Return of the Dambusters: What 617 Squadron Did Next. John Nichol
Hamilton acknowledged this, ‘putting my chest out, because I was quite proud’.
Cheshire frowned. ‘Well, I tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you six weeks to get your accuracy down to twenty-seven yards, or you’re off the squadron.’4
He was only half-joking. On 617 Squadron, everything revolved around accuracy in bombing. Before they were allowed on ops, every new crew was required to carry out at least three six-bomb practice drops on the ranges at Wainfleet on the Wash in Lincolnshire. The crew’s accuracy was assessed and the results added to the Bombing Error Ladder kept by the Bombing Leader. Crews with the highest accuracy – and the results of even the most experienced crews were continually updated – were assigned the most ops and the most important roles on those ops, and those with poorer records would find themselves left out, or even transferred off the squadron altogether, if their results did not improve. Cheshire was relentless in raising standards, but he set himself the highest standards of all, and was universally admired and even loved by the men under his command. ‘He was a great man,’ Johnny Johnson says, ‘and the finest commander I served under.’5
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In the autumn of 1943, during the continuing lull in ops that followed the disaster of Dortmund–Ems, 617 had been practising high-level bombing with new 12,000-pound ‘Blockbuster’ HC bombs – the equivalent of three 4,000-pound ‘cookies’ bolted together.
One of the squadron’s rear gunners, Tom Simpson, was lugging his Browning machine guns to the firing range one morning with 400 rounds of ammunition draped around his neck, when a ‘silver-haired, mature gentleman’ approached. A civilian on the base was an unusual sight, but the man seemed to know his way around. He asked if he could walk with Simpson and helped to carry one of the guns. After Simpson had installed the guns in the practice turret and fired off a few bursts himself, he noticed the stranger’s ‘deep blue eyes gleaming’ and asked, ‘Would you like to sit in here and have a little dab yourself?’
The man didn’t need a second invitation. Having watched him fire both guns singly, Simpson invited him to fire off the last hundred rounds using both guns together. After doing so, he was ‘trembling with excitement and pleasure’ as he climbed out of the turret. ‘That was really fantastic,’ he said. ‘I had no idea of the magnitude and firepower a rear gunner has at his disposal.’ Only later did Simpson realise that the silver-haired, mature gentleman was Barnes Wallis.6 When he mentioned the incident to Mick Martin, he told him that Wallis was developing even bigger and better bombs for the squadron. Within a few months they would all have the proof of that.
Barnes Wallis
Wallis, whose wife’s sister and brother-in-law had been killed by a German bomb in 1940, had already devised Upkeep – the ‘bouncing bomb’ used on the Dams raid. Forever innovative and forward-looking, he had never believed that carpet bombing could break German resolve, any more than the Blitz had broken Britain’s will to fight. Instead, he had argued from the start for precision bombing of high-value economic, military and infrastructure targets, and designed a series of weapons capable of doing so. He had been given the task of creating newer, ever more destructive weapons that could penetrate and destroy heavily fortified concrete bunkers and other targets, previously invulnerable to conventional attack.
A vegetarian non-smoker, Barnes Wallis came from a respectable middle-class background – his father was a doctor and his grandfather a priest – yet at sixteen years old, he had set his face against the advice of his parents and teachers and left school to take up an apprenticeship as an engineer. In later years, his daughter Mary attributed that decision to an experience when he was very young and his mother had taken him to a foundry to see the men and machinery at work. ‘The size, power, the noise of machinery in the light of the flames from the foundry furnace’ may have made a lasting impression on him.
Whatever the reasons, Wallis’s career path was set, though at first he showed more interest in the sea than in the air, training as a marine engineer, before being recruited by Vickers to work on airship design. An engineering genius, he worked as the chief designer on the R100 airship, ‘a perfect silver fish gliding through the air … a luxury liner compared with the sardine-tin passenger aircraft of today’. Having pioneered the geodetic system of construction in airships (more commonly called geodesic) – a latticework system of construction that produced a very light metal structure that nonetheless possessed great strength – he went on to apply it to military aircraft too, first using it on the airframe of the Wellington bomber. Despite his considerable achievements, he was a warm, humane and profoundly modest man. ‘We technical men like to keep in the background,’7 he said, and a friend and work colleague remarked that: ‘He would sooner talk about his garden than himself.’
Although he had designed aircraft, Wallis knew very little about bomb construction, but right from the outset of the war he resolved to put that right as quickly as possible. One of his early discoveries was that the explosive power of a bomb is proportional to the cube of the weight of the charge it carries, so that, for example, a 2,000-pound bomb would have eight times the impact of a bomb half its weight. He also learned that the pressure wave from an explosion is transmitted far more efficiently through the ground or through water than it is through air. Both of those discoveries were reflected in the design of the ‘Upkeep’, ‘Tallboy’ and ‘Grand Slam’ bombs he subsequently produced.
In addition to the new bombs Barnes Wallis was producing, 617 Squadron were now using a new and far more accurate bombsight. Shortly before Leonard Cheshire’s arrival, 617 had begun training with the sophisticated new SABS. Its only major drawback was that it required a long, straight and level run to the dropping point, reducing the pilots’ ability to make evasive manoeuvres and increasing their vulnerability to flak and fighter attack.
Wireless operator Larry Curtis always dreaded that vulnerable time, flying straight and level with the bomb-aimer in virtual control of the aircraft:
As long as you were busy, you never thought about anything except the job you were doing. But when it came to the bombing run, and to a great extent your duties were finished, it was then that you became aware that you were very vulnerable and people were actually trying to kill you. In the radio operator’s cabin there was a steel pole – some sort of support – and I used to hang on to it like grim death. I’ve always said if anyone could find that steel pole, they’d find my fingerprints embedded in it – and I’m not joking. It did come home very forcefully; I’m sure everyone would agree that was the time you dreaded. 8
There was no man on the squadron who did not feel fear at times, but, says one of the squadron’s wireless operators, ‘it was all about pushing fears to one side. I think if anyone said they were never afraid, I’d say they were either not there, or they’re lying. There was no possibility you couldn’t be scared at some points.’9
Even the squadron’s greatest heroes were not immune to fear. Wilfred Bickley, an air gunner who joined 617 at the same time as the great Leonard Cheshire, VC, once asked him, ‘Do you ever get scared?’
‘Of course I get scared,’ Cheshire said.
Bickley broke into a broad grin. ‘Thanks for that, you’ve made my day.’10
At a reunion after the war, Cheshire also said to one of his former men on 617 Squadron: ‘I could have been a pilot or at a pinch a navigator, but could never have done the other crew jobs; there was too much time to think, to be isolated, to dwell on what was going on around you. I never felt fear as a pilot, but as a passenger, I certainly felt it!’11
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The use of the new SABS bombsights in training on the ranges at Wainfleet had led to a huge improvement in accuracy, but the first real chance to assess their effectiveness under operational conditions came in raids against Hitler’s new ‘V-weapons’. ‘V’ stood for Vergeltungswaffen (‘vengeance weapons’),