history
They could never do this today. 1600 civilian deaths would be unacceptable with today’s PC climate.
Saw the British film from the fifties about the dam busters. Those Tommys in their Lancasters flew in low and slow bouncing their bombs across the water.
I’m more of a fan of the handsome B-17. But the ugly Lancaster ( as I also classify our own B-24 Liberator ) had much more bomb load capacity and those 4 Merlin engines really pulled them through the air to get the job done. They still show up at celebrations like royal weddings, flying in formation with spitfires and hurricanes.
“Bouncing Bettys”, weren’t they called?
Thanks! Now I have them for FREE!
I am underwhelmed by the destruction.
Nice of the Nazis to de-classify them.
Sounds like they are stolen/looted property unless the occupying powers sold them after the war. There was a local 'hero' here that had looted a church.
The perfect bouncing effect to clear the bomb over the dam nets ould be made only if an extremely precise altitude over the water was maintained.
There was no instrument at the time for this. A mathematician Familiar with basic geometry pointed out the obvious:
just put a bright light at the aircraft pointing down and back say at 45 degrees and a similar light at the rear their craft pointing down forward 45 degrees:
when an on-board observer sees those two beam spots merge on the water surface into one, then the airplane is at the perfect height to drop the bomb and see the skipping effect.
It was only via this geometric Insight that permitted the unlikely but successful dam breaching mission.
Nazi’s had some good reece cameras. No vibration caused blurring at all.
I see this and then i was thinking about Oroville dam again.
What was the code word for a successful mission!
Hint: It was the dog’s name back at the air base, the dog that got hit by the car!
The dam busters had a bigger part in WWII and it wasn’t even in Europe. The bouncing bombs weighed so much that a new heavy bomb rack was needed, one that could carry nearly ten tons. So they built them. Fast forward to the Manhattan project. Our people realized that we had no bomb racks in the US inventory with enough capacity to hold the atomic bombs. Making new ones would have delayed the whole program. But somebody realized the British had the racks with the capacity we needed. Story goes that when we got the racks we didn’t tell the British why we wanted them.