Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next. John Nichol
smaller bombs.
On the face of it, 617’s task was simple: bombing from 150 feet at a speed of 180 miles an hour, they were to drop their bombs on a precise aiming point within 40 feet of the west bank of the canal until a breach had been achieved. The remaining bombs were then to be dropped on alternate banks of the canal, moving north at 50-yard intervals to ensure as widespread a destruction of the canal embankments as possible. Even one bomb breaching the embankment would drain the canal, halting the flow of barge traffic, flooding the surrounding area and preventing millions of tons of Nazi supplies and weapons of war from reaching the front lines. However, the HC bombs were like elongated dustbins, built without streamlining and only small fins to enable them to fit into the bomb-bay. This made them unstable in flight and hard to drop accurately.
Six Mosquito fighter-bombers were to escort the squadron’s Lancasters, operating as ‘can-openers’ by dealing with any flak hot-spots on the route. The Lancasters were to approach the target at extreme low level – 30 feet over Holland and Germany – before climbing to 150 feet to bomb. Although they had been practising for several weeks, flying low level along English canals, first by day and later by night, not everyone was happy with the idea of another low level attack on a heavily defended target. ‘Our losses at the dams had been around fifty per cent,’ Fred Sutherland says. ‘And certainly I had doubts about this next op. My main concern was flying around at night, at very low level, with all those power cables criss-crossing everywhere.’
Born in 1923, Sutherland was Canadian, a full Cree Native American, who had volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force the minute he turned eighteen. ‘I couldn’t wait to get in the war in any way possible,’ he says. ‘Everybody wanted to get in. We were still suffering from the Depression, unemployment was high and it was a means to escape all that. All the talk was about the war and I wanted to be involved. I didn’t really understand what it would be like though, I had no idea what was to come, what I’d go through, so I suppose I was naive.’ After completing an air gunner’s course, he crewed up with Les Knight, a ‘short but very muscular’ Australian pilot, ‘strong in the shoulders and arms. He was a wonderful pilot,’ Sutherland says, ‘very quiet, but if you were out of line, he quietly told you that you’d better not do that again.’
David Maltby’s crew
One of the two four-ships – formations of four aircraft – making the raid was to be led by Squadron Leader David Maltby, a very skilful pilot who had completed thirty ops over Germany and been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross even before joining 617. Still only twenty-three, having struck the fatal blow against the Möhne dam, he was now one of the most highly decorated officers in the RAF and, like his comrades on the Dams raid, a national celebrity. A fun-loving, gentle giant over six feet tall, he was the life and soul of every party and always up for a prank; while training for the Dams raid, he had often ‘buzzed’ his wife Nina’s family farm. His first child, a son, had been born soon afterwards; the shock of Maltby’s aerobatics overhead may or may not have hastened the birth.
Maltby’s personal good luck token was a filthy, oil-stained forage cap. He had worn it on the night of the Dams raid, never flew without it, and even wore it on parade. He donned it once more as he prepared to lead Operation Garlic – the raid on the Dortmund–Ems Canal. It would be his crew’s first operation since the dams, and they would be flying at low level, straight into anti-aircraft gunfire, just as they had at the dams. The op was scheduled as a night-time raid on 14 September 1943, and eight Lancasters took off around midnight, but were recalled within forty minutes because of cloud obscuring the target. However, that ‘boomerang’ order resulted in tragedy. After acknowledging the order to return to base, Maltby’s Lancaster crashed into the North Sea 8 miles off Cromer on the Norfolk coast, killing everyone on board. Famed as the man who breached the Möhne dam, Maltby had now joined the mounting tally of the squadron’s dead.
Although the official accident report mentioned ‘some obscure explosion and a fire’ before the aircraft’s fatal crash, it was believed for many years that Maltby had simply misjudged his height and dipped a wing into the sea, with fatal consequences. However, a rival theory has recently been advanced, claiming that he collided with a Mosquito from 139 Squadron that was returning from a separate raid on similar routing, and was also lost without trace that night.5
Dave Shannon circled over the crash site for over two hours until an air-sea rescue craft arrived, but Maltby’s body was the only one ever to be recovered; his fellow crew members were lost in the depths of the North Sea, and are listed simply as having ‘no known grave’. Their average age was just twenty. David Maltby is buried in a quiet corner of St Andrew’s churchyard at Wickhambreaux near Canterbury, the church in which he had married Nina just sixteen months earlier. His son, just ten weeks old at the time of Maltby’s death, would now never know his father.
The following night, the surviving members of the squadron returned to the Dortmund–Ems Canal, with Mick Martin’s crew replacing Maltby’s. ‘Crews as a whole accepted the loss of a friend as a downside of the war in the air they were engaged in,’ Les Munro says, a view echoed by Larry Curtis. ‘One accepted the fact that you weren’t coming back from this war. I did and most people did and it helped a lot. You were frightened but you knew it had to be done, so you did it.’6 However, Maltby’s death had given some of the aircrews pause for thought, and there was considerable trepidation about the op. ‘I knew Dave Maltby,’ Johnny Johnson recalls. ‘He and Les Munro were on 97 Squadron with us, so when he’d been lost the night before, there was already a sense of it being a dodgy op.’7
The nervousness about the op only served to strengthen the importance of the pre-flight rituals or superstitions that almost all the crews followed. Every aircraft was carrying eight men rather than the usual seven, with an extra gunner aboard to ensure that all the gun turrets would be manned at all times throughout the flight. Unlike most of the other crews, one of Les Knight’s crew’s rituals was not peeing on the rear wheel before boarding their aircraft, and when Les Woollard, the extra gunner they were carrying, began to do so they all rushed over and pulled him away. ‘We were not really bothered though,’ Knight’s front gunner, Fred Sutherland says, ‘we were just fooling with him.’ Sutherland thinks his crew was not superstitious, but then adds, ‘but we always did the same routine. I always ate my chocolate bar when we were charging down the runway, and I always wore the same socks that my girlfriend, now my wife, had knitted for me.’
Eight Lancasters, all carrying 12,000-pound delayed-action bombs, and flying in two four-ships, took off at midnight on a beautiful, clear moonlit night. As they crossed the North Sea, the lessons learned on the Dams raid led them to adopt a new method of crossing the hostile coastline. Instead of flying a constant low level approach, they climbed before reaching the coast, but then went into a shallow dive back to low level, building up speed before flashing over the coastal flak batteries. ‘And it really was low level,’ wireless operator Larry Curtis recalls. ‘I can remember the pilot pulling up to go over the high-tension cables.’8 ‘What was really scary for me were the power wires,’ adds Fred Sutherland, who had the closest view of them from his gun turret under his aircraft’s nose. ‘Even if there was moonlight, you couldn’t see the wires until you were practically on them, and once you hit them, that was it, you were done for.’
George Holden led the formation, with Mick Martin on his starboard flank and Les Knight to port. Rear gunner Tom Simpson heard Martin and his bomb-aimer, Bob Hay, complaining that Holden was flying too high, allowing the searchlights to pick them up. ‘We seemed to be getting into a lot of trouble and I had never experienced such intense ground fire.’ Just before reaching the small German town of Nordhorn, Martin was, as usual, flying ‘lower than low’, squeezing between some factory chimney stacks, ‘the top of the stacks being higher than we were’, but Holden, still much higher, was drawing heavy anti-aircraft fire. Fred Sutherland, front gunner in Les Knight’s crew, whose job was to attack ‘any ground flak units that started firing at us, tried to return fire but couldn’t depress my gun enough because we were right on top of it’.
Rather