Dam Busters

Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany

Ted Barris

• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781443455442
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

National Bestseller

Foreword by Peter Mansbridge

“Barris tells the jaw-dropping story of a night that changed the war.” —The Globe and Mail

 It was a night that changed the Second World War. The secret air raid against the hydroelectric dams of Germany’s Ruhr River took years to plan, involved an untried bomb and included the best aircrewmen RAF Bomber Command could muster—many of them Canadian. The attack marked the first time the Allies tactically took the war inside Nazi Germany. It was a military operation that became legendary.

On May 16, 1943, nineteen Lancaster bombers carrying 133 airmen took off on a night sortie code-named Operation Chastise. Hand-picked and specially trained, the Lancaster crews flew at treetop level to the industrial heartland of the Third Reich and their targets—the Ruhr River dams, whose massive water reservoirs powered Nazi Germany’s military-industrial complex.

Each Lancaster carried an explosive, which when released just sixty feet over the reservoirs, bounced like a skipping stone to the dam, sank and exploded. The raiders breached two dams and damaged a third. The resulting torrent devastated enemy power plants, factories and infrastructure a hundred miles downstream.

Every airmen on the raid understood that the odds of survival were low. Of the nineteen outbound bombers, eight did not return. Operation Chastise cost the lives of fifty-three airmen, including fourteen Canadians. Of the sixteen RCAF men who survived, seven received military decorations.

Based on interviews, personal accounts, flight logs, maps and photographs of the Canadians involved, Dam Busters recounts the dramatic story of these young Commonwealth bomber crews tasked with a high-risk mission against an enemy prepared to defend the Fatherland to the death.

 

Chapter One

“Happy Valley”

NOBODY EVER FIGURED HIS NUMBER WAS UP. Not even on a first op. As daunting as a first combat operation over enemy airspace might seem, it couldn’t unnerve Jimmy Arthur. It wouldn’t. As long as he stayed focused on his job as a bomb aimer in the nose of his Lancaster bomber, everything would be okay, he kept telling himself. It didn’t hurt, either, that he was joining a combat-experienced crew. Warrant Officer (W/O) Arthur, from Toronto, would be flying this winter night with Lewis Burpee, a sergeant pilot who had thirty-one bombing operations under his belt, and who was a fellow Canadian, from Ottawa. So too was one of the air gunners, Gordon Brady; he hailed from Ponoka, Alberta, in western Canada. With so much experience and two countrymen in the crew around him, Arthur hoped his first trip to war might be an easy one. Either way, he wouldn’t actually learn what the target was until the late-afternoon briefing.

On this early March day in 1943, aircrews began trickling into the briefing room at Royal Air Force (RAF) Syerston aerodrome, in east-central England, at about 4:30 p.m., before their evening meal. The young men of RAF No. 106 Squadron, many of them perhaps nineteen or twenty, were outfitted in their roll-necked pullovers and battledress. They smoked cigarettes or sipped tea or coffee. And they tended to gather with their own crewmen along benches, or leaning against the side walls of the room, waiting for a crew roll call. Also waiting, a few war correspondents with pens and pads at the ready stood off to the side. As usual, the small stage at the far end of the room featured a set of curtains covering aerial maps of that night’s target. They would remain drawn until the squadron’s commanding officer (CO) and the lead navigation officer arrived. A lot of speculation about the op generally preceded the briefing. But when the CO, Group Captain (G/C) Edward Bussell finally arrived, all the chatter died down.

At the briefing that afternoon, Jimmy Arthur sat with his new crewmates. In addition to Canadians Burpee and Brady, there were flight engineer Sergeant (Sgt.) Johnny Pegler, navigator Sgt. Tommy Jaye, wireless operator Pilot Officer (P/O) Sam Weller, and the Lancaster’s other gunner, Sgt. William “Ginger” Long. WO Arthur would be replacing a bomb aimer who’d just completed his tour of duty with Burpee’s crew. Arthur had gone on one test flight with them to get acquainted. That was all. But the next order of business was the ritual of the reveal, as the CO nodded to his adjutant to open the drapes in front of the target map.

“Gentlemen, the target for tonight is Essen,” Bussell announced.

“Christ. It’s Happy Valley,” one of the experienced bomber crewmen said, so his voice could be heard above the din of general reaction.

When Arthur needed a further explanation, one of his Lancaster crewmates provided it: “He’s talking about the Ruhr Valley.”

The wall chart showed a magnified map of western Germany. The turnip-shaped blotch of red,¹ about a foot long and nearly as wide, showed the length and breadth of the Ruhr River Valley, its industrial cities and massive hydroelectric generating dams and reservoirs. Red circles on the map marked areas expected to throw up heavy enemy flak en route. And the belt of searchlights surrounding the valley appeared as a continuous blue border framing the blotch. A red ribbon showed the route to the target over the North Sea and the Zuiderzee and inland to Essen.

In the seconds that followed the announcement, WO Arthur dealt with the realizations that came with being assigned to a first combat op. He experienced the mental recognition that tonight he’d be aiming bombs at an actual enemy target, not a practice one back home at No. 1 Bombing and Gunnery School in Jarvis, Ontario. In the final moments of tonight’s bombing run, he’d be the one determining where the Lancaster’s bomb load would fall. But as well, he felt the physical response, the butterflies in the stomach, or worse, that came with knowing he was about to embark on his first trip into hostile airspace. Arthur looked around at the faces of those who knew what the announcement meant.

JAMES LAMB ARTHUR WAS BORN IN TORONTO ON JULY 3, 1917, the second of four children of an Anglican clergyman in the city. Jim did well in mathematics, and after graduating from high school he got a job at the Bank of Toronto. Father and both sons had the opportunity to learn to fly early on, so when the war broke out, Jim first applied for pilot training; by May 1942, however, the Air Force had streamed him into observer training. After graduating from No. 1 Air Navigation School at Rivers, Manitoba, he was shipped overseas through the Bournemouth personnel reception centre, to advanced flying, operational training, and then a heavy conversion unit (HCU) destined for service on Lancasters as a bomb aimer. He was assigned to Lewis Burpee’s crew in February 1943. This would be WO Arthur’s first combat operation with 106 Squadron.

Bussell continued the briefing by informing the aircrews they’d fly this sortie as part of a stream of 442 bombers attacking Essen. “The bomb load will be one 4,000-pounder and sixteen cans of incendiaries,” he said, and added that crews would bomb the target from an altitude of 19,000 feet. “Don’t get out of this height band or you’ll run into other aircraft.”²

Essen, a city about three miles in diameter, lay twelve miles east of the Rhine, wedged between two rivers—the Ruhr and the Lippe. From the air, bomber crews would find the city extremely difficult to locate at night. The river intersection might help, but German defensive strategists had drained a large adjacent lake, called Baldeney See, to remove a convenient locator for Allied navigators and bomb aimers making a timed run-up to the target.³ The city, with a population of about 670,000 and a density of 125 people per acre, consisted almost entirely of factories and workers’ accommodation. Krupp industries, the plant manufacturing flak, bombs, torpedo tubes, armour plating, armoured cars, tractors, and other war hardware for the Nazi war effort, presented the largest target. Nearby, on the outskirts of the city, sat Goldschmidt AG chemical and metal works, as well as large hydrogenation plants producing aviation fuel from tar. Making an air attack tougher than usual, industrial chimney smoke tended to obscure the entire region day and night. To help mitigate the poor visibility, however, Pathfinders—Mosquito fighter aircraft—would fly ahead of the bomber stream to mark the targets with flares.

Bussell turned over the briefing to the lead navigation officer, who outlined the Pathfinder approach. “At zero hour minus three and a third minutes, Pathfinders will sky-mark the lane to the objective with red TI (target indicating) markers, which change to green after 120 seconds,” he said.⁴

To assist them, Pathfinder Mosquitos would have Oboe, a blind-bombing targeting system through which a pair of radio transmitters on the ground in England sent signals received and retransmitted by a transponder in the Mosquito aircraft, guiding them with greater precision to the target. For the Essen raid, the Pathfinders would mark a point on enemy territory exactly fifteen miles short of the aiming point. Passing over the flares at a ground speed of 240 miles per hour (mph), the bombers would therefore take about three to four minutes to arrive at the targets, also marked by Pathfinder flares dropped just moments earlier.

“The TIs will go down right on the factory roofs,” the navigation officer promised. “The sky above the city will also be marked with green flares in case the TIs are obscured by fog or smoke.”⁵ He handed the briefing back to the CO.

Bussell pointed out that ten Mosquitos would lay the TIs, and then the Main Force would attack in three waves—Halifaxes first, Wellingtons and Stirlings second, and third, the Lancasters of 106 Squadron. Two-thirds of the bomb tonnage would be incendiary. The remaining third—high-capacity explosives called “Cookies”—would be fused for long delay.

“You are to take no evasive action,” Bussell added as a matter of course, “but keep straight on past the targets. No straggling. And don’t forget to twist your tails a bit so that you can see those fighters coming up from below.”

From as early as the spring of 1942, the concentrations of industrial plants along the Ruhr had become obvious targets for Allied bombing; as much as 10 percent of the year’s strategic bombing was directed against those Ruhr Valley targets.⁶ In that year, during the so-called obliteration raids, Bomber Command had focused attacks on the centres of Lübeck and Rostock, virtually razing them in the process. Allied bombers had staged the first 1,000-bomber raid against the industrial city of Cologne in May 1942, but the industrial centres of Mainz and Karlsruhe also received special attention from bomber ops. By the end of the year, 380 acres of Düsseldorf had been destroyed, along with 260 acres of Münster and 60 percent of Emden.

In response, Hitler had bolstered the SS presence in the region to eliminate even the slightest flagging of morale around the war plants. As well, because production in the Ruhr supplied so much of the German war effort, by 1943 the entire valley and all approaches to it had witnessed a ramping up of anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, and night-fighter airstrips. And with as many as nineteen power plants situated along the Ruhr, including the large hydroelectric Möhne, Eder, and Sorpe Dams, German engineers laid netted iron in the adjacent reservoirs to protect the dam walls from potential torpedo attack. But the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command would not be deterred.

“At long last,” Arthur Harris wrote in his diary in March 1943, “we were ready and equipped . . . to undertake with real hope of success the task which had been given to me—the task of destroying the main cities of the Ruhr.”⁷

Trips to the Ruhr had only one redeeming aspect for the bomber crews: they were generally shorter than those going deeper into enemy airspace, perhaps five hours instead of seven or eight. Otherwise, “Happy Valley” was among the most heavily defended industrial areas of Europe, with hundreds of flak batteries and walls of searchlights establishing a ground deterrent and the Nachtjagdgeschwadern (night-fighter groups) of Messerschmitt Bf 110 and Junkers Ju 88 aircraft prowling the skies. The Luftwaffe night fighters generally exhibited greater speed and agility than the Lancaster bombers; they also employed a lethal system of interception, known as Himmelbett, whereby ground controllers used mobile Würzburg radar sets—one trained on the fighter, the other on the bomber—to stalk their quarry.⁸

“A piece of cake,” one RAF pilot said in jest about the ops against the Ruhr, admitting that the remark was so much whistling past the graveyard.⁹

Finally, the CO reminded all aircrews to empty their pockets of letters and other personal items, to bury their parachutes if forced to bail out, and to recite only “name, rank, and number” if captured. He finished with the requisite “Good luck, chaps.” As if to punctuate the end of the briefing narrative, all the chairs and benches scraped across the briefing room floor as dozens of aircrews rose to go about their pre-operation rituals.

Bomb aimer Jimmy Arthur’s baptism of fire, his first combat op, would coincide with Bomber Command’s latest sustained salvos against Nazi Germany’s industrial might in the Ruhr Valley. With 106 Squadron’s attack on Essen, on March 12, 1943, Jimmy Arthur and the rest of Lewis Burpee’s crew would join the opening week of the Battle of the Ruhr, heralded by a British Air Ministry official “as one of the decisive battles of history.”¹⁰ Historic or not, for WO Arthur and his comrades, the late afternoon had become the pregnant pause between briefing and combat op, between knowing the target and taking off. Most didn’t like this period; there was nothing anybody could do but wait. Even the late-afternoon meal was uncomfortably quiet, with airmen eating their precious eggs and bacon mechanically.¹¹ Some sat and listened to the radio in the mess or played billiards. Others took the time to write letters to loved ones. But most stared or paced and waited for the clock to indicate it was time to don their flying clothes.

All day long the Syerston flight line had been alive with preparation. Bowsers pumped thousands of gallons of petrol into bomber fuel tanks. Trucks delivered oxygen cylinders for the breathing apparatus the crew would need during the high-altitude sortie. Aero-mechanics scoured engine, instrument, and hydraulic systems for faults, and completed repairs. Along the perimeter track, tractors towed strings of bomb trolleys, dispersing the assigned 4,000-pound Cookies and incendiaries for loading into the Lancaster bomb bays. Meanwhile, air gunners went through the ritual of stripping and cleaning their machine guns while armourers delivered belts of ammunition, which the front, mid-upper, and rear turret gun positions would require to defend the bomber against German fighter aircraft during the operation. Dozens of ground and aircrew moved around each aircraft like drones working in a hive—each focused on a task, none bothered by the other.

At Lewis Burpee’s Lancaster ZN-H, just before climbing aboard, the crew members told new man Jimmy Arthur they’d flown previous ops to Essen, one as recently as the week before. Indeed, they had been to Happy Valley a number of times: they’d bombed Duisburg twice, Düsseldorf twice, and Essen on three previous occasions. Guy “Johnny” Pegler, Burpee’s flight engineer from the UK, had flown twenty-five ops with his skipper; Tom Jaye, also from the UK, had served as Burpee’s navigator on sixteen trips; and fellow Brit Sam Weller had worked ten ops as Burpee’s wireless operator. British mid-upper gunner Ginger Long had flown twenty-one trips with Burpee, and rear gunner Gordie Brady had served with Burpee from his very first op for 106 Squadron.

Brady’s parents had emigrated from the United States to Ponoka, Alberta, during the Great War. Born in 1916, Gordon finished school in the 1930s and then worked in a drugstore. Early in the war, he worked as a field ambulance driver. By 1941, he’d joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) and trained as a wireless radio operator at Calgary, going overseas to serve in the RAF as a gunner in February 1942. He crewed up with Burpee in June of that year and flew every wartime op with him; Brady had earned a promotion to warrant officer in February 1943, just before his skipper, Flight Sergeant (F/Sgt.) Burpee, was recommended for a Distinguished Flying Medal (DFM).^*

Crew chemistry was vital aboard any military aircraft, for survival and sanity. Burpee’s bomber crew had gelled well in the short months of their first tour; one day, as Burpee signed and sealed a letter to a loved one, Brady insisted his skipper reopen the envelope to add a postscript “Hello” from him.¹² A photograph taken on January 18, 1943, following their fifteenth op, a raid on Berlin, shows the crew of Lancaster ZN-H arm in arm like brothers—although F/Sgt. Burpee is sombre-faced, perhaps feeling the weight of his responsibility to get his crew to target and back safely. Burpee disliked the strict protocol that often separated Air Force officers (Arthur, Brady, and Weller) from sergeants (Pegler, Jaye, Long, and himse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• End Papers
• Map
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Air Ministry and Airmen (Cast of Characters)
• Chapter One: “Happy Valley”
• Chapter Two: An Earthquake Bomb
• Chapter Three: The Plan
• Chapter Four: “A Tree in the Middle of England”
• Chapter Five: “Racehorses Standing in the Paddock”
• Chapter Six: “Big Do On”
• Chapter Seven: The Gauntlet
• Chapter Eight: “Après Moi le Déluge”
• Chapter Nine: The Op Too Far
• Chapter Ten: “The Old Lags”
• Chapter Eleven: Mythology Lost and Found
• Chapter Twelve: “For All the Good It Did . . .”
• Sources
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Also by Ted Barris
• Copyright
• About the Publisher