The Dam Busters
Language: English
Pages: 0
ISBN: B000O92Z6E
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
British Battleships 1939-45 (2): Nelson and King George V Classes (New Vanguard, Volume 160)
56th Fighter Group (Osprey Aviation Elite, Volume 2)
scratch marks that Nigger used to make on his door. Nigger and he had been together since before the war; it seemed to be an omen. The morning of May 16 was sunny. Considering the scurry that went on all day it was remarkable that so few people at Scampton realised what was happening. Even after the aircraft took off hours later the people watching nearly all thought it was a special training flight. It was just after 9 a.m. that Gibson bounced into his office and told Humphries to draw up the
second, reaching the top just after the hammer had bounced off, so there was nothing to rebound from again and they passed out and away, and in their wake you got a tension after the compression. A sort of crush and then a sharp stretch, almost in the same moment; enough to make a structure split—to shatter it. Concrete, the article concluded sagely, well resisted compression but poorly withstood tension. Wallis docketed the fact in his mind, thinking of dams. You needed a solid medium to get
each aircraft—twenty times less chance of being hit. New troubles kept cropping up with the S.A.B.S. For instance, the thermometers were showing errors up to 5 degrees, enough to throw a bomb over a hundred feet the wrong way. Farnborough put in new type thermometers, and by early November the squadron had an average bombing error of only 90 yards. Good, enough, Cochrane thought, and at dusk on November 12, Martin led the squadron off to try out the S.A.B.S. in battle. The target was the
they waited for the weather and on July 31 flew to deal with a flying-bomb storage dump in a railway tunnel near Rilly La Montagne. They caved in each entrance to the tunnel with their uncanny accuracy. They lost another crew that day. The liberating armies burst out and reached the Pas de Calais area and, as it happened, there was nothing for them to do about the rocket sites except stare in wonder. 617 had destroyed them. At Watten they found that “tallboys” had smashed the roof and wrecked
moments over Alten Fiord, but this time the white screens were higher and thicker. At 230 m.p.h. the bombers charged towards the ship and the cloud. A minute from release point they still saw the ship, but with thirty seconds to go the cloud slid between them. They couldn’t dive under it to bomb; lower down the “tallboys” would not have penetrated the armoured decks. Daniels tried to keep his bomb sight on the spot where he last saw the ship. Flak was bursting through the cloud among them now.
