May 16, 1943. While the fading light of an early summer’s evening colours the flat Lincolnshire landscape, 19 Lancaster bomber planes and their crews take off from the RAF base at Scampton. The target: a decisive blow to the energy supply for the Ger ...
May 16, 1943. While the fading light of an early summer’s evening colours the flat Lincolnshire landscape, 19 Lancaster bomber planes and their crews take off from the RAF base at Scampton. The target: a decisive blow to the energy supply for the German arms industry.
Although the British had carried out bombing raids against Germany since the first years of the war, it was clear that the objective had not been achieved. Now, however, there was a new secret weapon in the British arsenal. By dropping this weapon on a particular part of the enemy’s industry, a part that up to then had been virtually invulnerable, the RAF was hoping to cause more damage to the Germans than in any earlier raid.
The project would, however, be difficult to carry out. So the 617th squadron, a specially trained unit, was created exclusively for this one mission. The bomber planes would fly in across occupied Europe under extremely unfavourable flying conditions, and attack a target so secret that not even the pilots themselves got to know what it was, or where it lay, until twelve hours before the operation. It would be one of the most daring flying missions of the war, and its name was Chastise!
In Dambusters, Michael Tamelander tells the story of the British Wing Commander Guy Gibson who was appointed to lead the operation. We get to follow him from the time when he gradually becomes involved in the secret discussions, through his work of trimming the 617th squadron, right up to the hair-raising finish when 19 Lancaster bomber planes approach the target in the darkness above the Ruhr valley.
Dambusters is written with a technique which is now termed Tamelander-dramatisation, the half-historic, half-fictional way the author used with such skill in Havets vargar (The sea wolves) and Waterloo. This style makes the book a good read for those who are already fascinated by history as well as for a general public, and it will come to be an indispensible companion in a hammock on a warm summer’s day.
Michael Tamelander is one of our most skilled military historians.