80 YEARS AGO TONIGHT

Eighty years ago tonight, Lancaster bombers of the RAF’s 617 Squadron flew the most amazing aerial mission of World War II, the Dams Raid, to break the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in the Ruhr Valley of Germany. It was a daring low-level raid and half the force didn’t come back.

The raid was immortalized in the movie “The Dam Busters” in 1955, adapted from Paul Brickhill’s book.

The movie still holds up 70 years later, and George Lucas has admitted that the sequence of the attack on the dam influenced how he staged the attack on the Death Star in “Star Wars” (the good one).

Here’s an interesting documentary made for the BBC about the real story:

The Dam Busters documentary

Here’s a documentary about the making of the movie:

Making "the Dam Busters"

Here’s a clip of the famous attack sequence:

Gibson's attack

And here is the best book on the raid, “Operation Chastise” by the great Sir Max Hastings (my model for how to be a military historian). Sir Max saw the movie as a kid, like I did, and fell in love with the story. In the 1970s, when they were all still alive, he inerviewed everyone associated with the raid - including the Germans who survived the deluge. He presents a very different vision of Gibson from the “official version,” which interests me that someone like the real Gibson could get the people he did to join in and fly the mission when they had all “done their bit” and no one would have thought badly of their refusal. (Only $18 in trade paperback - a great bargain)

Operation Chastise

So there it is, a story that I’ve enjoyed since I was ten.

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