The Dam Busters

^{CHAPTER X} SNIPER SQUADRON

THE fate of 617 was decided at high level. “We’ll make ‘em a special duties squadron,” said Sir Arthur Harris. “They needn’t do ordinary ops., but whenever the Army or Navy want a dam or a ship or something clouted we’ll put 617 on to it. And we’ll put all the old lags in 617.”

“The old lags” was Harris’s affectionate and respectful name for the really hard-bitten aircrews who only wanted to do operations. Every now and then there would be a crew who, after finishing their tour, would stubbornly boggle at taking their six months’ rest training new aircrews. They insisted on staying on operations and were dearest of all to Harris, probably because they had the same volcanic temperament as himself.

Harris said 617 could stay in 5 Group with Cochrane, and Cochrarie had it in his mind to make them a “sniper” squadron for super-accurate bombing with Wallis’s 10-tonner. Ordinary bombing, he knew, would waste most of the 10-tonners, and there would be none to waste.

Up to this time a little more than one out of three raids were really effective. The Germans built dummy targets outside cities, spread camouflage nets over tell-tale lakes and rivers in the towns, decoyed the bombers in every way they could, and even lit: fires in fields so the bombers would think they were hitting their targets. Often the crews bombed open fields instead,.

That was why the Pathfinder Force had been formed, and now that: they were in action bombing was becoming more effective. P.F.F. found and marked the target areas with coloured flares, and the main force bombed these markers. It stopped them bombing open fields, but it was still “carpet bombing”, hateful, and yet, it seemed, necessary.

And losses still mounted. Now they were about 4 per cent; one bomber in twenty-five failed to return. Or average it another way—a squadron of twenty aircraft would lose every one in twenty-five raids. A tour of operation was thirty raids; then, if you were still alive, you had six months’ rest and went back for another tour. In lives and labour and for the minor damage done, bombing was not economical enough for Harris.

At Farnborough, in 1941, a man named Richards had invented a piece of intricate mechanism he called the Stabilising Automatic Bomb Sight. It incorporated a gyro; in perfect conditions it could aim a bomb uncannily, but Harris thought it was too complicated for the conditions of actual bombing. For one thing, a bomber using it had to run perfectly straight and level up to the target for ten miles, a perfect mark for flak, searchlights and fighters. Harris said it would mean death for too many of his boys, who had little enough chance as it was, and Bomber Command could not take much heavier losses.

Another school of thought said the S.A.B.S. could be used economically by a small force. Cochrane was one of them. He argued that from high level the S.A.B.S. could hit a well-marked target so accurately that they would not have to send the squadrons back to the same place again and again. In the long run they would lose less. He wanted to train 617 till they could use the S.A.B.S. in battle and deliver Wallis’s 10-tonners, when they arrived, in the right spots.

There were many conferences and then Harris agreed.

Patch called Martin to his office. “The Tirpitz is off for the time being,” he said, and Martin sighed gently with relief. “The A.O.C. has something new for you. From now on your squadron role is changed to ultra-accurate high-level bombing and you’re going to be practising till your eyes drop out.

You’ve got to get down to an average of under a hundred yards from twenty thousand feet.” Martin’s eyes almost dropped out on the spot. “The reasons,” Patch went on, “are that there’s a new bomb coming up… a big one. You’ll only be able to carry one and they’re so expensive every one will have to be spot on,” He said they were getting a new bomb sight at once.

A day later a tall, thin man with lively eyes walked into Martin’s office carrying a bundle wrapped in oilskin and announced that he was Squadron Leader Richardson come to help 617 convert to the S.A.B.S.

“This is it,” he said, carefully unwrapping the bundle. “It’s the loveliest thing in the world.” The S.A.B.S. looked like an ordinary bomb sight except that a bulky gyro was encased in it. Richardson handled it lovingly, and in the next few days the squadron found out why. He was not a bomb-aiming enthusiast, he was a fanatic who started talking bomb-aiming at breakfast and was still on the subject at bedtime. He lectured the crews, flew with them, experimented with them and after a time no one had any chance of not knowing everything about the S.A.B.S. Bob Hay, haunted now by his own profession, christened him “Talking Bomb”. Much of the credit for what happened belongs to “Talking Bomb”, who had been a pilot in World War I and managed in due course to fly on fifteen raids with 617 to watch his beloved bomb sight in action.

617 did no ops. for weeks, but night and day the aircraft were 20,000 feet over the bombing range at Wainfleet aiming practice bombs at the white dots on the sands with the S.A.B.S. It needed far more than a hawk-eyed bomb aimer; it called for teamwork. The gunners took drifts to help the navigator work out precise wind direction and speed, and navigator and bomb aimer calculated obscure instrument corrections. An error of a few feet at 20,000 feet would throw a bomb hopelessly off.

“Talking Bomb” himself was very accurate with the S.A.B.S., and before long a couple of crews could emulate him. Martin’s was one. Within three weeks Hay set an example with an average of 64 yards. Some of the others, however, were still well over a hundred yards.

Three more crews arrived: Bill Suggitt, Canadian squadron leader, to take over A Flight, Clayton and Ted Youseman, an Englishman, who never stopped talking flying. There were the usual incidents—two aircraft hit trees low flying and were written off (though no one was killed). Martin had an engine catch fire in the air but doused it with the extinguishers. Shannon’s aileron cables snapped over the North Sea, but he made an emergency landing, using trimmers to keep his wing-tips level and making a wide, flat turn on rudder alone. He claimed it was better than his usual landing, which, Sumpter said rudely, was nothing to boast about.

Spurred on by Cochrane, Sam Patch and Martin tried to find a way of minimising the danger of the ten-mile run-up to the target using S.A.B.S. “Talking Bomb “was a fertile source of ideas.

“This is what you ought to do,” he said. “You all fly round the target in a great big circle like Red Indians, see? and then someone gives the word and you all turn inwards and come in like the spokes of a wheel. The Hun won’t know who to shoot at.”

“That’s O.K., Talking Bomb,” Martin said, “but what happens when they all get into the middle?”

“Oh, put ‘em at different heights.”

“What about the bombs falling on the lower aircraft?”

“There must be a way over that,” “Talking Bomb” mut-ered.

It was a somewhat similar idea that they adopted, and it depended on immaculate timing and navigation. The aircraft, at different heights, would circle a spot in sight of the target but outside the defences, and when the markers were down the leader would assess their accuracy, give the order to bomb and they would all come in, converging slightly. If there were twenty guns below, for instance, and only one aircraft coining in, the twenty guns would all be firing at it, but with twenty planes coming in at the same time, too widely scattered for a box barrage, there would be only one gun against each aircraft—twenty times less chance of being hit.

New troubles kept cropping up with the S.A.B.S. For instance, the thermometers were showing errors up to 5 degrees, enough to throw a bomb over a hundred feet the wrong way. Farnborough put in new type thermometers, and by early November the squadron had an average bombing error of only 90 yards.

Good, enough, Cochrane thought, and at dusk on November 12, Martin led the squadron off to try out the S.A.B.S. in battle. The target was the Antheor Viaduct again, an easy one so that they could give the S.A.B.S. fair trial. In the bomb bays hung 12,000-lb. light-case “blast” bombs.

They found the viaduct in half-moonlight, but this time it was different… four searchlights and half a dozen guns round it. Running up, the viaduct was hard to pick up in the glare of the searchlights; the next little bay looked exactly the same and several crews bombed the wrong bay. Some of them got the right bay in their graticules but could not distinguish the viaduct:. Rice, O’Shaughnessy and one other got near misses, 50 yards away, but the blast was not enough to damage the viaduct.

They flew disgustedly on to Blida again and it was then that Martin, recalled what McCarthy had said about flares after San Polo. Everyone agreed that if they had had flares to mark the viaduct they could have hit it. Two days later they flew back to England, but Youseman never arrived. No one ever found out what happened to him and his crew, but a German fighter probably got them over the sea.

Martin reported to Cochrane the need for target marking, and Cochrane sent him and Patch to Pathfinder Headquarters to talk it over with the experts. Pathfinders promised to mark their next target, and Martin put the crews back on training to perfect their S.A.B.S. technique.

Martin’s time as temporary commander was up. Cochrane would not replace him with any ordinary squadron commander, but he had found the man he wanted. Leonard Cheshire, at twenty-five, was the youngest group captain in the R.A.F., and was not only willing to return to operations but actually asked Cochrane to drop him back to wing commander so he could take over the squadron. He did not look the part at all. Gibson had looked the part; but Cheshire looked more like a theological student thinly disguised as a senior officer; yet he had done two tours and won a D.S.O. and bar and D.F.C. He was tall, thin and dark, a strange blend of brilliance (sometimes erratic), self-consciousness, confidence and soft-spoken charm. Highly sensitive and introspective, he yet lacked, quite illogically, the foreboding imagination that makes some sensitive men sweat with fear before a raid.

He had a gentle consideration for other people, and a Puckish sense of humour, but in the air he was cool, efficient and calculating. In a way he had a mind like Barnes Wallis, liable to get ideas that horrified people but turned out to be right. He had been flying a certain type of heavy bomber at a time when losses of that type were inexplicably heavy. They had acquired too much extra equipment, so that fully loaded, at operational height, they were slow, flew soggily and were inclined to yaw and drop into a fatal spiral with the rudders locked over. Then they added kidney cowls to blanket the exhaust flames from night fighters, and that, for Cheshire, was the last straw. He considered it made the aircraft more dangerous than the enemy and asked permission to take the cowls off his squadron’s aircraft.

Everyone flatly disagreed except his A.O.C., Air Vice-Marshal Carr, who let Cheshire do so, with the result that his losses fell. It was the first step to taking off a lot more: front turret, mid-upper turret and armour-plate; freed of the excessive drag and weight the plane flew more comfortably, the engines were not overworked and losses fell further. * * *

A raid on Peenemunde had put Germany’s rocket programme back six months, and they stopped work on the monster rocket blockhouses to go ahead with the more dispersed flying-bomb sites. Recce aircraft were bringing back to England photographs showing mysterious new activity in the same areas, the erection of many low, curved buildings in clearings in woods, and next to them short sets of rails that seemed to start and end in nothingness. Intelligence men christened them “ski sites “because the long buildings were the same shape as skis, and bit by bit they connected them more definitely with secret-weapon reports.

It was clear that these and other satellite launching sites could be put up very quickly and were more or less mobile. They were springing up all over the place and ordinary blast bombs could smash them, but after Peenemunde, Hitler seemed to be relying for protection on dispersal—numbers, camouflage and mobility—instead of three or four centralised targets.

In Whitehall, Churchill, the Air Council, Harris, Sir Stafford Cripps (now Minister of Aircraft Production) and Sir Wilfred Freeman discussed the situation uncomfortably, and one day Freeman sent for Wallis.

“We’re stopping work on the ten-ton bomb,” he said. “The big targets we had for them aren’t so important now, and Sir Stafford doesn’t think the ten-tonner justifies all that work.”

Wallis could not dispute the logic of it. The biggest bombers would have a very short range with a ten-tonner— little more than across the Channel, and in that area there seemed no other targets important enough. There were plenty in Germany, of course, but the Lancasters could not carry the 10-tonner as far as that.

Wallis pleaded with Freeman to let him go ahead with the 12,000-lb. scaled-down version of the 10-tonner, to penetrate deeply in the same way and cause an earthquake shock. The Lancasters could drop them deep inside Germany on the kind of targets he had originally had in mind. Freeman thought for a long time, and in the end he said yes—a bold decision to make on his own. He knew that neither the Air Council nor the Ministry of Supply liked the idea of either the 10-tonner or the scaled-down version, because they were designed to be dropped from 40,000 feet for proper penetration. The Lancaster could not drop them from higher than 20,000, and the Council and Ministry considered they would not thus penetrate deeply enough for the proper earthquake effect.

Freeman made the decision so much on his own initiative that no Requirement Order was issued for the bombs, which meant that the Air Force did not have to accept them—or pay for them. He gave the scaled-down bomb the code name of “Tallboy”, and Wallis hoped to have one ready for trial by March.

Cochrane had his eye on the mobile launching sites as targets for 617 but left them in peace while Cheshire kept his crews perfecting the S.A.B.S. technique, and for some weeks the squadron did no operations until, on December 10, Cheshire got a call from Tempsford for the loan of four crews. Temps-ford was the hush-hush airfield where planes took off to land agents in occupied countries and drop arms to Resistance fighters. Cheshire chose McCarthy, Clayton, Bull and Weedon, and they flew their aircraft to Tempsford.

McCarthy landed back at Coningsby two days later, walked into Humphries’ office and dumped two kitbags on the floor. “Bull and Weedon’s kit,” he said. “They’ve had it.”

“Oh God! When?”

“Last night. We did a special low-level thing, dropping arms and ammunition. They must have hit trouble.” He added disgustedly, “I didn’t even find the target area.”

He went back to Tempsford that afternoon, and he and Clayton tried again that night—successfully.