Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next

As he skimmed the surface of the water, his attention focused on the massive grey wall spanning the gap between the two towers, Maltby suddenly realised that the crest of the parapet was beginning to change shape. A crack had appeared, growing wider and deeper by the second as a section of masonry began to crumble and pieces of debris tumbled into the water. Close to his own bomb-release point, Maltby realised that Dinghy Young’s bomb had made a small breach in the dam which was already beginning to fail.

As a result, Maltby veered slightly to port to target a different section of the dam just as his bomb-aimer dropped the Upkeep bomb. It was released perfectly, bouncing four times, before striking the dam wall and then sinking below the surface right against the dam face. Moments after Maltby’s aircraft passed over the parapet, the bomb erupted in a huge column of water mixed with silt and fragments of rock.

It was still not clear at first if even this bomb had actually breached the dam, and, moments later, Barnes Wallis and the others listening in the operations room in England heard the terse radio signal: ‘Goner 78A’. ‘Goner’ meant a successful attack, ‘7’ signified an explosion in contact with the dam, ‘8’ no apparent breach, and ‘A’ showed the target was the Möhne dam.

However, as the debris from the waterspout spattered down, Maltby could see that the dam – its masonry fatally weakened by the repeated bomb-blasts – was now crumbling under the monstrous weight of water it held, and as the raiders watched, the breach gaped wider. The torrent pouring through the ever-growing gap, dragging the anti-torpedo nets with it, hastened the Möhne dam’s complete destruction. As it collapsed, widening into a breach almost 250 feet across, a wall of water began roaring down the valley, a tide of destruction sweeping away villages and towns in its path. Tragically, among the countless buildings destroyed were the wooden barrack blocks housing hundreds of East European women that the Nazis had compelled to work as forced labourers. Almost all of them were drowned, and they formed by far the largest part of the 1,249 people killed by the raid, one of the highest death tolls from a Bomber Command operation at that time.

Maltby sent a one-word radio transmission: the name of Gibson’s black Labrador dog, which told all those waiting in the operations room that the Möhne dam was no more. Air Marshal Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, turned to Barnes Wallis, shook his hand and said, ‘Wallis, I didn’t believe a word you said when you came to see me. But now you could sell me a pink elephant.’6

Gibson told Maltby and Martin, who had both used their bombs and sustained flak damage, to turn for home, while he, old Etonian Henry Maudslay, the baby-faced Australian David Shannon – only twenty, but another pilot who was already the holder of the DSO and DFC – and yet another Australian, twenty-two-year-old Les Knight, who ‘never smoked, drank or chased girls’,7 making him practically unique in 617 Squadron on all three counts, flew on to attack the next target, the Eder dam. Thirteen storeys high, it was virtually unprotected by flak batteries, since the Germans believed that its position in a narrow, precipitous and twisting valley made it invulnerable to attack.

The approach was terrifying, a gut-wrenching plunge down the steep rocky walls of the valley to reach the surface of the lake, leaving just seven seconds to level out and adjust height, track and speed before releasing the bomb. Shannon and Maudslay made repeated aborted approaches to the dam before, at 01.39 that morning, Shannon’s bomb-aimer finally released the Upkeep bomb. Shannon’s angle of approach sent the bomb well to the right of the centre of the dam wall, but it detonated successfully and he was convinced that a small breach had been made.

Maudslay was next. Guy Gibson later described him pulling up sharply and then resuming his bomb-run, and other witnesses spoke of something projecting from the bottom of his aircraft, suggesting either flak damage or debris from a collision with the tops of the trees on the lake shore. Whatever the cause, Maudslay’s bomb was released so late that it struck the dam wall without touching the water and detonated immediately, just as Maudslay was overflying the parapet. The blast wave battered the aircraft, and although Maudslay managed to give the coded message that his bomb had been dropped, nothing more was heard from him or his crew. He attempted to nurse his crippled aircraft back to England but was shot down by flak batteries on the banks of the Rhine near the German-Dutch border. The Lancaster crashed in flames in a meadow, killing Maudslay and all the other members of his crew.

Knight now began his bomb-run. Like Shannon, he made his approach over the shoulder of a hill, then made a sharp turn to port, diving down to 60 feet above the water, counted down by his navigator who was watching the twin discs of light thrown onto the black water by spotlights fitted beneath the fuselage, waiting until they converged into a figure ‘8’ that showed they were at exactly the right height. Knight’s bomb – the third to be dropped, and the last one the first wave possessed – released perfectly, hit the dam wall and sank before detonating. The blast drilled a hole straight through the dam wall, marked at once by a ferocious jet of water bursting from the downstream face of the dam. A moment later the masonry above it crumbled and collapsed, causing a deep V-shaped breach that released a tsunami-like wall of 200 million tons of water.

The remaining aircraft of the second and third waves were now making for the third and last target of the night, the Sorpe dam. It was of different construction from the other two – a massive, sloping earth and clay mound with a thin concrete core, rather than a sheer masonry wall – making it a much less suitable target for Wallis’s bouncing bombs. Pilot Officer Joe McCarthy, a twenty-three-year-old New Yorker, was the only pilot of the second wave of five aircraft to reach the dam. Pilot Officer Geoff Rice had hit the sea near Vlieland, tearing his Upkeep bomb from its mounting and forcing him to abort the op and return to base. Like Astell, Flight Lieutenant Bob Barlow had collided with some electricity pylons, killing himself and all his crew, and Pilot Officer Vernon Byers had been hit by flak over the Dutch island of Texel. His aircraft crashed in flames, killing all seven men aboard.

New Zealander Les Munro was also hit by flak as he crossed the Dutch coast. As he reached his turning point approaching the island of Vlieland, he could see the breakers ahead and the sand dunes rising above the level of the sea, and gained a little height to clear them. He was, he recalled, flying ‘pretty low, about thirty or forty feet, and I had actually cleared the top of the dunes and was losing height on the other side when a line of tracer appeared on the port side and we were hit by one shell amidships. It cut all the communication and electrical systems and everything went dead. The flak was only momentary, we were past it in seconds, but one lucky or unlucky hit – lucky it didn’t kill anyone, or do any fatal damage to us or the aircraft, but unlucky that one shot ensured we couldn’t complete the op we’d trained so long for’ – had forced them to abort the op and turn for home.

For those who did make it to the target, the steep terrain and dangerous obstacles close to the Sorpe dam – tall trees on one side and a church steeple on the other – made it difficult to get low enough over the water for a successful bomb-drop. ‘All that bombing training we’d done,’ McCarthy’s bomb-aimer, Johnny Johnson, recalls, ‘we couldn’t use because, as the Sorpe had no towers, we had nothing to sight on. Also, it was so placed within the hills that you couldn’t make a head-on attack anyway. So we had to fly down one side of the hills, level out with the port outer engine over the dam itself so that we were just on the water side of the dam, and estimate as nearly as we could to the centre of the dam to drop the bomb. We weren’t spinning the bomb at all, it was an inert drop.’

McCarthy made no fewer than nine unsuccessful runs before Johnson, to the clear relief of the rest of the crew, was finally able to release their bomb. Had the dam been as well defended by flak batteries as the other dams, it would have been suicidal to make so many passes over the target, but at the Sorpe, the main threat was the precipitous, near-impossible terrain surrounding it. It was an accurate drop and the bomb detonated right at the centre of the dam, blasting a waterspout so high that water hit the rear gun turret of the Lancaster as it banked away, provoking a shocked cry of ‘God Almighty!’ from the rear gunner.8 McCarthy circled back but, although there was some damage to the top of the dam, there was no tell-tale rush of water that would have signalled a breach.

Two of the five aircraft from the third wave had already been shot down on their way to the target. Pilot Officer Lewis Burpee, whose pregnant wife was waiting for him at home, was hit by flak after straying too close to a heavily defended German night-fighter base and then hit the trees. His bomb detonated as the Lancaster hit the ground with a flash that his horrified comrades described as ‘a rising sun that lit up the landscape like day’.9 All seven members of the crew were killed instantly. Bill Ottley’s Lancaster also crashed in flames after being hit by flak near Hamm. Ottley and five of his crew were killed, but by a miracle, his rear gunner, Fred Tees, although severely burned and wounded by shrapnel, survived and became a prisoner of war.

Ground mist spreading along the river valleys as dawn approached was now making the task of identifying and then bombing their target even more difficult, and the third aircraft of the third wave, flown by Flight Sergeant Cyril Anderson, was eventually forced to abort the op and return to base without even sighting the target.

Flight Sergeant Ken Brown, leading an all-NCO crew, did find the Sorpe, and after dropping flares to illuminate the dam they succeeded in dropping their bomb, once more after nine unsuccessful runs. Like McCarthy’s, the Upkeep struck the dam wall accurately and also appeared to cause some crumbling of its crest, but the dam held.

Although the Sorpe still remained intact, for some reason the last aircraft, piloted by Bill Townsend, was directed to attack yet another dam, the Ennepe. Although he dropped his bomb, it bounced twice and then sank and detonated well short of the dam wall. Townsend’s was the last Lancaster to attack the dams, and consequently so late in turning for home that dawn was already beginning to break, making him a very visible target for the flak batteries. A superb pilot – on his way to the target he had dodged flak by flying along a forest firebreak below the level of the treetops – he was at such a low level as he crossed the Dutch coast and flew out over the North Sea that coastal gun batteries targeting him had the barrels of their guns depressed so far that shells were bouncing off the surface of the sea, and some actually bounced over the top of the aircraft.10

Although the Sorpe dam remained intact, the destruction of the Möhne and Eder dams had already ensured that Operation Chastise was a tremendous success, but it had been achieved at a terrible cost. Dinghy Young’s crew became the last of the night’s victims. An unusual character with an interest in yoga, who used to ‘spend much of his time during beer-drinking sessions, sitting cross-legged on tables with a tankard in his hand’,11 Young had reached the Dutch coast on his way back to base when he was shot down with the loss of all seven crew. His was the eighth aircraft to be lost that night, with a total of fifty-six crewmen killed or missing in action. Those waiting back in Lincolnshire for news, including Gwyn Johnson in her fitful sleep at her billet, faced a further anxious wait before the surviving Lancasters made it back. Townsend, the last to return, eventually touched down back at 617’s base at Scampton at a quarter past six that morning, almost nine hours after the first of the Dambusters had taken off.

As usual, Gwyn Johnson had heard the aircraft taking off before she went to sleep the previous night and had woken up again as they were coming back. For reasons of security – and for Gwyn’s peace of mind – Johnny hadn’t told her about the op before taking off, and he didn’t tell her he’d been part of the Dams raid at all until months after the event. ‘I didn’t really want to tell her I’d been on that particular op,’ he says, ‘as I suspected she might be annoyed I’d never mentioned it previously. Sure enough, when she did find out, she gave me an earful for not telling her in the first place!’

On the night of the raid, there had been ‘no sleep for anyone’ waiting back at Scampton as the hours ticked by. ‘Our hearts and minds were in those planes,’ said one of the WAAFs who were waiting to serve them a hot meal on their return. As the night wore on, twice they heard aircraft returning and rushed outside to greet crews who had been forced to turn back before reaching the target and were nursing their damaged aircraft home.

When they again heard engines in the far distance, the WAAFs were ordered back to the Sergeants’ Mess to start serving food to the first arrivals. They waited and waited, but no aircrew came in. Two hours later, their WAAF sergeant called them together to tell them the heartbreaking news that out of nineteen aircraft that had taken off that night, only eleven had returned, with the presumed loss of fifty-six lives. (In fact fifty-three men had died; the other three had been taken prisoner after baling out of their doomed aircraft.)

‘We all burst into tears. We looked around the Aircrews’ Mess. The tables we had so hopefully laid out for the safe return of our comrades looked empty and pathetic.’ Over the next few days, the squadron routine slowly reasserted itself and the pain of those losses began to diminish, but ‘things would never, ever be the same again’.12

The ground crews shared their sense of loss. ‘The ground crews didn’t get the recognition they deserved,’ one of 617’s aircrew says. ‘Without them we were nothing. They were out in rain, snow and sun, making sure the aircraft was always ready, always waiting for us to come back. And when one didn’t come back, it was their loss as much as anyone’s.’13

The aircrews of 617 felt the deaths of their comrades and friends as keenly as anyone, of course. ‘We had lost a lot of colleagues that night and there was a real sense of loss,’ Johnny Johnson says. ‘There were so many who didn’t make it home – just a mixture of skill and sheer luck that it didn’t happen to us as well.’ However, most of the aircrews were veterans of many previous ops and, if not on this scale, had experienced the loss of friends a number of times before and developed ways of coping. It wasn’t callousness, far from it, but with deaths occurring on almost every op they flew, men who dwelt on the deaths of comrades would not survive long themselves.

Losses of crewmates and friends were never discussed. ‘It just never came up,’ Johnny Johnson says:

though I did think about death when my roommate on 97 Squadron, Bernie May, was killed. We were on the same op together when his pilot overshot the runway on landing, went through a hedge and smashed the nose up. Bernie was still in the bomb-aimer’s position and was killed outright. By the time I got back, all his gear had been cleared away from our room. It affected me that one minute he was there, and the next minute, no trace of him. Just bad luck really, but you just had to go on and find another friend. That was how it was then.

‘The hardest part was writing to the relatives of those that didn’t make it,’ front gunner Fred Sutherland says. ‘Trying to write to a mother, and all you could say was how sorry you were and what a good friend their son had been to you.’

‘I’d lost friends and colleagues,’ Johnson adds:

but never thought it would happen to me, and I had total trust in Joe McCarthy. He was a big man – six feet six – with a big personality, but also big in ability. He was strong on the ground and in the air, which gave the rest of the crew a tremendous boost. Joe had a toy panda doll called Chuck-Chuck, and we had a picture of it painted on the front of all the aircraft we flew. Other than that, I didn’t believe in lucky charms – you made your own luck – but we had such confidence in Joe that it welded us together. We all gave him the best we could and trusted him with our lives and I never, ever, thought he’d not bring me back home.

McCarthy was a genial giant who had spent some of his youth working as a lifeguard at Coney Island. After three failed attempts to join the US Army Air Corps, he crossed the border and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force instead. He came to England in January 1942 and flew on operations to the Ruhr even before he’d completed his advanced training. He then joined 97 Squadron in September 1942, where Johnny Johnston became his bomb-aimer. Most of the ops they flew together were to the ironically named ‘Happy Valley’ – the Ruhr, which had such formidable air defences that bombing there was anything but a happy experience, and many of their fellow aircrews lost their lives.

McCarthy led a multinational crew. He was from the Bronx in New York, his navigator Don McLean, rear gunner Dave Rodger, and flight engineer Bill Radcliffe were all Canadians, and the three Englishmen – Johnny Johnson, Ron Batson, the mid-upper gunner, and Len Eaton, the wireless operator – were NCOs.

The mixture of rank and nationalities, Johnson says, ‘had no significance whatsoever to any of us. We were all on Christian-name terms, including Joe, and we all got on well. There was no stand-offishness, nothing to suggest any difference between any of us.’ By contrast their first meeting with their new commanding officer had been chilly, but Gibson was already known to get on much better with men of his own class and background than with ‘other ranks and colonials’. When Gibson was on 106 Squadron, Johnson says:

he was known as the ‘Arch-Bastard’ because of his strict discipline, and one thing he didn’t have was much of an ability to mix with the lower ranks; he wasn’t able to bring himself to talk with the NCOs, and certainly not with the ground crews. He was a little man and he was arrogant, bombastic, and a strict disciplinarian, but he was one of the most experienced bomber pilots in Bomber Command, so he had something to be bombastic about. He spoke to us all at briefings, but he never spoke to me on a one-to-one basis, or ever shook my hand, or even acknowledged me. But that’s just the way he was and he was a true leader in the operational sense, his courage at the dams showed that. 14

Gibson expected others to show no less courage and dedication, and he could be abrupt, even merciless, with those whom he decided had failed to meet his exacting standards. One of the reserve crews on the Dams raid, piloted by Yorkshireman Cyril Anderson, had been redirected to the Sorpe dam from their original target, but failed to find it. After searching for forty minutes, suffering a mechanical problem, and with dawn already beginning to lighten the eastern sky, Anderson aborted the op and returned to base with his Upkeep bomb still on board. Whether or not Anderson’s humble Yorkshire origins played a part in Gibson’s decision, he showed his displeasure by immediately posting Anderson and his crew back to 49 Squadron. In any event, the commander of that squadron did not share Gibson’s opinion of Anderson, and in fact recommended him for a commission as an officer shortly after he rejoined the squadron.15

However, others, even among the ‘other ranks’, found Gibson easier to deal with. He and his beer-drinking black Labrador – sadly run over outside Scampton the night before the Dams raid – were regulars in the Officers’ Mess, and wireless operator Larry Curtis, whose Black Country origins and rise from the ranks would not have made him a natural soulmate for Gibson, said of him: ‘I know some people said he was a bit hard, but I got on well with him … I found him hard but very just, you couldn’t ask any more than that. When it was time for business he was very businesslike, when it was time to relax, he relaxed with the best of them. I only regret I never had a chance to fly with him, because he was a wonderful pilot.’16 Gibson had demonstrated his skill and bravery as both a pilot and a leader many times, but the Dams raid was to be his crowning achievement.

Bomber Command C-in-C Arthur Harris had argued forcefully against the raid beforehand, describing the idea as ‘tripe of the wildest description’,17 but he and Air Vice Marshal The Honourable Ralph Cochrane, commander of 5 Group, of which 617 Squadron formed a part, had hurried from Grantham to Scampton to congratulate the returning heroes. For them, as for the government, the press and the nation, starved for so long of good news about the war, any reservations about the aircrew losses were swept away in the jubilation about the Dams raid’s success. 617 Squadron had shown Hitler and his Nazi hierarchy that the RAF could get through and destroy targets they had previously thought invulnerable. They had dealt a severe blow – albeit a short-term one, since the dams were repaired within months – to German arms production. They had forced the Germans to divert skilled workmen from constructing the Atlantic Wall to repair the dams, and that might well have a significant impact on the chances of success of an Allied invasion of France when it eventually came.

Even those successes paled beside the huge impact the raid had on the morale of the people of Britain, and on public opinion around the world, particularly that of our sometimes reluctant and grudging ally, the United States. ‘I don’t think we appreciated how important the raid was in that respect,’ Johnny Johnson says, ‘until we saw the papers the next morning, when it was plastered all over the headlines. There had been the victory at El Alamein a few months before and now this, and it was a big, big change in what had been a bloody awful war for us until then.’18

Ironically, Cochrane, a severe-looking man with a high forehead and a piercing stare, had warned the crews at their final briefing that the Dams raid might be ‘a secret until after the war. So don’t think that you are going to get your pictures in the papers.’19 Security before the raid had been so tight that one of the local barmaids in Lincoln was sent on holiday, not because she was suspected of treachery but because she had such a remarkable memory and such a keen interest in the aircrews that it was feared she might inadvertently say something that would compromise the op.

However, once the raid was over, any considerations of the need for secrecy were swept away like the dams, by the propaganda value of publicising the raid. The Dams raid chimed perfectly with the narrative created by British propagandists: the plucky but overwhelmingly outnumbered underdog fighting alone, and through expertise, ingenuity, courage and daring, breaching the defences of the monolithic enemy.

The Daily Telegraph exulted on its front page that ‘With one single blow, the RAF has precipitated what may prove to be the greatest industrial disaster yet inflicted on Germany in this war,’20 and the other newspapers were equally triumphant in tone. Guy Gibson was awarded a Victoria Cross for his leadership of the raid and more than half the surviving members of the squadron were also decorated, but Air Marshal Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s euphoria in the immediate aftermath of the raid soon gave way to pessimism. In a letter to the Assistant Chief of Air Staff he said he had ‘seen nothing … to show that the effort was worthwhile, except as a spectacular operation’,21 and although he often appeared unmoved by aircrew losses on Main Force – the major part of Bomber Command which carried out the near-nightly area bombing of German cities – he later remarked that missions where Victoria Crosses went along with high losses should not be repeated.

However, the damage to German industry and infrastructure was undoubtedly considerable. Thousands of acres of farmland and crops were buried by silt, and the land could not be tilled for several years. Food production, output from the coal mines and steel and arms manufacture were all badly hit. The destruction of power stations further reduced industrial output, and the disruption to water supplies caused by wrecked pumping stations and treatment plants not only deprived factories of water but left firemen in the industrial towns unable to extinguish the incendiaries dropped by RAF bombers. The destruction of 2,000 buildings in Dortmund was directly attributed to this.22