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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on the spot much that was previously obscure about the hazards facing the attackers. Charles Foster has recently published an invaluable new work of reference, The Complete Dambusters, providing images and details of all 133 aircrew who flew the raid. For my own narrative I have drawn heavily upon the researches of all the above writers. Richard Morris and Rob Owen, especially, have saved me from egregious errors. As in all my books, I seek to emphasise the human dimension and the ‘big picture’, making no attempt to match the admirable technical detail about Wallis’s weapons, of which Sweetman and Holland display mastery.

      Since starting this book, I have been repeatedly asked whether it is an embarrassment to acknowledge the name of Gibson’s dog, which became a wirelessed codeword for the breaching of the Möhne. A historian’s answer must be: no more than the fact that our ancestors hanged sheep-stealers, executed military deserters and imprisoned homosexuals. They did and said things differently then. It would be grotesque to omit Nigger from a factual narrative merely because the word is rightly repugnant to twenty-first-century ears.

      I have been moved to retell, and to reconsider, the Chastise story, in hopes of offering a new perspective which almost represents a paradox. I retain the awe of my childhood for the fliers who breached the Möhne and the Eder. In my seventies, I muse constantly upon the privilege of having attained old age, whereas the lives of most of those British, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and American fliers became forfeit before they knew maturity, fatherhood or, in many cases, love or even sex.

      MAX HASTINGS

       Chilton Foliat, West Berkshire, and Datai, Langkawi, Malaysia

       May 2019

      Let us begin this story where he began it: in the cockpit of an Avro Lancaster heavy bomber, callsign G-George, forging through the darkness towards Germany on the night of 16 May 1943, amid the roar of four Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that drowned out conversation save over the intercom. ‘The moon was full; everywhere its pleasant, watery haze spread over the peaceful English countryside, rendering it colourless. But there is not much colour in Lincolnshire anyway. The city of Lincoln was silent – that city which so many bomber boys know so well, a city full of homely people.’ Guy Gibson’s Enemy Coast Ahead, written in 1944, a few months before his death, is one of the great wartime warriors’ memoirs, despite its cavalier attitude to facts and dates. Those who edited the typescript for publication after its author perished softened harshnesses: for instance, Gibson originally characterised Lincoln as ‘full of dull, unimaginative people’, perhaps because his own experiences were beyond their imaginations, and those of most of us.

      He was leading 617 Squadron of the RAF’s Bomber Command to unleash upon the dams of north-western Germany a revolutionary new weapon, requiring an attack at extreme low level. Nineteen crews were committed to Operation Chastise, and the eight proven in training to be most proficient now accompanied Gibson himself towards the Möhne. Off his port wingtip flew the dashing Australian Harold ‘Micky’ Martin in P-Popsie, while a few yards to starboard was ‘Hoppy’ Hopgood’s M-Mother, its pilot a twenty-one-year-old who still began his letters home ‘Dear Mummy’.

      Gibson again: ‘We were off on a journey for which we had long waited, a journey that had been carefully planned, carefully trained for’ – only eight weeks, in truth, since inception, but such a span represented an eternity to very young men, crowding what should properly have been a lifetime’s experience into a fraction of a natural span: Gibson considered entitling the later memoir of his career as a bomber pilot Four Years Lifetime – ‘a mission which was going to do a lot of good if it succeeded’. The chiefs of the RAF had promised the aircrew of 617 Squadron that breaching the dams would inflict damage upon Germany’s war industries greater than any previously achieved by an air force.

      He wrote: ‘The pilot sits on the left on a raised, comfortably padded seat … usually flies the thing with his left hand, resetting the gyro and other instruments with his right, but most pilots use both hands when over enemy territory or when the going is tough. You have to be quite strong to fly a Lancaster. The instruments sit winking. On the Sperry panel, or the blind-flying panel as bomber pilots call it, now and then a red light, indicating that some mechanism needs adjusting, will suddenly flash on … The pilot’s eyes constantly perform a circle from the repeater to the Air Speed Indicator, from the ASI to the horizon, from the horizon to the moon, from the moon to what he can see on the ground and then back to the repeater. No wonder they are red-rimmed when he returns.’