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A review by mburnamfink
Dam Busters: The True Story of the Legendary Raid on the Ruhr by James Holland
adventurous
informative
5.0
I watched the 1955 Dam Busters movie on tape repeatedly as a kid, and the movie has become iconic, as well as the source of the Death Star trench run in Star Wars, but as Holland points out, only a handful of historical books have been written about the operation (subsequently, Hastings published his Chastise). This one aims to correct the record, focusing primarily on the pilots who carried out the attack, though there is a solid delve into organizational and technical details.
An attack on the Ruhr dams was the obsession of Barnes Wallis, who had focused on the strategic chokepoints of natural resources. His initial plan involved a six-engined super bomber and multiton earthquake bombs, but an afternoon playing with his children made him realize that a specially designed bomb could be skipped over the surface of the reservoir like a stone. It'd sink and explode in contact with the dam face, where the magnifying effects on an underwater explosion would enable a charge of a few thousands pounds to crack the dam.
This was an easier lift. All it'd require is developing an entirely new type of weapon, modifying Lancasters to carry it, training crews in precision low-level attack, and doing it during the full moon when the dams were highest, which meant the operation had to be mid May 1943, or not at all. Bomber Command Chief Arthur Harris was profoundly against any panacea superweapon attack, which he regarded as a distraction from his strategy of night area bombing. "Bomber" Harris believed that only constant bludgeoning of cities could meaningfully disrupt Nazi military production and shorten the war, and in 1943, he finally had a force that was just barely capable of finding and destroying cities in night raids. Pulling twenty precious Lancasters and elite crews wasn't in the offing.
Barnes Wallis was far from the brilliant rogue outsider he's portrayed as, and along with F.W. Winterbotham, maneuvered the byzantine British defense establishment, into approving the raid. Once he'd been ordered to carry out a job, Harris put his reservations behind him and set one of his favorite commanders, Guy Gibson, as commander of the new specialist 617 squadron. The problem was it was now February 1943, and there were barely 10 weeks to figure out the raid.
Training and development was one of those continuous brilliant improvisations which characterized the best of British success in World War II. Gibson's pilots practiced flying the mighty Lancaster at 100', just above the ground. Elementary trigonometry, in the form of angled spotlights that merged at the right altitude, and fixed pin bombsights that aligned with towers of the dam for range, helped the crews drop their bombs at the right distance and altitude. The bomb had worked exactly once, in testing, by the time mid-May arrived, but that was enough to give the go ahead.
19 Lancasters took off late on May 16th, headed for the Ruhr. Low-level navigation was a channel, and Holland argues that a failure in the weather reporting system means that the crew was unaware of winds over the English channel, meaning that many of them crossed into Europe over flak concentrations rather than the planned weak spots. Two planes turned back with critical damage, two flew into power lines, and six were shot down, for nearly 50% casualties on a single attack. And while bailing out of a Lancaster at 10,000 feet was hardly safe, it was possible. When things went wrong at low altitude, they were inevitably fatal.
The survivors made their attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams, destroying the first two. The devastation was incredible, spreading miles downstream. Thousands were killed (many of them slave laborers, unfortunately), bridges were torn away, and steel manufacturing severely impacted. The end effect was less than Wallis had hoped, as Albert Speer embarked on a crash plan to rebuild the dams, but the propaganda was spectacular, and the systemic effects may have impeded building Atlantic Wall defenses before the Normandy invasion.
Holland has presented a fascinating and informative exploration of the famous raid, and its human cost.
An attack on the Ruhr dams was the obsession of Barnes Wallis, who had focused on the strategic chokepoints of natural resources. His initial plan involved a six-engined super bomber and multiton earthquake bombs, but an afternoon playing with his children made him realize that a specially designed bomb could be skipped over the surface of the reservoir like a stone. It'd sink and explode in contact with the dam face, where the magnifying effects on an underwater explosion would enable a charge of a few thousands pounds to crack the dam.
This was an easier lift. All it'd require is developing an entirely new type of weapon, modifying Lancasters to carry it, training crews in precision low-level attack, and doing it during the full moon when the dams were highest, which meant the operation had to be mid May 1943, or not at all. Bomber Command Chief Arthur Harris was profoundly against any panacea superweapon attack, which he regarded as a distraction from his strategy of night area bombing. "Bomber" Harris believed that only constant bludgeoning of cities could meaningfully disrupt Nazi military production and shorten the war, and in 1943, he finally had a force that was just barely capable of finding and destroying cities in night raids. Pulling twenty precious Lancasters and elite crews wasn't in the offing.
Barnes Wallis was far from the brilliant rogue outsider he's portrayed as, and along with F.W. Winterbotham, maneuvered the byzantine British defense establishment, into approving the raid. Once he'd been ordered to carry out a job, Harris put his reservations behind him and set one of his favorite commanders, Guy Gibson, as commander of the new specialist 617 squadron. The problem was it was now February 1943, and there were barely 10 weeks to figure out the raid.
Training and development was one of those continuous brilliant improvisations which characterized the best of British success in World War II. Gibson's pilots practiced flying the mighty Lancaster at 100', just above the ground. Elementary trigonometry, in the form of angled spotlights that merged at the right altitude, and fixed pin bombsights that aligned with towers of the dam for range, helped the crews drop their bombs at the right distance and altitude. The bomb had worked exactly once, in testing, by the time mid-May arrived, but that was enough to give the go ahead.
19 Lancasters took off late on May 16th, headed for the Ruhr. Low-level navigation was a channel, and Holland argues that a failure in the weather reporting system means that the crew was unaware of winds over the English channel, meaning that many of them crossed into Europe over flak concentrations rather than the planned weak spots. Two planes turned back with critical damage, two flew into power lines, and six were shot down, for nearly 50% casualties on a single attack. And while bailing out of a Lancaster at 10,000 feet was hardly safe, it was possible. When things went wrong at low altitude, they were inevitably fatal.
The survivors made their attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams, destroying the first two. The devastation was incredible, spreading miles downstream. Thousands were killed (many of them slave laborers, unfortunately), bridges were torn away, and steel manufacturing severely impacted. The end effect was less than Wallis had hoped, as Albert Speer embarked on a crash plan to rebuild the dams, but the propaganda was spectacular, and the systemic effects may have impeded building Atlantic Wall defenses before the Normandy invasion.
Holland has presented a fascinating and informative exploration of the famous raid, and its human cost.