Chastise. Max Hastings. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Max Hastings
Издательство: HarperCollins
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008280543
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      Ranks attributed to personnel mentioned in the text are those held at the time of incidents or conversations described.

      AOC – Air Officer Commanding

      ATS – Auxiliary Territorial Service; women’s branch of the army

      CAS – Chief of the Air Staff; head of the RAF

      C-in-C – Commander-in-Chief

      CO – Squadron commanding officer

      Gee – Electronic navigation aid, detecting a grid of radio signals transmitted from the UK, fitted to all Bomber Command aircraft but jammed by the Germans over continental Europe

      HCU – Heavy Conversion Unit

      IFF – Identification Friend or Foe: electronic radar-pulse identification device fitted to all British aircraft

      MAP – Ministry of Aircraft Production

      MEW – Ministry of Economic Warfare

      OTU – Operational Training Unit

      RAAF – Royal Australian Air Force

      RAFVR – Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve

      RCAF – Royal Canadian Air Force

      RNZAF – Royal New Zealand Air Force

      SASO – Senior Air Staff Officer; comparable to an army or divisional commander’s chief of staff

      WAAF – Women’s Auxiliary Air Force; thus a woman serving at an RAF station would be described as a ‘Waaf’

      w/op – Wireless-operator

      Narrative of operations uses a twenty-four-hour clock, while the twelve-hour civilian clock is used for other timings.

      Bomber Command in February 1943 comprised around two thousand aircraft including trainers – the number varied daily, and significantly fewer were immediately serviceable – of which six hundred were ‘heavies’. Each of seven operational Groups was commanded by an air vice-marshal, and contained variously five to ten squadrons. A squadron was composed of eighteen to twenty-four aircraft, confusingly led by a wing-commander, and subdivided into two or three flights, each commanded by a squadron-leader.

      There were dams; a dog with an embarrassing name; a movie; a march composed by Eric Coates. These memories of Operation Chastise, the ‘bouncing bomb’ attack which burst open north-western Germany’s Möhne and Eder reservoirs on the night of 16/17 May 1943, cling to the consciousness of millions of people of all ages, both sexes and many nations, who may know little else about the Second World War. Wing-Commander Guy Gibson’s biographer Richard Morris has written: ‘The story of 617 Squadron’s breaching of the dams has joined that group of historically-based tales – like King Arthur, or Robin Hood – which defy all efforts at scholarly revision.’

      This book represents an emotional journey from my own childhood; from the day when, at boarding school, I first thrilled to Richard Todd’s portrayal of the twenty-four-year-old Gibson, who led 617 Squadron on that fateful May night. Many legendary feats of courage have been performed by warriors who clung to some bleeding piece of earth: the Three Hundred at Thermopylae; Horatius on the bridge before Rome; the Guards’ defence of Hougoumont at Waterloo; Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s 20th Maine on Little Round Top at Gettysburg; B Company of the 24th Foot holding Rorke’s Drift.

      The Allied bomber offensive has become one of the most controversial aspects of the Second World War. Some critics, not all of them German or Japanese, denounce the Western Allied assaults upon cities and their inhabitants as a war crime. The 1945 fire-bombing campaign by American B-29 Superfortresses killed far more people in Tokyo and other Japanese cities than did the atomic bombs later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The concept of air bombardment of civilians causes many twenty-first-century people discomfort, indeed repugnance. Contrarily, it is a source of bitterness to some descendants of the RAF’s wartime bomber crews that the public prefers to lavish legacy adulation on the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots of the Battle of Britain – defenders – than on their comrades the attackers, who bombed Germany at the cost of enduring losses much greater than those of Fighter Command. Australian Dave Shannon of 617 Squadron denounced in old age ‘sanctimonious, hypocritical and grovelling criticism about things that were done in a total war’.

      I was born at the end of 1945, and thus was five when Paul Brickhill’s best-selling account of Chastise was published, nine when the film was released. Both book and movie made a profound impression. I memorised the names of almost every one of 617’s pilots; assembled and painted plastic