The Dambusters raid of May 1943 was an RAF bombing that destroyed a number of important German dams. Known as Operation Chastise, the raid is one of the most famous air operations of the Second World War and was immortalised in the 1955 film The Dam Busters. But how effective was the Dambusters raid really and how much damage did it inflict?
Operation Chastise began a little before half past nine on the evening of Sunday 16 May 1943, when the first of 19 Lancaster bombers took to the air from the grass aerodrome of Scampton in Lincolnshire.
The aircraft belonged to No 617 squadron RAF – a unit that had been brought into being just eight weeks before, for the task on which it now embarked. The squadron was led by Wing Commander Guy Gibson, a veteran of two bomber tours and another tour on night fighters. Gibson was just 24 years old. His crews were armed with Upkeep, the name given to a new and operationally untried water-skipping mine that had been designed by the aeronautical engineer Barnes Wallis. All but two of their targets lay in the Sauerland, a hilly region above the industrial districts of Rhineland-Westphalia, Germany. Since the final years of the 19thcentury, a number of the Sauerland’s streams had been dammed to create reservoirs. On the night of Sunday 16 May 1943, the RAF was aiming to use Wallis’s mine to release the waters of at least three of them.
Thirty-six hours later, Wallis’s wife wrote to a friend:
“Poor B. didn’t get home till 5 to 12 last night, only 3 hours sleep Saturday, didn’t take his clothes off Sunday, and was awake till 2.30 this morning telling me all about it. And then, poor dear darling Barnes, he woke at 6 feeling absolutely awful: he’d killed so many people.”
The breaching of the Möhne Dam and the Eder Dam across the watershed in Hesse had indeed taken many human lives. But at that point, it was not the deaths in Germany which troubled Wallis; what had kept him awake was the number of aircrew casualties. At the final briefing late on the Sunday afternoon, Wallis had addressed 19 crews. The next day, only 11 of them came back. Fifty-six of the faces into which he had looked just a few hours before were gone, and all but three of them were dead. Among them were the raid’s deputy leader and both the Squadron’s flight commanders.
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