Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943. Max Hastings. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Max Hastings
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008280543
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as these issues were being thrashed out, at High Wycombe Harris made the only significant decision with which he, as a declared Chastise sceptic, was entrusted: which aircrew should fly the operation? The C-in-C determined that they should be drawn from 5 Group, an elite formation that he himself had commanded earlier in the war. He instructed its new AOC, Ralph Cochrane, that instead of diverting a line squadron to attack the dams he should form a new, special one. He also identified the officer who should lead it.

      2 GIBSON

      Gibson was about to go on leave to Cornwall, after receiving a second DSO for his distinguished tenure commanding 106 Squadron, when on the afternoon of 14 March 1943 he was summoned to Grantham to see 5 Group’s chilly, clever new AOC. The Hon. Ralph Cochrane, by common consent Harris’s outstanding subordinate, was an autocrat possessed of better manners and more imagination than his superior at High Wycombe, especially about means of attacking Germany from the air. He was a scion of a smart Scottish family – his father was an army officer turned Unionist politician, ennobled in 1919. Ralph, one of five children, entered the Royal Naval College, Osborne, aged thirteen in 1908, the year in which the Wright brothers made their first flights in Europe.

      A bewildered Gibson was kept hanging around for several days at St Vincent’s Hall, the rambling Victorian mansion boasting its own tower and spire in which 5 Group had its headquarters. He wrote: ‘Group headquarters are funny places. There is an air of quiet, cold efficiency. Waafs keep running in and out with cups of tea. Tired men walk through the corridors with red files under their arms. The yellow lights over the doors of the Air Officer Commanding and [his senior staff officer] are almost always on, showing that they are engaged.’ Gibson’s account of his encounter with Cochrane, which appears finally to have taken place on Thursday, 18 March, is probably roughly accurate: ‘in one breath he congratulated me on my bar to the DSO, in the next he suddenly said: “How would you like the idea of doing one more trip?”’

      Gibson wrote later about Cochrane’s proposal at St Vincent’s: ‘I gulped. More flak, more fighters. “What kind of trip, sir?” “A pretty important one, perhaps one of the most devastating of all time. I can’t tell you any more now. Do you want to do it?” I said I thought I did, trying to remember where I had left my flying kit.’ Gibson momentarily supposed that he was being invited to undertake the special mission that very night, or the next. Yet for such a man as himself, who had come to know no other life save bombing, who was justly proud of being the best, the defier of fate, it was unthinkable that he should have said no.

      Some commanders might have hesitated to make the request, however, in the face of Gibson’s exhaustion, observed by all those who spent time with him, and manifested in severe attacks of pain in his feet. Immense labour was involved in recruiting, establishing and training a new squadron, comprising some five hundred men. In addition, its commander must meet Barnes Wallis; address technical issues with Vickers and Avro; discuss tactics with 5 Group staff officers; plan operational details; exercise in the air with whatever scratch crew he himself might assemble. Gibson did not yet know what he and his men would be asked to do, but Harris did, and Cochrane. The C-in-C and 5 Group’s AOC were indeed ruthless men. How could they have fulfilled their roles, towards both the German people and their own aircrew, had they been anything else?

      Most human beings have their demons, but the new commander of the squadron that within days became 617, the number allocated by the Air Ministry in a natural succession, was tormented by more than most. He was born in the Punjab in 1918, third child of an unhappy marriage between Leonora, a nineteen-year-old Englishwoman, and Alex, a much older officer of the Indian Forestry Service, himself born in Russia. Guy spent his early childhood pampered by the tribe of domestic attendants customary among servants of the Raj, which some of his critics claimed influenced the abruptness with which he later treated comrades of a lower caste. He was only six, however, when his mother abandoned her husband and travelled to England to place Guy in an English school.

      Ralph Cochrane once described Gibson as ‘the sort of boy who would have been head prefect in any school’, but at St Edward’s he achieved neither distinction nor notoriety, academically or as a sportsman. Like so many of his contemporaries, the ‘Lindbergh generation’, he forged an early passion to fly, but his first application to join the RAF was rejected. The Battle