The Dam Busters by Paul Brickhill

Author:Paul Brickhill [Paul Brickhill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-06-29T21:57:26+00:00

CHAPTER X SNIPER SQUADRON

THE fate of 617 was decided at high level. “We’ll make ‘em a special duties squadron,” said Sir Arthur Harris. “They needn’t do ordinary ops., but whenever the Army or Navy want a dam or a ship or something clouted we’ll put 617 on to it. And we’ll put all the old lags in 617.”

“The old lags” was Harris’s affectionate and respectful name for the really hard-bitten aircrews who only wanted to do operations. Every now and then there would be a crew who, after finishing their tour, would stubbornly boggle at taking their six months’ rest training new aircrews. They insisted on staying on operations and were dearest of all to Harris, probably because they had the same volcanic temperament as himself.

Harris said 617 could stay in 5 Group with Cochrane, and Cochrarie had it in his mind to make them a “sniper” squadron for super-accurate bombing with Wallis’s 10-tonner. Ordinary bombing, he knew, would waste most of the 10-tonners, and there would be none to waste.

Up to this time a little more than one out of three raids were really effective. The Germans built dummy targets outside cities, spread camouflage nets over tell-tale lakes and rivers in the towns, decoyed the bombers in every way they could, and even lit: fires in fields so the bombers would think they were hitting their targets. Often the crews bombed open fields instead,.

That was why the Pathfinder Force had been formed, and now that: they were in action bombing was becoming more effective. P.F.F. found and marked the target areas with coloured flares, and the main force bombed these markers. It stopped them bombing open fields, but it was still “carpet bombing”, hateful, and yet, it seemed, necessary.

And losses still mounted. Now they were about 4 per cent; one bomber in twenty-five failed to return. Or average it another way—a squadron of twenty aircraft would lose every one in twenty-five raids. A tour of operation was thirty raids; then, if you were still alive, you had six months’ rest and went back for another tour. In lives and labour and for the minor damage done, bombing was not economical enough for Harris.

At Farnborough, in 1941, a man named Richards had invented a piece of intricate mechanism he called the Stabilising Automatic Bomb Sight. It incorporated a gyro; in perfect conditions it could aim a bomb uncannily, but Harris thought it was too complicated for the conditions of actual bombing. For one thing, a bomber using it had to run perfectly straight and level up to the target for ten miles, a perfect mark for flak, searchlights and fighters. Harris said it would mean death for too many of his boys, who had little enough chance as it was, and Bomber Command could not take much heavier losses.

Another school of thought said the S.A.B.S. could be used economically by a small force. Cochrane was one of them. He argued that from high level the S.A.B.S. could hit a well-marked

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