Paul Brickhill

by The Dam Busters

  Gibson drove off to see Satterly and plan the routes for the raid, taking with him Group Captain Pickard (of “F for Freddy”) because he was a “gen” man on German flak positions, and on a low-level raid there is nothing more important than plotting a track between the known flak. They spread their maps out on the floor and carefully pencilled in two separate tracks that wound in and out of the red blotches of the known flak. They plotted two more widely differing routes for the trip home so that any flak aroused on the way in would watch out in vain for the return.

  The attack would be in three waves, Gibson leading nine aircraft on the southern route, Munro leading others on the northern, and five aircraft taking off a couple of hours later to act as a reserve. If the Moehne, Eder and Sorpe were not smashed by the first two waves, Gibson would call up the reserves. If they were smashed the reserves would bomb three smaller dams in the same area, the Schwelm, Ennerpe and Dieml.

  Accurate navigation was going to be vital or there were going to be sudden deaths. The pencilled tracks had to go perilously near some of the red flak areas.

  “Doc” Watson and his armourers were loading the bombs into the Lancasters. Martin watched Watson winching the bomb up into his aircraft, “P for Peter” (or, as Martin always insisted, “P for Popsie”). “Just exactly how do these bombs work, Doc?” he asked.

  “I know as much as you do, Micky,” Watson said busily. “Nothing!”

  “Ar, what do they pay you for?” Half an hour later the bomb was in position and he and Bob Hay, Leggo, Foxlee, Simpson and Whittaker were crawling about inside the aircraft seeing that everything was in order when a fault developed in the bomb release circuit, the release snapped back and there was a crunch as the giant black thing fell and crashed through the concrete hardstanding, embedding itself 4 inches into the earth below. Relieved of the weight, “P for Popsie” kicked a little from the expanding oleo legs of the under-carriage.

  Martin said, “What’s that?” There was a startled yell from an armourer outside and Martin yelled, “Hey, the thing’s fallen off!”

  “Release wiring must be faulty,” Hay said professionally, and then it dawned on him and he said in a shocked voice, “It might have fused itself.” He ran, yelling madly, out of the nose. “Get out of here. She’ll go off in less than a minute.” Bodies came tumbling out of the escape hatches, saw the tails of the armourers vanishing in the distance and set off after them. Martin jumped into the flight van near by and, with a grinding of gears, roared off to get Doc Watson. He had his foot hard down on the accelerator and swears that a terrified armourer passed him on a push-bike. He ran into Watson’s office and panted out the news and Watson said philosophically, “Well, if she was going off she’d have gone off by this.”

  He got into the flight van and drove over to the deserted plane. Pale faces peeped out, watching him from deep shelters round the perimeter track hundreds of yards away, and Watson turned and bellowed, “O.K. Flap’s over. It’s not fused.”

  The squadron was fused though; painfully aware that something tremendous was about to happen. The aircraft were there, the bombs were there, both had been put together and crews were trained to the last gasp,. Now was the time, Gibson knew, nerves would be tautening as they wondered whether there was going to be a reasonable chance of coming back or whether they would be dead in forty-eight hours. (And it was not only the aircrews who were tensed. Anne Fowler was too; she was a dark slim W.A.A.F. officer at Scampton, and in the past few weeks she and the boyish David Shannon had become a most noticeable twosome.)

  Perhaps the least affected was the wiry and rambunctious Martin. Aged twenty-four, he had already decided that he was going to die, if not on this raid then on some other. Before the war was over anyway. During his first few “ops “he had often had sleepless nights or dreamed of burning aircraft. He saw all his friends on his squadron get “the chop” one after the other till they were all gone and knew it would only be a question of time before he would probably join them. So finally he had accepted the fact that in a fairly short time, barring miracles, he was going to die, not pleasantly. That was his strength and largely why he was so boisterous. Having accepted that, the next step was automatic: to fill every day with as many of the fruits of life as possible. He did so with vigour.

  It was a corollary, more than a paradox, that he was not suicidal in the air but audacious in a calculating way, measuring every risk and if it were worth while, taking it, spinning it out as long as he could, but making every bomb tell. He did not believe in miracles.

  * * *

  On the morning of May 15, you could clearly sense the tension, more so when word spread that the A.O.C. had arrived. Cochrane saw Gibson and Whitworth alone and was brief and businesslike.

  “If the weather’s right you go tomorrow night. Start briefing your crews this afternoon and see that your security is foolproof.”

  After lunch a little aeroplane landed and Wallis and Mutt Summers climbed out; ten minutes later they were with Gibson and Whitworth with a guard on the door. Gibson could not take his beloved Nigger on the raid but could not bear to leave him out altogether, so he gave him the greatest honour he could think of… when (or if) the Moehne Dam was breached he would radio back the one code word “Nigger.”

  In the hangars, messes and barracks the Tannoy came loudly and dramatically to life : “All pilots, navigators and bomb aimers of 617 report to the briefing room immediately.” At three o’clock there were some sixty of them in the briefing room on the upper floor of the grey-and-black camouflaged station headquarters. They sat silently on the benches, eyeing the familiar maps, aircraft identification and air-sea rescue posters on the walls, waiting. Whitworth, Gibson and Wallis filed down the centre to the dais and Whitworth nodded to Gibson : “Go ahead, Guy.” The room was still.

  Gibson faced them, feet braced apart, flushed a little. He had a ruler in one hand, the other in his pocket, and his eyes were bright. He cleared his throat and said :

  “You’re going to have a chance to clobber the Hun harder than a small force has ever done before.” Outside his voice, no sound. “Very soon we are going to attack the major dams in Western Germany.” A rustle and murmuring broke the silence—and some deep breaths. They were going to have a sporting chance. Gibson turned to the map and pointed with his ruler.

  “Here they are,” he said. “Here is the Moehne, here the Eder and here is the Sorpe. As you can see, they are all just east of the Ruhr.” He went on to explain the tactics, told each crew what wave they would be on and what dam they were to attack.

  Wallis took over and described the dams and what the queer bombs were supposed to do, how success would cripple the Ruhr steel industry, how other factories would be affected and bridges and roads washed away.

  Gibson stood up. “Any questions?”

  Hopgood said: “I notice, sir, that our route takes us pretty near a synthetic rubber factory at Huls. It’s a hot spot. I nearly got the hammer there three months ago. If we go over there low I think it might… er… upset things.”

  Gibson looked thoughtfully at the map. Huls was a few miles north of the Ruhr. Satterly and he had known about the Huls flak: when they were planning the route but had taken the track as far away from the Ruhr as they could. Better the flak at Huls than the Ruhr.

  “If you think it’s a bit too close to Huls we’ll bring it down a bit,” and he pencilled in a wider curve round the little dot. “You’d better all be careful here. The gap isn’t too wide. Err on the Huls side if you have to, but watch it you navigators.”

  He crossed the room to a couple of trestle-tables where three dust covers were hiding something, pulled the covers off, and there were the models of the dams.

  “All of you come over and have a look at these,” he commanded., and there was a scraping of forms as sixty young men got up and crowded round,.

  “Look at these till your eyes stick out and you’ve got every detail photographed on your minds, then go away and draw them from
memory, come back and check your drawings, correct them, then go away and draw them again till you’re perfect.”

  They were two hours doing that; each crew concentrated on its own target, working out the best ways in and the best ways out. The known flak guns were marked and they took very special note of them. Martin’s crew were down for the Moehne with Gibson and Hopgood, and they stood gazing down at the model.

  “What d’you reckon’s the best way in?” Leggo asked.

  “First thing is to get the final line of attack,” Martin said. “There’s the spot!” He put his ringer on the tip of a spit of land running out into the Moehne Lake and ran his fingertip in a straight line to the middle of the dam wall, right between the two towers. It met the wall at right angles. “A low wide circuit,” he said; “come in over the spit and we’re jake.”

  It was eight o’clock before Gibson was satisfied they knew it all and said, “Now buzz off and get some grub. But keep your mouths shut. Not even a whisper to your own crews. They’ll find out tomorrow. If there’s one slip and the Hun ‘gets an inkling you won’t be coming back tomorrow night.”

  They all drank shandy and went to bed, taking little white pills that the doctor had doled out so they would sleep well. As Gibson was going along to his room Charles Whitworth came in looking worried and buttonholed him quietly.

  “Guy,” he said, “I’m awfully sorry, but Nigger’s just been run over by a car outside the camp. He was killed instantaneously.”

  The car had not even bothered to stop.

  Gibson sat a long time on his bed looking at the scratch marks that Nigger used to make on his door. Nigger and he had been together since before the war; it seemed to be an omen.

  The morning of May 16 was sunny. Considering the scurry that went on all day it was remarkable that so few people at Scampton realised what was happening. Even after the aircraft took off hours later the people watching nearly all thought it was a special training flight.

  It was just after 9 a.m. that Gibson bounced into his office and told Humphries to draw up the flying programme.

  “Training, sir ? “—more of a statement than a question. “No. That is yes—to everyone else,” and as Humphries looked bewildered he said quietly: “We’re going to war tonight, but I don’t want the world to know. Mark the list ‘Night flying programme,’ and don’t mention the words ‘battle order.’”

  Watson, the armament chief, was dashing around busily. The pilots were swinging their compasses. Trevor-Roper was seeing that all guns were loaded with full tracer that shot out of the guns at night like angry meteors and to people on the receiving end looked like cannon shells. That was the idea, to frighten the flak gunners and put them off their aim. Each aircraft had two .303 Brownings in the front turret, and four in the tail turret. Each gun fired something like twelve rounds a second; each rear turret alone could pump out what looked like forty-eight flaming cannon shells a second; 96,000 rounds lay in the ammunition trays.

  Towards noon a Mosquito touched down with the last photos of the dams. The water in the Moehne was 4 feet from the top. After lunch “Gremlin” Matthews, meteorological officer at Grantham, spoke to all the other group met. officers on a locked circuit of trunk lines for half an hour. Such conferences rarely found agreement but this time they did. The lively bespectacled figure of “The Gremlin” walked into Cochrane’s office as soon as he had put the receiver down.

  “It’s all right for tonight, sir.” He gave a definite prediction of clear weather over Germany.

  “What?” said Cochrane. “No ifs, buts and probablies?” and “The Gremlin” looked mildly cautious just for a moment and took the plunge. “No, sir. It’s going to be all right.”

  Cochrane went out to his car and drove off towards Scamp ton.

  The Tannoy sounded about four o’clock, ordering all 617 crews to the briefing room, and soon there were 133 hushed young men sitting on the benches (two crews were out because of illness).

  Gibson repeated what he had told the others the previous night, and Wallis, in his earnest, slightly pedantic way, told them about the dams and what their destruction would do. Cochrane finished with a short, crisp talk.

  The final line-up was :

  Formation 1 : Nine aircraft in three waves, taking off with ten minutes between waves:

  Gibson,

  Hopgood,

  Martin.

  Young,

  Astell,

  Maltby.

  Maudsiay,

  Knight,

  Shannon.

  They were to attack the Moehne, and after the Moehne was breached those who had not bombed would go on to the Eder.

  Formation 2: One wave in loose formation:

  McCarthy,

  Byers,

  Barlow,

  Rice,

  Munro.

  They were to attack the Sorpe, crossing the coast by the northern route as a diversion to split the German defences.

  Formation 3 :

  Townsend,

  Brown,

  Anderson,

  Ottley,

  Burpee.

  They would take off later as the mobile reserve.

  Supper in the mess was quiet, the calm before the storm.

  No one said much. The non-flying people thought it was to be a training flight, but the crews, who knew it was going to be business—probably sticky—could not say so and there was a faint atmosphere of strain.

  With a woman’s wit Anne Fowler realised it was to be the real thing. She noticed the crews were having eggs. They often had an egg before a raid, and always after they landed. Most of the others did not notice it, but she started worrying about Shannon.

  Dinghy Young said to Gibson, “Can I have your next egg if you don’t come back? “But that was the usual chestnut before an “op” and Gibson brushed it aside with a few amiably insulting remarks.

  In twos and threes they drifted down to the hangar and started to change. It was not eight o’clock yet; still an hour to take-off and still broad daylight. Martin stuffed his little koala bear into a pocket of his battle-dress jacket and buttoned the flap. It was a grey furry thing about 4 inches high with black button eyes, given to him by his mother as a mascot when the war started. It had as many operational hours as he had.

  They drifted over to the grass by the apron and lay in the sun, smoking and quietly talking, waiting. Anne was with Shannon. Fay, the other W.A.A.F. officer, was talking to Martin’s crew. Dinghy Young was tidying up his office, just as a matter of course. He had no premonition. Munro seemed half asleep in a deck chair.

  Gibson drove up and walked over to Powell.

  “Chiefy, I want you to bury Nigger outside my office at midnight. Will you do that?”

  “Of course, sir.” Powell was startled at the gesture from the hard-bitten Gibson. Gibson did not tell him that he would be about 50 feet over Germany then, not far from the Ruhr. He had it in hlo mind that he and Nigger might be going into the ground about the same time.

  Gibson found himself wishing it were time to go and knew they were all wishing the same. It would be all right once they were in the air. It always was. At ten to nine he said clearly, “Well, chaps, my watch says time to go.” Bodies stirred on the grass with elaborate casualness, tossed their parachutes into the flight trucks, climbed in after them, and the trucks moved off round the perimeter track to the hardstandings. Shannon had gone back to the locker room for a moment and when he came out his crew, the only ones left, were waiting impatiently. The bald-headed Yorkshireman, Jack Buckley, said like a father to his small son, “Have you cleaned your teeth David?” Shannon grinned, hoisted himself elegantly into the flight truck and then they had all gone. Shannon had one of the best crews. Buckley, older than most, of a wealthy family, was his rear gunner and a wild Yorkshireman. Danny Walker was an infallible navigator, a Canadian, dark, quiet and intensely likeable. Sumpter, the bomb aimer, had been a guardsman and was tougher than a prize-fighter. Brian Goodale, the wireless op., was so
tall and thin and bent he was known universally as “Concave.” And in the air the babyish Shannon was the absolute master, with a scorching tongue when he felt like it.

  At exactly ten past nine a red Very light curled up from Gibson’s aircraft, the signal for McCarthy’s five aircraft to start; the northern route was longer and they were taking off ten minutes early. Seconds later there was a spurt of blue smoke behind Munro’s aircraft as his port inner engine started. One by one the engines came to life. Geoff Rice’s engines were turning; Barlow’s, then Byers’. The knot of people by the hangar saw a truck rushing at them across the field, and before it came to a stop big McCarthy jumped out and ran at them, roaring like a bull, his red face sweaty, the sandy hair falling over his forehead. In a murderous rage he yelled:

  “My aircraft’s u/s and there’s no deviation card in the spare. Where are those useless instruments jerks ! “

  The 15-stone Yank had found his own Lancaster, “Q for Queenie,” out of action with leaking hydraulics, rushed his crew over to the spare plane, “T for Tom,” and found the little card giving the compass deviations missing from it. No hope of accurate flying without it. If McCarthy had met one of the instrument people then he would probably have strangled him.

  Chiefy Powell had gone running into the instrument section and found the missing card. He dashed up to McCarthy shouting, “Here it is, sir,” and McCarthy grabbed it, well behind schedule now, and turning to run back to the truck, scooped up his parachute from the tarmac where he’d thrown it, but his hand missed the canvas loop handle and he yanked it up by the D-ring of the rip-cord. The pack flaps sprang back in a white blossom as the silk billowed out and trailed after him, and he let out a roar of unbearable fury.

  Powell was running for the crew room, but McCarthy snarled, “I’ll go without one.” He jumped into the truck but before the driver could move off Powell came running up with another parachute, and McCarthy grabbed it through the cabin and shot off across the field. There was a swelling roar from the south side; Munro’s Lancaster was rolling, picking up speed, and then it was low in the air, sliding over the north boundary, tucking its wheels up into the big inboard nacelles. Less than a minute later, as McCarthy got to his aircraft, Rice was rolling too, followed by Barlow and Byers.