The Dam Busters

^{CHAPTER VIII} THE WRITHING LAKE

AT Grantham a long silence had followed the flak warning at Huls, and then Dunn’s phone rang sharply, and in the dead silence they all heard the Morse crackling in the receiver. It was quite slow and Cochrane, bending near, could read it. “Goner,” he said. “From G George.” “Goner” was the code word that meant Gibson had exploded his bomb in the right place.

“I’d hoped one bomb might do it,” Wallis said gloomily.

“It’s probably weakened it,” Cochrane soothed him. Harris looked non-committal. There was no more from “G George,” and they went on walking. A long silence. Nothing came through when Hopgood crashed. The phone rang, “Goner” from “P Popsie.” Another dragging silence. “Goner” from “A Apple.” Wallis swears even today that there was half an hour between each signal, but the Jog shows only about five minutes. “Goner” from “J Johnny.” That was Maltby, and the aura of gloom settled deeper over Wallis.

A minute later the phone rang again and the Morse crackled so fast the others could not read it. Dunn printed it letter by letter on a signals pad and let out a cry, “Nigger. It’s Nigger. It’s gone.”

Wallis threw his arms over his head and went dancing round the room. The austere face of Cochrane cracked into a grin, he grabbed one of Wallis’s hands and started congratulating him. Harris, with the first grin on his face that Wallis had ever seen, grabbed the other hand and said:

“Wallis, I didn’t believe a word you said about this bomb, but you could sell me a pink elephant now.”

He said, a little later when some of the excitement had died down: “I must tell Portal immediately.” Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the R.A.F., was in Washington that night on a mission, actually at that moment dining with Roosevelt. Harris picked up the nearest phone and said, “Get me the White House.”

The little W.A.A.F. on the switchboard knew nothing of the highly secret raid. Even at Grantham, Cochrane’s security had been perfect. She did not realise the importance of it all, or the identity of the great man who was speaking, and was caught off guard. “Yes, sir,” she said automatically and, so they say, dialled the only White House she knew, a jolly little roadhouse a few miles out of Grantham.

Harris must have thought she was a very smart operator when the White House answered so quickly, and there are reported to have been moments of incredible and indescribable comedy as Harris asked for Portal, and the drowsy landlord, testy at being hauled out of bed after midnight, told him in well-chosen words he didn’t have anyone called Portal staying at the place; in fact, he didn’t have anyone staying at all, because he didn’t have room, and if he did have room he would not have anyone staying there who had people who called him up at that time of night. Not for long anyway.

Harris went red, and there were some explosive exchanges before one of them slammed the receiver down. Someone slipped down and had a word with the little W.A.A.F., and she tried in terror for the next hour to raise Washington, but without success.

Three kilometres down the valley from the Moehne lay the sleeping village of Himmelpforten, which means Gate of Heaven. The explosions had wakened the village priest, Father Berkenkopf, and he guessed instantly what was happening; he had been afraid of it for three years. He ran to his small stone church, Porta Coeli (which also means Gate of Heaven—in Latin) and begun tugging grimly on the bell-rope, the signal he had arranged with his villagers. It is not certain how many were warned in time. In the darkness the clanging of the bell rolled ominously round the valley and then it was muffled in the thunder moving nearer. Berkenkopf must have heard it and known what it meant, but it seems that he was still pulling at the bell when the flood crushed the church and the village of the Gate of Heaven and rolled them down the valley.

It went for many miles and took more villages, a tumbling maelstrom of water and splintered houses, beds and frying-pans, the chalice from Porta Coeli and the bell, the bodies of cattle and horses, pigs and dogs, and the bodies of Father Berkenkopf and other human beings.

War, as someone said, is a great leveller, but he did not mean it quite as literally or as bitterly as this.

The Eder was hard to find because fog was filling the valley. Gibson circled it for some time before he was certain he was there. One by one the others found it and soon they were all in a left-hand circuit round the lake. There was no flak; probably the Germans thought the Eder did not need it. It lay deep in a fold of the hills; the ridges around were a thousand feet high and it was no place to dive a heavy aircraft at night.

Gibson said, “O.K. Dave. Start your attack.”

Shannon flew a wide circuit over the ridges and then put his nose right down, but the dive was not steep enough and he overshot. Sergeant Henderson slammed on full throttle, and Shannon hauled back on the stick and they just cleared the mountain on the far side.

“Sorry Leader,” Shannon said a little breathlessly. “Made a mess of that. I’ll try it again.”

Five times more he dived into the dark valley but he failed every time to get into position and nearly stood the Lancaster on her tail to get out of the hills again. He called up finally, “I think I’d better circle and try to get to know this place.”

“O.K. Dave. You hang around a bit and let someone else have a crack. Hullo ‘ Z Zebra.’ You have a go now.”

Maudslay acknowledged and a minute later was diving down the contour of the hills, only to overshoot and go rocketing up again like Shannon. He tried again but the same thing happened. Maudslay said he was going to try once more. He came slowly over the ridges, turned in the last moment and the nose dropped sharply into the gloom as he forced her down into the valley. They saw him level out very fast, and then the spotlights flicked on to the water and closed quickly and he was tracking for the dam. His red Very light curled up as Fuller called “Bombs gone!”

But something went wrong. The bomb hit the parapet of the dam at high speed and blew up on impact with a tremendous flash; in the glare they saw “Z Zebra” for a moment just above the explosion. Then only blackness.

Gibson said painfully, knowing it was useless: “Henry, Henry—hullo ‘Z Zebra,’ are you all right?” There was no answer. He called again and, incredibly, out of the darkness a very faint voice said, “I think so… stand by,” They all heard it, Gibson and Shannon and Knight, and wondered that it was possible. After a while Gibson called again but there was no answer. Maudslay never came back. Gibson called, “O.K., David, will you attack now?” Shannon tried and missed again; came round once more, plunged into the darkness and this time made it, curling out of the dive at the foot of the lake and tracking for the dam. He found his height quickly, the bomb dropped clear and Shannon roughly pulled his plane up over the shoulder of the mountain. Under the parapet the bomb spewed up the familiar plume of white water and as it drifted down Gibson, diving over the lake, saw that the dam was still there. There was only Knight left. He had the last bomb. Gibson ordered him in.

Knight tried once and couldn’t make it. He tried again. Failed. “Come in down moon and dive for the point, Les,” Shannon said. He gave more advice over the R/T, and Knight listened quietly. He was a young Australian who did not drink, his idea of a riotous evening being to write letters home and go to the pictures. He dived to try again, made a perfect run and they saw the splashes as his bomb skipped over the water in feathers of spray. Seconds later the water erupted, and as Gibson slanted down to have a look he saw the wall of the dam burst open and the torrent come crashing out.

This was even more fantastic than the Moehne. The breach in the dam was as big and there were over 200 million tons of water pouring through. The Eder Valley was steeper and they watched speechlessly as the flood foamed and tossed down the valley, lengthening like a snake. It must have been rolling at 30 feet a second. They saw a car in front racing to get clear; only the lights they saw, like two frightened eyes spearing the dark, and the car was not fast enough. The foam crawled up on it, the headlights turned opalescent green as the water rolled over, and suddenly they flicked out.

Hutchison was tapping “Dinghy” in Morse; that was the code to say that the Eder was destroyed. When he had finished Gibson called, “O.K. all Cooler aircraft. You’ve had your look. Let’s go home.” and the sound of their engines died over the hills as they flew west to fight their way back.

McCarthy had fought a lone way through to the Sorpe, tucked down in rolling hills south of the Moehne. The valleys were full of mist, so it was a long time before he pin-pointed himself over the lake, dimly seeing through the haze a shape he recognised from the model.

He tried a dummy run and found, as the others found before at the Eder, that there was a hill at each end so that he would have to dive steeply, find his aiming point quickly and pull up in a hurry. He tried twice more but was not satisfied and came in a third time, plunging through the mist trying to see through the suffused moonlight. He nearly hit the water and levelled out very low. Johnson picked up the aiming point and seconds later yelled, “Bomb gone! “and they were climbing up over the far hills when the bomb exploded by the dam wall. McCarthy dived back over the dam and they saw that the crest had crumbled for 50 yards. As they turned on course for England, Eaton tapped out the code word that told of their successful drop.

Wallis’s joy was complete. Cochrane radioed “G George.’* asking if he had any aircraft left to divert to the Sorpe, and Hutchinson answered, “None.” Satterly, who had been plotting the path of the reserve force by dead reckoning, radioed orders to them.

Burpee, in “S Sugar,” was directed to the Sorpe, but he did not answer. They called again and again, but there was only silence. He was dead.

Brown, in “F Freddy,” was sent to the Sorpe and reached it after McCarthy had left; the mist was swirling thicker and, though he dived low over the dam, Oancia, the bomb aimer, could not pick it up in time,,

Brown dived back on a second run but Oancia still found the mist foiled him. They tried eight times, and then Brown pulled up and they had a conference over the intercom. On the next run Oancia dropped a cluster of incendiaries in the woods to the side of the dam. They burned dazzlingly and the trees caught too, so that on the tenth run Oancia picked up the glare a long way back, knew exactly where the target was and dropped his load accurately.

They pulled round in a climbing turn and a jet of water and rubble climbed out of the mist and hung against the moon; down in the mist itself they saw a shock wave of air like a giant smoke ring circling the base of the spout.

Anderson, in “Y Yorker,” was also sent to the Sorpe, but he was still later than Brown, and now the valley was completely under mist so that the lake and the dam were hidden and he had to turn back with his bomb.

Ottley, in “C Charlie,” was ordered to the Lister Dam, one of the secondary targets. He acknowledged “Message received,” but that was the last anyone ever heard from him.

The last man was Townsend, in “O Orange,” and his target was the Ennerpe. He searched a long time before he found it in the mist, and made three runs before he was satisfied and dropped the bomb. It was accurate.

Ten out of the nineteen were coming home, hugging the ground, 8 tons lighter now in bomb and petrol load and travelling at maximum cruising, about 245, not worrying about petrol; only about getting home. The coast was an hour away and the sun less than that. They knew the fighters were overhead waiting for a lightening sky in the east.

Gibson saw the dark blotch of Hamm ahead and swung to the east. To the left he saw another aircraft; it was going too near Hamm, he thought, whoever it was, and then the flak came up and something was burning in the sky where the aircraft had been. It was falling, hit like a shooting star and blew up. It may have been Burpee. Or Ottley.

Townsend was the last away from the dams area. He flew back over the Moehne and could not recognise it at first; the lake had changed shape. Already there were mudbanks with little boats stranded on them, and bridges stood long-legged out of the shrinking water. The torpedo net had vanished, and below the dam the country was different. There was a new lake where no lake had been; a strange lake, writhing down the valley.

Miraculously most of them dodged the flak on the way back; lucky this, because dawn was coming, the sky was paler in the east and at 50 feet the aircraft were sitting ducks. In Gibson’s aircraft Trevor-Roper called on the intercom., “Unidentified enemy aircraft behind.”

“O.K., Trev.” “G George” sank till it was scraping the fields and they could see the startled cattle running in panic. Trevor-Roper said, “O.K., we’ve lost him,” but Gibson still kept down on the deck.

Over Holland he called Dinghy Young, but there was no answer and he wondered what had happened to him. (Group knew! They had got a brief message from Young. He had come over the coast a little high and the last squirts of flak had hit him. He had struggled on a few more miles, losing height, and then ditched in the water.)

Coming to the West Wall, Gibson climbed to about 300 feet, Pulford slid the throttles right forward and they dived to the ground again, picking up speed, and at 270 m.p.h. they roared over the tank traps and the naked sand and then they were over the grey morning water and beyond the flak.

Ten minutes later it was daylight over Holland, and Towns-end was still picking his way out. He was lucky and went between the guns.

Maltby was first back, landing in the dawn and finding the whole station had been waiting up since dusk. Harris, Cochrane and Wallis met him at the hardstanding and he told them what he had seen. Martin landed. Mutt Summers went out to meet him and found Martin under the aircraft looking at a ragged hole in his wing.

One by one they landed and were driven to the ops. room, where Harris, Cochrane and Wallis listened intently. Gibson came in, his hair pressed flat from eight hours under his helmet. “It was a wizard party, sir,” he said. “Went like a bomb, but we couldn’t quieten some of the flak. I’m afraid some of the boys got the hammer. Don’t know how many yet. Hopgood and Maudslay for certain.”

They had bacon and egg and stood round the bar with pints, drinking and waiting for the others. It was an hour since the last aircraft had landed. Shannon said Dinghy Young had ditched, and someone said, “What, is the old soak going to paddle back again? That’s the third time he’s done it. He’ll do it once too often.” Young had done it once too often. He was not in his dinghy this time.

Wallis was asking anxiously, “Where are they? Where are all the others?”

Summers said, “Oh, they’ll be along. Give ‘em time. They’ve probably landed somewhere else”: but after a while it was impossible to cover up any longer and Wallis knew they were all standing round getting drunk for the ones who were not coming back. Except himself; he didn’t drink. Martin made him take a half pint but he only held it and stood there blinking back tears and said, “Oh, if I’d only known, I’d never have started this! “Mutt and Charles Whitworth tried to take his mind off it.

Gibson left the party early, but not for bed; he went over to the hangar to give Humphries and Chiefy Powell a hand with the casualty telegrams to the next of kin. Fifty-six beardless men out of 133 were missing, and only three had got out by parachute at a perilously low height to spend the rest of the war miserably in prison camp. Gibson had expected to lose several over the Moehne, where those sinister installations had been spotted by the recce aircraft, but they had lost only one there. (It was not till after the war that they discovered that those dark shapes on top of the Moehne had been—trees… ornamental pine trees. In the middle of the war the Germans would not send extra guns but had gone to the trouble of decorating it.)

Around lunchtime the party survivors transferred to Whitworth’s house and Whitworth’s best port. Wallis came tiredly downstairs in a dressing-gown, distressed about the losses, and after a while he left to fly back to Weybridge with Summers. Martin gave him a sleeping-pill as he was leaving so he would sleep that night. He slept all right. The weary scientist swallowed the pill sitting up in bed at home and went out like a light.

About two o’clock even the durable Martin and Whittaker were ready for bed, but they were all up again at five o’clock and drove over in buses to a party at Woodhall Spa. On the way back David Shannon and Anne were sitting close together, and Shannon leaned closer so the others couldn’t hear and asked her to marry him.

“Oh, David,” she said, and there was a pause, “n-n-not with that moustache.”

Shannon fingered the growth defensively. It was a dear possession; made him look years older—at least twenty-two. He groaned. “What is it?” he said. “My moustache or you?” There was only silence and he sighed, “All right, I’ll whip it off.”

In the morning 617 Squadron went on leave, three days for the ground crew, seven days for the aircrew survivors— except Gibson, who stayed on two days to write to the mothers of the dead. He wrote them all out in his own hand, different ones each time, fifty-six of them.

In London and in their homes the crews found they were famous, though the headlines in Germany were not so flattering. A recce Mosquito arrived back from over Germany with the first pictures of the damage, and they were breath-taking. The Moehne and Eder lakes were empty and 330 million tons of water were spreading like a cancer through the western Ruhr valleys, the bones of towns and villages showing lifeless in the wilderness.

The Ruhr, which had been enduring its ordeal by fire, was having it: now by water. For fifty miles from the Moehne and fifty miles from the Eder coal mines were flooded and factories collapsed. At Fritzlar one of Hitler’s largest military aerodromes was under water, the aircraft, the landing ground, hangars, barracks and bomb dumps. Roads, railways and bridges had disappeared. The Unterneustadt industrial suburb of Kassel, forty miles from the Eder, was under water, and the flood ran miles on down the Fulda Valley. Canal banks were washed away, power stations had disappeared, the Ruhr foundries were without water for making steel. A dozen waterworks were destroyed as far away as Gelsenkirchen, Dortmund, Hamm and Bochum. The communications system feeding raw materials to the Ruhr and taking away the finished weapons was disrupted. Some factories were not swept away but still could not work because there was no electricity. Or no water.

In the small town of Neheim alone 2,000 men, including 1,250 soldiers, were diverted to repair damage. Another 2,000 men were trying to repair the dams. And in the months ahead, in the Battle of the Ruhr, there was not enough water to put the fires out.

The official German report said it was “a dark picture of destruction.” By the next autumn they might know how much industrial production would be ultimately affected, but estimated it was going to mean the equivalent of the loss of production of 100,000 men for several months.

A hundred and twenty-five factories were either destroyed or badly damaged, nearly 3,000 hectares of arable land were ruined, 25 bridges had vanished, and 21 more were badly damaged. The livestock losses were 6,500 cattle and pigs.

There was a moral price to pay too; there always is. 1,294 people drowned in the floods, and most were civilians. Most were not German—there were 749 slaves and prisoners among the dead. There had been a Russian P.O.W. camp in the valley below the Eder.

Gibson spent his leave quietly with his wife, Eve, who had had a shock when she had opened the papers and found Guy’s name and photographs splashed over the front pages. All the time he had been at 617 he had told her he was having a rest at a flying training school.

Micky Martin was summoned to Australian Air Force Headquarters, where a dark, pretty girl called Wendy tried her hardest to get him to talk about the raid for a story for Australia, but all the incorrigible Martin would say was, “Come and have lunch with me,” and kept it up until she did.

Then the decorations came through—thirty-three of them. Gibson was awarded the Victoria Cross. Martin, McCarthy, Maltby, Shannon and Knight got D.S.Os. Bob Hay, Hutchison, Leggo and Danny Walker got bars to their D.F.Cs. There were ten D.F.Cs., among them Trevor-Roper, Buckley, Deering, Spafford and Taerum. Brown and Townsend got the Conspicuous Gallantry Medal, and there were twelve D.F.Ms., among them being Tammy Simpson, Sumpter, Oancia and Pulford.

When he heard the news Gibson rang for Flight Sergeant Powell. “Chiefy,” he said quietly, “if I ever change, tell me.”

On May 27 the King and Queen visited the newly famous squadron, and the crews pressed their uniforms and stood in front of their aircraft to be presented, though Martin overlooked one point and was standing there smartly to attention with an orange sticking out of his pocket.

Gibson had had a competition for a design for a squadron badge, and after the parade he showed the King the roughs and asked if he would choose one. The King called the Queen, and unanimously they picked a drawing showing a darn breached in the middle with water flowing out and bolts of lightning above. Underneath, the motto was “Apres nous, le deluge”