Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next. John Nichol
– and saw his skipper’s last moments. ‘I imagine that when he let go of the stick, the plane dived straight to the deck … I shall never forget how he wished me good luck before I left … he was a good lad.’15
Mick Martin had lost sight of Knight’s aircraft in the fog and did not know what had happened to him. He eventually identified the target ‘after stooging around for about an hour, but it was very hairy’, and he had to make thirteen passes over it before his bomb-aimer was sufficiently confident to release their bomb.
Meanwhile, more of their comrades were being shot down. Flying Officer William Divall’s Lancaster came down a few miles away after being hit by flak. Having dropped his bomb into the canal, Divall crashed into the bank and the ensuing explosion flattened the trees flanking the canal and blew the rear turret, with the rear gunner’s body still inside it, right across to the opposite bank. All the crew died in the blast.
Flight Lieutenant Ralf Allsebrook’s Lancaster was also hit by flak as he flew over the canal. A veteran of two tours with 49 Squadron, Allsebrook had joined 617 Squadron a few days after the Dams raid, and was not to survive his first op over Germany with them. He tried to make an emergency landing, but hit the roof of a house and then smashed into a crane on the canal bank, decapitating himself and killing his crew.
The lethal anti-aircraft fire and the crashes caused by low-level flying in such poor visibility made it unsurprising that only two bombs – dropped by Mick Martin’s and Dave Shannon’s crews – landed anywhere near the target, one hitting the towpath, the other falling in the water without doing any significant damage to the canal. Even worse, the abortive raid had seen five of the eight Lancasters shot down or crash, leaving a trail of burning aircraft across the German countryside, and causing the loss of forty-one men’s lives, including thirteen of the survivors of the Dams raid that had made the squadron’s reputation. The op had also claimed the lives of David Maltby and his crew the previous night, making a total of six out of nine aircraft and their crews lost – a loss rate of two-thirds compared with the 5 per cent losses that the supposedly more vulnerable Main Force bombers were suffering on their mass raids on heavily defended German cities.
The first two major ops by 617 Squadron had therefore cost the lives of fourteen crews. The death rate on the Dortmund–Ems Canal op was equivalent to that of the triumphantly received Dams raid, and as Johnny Johnson remarked, ‘In many ways it was not dissimilar to the Dams, apart from those very heavy defences and the difficulty of getting at the target. That was the killer.’16 Yet while the Dams raid had been hailed as one of the greatest successes of the war, the failure to destroy the target this time caused Dortmund–Ems to be regarded as an unmitigated disaster. The margins between great success and total failure were proving to be vanishingly small.
Johnny Johnson was ill and had played no part in the raid, but hearing about the losses, he was desperate to find out if his pilot, Joe McCarthy, and the rest of his usual crew had been involved. ‘It was a worrying time, these men were my family,’ he says, but to his great relief he found that they had not taken part in the raid, with both McCarthy and Les Munro temporarily grounded on the orders of the Medical Officer.
The squadron’s relative inactivity since the Dams raid and the attendant ‘one op’ gibes from other squadrons may have led to the target and the method of attacking it being hastily chosen, with too little thought about the potential pitfalls, and as successor to the now legendary Guy Gibson, George Holden may also have been eager to win his own spurs. ‘There was a sense that we had to get back on ops,’ Johnny Johnson now says. ‘Squadron Leader Holden wanted to do it to keep the reputation of the squadron and its role in special operations. Maybe the accolades we had received because of the Dams op meant we had to get on and do more, be more successful. But those accolades were a hindrance here.’17
Only six crews – including those of Mick Martin, Dave Shannon, Les Munro and Joe McCarthy, who were veterans of the Dams raids – now remained on the squadron. Desperate to atone for the failures, Martin volunteered to return to the target the following night, flying solo to complete the job, but he was overruled by his superiors and, apart from an abortive attempt to bomb the Anthéor railway viaduct in southern France the following night, the Dortmund–Ems Canal raid proved to be 617 Squadron’s last for almost two months.
The heavy losses they had suffered at the canal were proof that their signature operations – low-level, night-time, precision-bombing raids – were no longer viable. They had been lucky at the dams, albeit still with the loss of almost half their force. At the Dortmund–Ems Canal their luck had run out. ‘It was a big blow to the squadron,’ one crewman says. ‘We lost so many that night that it seemed to affect the thinking of the powers that be. It was a very traumatic experience.’18
There were to be no more low-level attacks. From now on 617 Squadron would operate at high level, using a new tachometric precision bombsight, the SABS (Stabilised Automatic Bomb Sight), to ensure accuracy. It was one of the world’s first computerised bombsights and a complex, hand-built piece of equipment, consisting of a mechanical computer mounted to the left of the bomb-aimer and a stabilised sighting head fitted with an optical graticule. The sight was connected to a Bombing Direction Indicator (BDI) mounted on the pilot’s instrument panel, which indicated the amount of left or right turn required to bring the sight to bear on the target. Once the sight had been programmed with the necessary data – the aircraft’s speed and altitude, and the wind-speed and direction – the bomb-aimer had only to keep the target centred in the graticule and the sight itself would then automatically release the bomb at the right moment.
However, while they could achieve impressive accuracy with the sight, and attacking from height made them less vulnerable to flak, it also made them much more vulnerable to German night-fighters, particularly when attacked from below, the Lancaster’s blindspot. In the early stages of the war, anti-aircraft guns had claimed far more victims than fighters, but that was quickly reversed and by 1943, Bomber Command losses to night-fighters were twice those caused by flak.
German night-fighter pilot Peter Spoden – these days a great-grandfather living in a care home with his wife – brought down twenty-four four-engine British bombers during the war, and he cries as he reflects on the deaths of the crews inside them, young men of his own age. The aircraft he shot down never even knew he was there: he approached from behind and below them, flew 50 or 60 feet underneath their fuselage and unleashed the two upward-firing guns the German pilots called Schräge Musik. (Translating literally as ‘slanting music’, Schräge Musik was their slang term for jazz.) Spoden recalls one night where he was talked in by his radio operator and suddenly saw ‘this black shadow above me … in ten minutes I shot down three Lancasters – I was completely out of my mind.’19 However, the firing wasn’t all one way. One Lancaster gunner has vivid memories of shooting down a fighter at close quarters: ‘I could see my bullets hitting him. I couldn’t miss him – not at that range.’20
617 Squadron’s shocking rate of losses had led to their sarcastic nickname ‘The One Op Squadron’ being replaced with a new one, ‘The Suicide Squadron’, and the deaths of so many crewmates dealt what could easily have been a terminal blow to morale. ‘Those losses had a big effect, there was a sense of distress and shock, and possibly even dissatisfaction that we were asked to do something which should never have been attempted,’ Johnny Johnson says. But although morale was inevitably affected in the short term, confidence soon recovered. ‘Morale slumped because they were rather staggering losses,’ Larry Curtis adds, ‘but one did tend to throw these things off very quickly. Going from low level to high level made all the difference; losses were very slight after that.’21
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While their comrades were trying to come to terms with the disaster, two of the survivors of Les Knight’s crash had been captured, but the remaining five, including Sidney Hobday and Fred Sutherland, were on the ground in the Occupied Netherlands, trying to evade the Nazis. They were separated from each other, and the knowledge that he was now alone in the heart of enemy territory, facing capture or perhaps even death if he were found, almost paralysed Hobday at first. However, realising that the greatest danger of discovery lay in remaining close to the wreckage