Dan Snow's History Hit - Dan Explains: The Dambusters Part 2

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

On the night of the 16th May, 1943, Operation Chastise commenced - 133 RAF airmen in their iconic Lancaster bombers took off from England, bound for Germany. Armed with specially designed 'bouncing bombs', the highly trained crews were tasked with destroying key installations in Germany's industrial heartland, the Ruhr Valley. It was an audacious mission of unprecedented precision, from which over a third of the airmen would never return. The Dambusters Raid, as it came to be known, is remembered as one of the greatest feats of daring and airmanship in the Second World War. In this two-part Explainer, and with the help of the late, great RAF veteran 'Johnny' Johnson, Dan delves into the true story of this historic operation.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.You can take part in our listener survey here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

It's 9pm on the 16th of May 1943. The first of 19 Lancaster bombers are rumbling down the grass strip of RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire. They're carrying the heaviest bombs ever strapped to an aircraft and they've just begun what will become the most famous air raid in history, the Dam Busters Raid or Operation Chastise. They're now heading into the gathering dark, out across the North Sea at ultra-low level. On the previous episode of this podcast, I told the remarkable story of the preparation for this raid, the amount of innovation that needed to take place, and the amount of bravery showed by the aircrew, just to see if the idea was practical. We also heard from the last dam buster, George Leonard,

known as Johnny Johnson, who died at 101 last year. I was lucky enough to interview him a couple of years before his passing. He was in charge of dropping the bomb. Stuck up right in the front of his Lancaster, the lead plane in the second wave of bombers. This is the story of the night the dam busters came to the Ruhr. Enjoy. Never to go to war with one another again.

And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Under the command of the 24-year-old Guy Gibson, who was piloting the first Lancaster, the dam busters left the coast of England behind. The trip across the North Sea alone was a triumph. They flew low, very, very low indeed, to avoid radar. They maintained strict radio silence. The navigator, can you imagine, was trying to calculate wind, speed, bearing, trying to use the stars and dead reckoning to work out exactly where the aircraft were. If you ended up over a particularly heavily defended stretch of the Dutch coast, anti-aircraft battery for example, you were dead men. One of the pilots, New Zealander Les Monroe, crossed the Dutch coast, an anti-aircraft battery for example, you were dead men. One of the pilots,

New Zealander Les Munro, crossed the Dutch coast successfully but he looked south and saw a burst of anti-aircraft fire and an explosion. Somebody had drifted too far south and crossed at the coast at the wrong spot. We now know it was Vernon Byers, the squadron's least experienced pilot. It was only his sixth mission. His whole crew were killed. Then suddenly Munro feels his fuselage shake with incoming fire. His communications are shot through. He can't talk to the bomb aimer, he can't talk to the rear gunner, he can't talk to the navigator. There's no way he can continue the mission. He turns for home. Meanwhile, another pilot, Jeff Rice, is flying an aircraft codenamed H for Harry. He misjudged it over the North Sea. He hit the surface itself, flooded the aircraft

tail. He managed to lift the plane off the water. The tail gunner had been almost submerged in the back of the aircraft. He shook himself off and checked the bomb below the fuselage and it was gone. It had been torn off. He also was forced to turn for home. They've hardly reached the coast of Europe and three crews have dropped out. Only 16 remain. It seems that a stronger than expected north wind had pushed all of them slightly further south than they were expecting. Gibson also hit the coast over some strong German defences. One of the pilots, John Wehr Hopgood, known as Hoppy Hopgood of course, had expressed deep pessimism before taking off. He was convinced that he wasn't going to survive this mission. He found himself now throwing his plane through some aerobatics

to avoid enemy fire. His front gunner shouted they passed under some high-voltage cabling. Hopgood said calmly, sorry about that. Here's the part of my interview with Johnny Johnson when he told me about getting underway that fateful night. When we got flying, some distance south of Ham, there was a goods train travelling up at right angles to our track. And because we had no mid-upper turret, the mid-upper gunner was flying in the front

turret. Fortunately, they had fitting stirrups so he wasn't kicking me up the backside all the time. But then when we saw this train, he said, can I have a go Joe? I think somewhat reluctantly Joe said, well yes all right then. And Ron opened up with these little 303s, that's all we had in the front, right. What we didn't know of course, it wasn't just a goods train, it was an armoured goods train, and it replied with rather more than 303s. We knew we'd been

hit, we heard it, and we felt it, but it didn't seem to impede the aircraft at all, so we carried on. Well, Johnny Johnson and hundreds of other brave young men flew and battled for their lives over occupied Europe, back in Lincolnshire the boss of Bomber Command, the RAF's most senior bombing officer, Bomber Harris, and Barnes Wallace, the scientist whose idea this all was, were waiting in the ops room of a Victorian Gothic house in Lincolnshire that was acting as their wartime headquarters. The ops room was built in a temporary hut in the garden. It's now been demolished. But people in there took short strolls to try and relieve the tension to the billiard room, which still exists today, a rather grand space with

high Victorian Gothic ceilings. The crews had to observe radio silence, so it was a long, frustrating wait for news back in Lincolnshire. Just before midnight, Johnny Johnson's group of Lancasters entered Germany. They were due to attack the Sorpa Dam, a massive dam in the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany, from which German war industry was able to source so much of its hydroelectric energy and water. Just two of the five bombers remain, thanks to those destroyed or that turned back. Seconds later, one more aircraft, E for easy, crashed in some 100,000 volt cables. Everyone on board was killed. Just one Lancaster bomber is now heading for the Sorpa Dam. Just after midnight on the 17th of May, Guy Gibson's group

crossed into Germany. A navigational error has put them about six miles off course, much closer to the heavily protected industrial Ruhr valley. Hoppy Hopgood's plane is lit up by searchlights. It's sprayed with AA fire. The rear gunner is wounded, the wireless operator is very badly wounded, and the front gunner is killed. One engine is on fire. Hopgood has blood pouring down his face from a wound to the head. He manages to shut the engine down. Over the intercom in the rear turret, the rear gunner hears the flight engineer shout, Christ, look at all that blood. Then he hears Hopgood's calm reply, blood. Then he hears Hopgood's calm reply. Carry on and don't worry. I'm okay. Extraordinarily, they continue towards the dams. At 0015 in the morning, Gibson arrives above his dam, the Myrna. He can see it clear in the moonlight. He said later it looked unconquerable, squat,

massive, and he didn't have long to make a leisurely reconnaissance. Anti-aircraft fire opened up from positions on the dam and around it. He has fewer aircraft than he hoped. Another one's crashed into power lines, seven men killed, bringing the death toll already to 21 dead. Gibson has a quick look at the dam and then goes for it. He breaks radio silence. He calls the other

aircraft, saying, well boys, I suppose we'd better get the ball rolling. I'm going in to attack. He leaves the only way he knows how, from the front. He goes first. Now, these Lancaster carrying bombs so new that they've never been dropped on an operational mission ever before. They've only been delivered to the squadron a few days before, and some members of the squadron have never trained even with a dummy one. To blow up the dams, the bomb was going to have to skim along the surface and then come to a stop right next to the wall of the dam, drop down to 30 feet and detonate there.

But I should have mentioned one more thing. You also had to put backspin on the bomb. So they had to start spinning the bomb at about 500 revs per minute. The machines crank into action, shaking the fuselage as Gibson dives to a low level. And off they go. The navigator calls Gibson down, using the beams of light fixed to the outside of the fuselage. Lower, lower, lower, till they're at 60 feet above the surface of the reservoir. Anti-aircraft fire comes screaming horizontally past his cockpit. The guns on the dams open up.

Gibson's bomb aimer is looking through the primitive wooden site, which proves so effective in training at dropping the bomb in just the right place. A little left, a little right, steady, steady, then comes the call. Bomb's gone. Gibson pulls up so he doesn't hit the dam. Soars into the sky. The bomb below them bounces. Skims across the surface. Doesn't quite make it to the dam. Sinks and explodes, sending a shoot of water a thousand feet into the air. A German anti-aircraft gunner on the dam felt it shake. It was like an earthquake and it was followed by a tsunami of water. But the dam held firm. For now. The first coded message was sent back and received

in Lincolnshire. It's a fail. Scientist Barnes Wallace groans. Now Hoppy Hopgood goes in. Half his crew wounded, dead, himself badly injured. He's flying on three engines. One of his has been knocked out, but he goes for the bomb run nonetheless. The anti-aircraft fire is more accurate now. His aircraft is peppered with holes. His bomber releases a second, a fragment of a second too late, and the bomb bounces over the dam and explodes beyond. Hopkid's plane is on fire.

He roars over the intercom, screaming at his crew to get out. He climbs as high as he can to give them a chance. The tail gunner drags the terribly wounded radio operator to the door and throws him out, pulling his shoes as he does so. Then he jumps out too. The bomber is so low that he hits the trees hard, but survives, albeit with a broken back, and he eventually finds himself in German captivity. Hoppy Hopgood stays rooted to his seat, fighting with the controls, desperately giving the rest of the crew the best possible odds of survival by bailing out. No chance of parachuting out of the broken plane for him. Shortly after, his Lancaster, M for mother, smashes into the valley below and Hoppy Hopgood is killed instantly.

There was no time to mourn Hopgood then. Next up came the Australian, Mickey Martin. He was as wild on the ground as he was in the air. And Gibson at this point does something extraordinary. He dives down to fly alongside Martin's Lancaster to draw enemy fire away from them and no doubt provide great encouragement to Martin. Martin gets the bomb away cleanly, it explodes, but the dam remains intact. Three of the best pilots in the squadron have gone, and there's been no dam break.

Next up, A for Apple also failed. Then came the Lancaster J for Johnny. 23-year-old David Maltby at the controls. This time, Gibson decided to circle the dam to use the machine guns on board his Lancaster to try and suppress the fire of the anti-aircraft guns on the dam. He has some success at this. Maltby experiences less anti-aircraft fire as he makes his approach. He goes screaming over the dam and sees that the top is already

crumbling. A previous effort has weakened it, done some good. His bomb skims over the water, comes to a rest, strikes the dam dead centre, sinks and explodes. Gibson paused. He was about to order another aircraft to go and attack, but suddenly he saw something. He saw a breach. Millions of gallons of water was now pouring over a hundred metre long stretch of broken dam in the centre. His crew started screaming in celebration. The water crashed down into the valley below and this is something we often forget about the Dam Busters raid. It would be the costliest raid to that point in the war for the civilian population. It unleashed a tidal wave in some places 40 feet high. It swept with an astonishing primal force and floods would extend hundreds of miles,

destroying factories, villages, houses, farms. There would be a terrible human cost on both sides this night. Back in Lincolnshire, the news of success transforms what must have been a fairly grim ops room. Bomber Harris, who you'll remember from the first episode had been extremely pessimistic about the outcome of this raid, walked up to Barnes Wallace and said, when you first came to me with this idea, I didn't believe it for a moment. Now you could sell me a pink elephant. Back in Germany, Gibson was rallying his men after the destruction of the Mona Dam. But as he was doing so, a lone aircraft was trying to hit another dam, the Soppa. Johnny Johnson was aboard. Now interestingly, the topography was

simply too difficult for a Lancaster to weave its way and skim a bomb at low level towards the dam. So on this occasion, they were using a slightly more conventional way of bombing. Johnny Johnson was flying along the line of the dam and then simply trying to drop it on top of the dam without any bouncing. That made it even more difficult. Here's Johnny describing what happened. And we eventually found the Zorba. The first thing we noticed, which we should have probably, if it was on the model, we should have seen,

was a church steeple on the side of the hill down which we were supposed to go. Joe used that as a marker, tried to align the aircraft as best he could at that position, and then went down. Because we weren't spinning the bomb, it was an inert drop, the actual position, the conditions for dropping it didn't apply, so it didn't matter about the height

or the speed at which we dropped it. We hadn't practiced that type of attack at all. And it wasn't easy. If I wasn't satisfied, I called dummy run. If Joe wasn't satisfied, he just pulled away and left me to call dummy run. This is where Dave Roger in the rear turret came up, not in a humorous vein. I had a voice from the rear turret out of about the sixth or seventh of these dummy runs. Won't somebody get that bum out of here? And I had to realize how to become the most

unpopular member of crew in double quick time. But that was my job. And that was what I was there for. So how many times did you go over the dam to try and get it right? Yeah. Then we had to go up again. And in retrospect, I can understand to some degree Dave's anxiety.

Because his job, basically, was the safety of the aircraft from enemy fighters. And each time he went up, came back over the village, there's nothing to stop somebody down there ringing up the authorities and saying, they're bombing our dam at that moment. And of course that would have brought the fighters in, bye-bye McCarthy's crew, just like that. And that would have been part of his apprehension, I think.

But then on the tenth run, neither Joe nor I had said anything to each other about height. But I'm sure we both realized that the lower he got, the less forward travel that bomb would have before it hit the water. And secondly, the lower we got, the easier it would be to estimate the dropping point. On that tenth run, we were down to 30 feet. And when I said, bomb gone, thank Christ came from the rear turret, just like that. And of course, he was so low, his nose up straight away, so I didn't see the explosion. But Dave did in the rear turret.

And he estimated that the tower of water went up to about a thousand feet. Well, if you imagine 6,500 pounds of explosive being detonated at a depth of 25 feet, it's going to move a hell of a lot of water in all directions, upwards as well as outwards. And that was what he saw.

He said, not only that, but in the downflow, some of it came into the turret. So I thought I was going to be drowned as well as knocked around by you buggers up there. But that was just, again, typical of Dave. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. From biblical fame to its fabled great walls, Babylon was home to kings, conquerors and wonders of the ancient world. But what do we actually know about this legendary city? And how much is still shrouded in mystery?

Join me, Tristan Hughes, every Sunday throughout May on the Ancients as we delve into the story of Babylon. May on the Ancients as we delve into the story of Babylon. We'll be covering topics varying from the King Nebuchadnezzar II and how he forged a massive Babylonian empire. We'll be exploring the mystery of the hanging gardens of Babylon, looking at world-renowned objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and also looking at Babylon in the aftermath of one of the most well-known conquerors in the whole of history. Babylon after Alexander the Great. That's all to come this May on The Ancients every Sunday. To be continued... the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. I've always found Johnny's description of their almost leisurely attack on the Sorpa Dam,

an isolated aircraft, so disconnected from the rest of the story, so almost disconnected from the war itself. No anti-aircraft fire, no enemy fighters, just a Lancaster going again and again, again, trying to drop a huge bomb on a rural dam. It's such a strange aspect of this dramatic night. But back at the main group, Gibson had wrangled the three aircraft left who hadn't yet dropped their bombs and headed for the mighty Eder Dam, 138 feet high, 120 feet thick at its base. It is a monster. He arrived at 1.30 in the morning. It was getting foggy. The dam was becoming obscured. Now, there was no anti-aircraft guns here either because the Germans had thought it was simply inconceivable the Brits would attempt to attack it. It is like Top Gun 2. There is a super narrow approach. Then, having dropped the bomb,

having skimmed the bomb, the pilots would have to pull up in a frenzied attempt to avoid hitting a giant cliff of rock beyond the dam. L for leather made multiple attempts. Then once it was happy, it dropped the bomb, which exploded, but no destruction of the dam. The next aircraft up seemed to have an issue, perhaps with its releasing gear. It seemed to jam and it dropped the bomb late. The bomb smashed into the parapet The next aircraft up seemed to have an issue perhaps with its releasing gear. It seemed

to jam and it dropped the bomb late. The bomb smashed into the parapet. It blew up and damaged the aircraft. 40 minutes later, that limping aircraft was shot down at the Dutch border as it was heading for home. The last available aircraft with a bomb is N for nuts. The pilot was the 22-year-old Australian Methodist, Les Knight. On the ground, unusually, he was rather religious, quiet. He avoided the drinking sessions. He lined up N for nuts, released the bomb and climbed hard. Behind him, there was a mighty explosion. Behind him, there was a mighty explosion. Gibson, who was watching, reported that he saw what seemed like a fist punching through cardboard. The dam disintegrated.

A giant wall of water gouged its way down the valley. Again, as with the Mona Dam, hundreds of people were killed, drowned. Many of them we know were slave labourers, imported workers from Hitler's conquests in the East. It's a humanitarian catastrophe. Two of the dams on the Ruhr, destroyed. There was some hope that the Soppa might yet be breached, but the reserve wave of five aircraft was a bit of a disaster. One tried to drop a bomb on the SORPA, it didn't achieve much, and two of those five ended up getting shot down. The SORPA dam would remain intact. Johnny Johnson describes leaving for home. We circled and we found it. We'd crumbled the top of the dam, that was all.

Barnes Wallace had told us at briefing that he estimated that because of the structure of the Zorpa, it was like a concrete centre with a sort of pyramid building of broken rock, it's earth packed in tight, and then concrete again on either side. He said it would need at least six bombs to crack it.

If you can crack it, the water pressure will do the rest. And judging from the amount of water in that dam, I'm sure he was right. However, it would seem, and this is what surprised us, although we were half an hour late, or thereabouts, when we got there, it didn't seem that any of the other five had been, nor did they arrive whilst we were there, and we didn't find out about that until we got back so eventually we just soldered off and the route home took us over what had been the moan there are now 12 lancasters just 12 crews left in the air and they all have to get home the skies are beginning to lighten they're losing the cover of darkness they've lost the

element of surprise, and the Germans know they have to steer a course back to eastern England. The crews were now very worried about being intercepted by fighters. On the way back, Johnny Johnson witnessed the destruction at the Mona Dam. And for me, that was probably the greatest satisfaction of the raid, in that we were able to see the destructive result of at least one of those attacks. And we knew that the Ada had been breached as well by radio broadcast. What did the Mona Dam had been breached by your other crews? What did the area look like?

The area was just like an inland sea. There was water everywhere, and it was still coming out of that dam about 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, since it had been breached. It had been difficult to breach it, but they'd made it. And the Ada was even more difficult, but the last one to attack it,

there's Knights, an Australian. His bomber was also a Johnson, Ted Johnson, but he was a flight lieutenant. And they managed to breach it on their run. That was the last aircraft there. If they hadn't made it, that one would have stayed stick too. But it didn't, it reached. And that was not so much important as far as the, I mean it's an industry to turn, but the canals round about and the agricultural land and the waterways, the access on the waterways into the Harmond area.

Were you cheering and whooping in your plane when you saw that? No. Cheering quietly, yes. At least we'd seen the success of parts of the raid, even though ours hadn't been quite so successful. As the crews race back across Europe, A for Apple flies a little too high. You can understand why.

It makes navigation much easier. It makes flying safer, especially when the pilot's exhausted. But the enemy can see you for longer. You're more of a target. You don't just whiz past at treetop height. You can be seen and spotted by anti-aircraft observers. And tragically, as they cross the French coast, almost on their way home, they're shot down by AA fire.

All the crew were lost. At 3.19am, the first of the aircraft that actually made it all the way to Germany, they land. P for Popsi, the third to attack the Mona Dam. Mike Martin, the captain, has been flying for five hours and 40 minutes. Maltby lands just after that. He was the man you'll remember who breached the Mona Dam. Someone asked Maltby how it went. Bloody marvellous, he enthuses. Water, water everywhere. Wonderful, wonderful. I've never seen anything like it in my life.

But then a wave of melancholy swept across him and he said, Hoppy's bought it. Shot down over the target. Some of them never even got there. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And that does seem to sum up the atmosphere as they landed. Jubilation, excitement and pride mixed with a deep, deep sadness for those that were lost. It's almost impossible for most of us to be able to empathise with those two extreme emotions being felt at the same time.

When Johnny Johnson landed, he remembers looking around the aircraft in astonishment, realising how smashed up it was. He also remembers getting told off. When we got back, we landed at Scanton, and I say,

see the grass where I've built? And landings tended to be a bit more lumpy than they were on the runway. But in our case they were a bit lumpy and we just started doing low. And the engineer looking out of the perspective said, we've got a burst tire skipper. So we taxied back carefully to dispersal and the chiefly engineer took the aircraft off for inspection. When he

came back he gave us a severe telling off, only he put it rather more strongly than that, for getting his aircraft shot up so much. But he could tell us the shot that we'd heard and felt had passed through the starboard on the carriage nacelle, had burst the tyre en route, had then passed through the wing and had landed in the roof just above the navigator's head. How lucky can you get? But we'd got away with it.

Gibson landed at 4.15. The final plane landed at 6.15. Nearly every single one of them, as Johnny Johnson described, is damaged. And all the aircrew seem to go straight for the bar. It was sad when I visited the officer's mess at Scampton. It was already derelict. Wildflowers growing through cracks in the concrete, the windows boarded up, demolished now. That was where they all went. That was where they had the famous photograph taken the morning after. And the party continued. They went from the mess to the station commander's house. Barnes Wallace was there in his dressing gown. He's had a crying about the losses of the young men who

had never come back. And Gibson tried to comfort him. You can understand why Barnes Wallace was so moved. It had been his plan, his bomb, his conception. Of the 133 men who flew on the raid, at his behest, only 80 survived. Three of them were prisoners in German hands. 53 young men had been killed in a night. I'll talk about them a bit more in a second, but first of all, let's talk about the damage. Let's talk about the impact on the war. A photo reconnaissance Spitfire flew over first thing. The pilot reported, I looked down into the deep valley, which had seemed so peaceful three days before, but now it was a wide torrent. The whole valley of the river was inundated with only patches of high ground and tops of trees and church steeples showing above the flood. I was overcome by the immensity of it. The damage was superficially astonishing. Albert Speer was the man appointed by Hitler to boost

Germany's munitions production. Through extensive use of appalling slave labour and working in shocking conditions, he achieved some extraordinary results. And he reported, that night, employing just a few bombers, the British came close to a success which would have been greater than anything they'd achieved hitherto with a commitment of thousands of bombers. He reported that he was forced to move several thousand construction workers to repair the Moerner and the Eder dams. They were workers who otherwise would have strengthened the construction of Germany's Atlantic Wall, the defences on the beaches of France, Belgium and elsewhere, to stop the inevitable invasion of Western Europe, D-Day.

And it is true, inevitably, there were hundreds of factories that were destroyed, industrial production was disrupted. But, and this is the key thing, Speer comments that the British didn't follow up on that success. They allowed that reconstruction of those dams to go on all through the summer without any more bombing raids. No conventional high-level, you know, massed fleets of Lancasters pounding those construction workers and the repairs. They were left alone to get on with the job. And Speer calls this a failure of the Allies, and it represented a major lost opportunity. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's spin doctor, commented that the English had never invented anything original, which is a grotesquely unfair slur, but this time they had. He also comments on the fact that despite the huge

initial damage, the British never tried to bomb the rebuilding process. And I think that British reluctance to do that does reflect Arthur Harris's essential scepticism that the dams were a kind of silver bullet, they were a shortcut to victory. And he believed that a massive campaign of destruction of Germany's industrial areas would be a better way to disrupt the industry and perhaps bring the war to a quicker end by undermining people's consent for Hitler's Nazi regime. Tragically, I think that theory has been borne out by historians not to be the case. It is interesting to think what would have happened if those dams had sustained further punishment.

What it was was a gigantic victory in terms of morale. Nationally and internationally, this was a stunning success. The Dam Busters immediately became world famous. The men themselves, well, they were given a whole week off, but soon they were flying again operationally. men who came home from the Dambusters raid, 32 would be killed before the end of the war. Some of the men that night would go on to take part in other very famous raids. They'd drop the massive Tallboy bomb, the Grand Slam bombs, these huge bombs also pioneered by Barnes Wallace

on the German U-boat pens on the coast of France. They would attack the German battleship Tirpitz and they would pioneer the use of these very advanced bomb sites, which enabled bombing of smaller targets with greater accuracy. Again, stepping on this path towards a world which we now live in, where you can put a so-called smart bomb through someone's air conditioning duct. Maltby, who breached the Mona Dam, who I mentioned, he was killed four months

later. Most of Gibson's crew were actually flying with him that night and they were killed with him. Gibson was away on a publicity tour of America. He'd been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry, the highest gallantry medal you can receive as a Brit. Dozens of other men on the raid that night also received gallantry decorations. They'd all gone to Buckingham Palace together. Although again, Gibson, apparently the reports are he was too upset by the loss of his dog. He would lie in bed moaning about the loss of his little dog to really celebrate the news they've been giving the Victoria Cross. The government turned him into a celebrity. Winston Churchill met him.

Winston Churchill's wife was annoyed that he was married. She rather fancied him to marry one of her daughters. He went on desert island discs, and his last pick was a ride of the Valkyries. But Gibson wasn't happy when he wasn't on frontline duties. I'm not sure where he was happy really. On the 19th September 1944 he insisted on leading a raid over Holland and he crashed and was killed and it's thought his unfamiliarity with the Mosquito aircraft that he was flying may have led to him making a mistake. You know it's amazing to think that even someone as extraordinary as

Guy Gibson needs to pay attention to issues as humdrum as staying current on a particular aircraft type, a lesson for all of us. He'd taken part in 172 operational missions, and he was 26 years old when he died. Winston Churchill wrote, We have lost in this officer one of the most splendid of all of our fighting men. His name will not be forgotten. It will forever be enshrined in the most wonderful records of our country. Splendid Churchillian stuff from the big man, but Barnes Wallace, I think, was more perceptive. He wrote, for some men of great courage and adventure, inactivity was a slow death. Would a man like Gibson ever have adjusted

back to a peacetime life? One can imagine it would have been a somewhat empty existence after all he'd been through. Facing death had become his drug. He had seen countless friends and comrades perish in the Great Crusade. Perhaps something in him even welcomed the inevitability he'd always felt that, before the war ended he would join them in their bomber command Valhalla. He had pushed his luck beyond all limits and he knew it, but that was the kind of man he was, a man of great courage, inspiration and leadership, a man born for war, but born to fall in war. So many other men and women fell in that war,

whose names are not remembered today. And I think it's best that we give the last word here to Johnny Johnson of what he and his comrades made of their wartime purpose. Raining fire and death upon people below them on the ground. I enjoyed my war. I think I felt I was doing what I joined for and I was doing it to the best of my ability. And that was what I was there for, that I enjoyed doing it. And so much so with the confidence in my pilot and the rest of the crew that I flew with. We had a crew comedian, that was Dave Roger in the rear turret. He could always make some craptic comment when situations were a bit grim.

Like as we were coming back from the dams raid, it must have been partially my fault, we obviously got off track and we ended up on a railway. Not only a railway, but a railway yard. But of course it wasn't a normal railway yard, it was the ham marshalling yard, where all the munitions that were made in the rear were distributed to various areas of the war. Obviously not the healthiest of places to be at the end of May in 1943. There again down goes Joe. From the rear turret, who needs guns?

At this height, all they need to do is change the points. And that was the sort of thing that Dave could come up with. Did you ever think about what was going on on the ground? You were dropping these bombs, smashing buildings, killing people. Did you think about that? No, no. I think the only respect with which I thought about it was it was basically retaliation for what Hitler was doing and had done to us. I think that was all it was. I think maybe from that childhood upbringing emotion was basically knocked out of me.

I don't think I had any particular strong emotion at all. And that's why I didn't feel, I put that on partially, I didn't feel frightened about the flying or the actual bombing. And I didn't really appreciate what it meant to those at the actual bombing. And I didn't really appreciate what it meant to those at the receiving end. I didn't find that out until after the war, when I went back and talked to some German people. Of course, at debriefing,

we learned the end of the story I don't look forward to war certainly but at that time and at that age I felt I had to do something I had to join

and try to do something about it and I think that's what makes my life so different from what it had been I had to join and try to do something about it. And I think that's what made, makes my life so different from what it had been. At Lord's Wonders, the school motto was in Latin. In translation, it means perseverance conquers. And looking back on my life, I found how true that has been from time to time.

It's pure guts going forward with what you want to do and making sure you do it to the best of your ability. Doing something that was worthwhile and doing it for a real purpose. I have to say that I feel privileged and yes, honored of being able to take part in that raid. Having said that, now I have to constantly remind people But now, I have to constantly remind people

that I'm the lucky one. I'm still alive. And what I'm doing, and what they are saying to me, is not for me, it's for the squadron. And I am purely representing the squadron. Of the 19 aircraft that took off, three came back, had to come back early. Of the 16 that went on, only eight came back. We lost eight aircraft. Three crew members had been able to escape from one of the aircraft, but it meant 53 aircrew had been lost as well.

And that was a tremendous loss for one squadron, for one night's operation. And everybody felt very strongly about it. And although the bars were open in the messes and there was drinking going on, I'm quite sure it wasn't because of the success of the operation. It was commiseration with all those who hadn't come back and that was what the drinking was about. And that was the end of it all. Thank you. you you