Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943

Since starting this book, I have been repeatedly asked whether it is an embarrassment to acknowledge the name of Gibson’s dog, which became a wirelessed codeword for the breaching of the Möhne. A historian’s answer must be: no more than the fact that our ancestors hanged sheep-stealers, executed military deserters and imprisoned homosexuals. They did and said things differently then. It would be grotesque to omit Nigger from a factual narrative merely because the word is rightly repugnant to twenty-first-century ears.

I have been moved to retell, and to reconsider, the Chastise story, in hopes of offering a new perspective which almost represents a paradox. I retain the awe of my childhood for the fliers who breached the Möhne and the Eder. In my seventies, I muse constantly upon the privilege of having attained old age, whereas the lives of most of those British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and American fliers became forfeit before they knew maturity, fatherhood or, in many cases, love or even sex.

Yet in the twenty-first century it also seems essential to confront – as many past British writers have been reluctant to confront – the enormity of the horror that the unthinking fliers unleashed upon a host of innocents. A Norwegian Resistance hero, Knut Lier-Hansen, wrote words in 1948 that linger in my mind whenever I compose narratives of conflict: ‘Though wars can bring adventures which stir the heart, the true nature of war is composed of innumerable personal tragedies, of grief, waste and sacrifice, wholly evil and not redeemed by glory.’ We shall consider below whether the extraordinary tale of Operation Chastise – its impact upon the Second World War set against its human consequences – is ‘redeemed by glory’.

MAX HASTINGS

Chilton Foliat, West Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia

May 2019

Prologue

Let us begin this story where he began it: in the cockpit of an Avro Lancaster heavy bomber, callsign G-George, forging through the darkness towards Germany on the night of 16 May 1943, amid the roar of four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that drowned out conversation save over the intercom. ‘The moon was full; everywhere its pleasant, watery haze spread over the peaceful English countryside, rendering it colourless. But there is not much colour in Lincolnshire anyway. The city of Lincoln was silent – that city which so many bomber boys know so well, a city full of homely people.’ Guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead, written in 1944, a few months before his death, is one of the great wartime warriors’ memoirs, despite its cavalier attitude to facts and dates. Those who edited the typescript for publication after its author perished softened harshnesses: for instance, Gibson originally characterised Lincoln as ‘full of dull, unimaginative people’, perhaps because his own experiences were beyond their imaginations, and those of most of us.

The book reveals a sensitivity that few of the squadron commander’s men recognised in him, together with a consciousness of his own mortality, derived from completion of an astounding seventy-two previous bomber operations, together with ninety-nine sorties as pilot of a night-fighter. He describes the fate of an aircraft hit over Germany, plunging steeply out of the sky for an interminable minute, ‘then it is all over and you hit the ground. Petrol flames come soaring up into the sky, almost reaching to meet you as though to rocket your soul to heaven.’ He knew. Unlike some heroes who are bereft of fear, Gibson anticipated his own almost certain destiny. Only its hour remained to be fixed, and this May night seemed more plausible than most.

He was leading 617 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command to unleash upon the dams of north-western Germany a revolutionary new weapon, requiring an attack at extreme low level. Nineteen crews were committed to Operation Chastise, and the eight proven in training to be most proficient now accompanied Gibson himself towards the Möhne. Off his port wingtip flew the dashing Australian Harold ‘Micky’ Martin in P-Popsie, while a few yards to starboard was ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood’s M-Mother, its pilot a twenty-one-year-old who still began his letters home ‘Dear Mummy’.

Gibson again: ‘We were off on a journey for which we had long waited, a journey that had been carefully planned, carefully trained for’ – only eight weeks, in truth, since inception, but such a span represented an eternity to very young men, crowding what should properly have been a lifetime’s experience into a fraction of a natural span: Gibson considered entitling the later memoir of his career as a bomber pilot Four Years Lifetime – ‘a mission which was going to do a lot of good if it succeeded’. The chiefs of the RAF had promised the aircrew of 617 Squadron that breaching the dams would inflict damage upon Germany’s war industries greater than any previously achieved by an air force.

Among the sharpest contrasts between the environment of twentieth-century war and that of twenty-first-century peace is colour. We live in a world of reds and whites, blues, silvers, oranges. Allied airmen bombing Europe in 1943 existed by day under sunshine and bright skies, then fought their battles in a universe that was darkened, shaded, shadowed, unless or until it erupted into flame. The undersides and flanks of night bombers were painted matt black; their upper surfaces disrupted foliage-greens and earth-browns. Once airborne, Gibson and his kin inhabited cramped, stunted workspaces, crowded with technology and control mechanisms, black or green save where paint had been worn away by human friction and hard usage to reveal streaks of dull metal.

He wrote: ‘The pilot sits on the left on a raised, comfortably padded seat … usually flies the thing with his left hand, resetting the gyro and other instruments with his right, but most pilots use both hands when over enemy territory or when the going is tough. You have to be quite strong to fly a Lancaster. The instruments sit winking. On the Sperry panel, or the blind-flying panel as bomber pilots call it, now and then a red light, indicating that some mechanism needs adjusting, will suddenly flash on … The pilot’s eyes constantly perform a circle from the repeater to the Air Speed Indicator, from the ASI to the horizon, from the horizon to the moon, from the moon to what he can see on the ground and then back to the repeater. No wonder they are red-rimmed when he returns.’

Gibson himself had much to be red-rimmed about. Since 1940, he had been almost continuously making war. Two months earlier he completed a tour as 106 Squadron’s commander, during which he flew its most hazardous operations. He was now among the most decorated pilots in the RAF, holding two Distinguished Service Orders, two Distinguished Flying Crosses. In the seven weeks since he began to form 617 Squadron he had grappled with relentless administrative and personnel problems; directed specialised crew training; raced between Scampton, Weybridge and Reculver to discuss the dam-busting bomb with its creator and to witness the mixed fortunes of its trials. He had flown low-level tests by day and night; hastened to and from the Grantham headquarters of 5 Group for tactical conferences; delivered the most important briefings of his life; and now, taken off for Germany in the dying light of a lovely English spring Sunday.

Exhaustion most conspicuously manifested itself in an inflamed foot condition which caused pain on the ground, worse in the air. In a conversation with Gibson that morning, the station medical officer felt unable to prescribe medication, lest it impair the pilot’s reflexes. Meanwhile Gibson’s three-year marriage to an older showgirl had become a poor thing. His only relaxation in weeks had been a snatched trip to a Grantham ‘flickhouse’ with a WAAF girlfriend to see Casablanca. Like a host of young men of all the nations engaged in the Second World War, he had aged years beyond the twenty-four cited in RAF records.

That night of 16 May, he wrote of himself and John Pulford, the flight-engineer on the folding seat beside him in the Lancaster’s ‘glass house’: ‘two silent figures, young, unbearded, new to the world yet full of skill, full of pride in their squadron, determined to do a good job and bring the ship home. A silent scene, whose only incidental music is provided by the background hiss of air and the hearty roar of four Merlin engines.’ He described Pulford as ‘a Londoner, a sincere and plodding type’. He embraced Fred ‘Spam’ Spafford, the bomb-aimer, as ‘a grand guy and many were the parties we had together’. His rear-gunner, Richard Trevor-Roper, silent in the remoteness of the tail, was ‘Eton, Oxford’, to which his pilot added that ‘Trev’ ‘was probably thinking what I was thinking. Was this the last time we would see England?’

Gibson wrote of his crew as if he knew them intimately, yet in truth this was the first operation that any save wireless-operator Bob Hutchison had flown with him, and it would also be the last. Most of what he stated about the others was wrong. Trevor-Roper attended Wellington College, not Eton, and never Oxford; Pulford, dismissed in the author’s original as ‘a bit of a dummy’, was a Yorkshireman, not a Londoner. Like all 617’s engineers, he was a former ‘erk’, a ground crewman, maid of all work: monitoring the throttles and dials, moving around the aircraft to deal with small problems, check on the rear-gunner or investigate an intercom failure. Every twenty minutes it was his job to log engine temperatures, fuel state. That morning, Sgt. Pulford had received extraordinary permission from Gibson to attend his father’s funeral in Hull, an hour’s drive from Scampton, to which he had been accompanied by two RAF policemen to ensure that he said not a word to anyone about what he was to do that night.

The pilot described ‘Spam’ Spafford as a great bomb-aimer, ‘but he was not too hot at map-reading’. ‘Hutch’, the wireless-operator, was ‘one of those grand little Englishmen who had the guts of a horse’, despite being often airsick. George Deering, the Canadian front-gunner who was a veteran of thirty-five operations, was ‘pretty dumb, and not too good at his guns, and it was taking a bit of a risk taking him, but one of our crack gunners had suddenly gone ill and there was nobody else’. If pilot and bomb-aimer had ever caroused together, there is no record of it. For all the ‘wingco’s’ leadership skills, to most of his comrades, and especially to subordinates, little Gibson – on the ground, it was impossible to fail to notice his lack of inches – was a remote figure, respected but not much loved, especially by humbler ranks. A gunner said sourly, ‘He was the sort of little bugger who was always jumping out from behind a hut and telling you that your buttons were undone.’ By the time Gibson wrote his book, however, both he and Chastise had become legends. Thus, he described a close relationship with his crew as a fitting element of the story.

Reality was that five of the six young men sharing G-George with their squadron commander that night were bleakly aware that they were committed to one of the most hazardous missions of the war, in the hands of a pilot with whom they had never flown over enemy territory. More than that, he was an authentic hero; and heroes are immensely dangerous to their comrades.

Now they were over the North Sea: ‘Our noses were going straight for the point at which we had to cross the Dutch coast. The sea was as flat as a mill-pond, there was hardly a ripple … We dropped lower and lower down to about fifty feet so as to avoid radio detection … After a time I tried to light a cigarette. In doing so we again nearly hit the drink and the boys must have thought I was mad. In the end I handed the thing to Pulford to light for me.’ Gibson was flying in shirtsleeves, wearing a Luftwaffe Mae West, spoils of war that he had picked up in his fighter days. Although they were operating far below the height at which oxygen was necessary, they were still obliged to wear masks, because these contained microphones for the intercom and VHF link between aircraft – Gibson hankered in vain for throat mikes such as the USAAF employed.

He wrote in 1944, looking back to that unforgettable night: ‘One hour to go, one hour left before Germany, one hour of peace before flak. I thought to myself, here are 133 boys who have got an hour to live before going through hell. Some of them won’t get back … Who is it will be unlucky? … What is the rear-gunner in Melvin Young’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? What’s the bomb-aimer in Henry Maudslay’s ship thinking, because he won’t be coming back? … One hour to go, one hour to think of these things, one hour to fly on a straight course and then it will be weaving and sinking to escape the light flak and the fury of the enemy defence.’ A few months later, he chose as one of his favourite records on BBC radio’s Desert Island Discs Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’: ‘it’s exciting, it’s grandiose, it’s … rather terrible. It reminds me of a bombing raid.’ Then Guy Gibson thought about his dog, which was newly dead; and about the epic experience ahead, which would make him one of the most famous fliers in history. ‘This was the big thing,’ he wrote. ‘This was it.’

1

Grand Strategy, Great Dams

1 THE BIG PICTURE

In May 1943 the Second World War was in its forty-fifth month. While it was evident that the Allies were destined to achieve victory over Germany, it was also embarrassingly obvious to the British people, albeit perhaps less so to Americans, that the Red Army would be the principal instrument in achieving this. The battle for Stalingrad had been the dominant event of the previous winter, culminating in the surrender of the remnants of Paulus’s Sixth Army on 31 January. The Russians had killed 150,000 Germans and taken 110,000 prisoners, in comparison with a mere nine thousand Axis dead, and thirty thousand mostly Italian prisoners taken, in Montgomery’s November victory at El Alamein.

Day after day through the months that followed, newspapers headlined Soviet advances. To be sure, British and American forces also made headway in North Africa, but their drives from east and west to converge in Tunisia embraced barely thirty divisions between the two sides, whereas in the summer of 1943 two million men of Hitler’s and Stalin’s armies would clash at Kursk and Orel. Axis surrender in North Africa came only on 13 May, months later than Allied commanders had expected.

Almost four years after Britain chose to go to war, and eighteen months after America found itself obliged to do so, the bulk of their respective armies continued to train at home, preparing for an invasion of the continent for which no date had been set. The Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy, assisted by the Ultra codebreakers and latterly by the US Navy, had performed prodigies to achieve dominance over Dönitz’s U-Boats: the Atlantic sea link was now relatively secure, and a vast tonnage of new shipping was pouring forth from American shipyards. But this was a defensive victory, its importance more apparent to Allied warlords than to Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s peoples.

Among the latter, even after its North African successes the standing of the British Army remained low: memories lingered, of so many 1940–42 defeats in Europe, North Africa and the Far East. Many Americans viewed their Anglo-Saxon ally with a disdain not far off contempt. A July 1942 Office of War Information survey invited people to say which nation they thought was trying hardest to win the war. A loyal 37 per cent answered, the US; 30 per cent named Russia; 14 per cent China; 13 per cent offered no opinion. Just 6 per cent identified the British as the hardest triers. ‘All the old animosities against the British have been revived,’ wrote an OWI analyst. ‘She didn’t pay her war debts for the past war. She refuses to grant India the very freedom she claims to be fighting for. She is holding a vast army in England to protect the homeland, while her outposts are lost to the enemy … Phrases such as “The British always expect someone to pull their chestnuts out of the fire” and “England will fight to the last Frenchman” have attained considerable currency.’

Thoughtful British people saw that in almost three years since Dunkirk in June 1940 their army had accomplished relatively little, while the Russians endured the most terrible and costly experiences in the history of war. In 1942 Winston Churchill’s reputation as a war leader fell to its lowest ebb, in the face of new British humiliations. The sister of RAF pilot John Hopgood, a future dambuster, was an ATS officer who wrote to her mother in August that she had been cheered by the proclaimed success of the recent Dieppe raid: ‘the feeling that at last we were taking the offensive and that my uniform would mean something. A feeling I had very strongly at the beginning of the war, but it has gradually diminished since we have been on the defensive. This is not the talk of a defeatist, but I think it is the truth which most of us have experienced lately. I hope that [Dieppe] was a dress rehearsal and that the performance [D-Day in France] will follow shortly.’ Which, of course, it did not.

Belated successes in North Africa delivered Churchill from a real threat of eviction from his post as minister of defence. It was plain that the German flood tide on the Eastern Front was ebbing; that the Russians had survived the decisive crisis of their struggle. But the British people had seen little about their own war effort in which to take pride since the RAF’s sublime triumph in the 1940 Battle of Britain. An unusually reflective young airman afterwards looked back upon an early-1943 conversation with friends: ‘It was pleasant to sit there and rest a while and think that the worst was behind … The evening had been pleasant and we had practically “won” the war. But we wouldn’t have been so pleased if we had known of the big battles that were to be fought; the heavy casualties to be borne … The tide had turned, but it was a leap year tide.’ This was Guy Gibson, who in those days led 106 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command.

It is hard to overstate the impatience felt by millions on both sides of the Atlantic for action against Hitler on a scale to match the efforts and sacrifices of ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin’s Red Army. The Western Allied leadership was prosecuting the war at a pace that suited themselves, their countries’ immunity from invasion from 1941 onwards conferring the luxury of choice, such as the Russians never had, about where and when to engage the Wehrmacht. British caution exasperated US chief of the army George Marshall and his peers. Yet the old prime minister and his chiefs of staff recognised fundamental truths: that Britain and America were sea powers, confronting a great land power. It would be madness to attempt an amphibious return to the continent without command of the air, which could not be secured any time soon. The voice of Churchill, backed by the intellects of his professional military advisers, Portal and Alanbrooke foremost among them, was decisive in delaying D-Day until June 1944, saving hundreds of thousands of American and British lives. Meanwhile, it was vital to the prestige and morale of the Western Allies, and especially those of Churchill’s nation, that Britain should be seen to be carrying the war to Germany by any and every means within its power.

2 HARRIS

A consequence of the Western Allies’ cautious grand strategy, rendered necessary by their slow industrial build-up, was that the Anglo-American air forces, and especially heavy bombers, constituted their most conspicuous military contribution to the defeat of Germany between the fall of France in June 1940 and the invasion of Normandy. Bomber Command’s pre-war estate of twenty-seven British airfields had by 1943 expanded to over a hundred stations, while the RAF’s overall strength grew from 175,692 personnel to over a million men, including a significant proportion of the nation’s best-educated adolescents.

Some senior officers, including the USAAF’s Gen. Carl ‘Tooey’ Spaatz and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, C-in-C of Bomber Command, believed that air attack on Germany could render redundant a land invasion of the continent. 1943 was the year in which British warmakers drafted plans for Operation Rankin, whereby troops would stage an unopposed deployment to occupy Germany in the event that some combination of bombing, Russian victories and an internal political upheaval precipitated the collapse of the Nazi regime, an abrupt enemy surrender.

Yet, while Winston Churchill committed a lion’s portion of Britain’s industrial effort to the air offensive, he never shared the airmen’s extravagant hopes for it. For a season in 1940, when Britain’s circumstances were desperate, he professed to do so. Once the threat of invasion receded, however, he recognised that, while bombing could importantly weaken the German war machine, it could not hope to avert the necessity for a continental land campaign. The airmen’s most critical contribution until June 1944 was to show Churchill’s people, together with the Americans and – more important still – the embattled Russians, that Britain was carrying the war to the enemy. The prime minister recognised, as his chiefs of staff often did not, the value of ‘military theatre’ – conspicuous displays of activity that sustained an appearance of momentum, even when real attainments were modest. As the author has written elsewhere: ‘There must be action, even if not always useful; there must be successes, even if overstated or even imagined; there must be glory, even if undeserved.’ Through those apparently interminable years between Dunkirk and D-Day, again and again the BBC prominently featured in its news bulletins the words ‘Last night aircraft of Bomber Command …’ followed by a roll call of industrial targets attacked in France, Italy, and above all Germany.

In 1940–41 the RAF caused mild embarrassment to the Nazi leadership, which had promised to secure the Reich against such intrusions. Bombing nonetheless inflicted negligible damage upon Hitler’s war effort. Although more aircraft became available during the winter of 1941, poor weather, navigational difficulties and German fighters inflicted punitive casualties upon the attackers, who still made little impact on the enemy below. Thereafter, however, a succession of events took place which progressively transformed the offensive.

In December 1941 the prime minister and the Air Ministry received an independent report from the Cabinet Office, commissioned by Churchill’s personal scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, the former Professor Frederick Lindemann, analysing the effectiveness of British bombing through a study of aiming-point photographs returned by aircrew. This devastating document showed that the average RAF crew on an average night was incapable of identifying any target smaller than a city. In consequence, and after a vexed debate in which practical issues dominated and moral ones did not feature at all, British strategy changed. By a decision for which Cherwell was prime mover in concord with Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, since October 1940 head of the air force, it was agreed that instead of pursuing largely vain efforts to locate power stations, factories and military installations, the RAF would assault entire urban regions.

The principal objective would be to ‘de-house’ and frankly terrorise the German industrial workforce – break the spirit of Hitler’s people – even though the Luftwaffe had conspicuously failed to achieve this against Churchill’s nation. The new policy, known as ‘area bombing’, was never directly avowed to the public, nor indeed to Bomber Command aircrew, who were told that the RAF continued to strike at military and industrial targets, with civilian casualties an incidental, and implicitly regrettable, by-product. This was a falsehood. Between 1942 and 1945, the civilian population of Hitler’s cities was the target of most British bombing.

America’s entry into the war in December 1941 made eventual Allied victory seem certain. Until a continental land campaign began, US air chiefs were as eager as their British counterparts to demonstrate their service’s war-winning capabilities. Daylight operations by American B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators began slowly to reinforce the RAF’s night campaign. The British received early deliveries of a new generation of four-engined heavy bombers – Short Stirlings and Handley-Page Halifaxes, followed by Avro Lancasters – which progressively increased Bomber Command’s striking power. They also acquired ‘Gee’, the first of a succession of electronic aids which improved the accuracy of RAF navigation.