Authors: Paul Brickhill

The Dam Busters (19 page)

BOOK: The Dam Busters

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CHAPTER XX “GRAND SLAM”

A’ one o’clock 617’s engines were bursting into life round the field. Fauquier was running up his engines, testing his magnetos, when there was a crash from the starboard inner and the propeller jerked to a grinding halt as it seized. Fauquier, muttering with frustration, knew the aircraft would never get off the ground on three engines. There was only one thing to do… borrow Calder’s aircraft. The fact that he might then be shot down instead of Calder never even occurred to him, and would not have worried him if it had. He scuttled out of his plane and went haring across the field.

Calder saw the running figure, shouting and waving hands in urgent signals, guessed what had happened and cracked his throttles open. The Lancaster lurched forward and, with the small figure sprinting despairingly in the rear, rolled thunderously down the runway, picking up speed till it lifted heavily over the far fence on the way to drop the world’s biggest bomb.

The “tallboy”-armed gaggle fell in behind, watching Calder’s wings in wonder and alarm. On the ground a Lancaster has no perceptible dihedral, the wings spread in a flat, straight line, but Calder’s wings now were a graceful arc, curving up at the tips as they took the strain of the 10-tonner. Those underneath could see the great missile hanging in the bomb bays where the bomb doors used to be.

The sky was clear of cloud; they skirted the flak at Bremen and ten minutes later picked up the line of the viaduct threading across the marshes. Calder headed in, the laden bomber thrusting smoothly through the bumps till Calder felt her bound up as the “grand slam” slipped away from the grips.

Wheeling away, they watched it drop like a silver shark, slowly starting to spin as its nose dipped lower and it picked up speed, lunging towards the viaduct. It fell for some thirty-five seconds and from far above the sharpest eyes picked up the squirt of mud as it speared into the marsh 30 yards from the foot of one of the arches.

Eleven seconds later the marsh seemed to split and a vast core of mud and smoke vomited up, blotting out 500 feet of the viaduct. In the next seconds “tallboy” explosions erupted along both sides of the viaduct. Calder peeled off to try and see what had happened; slowly the mud settled, the wind wafted the smoke away, and as the target appeared through the veils Calder saw that the viaduct looked like a Roman ruin. Seven massive arches over a hundred yards were missing.

He could see almost no collapsed masonry underneath arid thought for a moment that the bomb had blasted the arches into dust, but could not believe that possible.

Later they found that the one “grand slam” had completely vindicated Barnes Wallis’s theory that a near miss could be more effective than a direct hit. It had penetrated about a hundred feet, and the shock wave had shivered the arches to cracking point; the explosion had produced a near “camouflet”, blasting an enormous subterranean cavity underneath, and, robbed of their foundation in the mud, the weakened arches had collapsed into the abyss. It was the perfect trapdoor effect, the “hangman’s drop” that Wallis had planned in 1939.

In the next few days trailers delivered several more “grand slams” to the bomb dump, and on March 19 Fauquier got his delayed chance to drop one. The target was in historic territory for 617, the Arnsberg Bridge, a long masonry viaduct a few miles north of the Moehne Dam. Five Lancasters carried “grand slams”, and the other fourteen had “tallboys”. The first: bomb was a direct hit on the viaduct, and the rest, including Fauquier’s “grand slam”, went down into the centre of the smoke that gushed up. When the smoke lifted, the central spans were a pile of rubble in the river bed.

Two days later they went to the Arbergen Bridge, near Bremen. Flak got a direct hit on Gumbley’s aircraft on the run-up and he went straight down in flames. Price had to swerve out of the way of the falling aircraft, marring his bombing run, but he straightened up and his bomb aimer, Pilot Officer Chance—by a very good chance indeed—lobbed his “tallboy” a direct hit on the viaduct. There was one more direct hit and a lot of near misses. Two piers collapsed, another one was thrown 15 feet out of alignment and earthquake shock threw a span off another pier. Target destroyed.

Next day they went to the Nienburg Bridge, near Bremen, over which the Germans were taking oil to the front. It was not heavily defended, so Fauquier evolved a new plan to try and save some of the precious earthquake bombs. On the way up to the target he ordered four aircraft to start their bombing runs and told the others to circle near by and wait for orders in case the first four missed. It was an unprecedented idea, and the very fact that Fauquier considered it possible speaks eloquently of their phenomenal accuracy. He himself dived low to one side of the target to watch.

The results were fantastic. The four Lancasters made a steady run in loose formation and bombed almost in the same second. Fauquier saw the first two bombs hit simultaneously (one of them a “grand slam”) on each end of the bridge. The bridge span lifted bodily and still intact into the air, seemed to hang there a second, and in that very moment a third bomb hit it fair and square in the middle. When the smoke had cleared there was no visible sign of the bridge whatsoever and the squadron turned for home, taking their fifteen remaining bombs with them.

Fauquier said when he landed, “I’d hate to have to do
that
again to prove it.”

The Germans had one last railway bridge still serving the Ruhr; it was also near Bremen, and 617 went there early next morning. The first three bombs (from 16,000 feet) hit almost in the same second, all direct hits (including Fauquier’s and Calder’s “grand slams”). The next two were very near misses, followed by what seemed to be one more direct hit before smoke smothered the ruins.

As there were no worthwhile bridges left, 617 went back on the U-boat pens. At Farge, near Bremen, 7,000 slaves had sweated for two years to build the biggest concrete structure in the world, 1,450 feet long, over 300 feet wide and 75 feet high. The roof was 23 feet of solid reinforced concrete and the pens were just ready for use. 617 paid their call on March 27 and sank two “grand slams” deep in the roof which exploded right through, making holes 20 feet across and bringing down thousands of tons of concrete. Several “tallboys”, direct hits and near misses, cracked the monster and undermined it and the pens were never used.

It was hard to find good targets now till a recce plane brought a report that Germany’s last pocket battleship, the
Lutzow,
was sheltering in Swinemunde, in the Baltic. 617 slogged up there and sank her. Then they took some “grand slams” and “tallboys” to Heligoland and plastered half the island fortress’s big guns. Next day they went back and plastered the other half, ending Germany’s mastery of the approaches to the north-west ports.

Cochrane went to take over Transport Command, which, now the shooting was nearly over, was coming into its own. The new 5 Group A.O.C. told Fauquier he was grounded because he did not want him killed in the last moments. The tough Canadian had just finished his third tour and had won three D.S.O.s and a D.F.C.

The remnants of the Wehrmacht were said to be pulling back into Hitler’s “Southern Redoubt” in Bavaria, where Berchtesgaden lay. It seemed that there was no more work for 617 till someone remembered that Hitler had recently told his Party chiefs, “I have read these days in the British Press that they intend to destroy my country house. I almost regret that this has not been done, for what I call my own is not more valuable than my compatriots possess.”

Eager to ease his conscience, 617 flew to Berchtesgaden, hoping that if Hitler was there they might bury him in his house. As the world knows, Hitler was in Berlin, but it made no difference because the land was deep under snow and Berchtesgaden merged with the white hills and low cloud so that the squadron could not pick it out. However, they identified the near-by S.S. barracks, home of Hitler’s bodyguard, and flattened them with four “tallboys” and a selection of 1,000-pounders, and that, with Hitler away, was probably more useful than laying their eggs on the Eagle’s Nest.

That was 617’s last operation. On May 8 it was all over and the 150 pilots, navigators, bomb aimers, wireless operators, engineers and gunners realised they were going to have the same chance as ordinary people of walking down the years to a more natural death.

But no. Not quite. 617 and one other squadron were detailed for “Tiger Force”, to be the R.A.F.’s contribution to the strategic bombing of Japan. They were to fly from Okinawa and drop their “tallboys” and “grand slams” on the bridges connecting Kyushu to the main Japanese island of Honshu to cut off reinforcements when the Americans invaded Kyushu, as they planned, in January, 1946. They were all set to go when the two bombs so much deadlier than “Grand Slam” fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan surrendered.

“They must have heard we were coming,” said the thwarted volunteers.

EPILOGUE

After the war, Wallis’ friends urged him to claim a reward for his war-time inventions, but he said that if he did he would never touch such money for himself. I asked him why, and he said, “My dear chap, go and read your Bible. Turn up Samuel II, chapter twenty-three. You probably haven’t got a Bible, so I’ll tell you this story about David:

“He was hiding in the cave of Adullam after the Philistines had seized Bethlehem, and in his anguish he said, ‘Oh that one would give me drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!’ Now the three mighty men who were his lieutenants were with him, and I’m dashed if they didn’t fight their way through the Philistine lines and draw a goatskin of water out of the well by the gate. They fought their way back and took the water to David in the cave, but when they told him how they had got it he would not drink it. They asked him why, and he said:

”’ Is not this the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?’”

THE END

(Just after this was written the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors granted Barnes Wallis PS10,000 for his wartime work. He immediately put it all into a fund to help educate the sons and daughters of men who died serving with the Royal Air Force.)

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