The Dam Busters

^{CHAPTER XV} EARTHQUAKE BOMB

COCHRANE sent for Cheshire and took him walking in the grounds of headquarters away from listening ears.

“You’ll be doing no more operations for a month,” he said, “and then you’ll be doing a very special one. You’ll spend the next month training for it.”

He would say no more, but next day a scientist, Dr. Cock-burn, arrived at Woodhall from London and also took Cheshire walking. They lay alone on the grass by the air field, obviously for privacy. Cockburn said: “I understand you can be trusted to keep your mouth shut, so I’m going to tell you something a lot of Cabinet Ministers and generals don’t know yet. You know by now an invasion is coming off very soon. If the weather is right it will be in about a month, and landings will be made west of Le Havre. We want to fool the Germans we’re going in somewhere else.”

Cheshire waited.

“On that night,” Cockburn went on, “there’s going to be a big convoy fourteen miles wide passing across the Channel at seven knots.”

“Sounds a pretty big invasion,” Cheshire said.

“That isn’t the invasion. They’ll be heading towards Cap d’Antifer, on the other side of Le Havre.”

“A diversion!”

“Yes.”

“I must say,” Cheshire said, “it sounds a pretty big diversion. Have they got all those ships to spare?”

“No. They won’t be ships. They’ll be you and your boys.”

Cheshire rolled over and looked at him. “Us!” he said blankly and then got the glimmerings of an idea. “Dropping window?”

“That’s it,” said Cockburn. “It’s going to need the most precise flying you’ve ever done. Can you do this… can you all fly in a very wide formation, invisible to each other, and do a lot of intricate manoeuvring, keeping within three seconds of all your e.t.a.’s and within twenty feet of your height.”

“I don’t know. Doesn’t sound very possible.”

“It’ll have to go on for hours and hours,” Cockburn said, “so you’ll do it in two waves. Eight aircraft for a few hours and then the second eight taking over from them.” He went on to explain the technique: lines of aircraft a set distance apart, flying precise courses at precise speeds and height, throwing out window at intervals of a precise number of seconds. The planes would fly thirty-five seconds on course, turn evenly, fly a reverse course for thirty-two seconds, a slow turn again back to the first course and start throwing out more window. They would thus start the original course again at a point slightly ahead of where the previous one started and the first of the new lot of window would drop from the aircraft at the moment that the first bundle dropped on the previous leg hit the water, so there would be no interruption of the steady blips on German radar. It would go on like that for eight hours, timed to give an effect of a large convoy several rows of ships deep moving at seven knots towards the French coast.

The training never let up except for one day when the weather closed in. Otherwise there was no moment, night or day, in the next month when some 617 aircraft were not flying, particularly by night, cruising at a steady 200 m.p.h. on a steady course and height, curving in even turns to reverse courses, turning back on the stop watch, unspectacular, tedious and demanding meticulous care and skill.

They all sensed the invasion was drawing near; Cheshire had the idea that the Germans might drop paratroops on British airfields on D-day, so he persuaded Doc Watson’s armament section to issue as many aircrew as they could with either a revolver, Sten gun, rifle or hand grenade. It was one of his few sad mistakes. For three days life was a precarious possession at Woodhall. First they set dinner plates up on the lawn near the mess and loosed off at them with Sten guns from the second-floor windows. That palled after a while, so they started lobbing hand grenades in the general direction of the sergeants’ mess. At night time Buckley became a terrible menace, keeping a vigil by his bedroom window and loosing off clips from his Sten gun over the heads of late home-comers so that they had to crawl to bed over the back lawn on their bellies.

Even Witherick, who was known to be too durable for death by any of the known methods of war, commented uncomfortably, “The only time you’re safe on this squadron is when you’re in the air! “It became obvious that German paratroops were less of a menace than the local aircrew army, so Cheshire collected all the weapons and returned them to the armoury. Peace descended once more on the mess, to the regret of Shannon and McCarthy. Shannon and McCarthy were rarely seen apart; they drank together and dined together and it was logical, therefore, that they should act together to revive the reign of terror, climbing to the roof of squadron headquarters to drop a Very cartridge down the adjutant’s chimney. They knew the innocent Humphries had a fire in the grate.

A Very cartridge in artful hands is like a semi-lethal firework; exploding in a confined space it resembles a small but concentrated bombing raid, providing a monstrous crash, sheets of coloured flame and clouds of choking smoke. Half the beauty of the thing is that it goes on for about fifteen seconds. They dropped it down the chimney and started laughing as the waves of sound came rocking up from below.

Unfortunately it was not Humphries’ chimney, but the commanding officer’s. Cheshire scuttled out, pursued by flashes and rolling fumes, ran on to the tarmac and spotted his two flight commanders hiding behind a chimney. With aristocratic dignity he said nothing but for several nights Shannon and McCarthy found themselves doing duty officer together, an irksome task which kept them out of their beds and abstemiously patrolling the station buildings.

Throwing Very cartridges into the mess fire had long been a favourite sport, so Cheshire thought it time to issue a stern order that no firearms, cartridges or pyrotechnics of any kind be brought into the mess building.

He was woken that night by a scuttling outside his window, threw it wide open and saw a rat running across the roof. Quick as lightning he grabbed his own.38 revolver from his dressing-table and took a pot-shot that bowled the rat over and echoed through the quiet night like a small cannon. Cheshire was still leaning out of his window, revolver in hand, when the next window shot open and the head of Danny Walker poked out. “Got the dirty rat that time,” Cheshire said triumphantly and became conscious of Walker’s eyes staring coldly, focusing on the hand that held the gun. He felt his face going red and ducked inside, laying the pistol down, and heard Walker’s voice next door, talking loudly to a mythical room-mate, “But I tell you, old boy, I distinctly heard the man say that no one under any circumstances was to have a firearm inside the mess.”

On June 5 everyone was confined to camp, and at dusk, with guards on the doors of the briefing room, Cheshire told the crews that the invasion was about to start. The first wave of eight planes took off about u p.m. with twelve men in each aircraft, an extra pilot, extra navigator and three men to drop the bundles of window out.

They made absolutely no mistakes that night, though it would have taken an error of only four seconds in timing to make the convoy suspiciously change position on the German radar. Hour after hour they flew in the blackness over the Channel, turning on stop-watches up and down on reversed courses while the window was tossed out at four-second intervals. Round 3 a.m. the second wave of eight aircraft took over, the trickiest part of all because they had to come in directly behind with split-second timing to carry on. They saw nothing of the invasion.

They were to break away just before dawn, before the light was good enough for the Germans to see from the shore that they had been tricked. By that time they should be within ‘seven miles of the French coast, and that is exactly where they were. Farther north another squadron was doing a similar task with at least as much success.

They had their reward as they turned for home; the German coastal batteries opened up… not the flak but the big guns, aiming 12-inch shells by radar prediction at the ghost armada. German E-boats came out from Calais and Boulogne but they would have needed aerial torpedoes to do any damage.

It is history now that the Germans really thought the main invasion was aiming at that area. (In prison camp in the heart of Germany that day, I heard the German radio announcing two huge armadas heading in towards Cap d’Antifer and Calais. It gave us great joy, but we wondered for months what had happened to those convoys.)

Inland from Boulogne and Dieppe the bulk of the German Army, which should have been hurrying to the real invasion area on the other side of Le Havre, waited… and waited, poised to swoop on the armadas that were not there. By the time the Germans woke up to it other squadrons had blasted bridges over the Seine between them and the invasion and the Allied troops were consolidating their landings with greater freedom from counter-attack than they had dreamed possible.

Cheshire was driving round the perimeter track with Munro that evening for no particular reason that he can remember, and just past the A Flight hardstandings they passed a huge tarpaulin-covered lorry cruising slowly along.

“What’s that doing here?” Munro murmured, not very curiously, and Cheshire, his head still full of D-Day precautions, said, “Lord knows. Let’s find out.”

They drove across the lorry’s bows; it stopped and they climbed out of their jeep and went back to the lorry driver. “What have you got in there?” Cheshire asked.

“Boilers for the cookhouse, sir,” the driver said.

“Aren’t you going the wrong way? The cookhouse is over there,” Cheshire waved a hand to the rear.

“Well I dunno, sir. They told me to deliver them over there.” The driver pointed to the far side of the field.

“The bomb dump! That’s the bomb dump. Who told you that?” A suspicious edge had crept into Cheshire’s voice.

“That’s what they told me, sir.”

Cheshire said, “Let’s have a look at this, Les. Something funny here.” He heaved himself over the tailboard of the lorry. Another tarpaulin covered a shapeless bulk in the back; he tugged a corner clear and, unbidden, a grunt of surprise came out of him. “Look at these! “

Lashed to the floor were two shining steel monsters. They were like sharks, slim, streamlined and with sharp noses. “Bombs,” Cheshire said, almost in awe. “Wallis’s ‘ tallboys ‘.”

They followed the lorry to the bomb dump and were staggered to find the dump nearly full of “tallboys”, snugged down under tarpaulins. An armament officer said apologetically, “They’ve been coming in at night time for the past week, sir. I was told to keep quiet about them.”

Cheshire tore back to his office, got Cochrane at Group on the secret scrambled phone and told him he had just been inspecting “the new boilers for the cookhouse in the bomb dump.” He heard what sounded like the ghost of muted amusement in Cochrane’s voice:

“Just see they’re safely in storage, Cheshire. You’ll be using them soon.”

The call came without warning forty-eight hours later. Intelligence had reported a German panzer division moving up from Bordeaux by rail to attack the invasion. The trains would have to pass through the Saumur Tunnel, near the Loire, over a hundred miles inland, and in the late afternoon Harris suggested to Cochrane that they might have a chance of blocking the tunnel before the trains reached it. They would have to move fast; it would be nightfall before bombers could reach the spot, and a tunnel on a dark night would be an elusive pin-point of a target. Only one squadron could do it; that was obvious. And probably only one type of bomb!

Cheshire got the order about 5 p.m. to take off as soon as they could, and there was a mad rush to collect everyone, trolley the “tallboys” out of the dump and winch them up into the bomb bays. They were airborne soon after dusk, and it was shortly after midnight that Cheshire, in his Mosquito, dropped flares by a bend of the river and saw where the rails vanished into the tunnel that led under the Saumur hill.

He dive-bombed from 3,000 feet, aimed his red spots point blank, and as he pulled up from about a hundred feet saw them lying beautifully in the tunnel mouth. Ninety seconds later the Lancasters were steady on their bombing runs, and a couple of minutes later the first earthquake bombs ever dropped on business were streaking down.

Ten thousand feet above, the crews felt disappointed. The “tallboys” did not make a splash of brilliant light like the blockbusters but showed only momentary red pin-points as they speared into the earth and exploded nearly a hundred feet deep. The little flashes they made were all round the markers but the crews turned for home with a feeling of anti-climax, and it was not till the recce Mosquito landed next morning with photographs that the impact of what they had done hit them. With one exception the fantastic craters were round the tunnel mouth, two of them in a line along the rails as though giant bites a hundred feet across and seventy feet deep had been torn out of the track bed.

But what really staggered everyone was the bomb that had fallen on the hill 60 yards from the tunnel mouth. No one ever found out whose bomb it was, which is a pity, because some bomb aimer would have received an instant decoration (though the credit should really go to Barnes Wallis). The hill rose steeply from the tunnel mouth, and under the spot where this bomb hit lay 70 feet of solid earth and chalk down to the tunnel. The bomb had bored straight through it into the tunnel itself and exploded there. Something like 10,000 tons of earth and chalk were blown sky-high and the mountain collapsed into the tunnel. It was one of the most startling direct hits of all time.

The panzer division did not get through. It was several days before dribs and drabs of them started to reach the invasion front on other transport, but by then it was too late for the decisive counter-attack they were supposed to have made. (The morning after the raid the Germans collected all the excavation gear in the district and slaved for weeks clearing the tunnel, filling in the craters and laying new rails. They just had it nicely finished when the Allies broke out of their bridgehead and took it over.)

And then, so soon after the invasion, the V1 “buzz-bombs “started to fall on London. The V2 rockets would follow soon…. Intelligence was sure of that.