Tim Worstall

Dambusters Again!

This is all rather fun, isn’t it?

Veterans of the legendary 617 "Dambusters" Squadron have welcomed plans
to screen a digitally restored version of the classic film that
immortalised their heroic wartime exploits.

The stirring epic The Dam Busters, starring Michael
Redgrave and Richard Todd, is to be re-released in cinemas nationwide
next week, for the first time since it opened in 1954.

The
film, recounting 617 Squadron’s daring raid on May 16, 1943, to destroy
dams in Germany’s Ruhr district with Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bombs,
holds a unique place in aviation and British cinema history.

Now,
as part of a £12 million lottery-funded project involving the BBC and
the UK Film Council, audiences at 136 screens across Britain will be
able to watch the remastered version of the film.

I do question the timing though….Germany doesn’t have a team in this autumn’s (rugby) world cup.

In

9 responses

  1. Ingram Avatar
    Ingram

    Any ideas where to find a list of participating cinemas? A cursory look round the web reveals nothing…

    Reply
  2. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    An illuminating commentary on the Dambuster raid, made in the context of a review of a new biography of Albert Speer, who became responsible in the Third Reich for managing the German war economy in 1943:
    “The Dambuster raid of May 1943 destroyed or badly damaged some of the dams supplying the Ruhr, but [Bomber] Harris [head of RAF Bomber Command], never liking such ‘panaceas’, did not press on by attacking the neighbouring dams, the effect of which would have been to bring the Ruhr to a standstill. It was the same with the brilliantly successful American raid on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing plant the following August. If there had been an immediate second strike, which Harris obstructed, armaments production would have collapsed and the war might have ended that year. Speer was astonished by this negligence and spoke with irony of his powerful ally among the British general staff.”
    http://www.newstatesman.com/200111050043
    For all the intense bombing of Germany by the RAF and USAF, under Speer’s management German war production peaked in the summer of 1944.
    “At its height, Bomber Command under Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris could put over 1,000 aircraft into the air over Germany. Over 12,000 Bomber Command aircraft were shot down during World War II, and 55,500 aircrew were killed. It had the highest attrition rate of any British unit.
    “The planned campaign medal for Bomber Command was never struck and Harris turned down the offer of a peerage in protest at the snub. In spite of tying up huge resources in defence of Germany, which might have been diverted to the Eastern and Western Fronts and elsewhere by their raids and physical destruction of war materiel, Bomber Command’s contribution had become shameful to the incoming Labour Government of 1945. The battle for a campaign medal continues. Harris was promoted to marshal of the RAF in 1946.”
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Command
    Operation Gomorrah on Hamburg, in the summer of 1943, caused at least 50,000 deaths and left over a million German civilians homeless. Approximately 3,000 aircraft were deployed, 9,000 tons of bombs dropped, and 250,000 houses destroyed.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Hamburg_in_World_War_II
    In other words, the scale of civilian slaughter in Hamburg was about on par with that later on Hiroshima and Nagaski in August 1945. Bomber Harris had signed the operational order for Gomorrah on 27 May 1943.

    Reply
  3. JuliaM Avatar
    JuliaM

    Yes, yes, but what are they doing to call the dog….?
    Tim adds: It’s there, last line of the piece.

    Reply
  4. Harris Avatar
    Harris

    Bob B
    Interested that you recall Albert Speers comments on the Allied failure to press home successful raids. I assume there was a maximum comment size limit that caused you to miss out the Speer comment on Gomorrah:
    “We were of the opinion that a rapid repetition of this type of attack upon another six German towns would inevitably cripple the will to sustain armament manufacture and war production. It was I who first verbally reported to the Fuehrer at that time that a continuation of these attacks might bring about a rapid end to the war.”
    Of course he might be wrong. The Dambusters raid had very high casualties: 8 out of 19 aircraft, or 53 fatalities and 3 POWs out of the 133 aircrew. This after selecting only skilled and experienced crews and taking them out of line for weeks to practice. This wasn’t a job for novices or the fainthearted. It certainly couldn’t have been repeated immediately. On the other side Germany, took measures to protect itself including devises to render the invention less effective. After 6 weeks the water levels were back up to normal levels and production resumed. The raid had more impact upon food production and moral than the war effort.
    Prior to 1943 the bombing effort was subjected to a review resulting in the Butt Report which revealed that only 1 in 3 aircraft (on average) dropped their bombers within 5 miles of their target. Over the Ruhr where the dams were sited, that dropped to 1 in 10.
    Like I say, Speer might be wrong, but don’t let me stop you quoting people who’s opinion you rate.

    Reply
  5. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Harris: “The Dambusters raid had very high casualties: 8 out of 19 aircraft, or 53 fatalities and 3 POWs out of the 133 aircrew. . . The raid had more impact upon food production and moral than the war effort.”
    That is a very fair summary of what – rightly or wrongly – I also had come to understand about the military significance of the Dambuster raid.
    It was a heroic raid. The operational risks were recognised as high before they set out so they were brave men indeed who went on that mission. It is right that we celebrate and honour their heroism but I fear that the larger and deeper issues at stake may pass unremarked. I suspect the public consequences of reissuing the DVD of the Dambusters film will be to distort popular understanding of the context.
    There are still important issues to be raked over about Bomber Harris’s obsession with area bombing, despite the low accuracy of bombing strikes that you (rightly) mention. For all the bombing, German aircraft production peaked around the end of 1944, as I recall. Fortunately the German war machine lacked the fuel supplies to enable the planes to fly.
    The issues are not just about the humanity of deliberately bombing civilian targets in Germany on a scale where the fatalities were on par with the incendary raid on Tokyo on 9 March 1945 (which destroyed a quarter of Tokyo with, probably, 100,000 killed) and the later a-bombs in August on Hishoshima and Nagasaki. There are more prosaic issues about whether it made any kind of strategic sense for Britain to devote the scale of economic resources in our war economy necessary to maintain the successive 1000 bomber raids over Germany instead of resourcing other military missions or allowing consumers more rations.
    There was, at the time, internal controversy [*] within the British high command about whether many military targets could have been hit with greater accuracy, with fewer RAF casualties and at lower overall resource cost by using fast twin-engined Mosquito bombers instead of the big, heavy four-engined Lancasters, Stirlings and Halifaxes. But that issue stressed all sorts of sensitivities – the Lancasters, which were the most successful of the heavy bombers, and the other heavies were built to a RAF specification, whereas the relatively cheap and fast Mosquitos were an extraordinary private enterprise venture by De Havilland.
    The Mosquitos created a miltary option for a very different bombing strategy of precision bombing but one that implicitly suggested the official Bomber Command strategy was flawed.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Havilland_Mosquito
    Barnes Wallis is rightly celebrated for devising the ingenious Dambuster bomb. It is much less well known that he also designed other weapons systems, famously including “the Tallboy (6 tonnes) and then Grand Slam (10 tonnes) deep-penetration earth quake bombs. These were used on strategic German targets such as V1 rocket launch sites, submarine pens, and other reinforced structures, large civil constructions such as viaducts and bridges, as well as the German battleship Tirpitz. These two bombs were the fore-runners of modern bunker-busting bomb, and could enter the earth at supersonic velocity.”
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnes_Wallis
    The applications of the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs were very significant militarily, arguably far more so in aggregate than the Dambuster bomb had been.
    Most folks with even a nodding acquaintance with the history of WW2 will recall reading about the V1 flying bombs and the V2 rockets which fell on London between June 1944 and March 1945 – one of each fell at either end of the road where I lived then. It was only after the war, looking through a magazine in dentist’s waiting room, that I learned of the nightmarish V3 weapon – which was never used (thank heavens) because the deeply buried launch facilities were destroyed by Tallboy bombs:
    “V3, the third vengeance weapon, consisted of barrages of small rocket projectiles fired from an underground cannon and capable of reaching London from the north French coast at a speed of 1500 metres a second.
    “Waves of 300 rockets an hour could have been fired, but the V3 was also abandoned unfinished as Allied troops captured it after D-Day. Both the V2 and V3 bases were subjected to heavy bombing raids with the ‘Tallboy’ – a bomb specially developed to pierce the thick concrete of the V-weapon bases.”
    http://www.theotherside.co.uk/tm-heritage/background/v1v2.htm
    We owe Barnes Wallis a deal more for devising the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs.
    [*] The controversy appears in various histories and I once discussed this with my economics prof, who was one of three economists who worked in the famous Ministry of Aircraft Production where Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964) was the minister especially appointed by Churchill to underpin the importance of maintaining aircraft production. All three economists – Alec Cairncross, Ely Devons and JHB Tew – went on to later illustrious careers.

    Reply
  6. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Btw overall, about how many civilians in Britain were killed during WW2 as a result of the war?
    About 65,000, mainly by air raids, and that includes 8,938 killed as the result of the V1 flying bombs and V2 rockets which landed in and around London between June 1944 and March 1945:
    http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_British_civilians_died_during_World_War_2
    http://www.flyingbombsandrockets.com/
    In London at the time it was frightening, but endurable, to live with the continual threat of being bombed but British civilian casualties from air raids were, in fact, relatively light compared with the scale of civilian casualties in Germany inflicted by RAF bombing raids. The loss of RAF aircrew from Bomber Command during the war, which was high by comparison with casualty rates in other units in Britain’s armed forces, was broadly similar in magnitude to the scale of civilian casualties from air raids on just Hamburg during the summer of 1943, and that leaves out all the casualties from air raids by the RAF on Berlin, Cologne, Dresden, Dusseldorf, Munich and so on.
    An oustanding example of precision bombing by Mosquitos was a famous daylight raid on Amiens Prison in occupied France on 18 February 1944 to breach the prison walls in order to liberate important members of the French resistance who were being held in the prison.
    http://www.raf.mod.uk/bombercommand/ameins.html

    Reply
  7. JuliaM Avatar
    JuliaM

    “Tim adds: It’s there, last line of the piece.”
    Heh, that’ll teach me to skim…

    Reply
  8. Harris Avatar
    Harris

    Bob B
    You’re right to pick on the Peenumunde (?) raid as an example of success.
    There is a debate about area bombing to be had, although I decline to blame Harris for it. If the policy was right, then he was the man for the job; if the policy was wrong, then he wasn’t. You need an operational commander who believes in the policy that has been chosen.
    As I see it, prior to area bombing, the results were pretty useless. Daylight raids were catastrophically ineffective in terms of losses. That meant night raids were the only option but results of raids were highly ineffective as Butt was able to prove. It’s also worth recalling that in some early raids, more people died in the air than on the ground. At that point the government had a choice:
    1. Continue with an ineffective policy that might yield some benefits in the distant future.
    2. Abandon strategic bombing in favour of air support (eg. like the Russians and Germans).
    3. Switch to Area bombing.
    The first was clearly unacceptable. The second was unrealistic gven the lack of a second front. Britain had to do something visible. The third was potentially attractive option.
    My own view for what it’s worth is that if BC could have produced a fire storm every raid, then Speer might have been proved right, but the conditions for a fire storm were very rare. Gomorrah consisted of several raids (4?) including one by the USAF and in only one was a fire storm raised. Overwhelmingly the death toll came during that one night. In comparison, no fire storm occured during the Berlin campaign which followed. The wiki article here reveals that 2,000 civilians died in Berlin against 2,690 RAF. A lot more were injured of course but the comparison of deaths unlines the utter failure of the campaign. Soon after Berlin, the bombers were switched to invasion support.
    My view is that you can just defend Area bombing prior to D-Day, when it held the potential to win the war. After D-Day it clear that it would neither win the war nor was it necessary.
    Production rose in German during the war for several reasons including
    1. High explosive does not tend to destroy machine tools unless they are hit directly.
    2. Production was dispersed
    3. Hitler thought German failure in WWI was linked to low moral caused by shortages. He was thus late in switching to a total war footing. He also was an opponent of mass production. Speer was able to get some quick wins as he finally tured Germany into a full war economy. It is instructive to know that German war production in WWI exceeded that in WWII. [I can’t find the quote now so I can’t confirm that is a total or a peak.]
    It was effective to switch to transport and oil targets in the closing months of the war and Portal should have sacked Harris. I therefore hold figures above Harris responsible for failing to enact what was after all policy.
    But war is a tale of missed oportunities. We could have closed the Atlantic air-gap sooner. We could have won in Africa a year earlier and knocked Italy out of the war sooner. Your point out the use of Tall Boy on finished submarine pens – another missed opportunity in that we could have bombed them during construction!
    As for the V weapons – a missed oportunity for the Germans. They consumed vast resource for little return. A competing war aim was to provide “true” submarines. Suppose they had focused attention on that instead?

    Reply
  9. Bob B Avatar
    Bob B

    Harris – Several comments in brief as I’m not sure you’ll read this.
    BC didn’t give up daylight raids completely – eg the Amiens Prison raid was in daylight – and, of course, the USAF bombing raids were in daylight and the USAF bomber formations eventually had long-range fighter protection from Mustangs.
    You’ve not tackled two (challenging) isues:
    – Whether the massive resources needed to maintain successive 1000 bomber raids was a misguided strategic play since the resources could have been allocated to other military objectives such as better air protection for sea convoys or developing better fighting vehicles. Strangely, although Britain can claim to have invented the tank (in WW1) and to have devised the whole notion of blitzkrieg warfare in the inter-war years – Guderian acknowledged as much – we never managed to make tanks capable of taking on the German Panzers.
    – A live controversy in Britain’s high command about whether precision bombing of strategic targets by Mosquitos would have been altogether more cost-effective because of lower aircrew casualty rates, greater bombing accuracy and lower cost aircraft so we could have built more for the same manufacturing spend.

    Reply

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