The Dam Busters

^{CHAPTER XIX} BACK FROM THE DEAD

AFTER the excitement of the Tirpitz came anti-climax. Unbroken cloud lay over Europe for weeks, making high precision bombing impossible. 617 stood by constantly, were briefed hopefully a dozen times and then the cancellations came. Once they got into the air but were recalled.

Carey, Witherick and company arrived back, gloating over their taste of peacetime flesh-pots in Sweden but furious at missing the end of the Tirpitz. “You might have waited for us, sir,” Witherick said aggrievedly to Tait. “You know I always come back.”

Increasing sea losses testified to the fact that Germany’s fleet of “schnorkel “U-boats was increasing. For all the main force bombing, the U-boats found shelter in the massive concrete pens and Cochrane switched 617 on to them. They battered the pens at Ijmuiden (the port of Amsterdam) with six direct hits.

Cochrane decided that Tait had done enough. Tait had four D.S.Os. now and two D.F.Cs.—a record—and Cochrane did not want him to strain his luck too far. Shopping round for a new commander, he found no one with all the qualities he wanted till an air commodore heard the position was vacant and asked to be dropped in rank and given the job. This was Johnnie Fauquier, a Canadian, and a tough one, a thick-set, ex-bush pilot. Ten years older than most of them, he was as forceful as a steam-roller. Feeling that the war was almost over, the crews had been in a mood to relax and were scandalised when Fauquier got them out of bed in the frosty early mornings for P.T. Storms were sweeping over Europe and the runways were snowed up, so there was no flying. Fauquier gave them lectures instead, and then made them shovel snow off the runways.

More days waiting for weather; more briefings, more cancellations, till January 12, when they went to Bergen, in Norway, on the campaign against U-boats. For the first time Fauquier flew a Mosquito to direct them and for the first time in months German fighters fell on them like a swarm of hornets. They got Pryor on their first strike and he went straight into the sea. Three of them lunged at Nicky Ross on the flank of the gaggle. Watts, next to him, saw the tracer flicking into the Lancaster and lumps flying off her. He wheeled to help him, but Ross was going down, slewing into a spiral with three engines smashed. Near the water he seemed to recover; the spiral stopped, the mad dive eased and the plane had almost flattened out when it abruptly vanished in a sheet of spray. The rest took vengeance. Someone put a “tallboy” squarely on the stern of a large ship and in two minutes she had blown up, rolled over and sunk. The rest got several direct hits on the pens.

Next morning Chiefy Powell was sadly typing out the casualty report on Nicky Ross (who had been on the squadron nearly a year—longer than any other pilot) when the door swung open and in walked Ross himself.

Powell gaped.

“Wotcher, Chiefy,” quoth the ghost. “Home again!”

“Good God, sir! Where’ve you come from?”

“Air sea rescue picked us up. Cold in that dinghy.” He sat on a corner of the desk and rattled on amiably about the details.

After some splutters Powell found speech. “D’you know what I was doing when you walked in, sir? Typing your death notice!”

“Ar, hold it for a while, Chiefy,” said the cheerful Ross. “You’re a bit premature.”

Meantime the first “grand slam” was nearly ready. Like the “tallboy”, its tail had offset aero-dynamic fins to make it spul so fast in falling that the gyroscopic effect would stop it toppling as it shuddered through the sonic barrier. When the tail was put on “grand slam” would be 25 feet 6 inches long. At its thickest part it was 3 feet 10 inches in diameter, and the finished bomb was to weigh just over 22,000 Ib.

The German fighter force was nearly spent now, making it possible for 617’s inadequately armed Lancasters to penetrate deeper and deeper against the enemy by day. They carried on with “tallboys” against the U-boat pens until Eisenhower asked the Air Forces for an all-out assault on German communications. The vulnerable points were the railway bridges, and most vital of these was the Bielefeld Viaduct, not far from Bremen, main link between the Wehrmacht defending the arsenal of the Ruhr and the great centres of north-west Germany. The idea was to starve the front of men and materials and split the country into “islands” that could be taken one by one.

Three thousand tons of bombs had already been aimed at the Bielefeld Viaduct; the earth for a mile around it was torn into overlapping craters, but the 75-foot arches of the viaduct still firmly bridged the marshes for the trains running south. The light-case bombs of the main bomber forces were not powerful enough to do more than chip it. Cochrane turned 617 on to it, and so began the battle of Bielefeld.

They took off with their “tallboys” one morning, but found the viaduct under ten-tenths cloud and brought them back. Next day they tried once more but again found unbroken cloud. Days later the cloud had cleared; they flew back to Bielefeld, found it reasonably clear and a few minutes later the viaduct was hidden under smoke as the “tallboys” crashed round it. Half an hour later, when the smoke lifted, a recce aircraft found the viaduct still there. “Tallboy” craters lay in its shadow, but the viaduct was no round target like a bull’s-eye or a U-boat pen. From 18,000 feet it was almost indistinguishably threadlike. It was like trying to stick a dart in a pencil line.

They waited on the weather and tried again a few days later, but once more found it under cloud. Doggedly they went back a fifth time and turned away in fuming frustration once more. There seemed to be something diabolical about the persistence of the cloud that shielded it.

That night two heavy trailers rolled round the perimeter track to the bomb dump carrying the first two “grandslams”. In the morning armourers trollied them out and slowly winched them up into Fauquier’s and Calder’s Lancasters, specially modified in readiness for this day. They had the most powerful Merlin engines, the fuselages, undercarriages and main beams of the bomb bays had been strengthened and the bomb doors taken off (they could not have closed round the great girth of “Grand Slam”).

“Grand Slam” had never been tested. There had not been tune. Only one other “grand slam” existed, and that very morning a Lancaster was going to drop it over the range in the New Forest. Group was wailing for that, and also for the cloud to clear.

Just before noon Met. reported the cloud over Germany rolling away. As Fauquier was briefing his crews a phone message reached Group from the New Forest: “The beast went off all right!”