- The Dam Busters Raid - Success or Sideshow?
Article
CID:
- 180465
Authors:
- Webster, T.
Publication Date:
- 01 March 2004
Journal Title:
- Air Power Review
Volume Number:
- 7
Issue number:
- 1
Page Numbers:
- Pages 58 - 75
Language:
- English
Abstract:
- At 2128 hrs on the evening of 16 May 1943 the first aircraft of the newly formed 617 Squadron, AJ-E piloted by Flt Lt Barlow, lifted from the grass runway of RAF Scampton and set course for Germany. So started Operation CHASTISE, an attack that had been in planning on and off since October 19371 and that would come to be recognised as Bomber Command’s most spectacular operation of World War II. By dawn the next day two major German dams had been breached, significant areas flooded, over 1,250 deaths caused and the industry of the Ruhr Valley disrupted. On the British side, 8 aircraft and 53 aircrew had been lost. The British would use post-raid reconnaissance pictures to show the world the damage caused to the dams, to the countryside below them and, by implication, to the industrial complex of the Ruhr Valley. The post-raid propaganda was not confined to Britain but was trumpeted around the Empire in newspapers in the United States and in leaflets dropped into Occupied Europe.
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