The Valour and the Horror

A painting by Frank Wooten of the RAF Bomber Command. raid on the Mohne Dam on the night of May 16/17 1943. The attack successfully breached the dam and caused widespread loss of life and destruction. The attack was not repeated and within the month the damage had been repaired.

Dam Busters 2:

A day after the briefing, on a clear night with a rising moon, 17 Lancaster bombers took off from the air base at Scampton, headed for the dams in the Ruhr. Under each bomber was a massive bomb, so heavy that the planes barely cleared the hedge at the end of the runway. Brown's target was the Sorpe, over six hours from base. The crew flew low all the way into a valley socked in with fog. When he reached the dam-125 feet of concrete, reinforced with a thick berm of earth wide enough to drive a truck across-Brown dove towards the water, narrowly missing the church steeple of the hillside village.

Again and again, Brown and his crew dove towards the dam, trying to fly low enough and at the prescribed trajectory to release the bomb. The other dams would be attacked with the bouncing bomb but because the Sorpe was so thick, Brown had to hit the dam directly on its face, near the top. Theoretically, the explosion would disperse the earth and crack the concrete. The force of the rushing water would finish the job.

On the eighth try, Brown got it right. The aimer released the bomb.

"When the damn thing went off, it was almost like the atomic bomb. It blew up all that water into a huge mushroom of rain."

Mission accomplished, Brown and his crew fumed around. And, as Brown reports, "We went back along the Rhine and we had a bunch of incendiaries so we were dropping incendiaries on barges all the way down the Rhine. And we shot up a few planes. We were out to raise all the hell we could."

When Brown reached the Dutch coast, it was daylight and the flak guns on the Zieder Zee were waiting for him. At 5:30 a.m., after more than seven hours in the air, he returned to base. His plane was damaged by flak. One man was dead; two badly wounded. Brown would consider his crew lucky. Of the 17 aircraft that took off on the dam raid the night before, 8 resumed. Brown was the only Canadian pilot to survive.

"When we came back from the dam raid, we discovered how many we had lost; good friends we knew. We'd seen some go down on the way in, blowing up in the air but we had no idea of the numbers until we got on the ground. And then it started to sink in."

Bomber Command was not in mourning; it was elated. Even though so many had died and the Sorpe had survived the bomb, two dams had been breached.

The raid was a resounding public relations success. King George awarded British Squadron Leader Guy Gibson the Victoria Cross. Brown would be given the Conspicuous Gallantry medal. Huge headlines hailed the "perfect bombing," calling the operation a "decisive blow." Reports described the "two mighty walls of water" which had devastated the areas surrounding the dams. First reports claimed 10,000 Germans drowned. Industry was said to be out of commission, navigation on the Ruhr stalled. "A titanic blow at Germany." The "Dambusters' raid" seemed to justify the British strategy of "smart" bombing.

In the euphoria that followed, the unusually high losses were forgotten. Over 50 percent of the flyers never returned; 53 men died, 13 of them Canadians.

According to Brown, Barnes Wallis, the eccentric scientist who devised the bouncing bomb in his back garden, "wept. 'All those boys. All those boys,' he said."

Quickly, the Germans repaired the damaged dams. Steel production in the Ruhr valley doubled that year. Few remembered, or knew, that almost 1,300 people died in the floods following the dam bombing, many of them Ukrainian women and children, trapped in a German prisoner of war camp below the Mohne dam.