Posted on 04/21/2017 4:24:46 AM PDT by DFG
Photographs described by experts as 'extremely rare' which show the damage wreaked by the famous Dam Busters in World War II are to be auctioned next week. The aerial shots taken by German Intelligence depict the Möhne and Edersee Dams before the raid and after they were breached by the ingenious bouncing bomb, designed by Barnes Wallis, causing catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley. Operation Chastise, as the famous raid was officially known, was an attack on major dams in Germany's industrial heartland carried out on 16-17 May 1943 by the Royal Air Force's renowned 617 Squadron, based at Scampton, Lincolnshire.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
history
They could never do this today. 1600 civilian deaths would be unacceptable with today’s PC climate.
I read several books about it and also saw the famous movie. The determination of the necessary height was ingenious, a result of viewing spotlights at an opera or something like that.
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.
The destruction was down-stream.
That one raid put large parts of the Ruhr into disruptive brown-out for four months.
Bouncing Betty was the name for the German anti-personnel shrapnel mine. When it was triggered it would launch into the about 3-5 feet high and then explode outward. It was designed to do as much damage as possible to infantry.
As have I, movies and history of the bombs.
Done with slide rules and greatest computer ever , the human mind.
These men had more courage than I , I do not know if I could fly this gauntlet, knowing the danger.
Also the Dolittle raid on Japan, one way trip. I have utmost respect for these men and what they did for the civilized world.
“history”
I like history, so much can be learned from it.
Maybe that’s why the Snowflake Generation is totally void of such knowledge.
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 Libs could almost handle the human deaths...
It's "the loss of natural habitat and destruction of environmentally sensitive wetlands" that would drive them up a wall.
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.
Thanks for the corrrection.
Bouncing Betty’s were land mines IIRC.
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”
Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet
Marshal of the Royal Air Force
AKA Bomber Harris
In his postwar memoirs Harris wrote, “In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a relatively humane method”, which augmented his wartime views expressed in an internal secret memo to the Air Ministry after the Dresden raid in February 1945:
I ... assume that the view under consideration is something like this: no doubt in the past we were justified in attacking German cities. But to do so was always repugnant and now that the Germans are beaten anyway we can properly abstain from proceeding with these attacks. This is a doctrine to which I could never subscribe. Attacks on cities like any other act of war are intolerable unless they are strategically justified. But they are strategically justified in so far as they tend to shorten the war and preserve the lives of Allied soldiers. To my mind we have absolutely no right to give them up unless it is certain that they will not have this effect. I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining cities of Germany as worth the bones of one British Grenadier
Nazi’s had some good reece cameras. No vibration caused blurring at all.
Unless it is muslims that killed them.Then it not only accepted, it is celebrated. ISIS burns to death several cages full of live women because they refuse to have sex, that is perfectly accepted by the media and p.c. crowd. ISIS burns to death several cages of live men just for the hell of it, the reaction of the media and p.c. crowd is that boys will be boys.
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