Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943

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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 (#litres_trial_promo)

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.’