The Night the Dams Burst Page 6

  An hour earlier, the local authorities in the valley below the Möhne Dam had refused to believe the similar warning telephoned to them by Clement Köhler. But this officer did not hesitate. He shouted to the Warnzentrale to clear the line, and at once telephoned the SS unit closest to the Eder Dam, the third Company of 603 Regional Defence Batallion at Hemfurth. The duty corporal there confirmed that there were three enemy aircraft circling overhead.

  “I'll call you back in a couple of minutes,” said Saahr. “If an attack starts before then, sound the alarm!”

  Then Saahr telephoned through to SS Standartenführer Burk, the commanding officer of the SS Flak Training Regiment nearby, and warned him that a flood disaster was imminent. Within minutes, the colonel had told one hundred men and trucks to stand by.

  Almost at once, Sturmführer Saahr telephoned him again, and the news was even more alarming: “The local battalion says the planes are releasing flares – and they have switched on searchlights!”

  “BUTCHER” HARRIS Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of RAF Bomber Command (top left) watches with Air Vice Marshal the Hon. Ralph Cochrane, No. 5 Bomber Group, as No. 617 Squadron aircrew are debriefed at Scampton airbase

  GUILT-STRICKEN Dr Barnes Wallis, the boffin who devised the attacks, never forgot the deaths his unusual weapon had caused

  The roar of truck engines and motorcycles on the ground mingled with the noise of aircraft engines in the air, as the Germans prepared for the biggest flood-disaster operation in their history.

  BELOW THE Möhne dam, the catastrophe was beginning. Clement Mols, the postmaster, had lived all his life in a town downstream from the dam, Wickede. The air raid sirens had suddenly sounded at about eleven-thirty p.m. His wife was already unusually nervous that night. She badgered him to switch on the cable radio and find out where the English planes were.

  The news was not good. “Low-flying enemy aircraft above Arnsberg and the Möhne Lake.” Arnsberg was close. Mols had sent his wife over to wake their neighbours and then went to the window upstairs – the one with a view up the valley to the lake.

  The night was so clear, and visibility good. In the distance he heard aero-engines and a violent detonation, and he distinctly saw a huge column of water shooting up.

  For a while after that there was silence.

  The cable radio loudspeaker was broadcasting an update. “Low-flying enemy aircraft over the Eder Lake.”

  There was no more talk of the Möhne Lake. The danger seemed to be past. Clement Mols went down into the neighbours’ cellar to tell them – they were mostly women and children, still chattering and joking.

  “I think it's all clear,” he said. “Back to bed.”

  His wife was less sure, and urged him to go upstairs again to listen.

  As he walked through the post-office he heard the telephone ringing and stopped to answer it. It was the postmaster at Arnsberg: “You're still at the post-office?” the man screamed. “The Möhne Dam has burst, the waters must have reached Vosswinkel by now.”

  Vosswinkel? That was only three miles away. Dizzy with fear he rushed back next door, yelling. “Get out at once! All of you. Get up to the upper village! The Möhne Dam is broken, the water has already reached Vosswinkel.”

  At that instant the electric light went out. He shouted to his wife: “You go on ahead! I'll stay here and wake people by phone.” She refused to leave.

  “Then run over to Mrs Brunberg and wake her up so she can escape with her three infants, and warn Miss Wilmes too.” All their menfolk were away in the army.

  Nobody was answering their phone. They all seemed to be asleep. He and his wife took to the hills, literally, making for the upper village – but they had gone only twenty yards when the postmaster suddenly felt the air turn damp. It was like a cold, damp, clammy curtain of fog. “We can't run,” he shouted to her. “No time! The water will be here. Back to the house!”

  The flood waters overtook them. He slammed the door but the water plunged into the house with colossal force, and a sulphurous vapour cloud came up from the cellar. The batteries in the cellar had short-circuited.

  In no time the water rose in the ground floor. He counted the stairs as the level rose, and the first ten were already under water, about six feet deep. It was far deeper in the valley. He looked out of an upstairs window. He could see a freight train a short distance from the railway bridge. The locomotive steam whistle let out a shriek as it drowned in the flood water.

  He could see the waters swirling endlessly by, hear cries for help as people struggled to stay afloat in the torrent, and the bellowing of drowning cattle. Beams and planks, prams, furniture, trees, and flotsam rocketed past. Beyond the post-office a truck's trailer floating past like a boat until it tangled on a beam in the yard.

  Minutes passed, then hours; the masses of floating debris parading past seemed endless, and still the waters continued to rise. His wife wept and prayed.

  “Those were terrible hours,” he recalled later. “I tried to comfort her. I pondered on how to get on our neighbours’ roof in case the flood swept our house away. Theirs was bigger and had a flat roof. We carried our bedding to the loft. We could not know how high the water was going to rise. I ran from window to window to see how our walls were standing up to the flood waters thundering past… And above all this horror shone the beautiful moon, brightly reflected by the water.”

  IT HAD TAKEN Guy Gibson some time to find the Eder Lake: there was mist in the valleys, and every hollow looked not unlike a reservoir from the air. When he found the right valley he flicked on his microphone and called up the other aircraft: “Can you see the target?”

  Dave Shannon's voice came faintly into his earphones: “Can't see anything – I can't find the dam.”

  It was now well after one a.m., and early summer fog was rising in the valleys. Worse, the lake had several branches. Shannon hurled his Lancaster along the wrong one to start with. There was no doubt. He radioed simply that it was not there. Guy Gibson had his plane right over the Eder dam by this time, and fired a red Verey light, and Shannon's voice came immediately:

  “Okay, I'm coming up.”

  Shannon was an Australian and a perfectionist. At 1:39 a.m., he attempted his first bombing run, but his bombaimer was not satisfied and they circled back to the other end of the lake. This was easier said than done: To get out of the valley he had to pull on full throttle and execute a steep climbing turn to avoid a vast rock face. He later used two words from Down Under to describe this exit, carrying a nine thousand pound bomb which was revolving at 500 revs and inflicting its weird gyroscopic forces on the plane from its station in the bomb bay: “Bloody hairy” he called it, and added four more: “to put it mildly.”

  He tried again, but still the bombing run was not quite right.

  Gibson told Dave Shannon to pull out for while and get his bearings, and he sent Henry Maudslay in to attack.

  EDER DAM TARGET MAP In 1943 Bomber Command's maps were printed in black, grey, and magenta, designed for easy viewing in cockpit lighting and comparison with H2S radar images.

  GIBSON CALLED UP the second of the three Lancasters:

  “Hello Z for Zebra – you can go in now.”

  It was 1:50 a.m. Squadron-Leader Henry Maudslay dived his Lancaster steeply down over the castle which marked the beginning of the bombing run at the far end of the lake, and closed in towards the dam.

  During their bombing trials a few days before, this quiet, athletic English officer had totalled one of these irreplaceable Lancasters when he had dropped the special bomb from so low that the water had damaged the fuselage. There appeared to be no defences on the Eder dam at all, but luck was against him: as Z for Zebra thundered across the moonlit lake, Gibson and his other pilots could see that besides the dambusting bomb, there was some other large object dangling from beneath the plane – it must have been damaged by the enemy defences on the flight out.

  Something else must have been wrong
, because Maudslay's Lancaster released the spinning bomb far too late from the clutch of its callipers. The bomb volleyed into the Eder Dam's parapet at nearly 250 miles an hour and blew up instantaneously, right beneath the bomber that had just dropped it.

  A few of the dam's huge masonry slabs were blown off the parapet like confetti, and a yellow glare lit the whole valley as bright as day for several seconds.

  Out of the darkness, somebody's voice on the radiotelephone said quietly what everybody was thinking: “He blew himself up.”

  Guy Gibson called up Maudslay's aircraft. There was no reply. He tried again: “Z for Zebra, Z for Zebra, are you okay?”

  This time, there was a faint, tired reply. “I think so,” it said. “Stand by.”

  But the voice was very weak. Maudslay was dying. His radio operator performed one more duty. At three minutes before two a.m. he sent back to England a coded wireless signal signifying: “Special weapon released, overshot dam, no apparent breach…” That was the last that was ever heard of this aircraft or its crew. The lamed bomber crashed with no survivors forty minutes later, finally brought down by light flak near Emmerich.

  Gibson ordered Dave Shannon, the perfectionist, back in for his third bombing run against the Eder dam. This time Len Sumpter the bomb-aimer released the special weapon perfectly: it bounced twice, and scored a direct hit on the dam's narrow parapet. Seconds ticked past as the bomb sank, then a mighty explosion rent the air and a pillar of water shot up hundreds of feet into the air, followed by a blinding blue flash as the blast waves short-circuited the 60,000-volt power-lines leading across the valley from the generator house.

  As they flew away, Shannon's rear air gunner Pilot Officer J Buckley shouted that there was a bloody great hole below: “Water is pouring out.”

  But still the dam was standing, and now only one Lancaster remained.

  The generator-house foreman, Meister Karl Albrecht, later described: “At first we had assumed that the bombers were only using the lake as an assembly point, as they had done so often before. The first bomb fell at about half-past one, but it did not damage the wall much, though it did cause damage to the Power House No. 1. I went to the Power House No. 2, on the right-hand side of the valley by the dam. There were two brilliant flares burning on the little island between the two plants, presumably as an aiming guide for the bombers.

  “The aircraft continued to circle …”

  THE THIRD WAVE of No. 617 Squadron's aircraft was now invading German territory, as an airborne reserve to fill in the gaps. But by two a.m. there were more gaps than aircraft in this reserve: seven minutes earlier, S for Sugar had exploded in mid-air over Tilburg in Holland – the other aircraft could not see why, but German records indicate that it was flying so low that it fouled electric power lines. Its captain, Canadian Pilot Officer L. J. Burpee, had just got married to an English girl, and they had been hunting for a house near Scampton. Now she was already a widow.

  In any case, there was already a glow in the East where the dawn was coming up. The last aircraft in Gibson's immediate force, piloted by an Australian, Les Knight, thundered in towards the Eder dam, made one dummy run, and then attacked, using the flares that had been dropped beyond the dam as a rough guide – the flares the generator-house foreman had seen. Guy Gibson, flying alongside Knight and just above him, saw the bomb bounce three times, skip lightly along the lake's surface to the dam wall, sink and detonate perfectly, throwing up an eight-hundred-foot water-spout.

  A huge hole suddenly appeared about thirty feet below the dam's parapet, as though a giant fist had punched through the masonry. Barnes Wallis's special four-ton bomb had started a collapse that would push aside twenty-four thousand tons of masonry.

  Gibson ordered his surviving men home. “Get the hell out of it,” were the words he used.

  There was nothing else they could do. They were out of bombs and did not have enough fuel to reach the Sorpe dam and return to Engand. The second wave of bombers had gone to the Sorpe Dam, but it was an earth-wall dam, and never broken. Barnes Wallis’ bouncing bomb was best against masonry.

  Dave Shannon did as ordered. He opened the throttles wide and took his Lancaster down as close to the deck as he dared.

  He landed back at Scampton at four a.m.; he and his men had been airborne for six and a half hours.

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER the dam's collapse, the telephone rang in SS Standartenführer Burk's office, waking him out of a fitful sleep. “This is Sturmführer Saahr again, Herr Colonel! Arolson Post Office has just phoned through a report from the 603 Regional Defence Batallion. The dam has been destroyed. I have tried to contact them myself, but all the lines are dead.”

  The villagers closest to the stricken dam needed no telephone. They knew what had happened. A motorcyclist rode through the main street of Affoldern, bellowing at the top of his voice, “The dam's been hit – the water's coming. Everybody out of the cellars!”

  Within seconds, the streets were full of scores of people, clutching children and suitcases and scrambling for the higher ground.

  There was a noise like a hundred express trains coming down the valley – 8,500 tons of water a second were cascading out of the dam, and the breach was getting wider every moment.

  As the people reached the higher ground, they turned round and looked at Affoldern – within minutes it had vanished into the flood. The steel suspension bridge at Hemfurth collapsed with an enormous rumble into the torrent.

  The villagers could hear the bellowing of cattle chained and trapped in their stalls, and the screams of those people who had not been able to escape in time.

  Standartenführer Burk did not underestimate the size of the catastrophe. Within minutes, he had telephoned emergency flood warnings to the major city of Kassel, forty miles away, and to the Luftwaffe's big airfield at Fritzlar.

  By 2:30 a.m., the Army Command at Kassel had alerted an engineer battalion, and within half-an-hour troops were being rushed by trucks to the disaster area.

  At 4:15 a.m., a major emergency was proclaimed. The Royal Air Force had succeeded in doing what the Germans had believed to be impossible, and now the Germans were paying the price.

  *

  It was at about this time, four in the morning, that “Bomber” Harris, listening to the final signals filtering in to No. 5 Bomber Group headquarters at Grantham, finally said: “Well, that's all we can do here. Let's go over to Scampton and meet them as they come back.”

  His expression as he turned to the bomb's inventor was softer than it had been earlier that night. “Can I give you a lift, Mr Wallis?” he asked.

  Wallis accepted gratefully. Harris's black limousine was one of the very few yet fitted with a heater – and the early hours in Lincolnshire were chilly.

  AFTERWORD: It was the back spin that did the trick

  FOR THREE DAYS the local rats disputed Tony Burcher's possession of the culvert. As he lay injured in his hiding place, he thought he could hear a train; he had been told that hopping a freight train was the best hope of getting away from Germany. He was probably delirious. He decided to venture out into the open. He was promptly captured by a Hitler Youth boy patrolling on a push-bike.

  “Where the hell did you come from?” asked the boy. He spoke English; most of the better-educated Germans did.

  “Up there,” said Burcher non-committally.

  “What aeroplane were you in?”

  “A Tiger Moth,” groaned the Australian, anxious to end this interrogation. The boy kicked him for his impertinence, then realised the airman was in a bad way.

  Shortly a policeman hove into view, also pushing a bicycle.

  They laid Burcher onto some fencing posts strapped between their bikes and wheeled him into the local police station to await medical help.

  Burcher asked: “Could I have some water?”

  This officer glared at him. “Wasser?”

  “Ja,” said Burcher. “Wasser.”

  The officer fetched another officer. This on
e spoke English.

  “You want water?” he repeated. It appeared that there was none. Burcher suppressed a grin.

  “Your people,” grunted the German, “have just blown up our supply.”

  This was the first that the airman knew that their raid had been successful.

  THE GERMANS took him to a hospital almost immediately. It was a clearing station for troops injured on the eastern front, and it had skilled doctors. He had thought his back was only sprained, but X-rays showed it was broken. “I received only the best of treatment,” he recalled.

  Tony Burcher never forgot that he owed his remaining years of life to Hoppy Hopgood and his unselfish act that night. He lived out his life in Hobart, Tasmania, in mounting discomfort from chronic back injuries, and was buried with full military honours in 2001.

  *

  As dawn fingered the pale May 1943 skies over Lincolnshire, No. 617 Squadron's surviving Lancasters limped back into their home base at Scampton.

  An aircraftwoman heard the sound of their engines in the far distance and dashed out with the other WAAFs to the landing strips. “The first planes came in low and taxied to a halt. Then at intervals other planes began to land.”

  The girls were ordered back to the Sergeants’ Mess to start serving the first arrivals. Minutes passed, then an hour; then two. They waited but no aircrew came in.

  After two hours their sergeant entered, and called them together: “I must tell you now some very sad news,” she began, clearing her throat. “Of our nineteen aircraft, only eleven have returned. Eight have been lost.” That meant that fifty-six of those young boys would never come back and mill around these tables again.

  “We all burst into tears,” recalls the aircraftwoman. “We looked around the Aircrews’ Mess. The tables looked empty and pathetic. The sergeant told us to go to our quarters and try to get a few hours sleep. Tomorrow will be another working day.”