ’phone rang for the signals officer at Grantham. He listened briefly, then shouted: “Gibson has signalled nigger, Sir – they've done it!”

  Gibson had already diverted his remaining aircraft to the second main target, the Eder dam. This contained even more water than the Möhne, 202 million tons, making it the biggest artificial reservoir in Europe. This dam was one hundred and thirty-nine feet high, 1,310 feet long, and built of masonry like the Möhne dam.

  As Gibson's aircraft reached it, small rivers of water were running out of the dam's overflow channels, so it could not have been more full. The only anti-aircraft guns on this dam had been removed after the defeat at Stalingrad five months before. It was virtually undefended. Only sentries with rifles patrolled the road running along the dam's crest – rifles against the best heavy bomber in RAF Bomber Command.

  At 1:32 a.m., the telephone rang in the local Air Raid Defence controller's office. A lieutenant in SS uniform answered: “Sturmführer Saahr speaking.”

  “This is the Warnzentrale! There are several enemy aircraft circling the Eder dam!”