70 years ago they knew they were headed into a war zone. ibid.
In Spring 1943, 133 young men set out on the most daring and ingenious bombing raid in history: to destroy the great dams of Germany using bombs that bounce. If successful, they will deal a hammer blow to the Nazi war effort. They are led by this man: Guy Gibson. He is only 24 but he is already one of the most famous and decorated pilots in the world. Dan Snow, The Dambusters I: A Daring Plan, Channel 5 2020
RAF Scampton hasn’t changed much from the Sunday afternoon Gibson arrived here in March 1943. This was to be the home of the new secret squadron who he had ordered to create from scratch. There hadn’t even been time to issue an official name. ibid.
Barnes Wallis is one of Britain’s most respected aircraft designers. Now he’s also designing a precision weapon he believes can devastate Germany’s industry. ibid.
The secrecy around the mission is so tight Wallis is only allowed to reveal the target to a small number of people on an approved list: Gibson’s isn’t on it. ibid.
The squadron now has to learn to fly at extreme low level to avoid being picked up by German radar. ibid.
Incredibly there are no accidents but a lot of close scrapes. ibid.
A secret squadron was assembled at breakneck speed. Their orders – to learn to fly and drop bombs at dangerously low levels. ‘If I tell you to fly through hangar doors,’ Gibson tells them, ‘then you will learn to do so, even if your wingtips brush either side.’ Dan Snow, The Dambusters II: Race Against Time
The increasingly dangerous training almost ends in disaster ... Maudsley and the other pilots need to know when they are flying at exactly 150 feet. ibid.
So he [Wallis] decides to dispense with the wood altogether which means that the Lancaster will go with this steel cylinder strapped to its underneath. ibid.
Wallis shows Gibson some calculations he had been working on, and he had come to the shocking conclusion that for this bomb to bounce properly, to work, it has to be dropped not from 150ft as they’d hoped but from 60ft. ibid.
‘Their only chance of pulling off this almost impossible feat was if the Germans had not known they were coming.’ ibid. Max Hastings
He [Willis] sees 150-odd very young men who are going to execute his idea at the risk of their lives. ibid.
‘The Dambusters: Here were all these young men who knew they were likely to die and yet their sense of duty to their mates and the crew, to the squadron, to the RAF, and to their country.’ ibid.
This is the story of the single mission that can change the course of the Second World War: these are the Dambusters. Dan Snow, The Dambusters III: Attack! Attack! Attack!
At the control of one is mission commander Guy Gibson. They also struggle to get airborne but fortunately they make it up safely as do all the other bombers. ibid.
16th May 1943 9.54 p.m.: Time to target 2 hours 21 minutes: the lead aircraft reached the English coast but then dropped down to wave height. ibid.
In just a few minutes of the first three aircraft reaching the enemy coast, two are returning home damaged and one has been destroyed. The remaining sixteen crews now faced hundreds of miles of low level flying. ibid.
‘Huge human catastrophe alongside a huge triumph of British technology and British courage.’ ibid. Max Hastings
In the summer of 1942 these two tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific ocean west of Hawaii were at the heart of an epic battle fought between the navies of Japan and the United. It was a battle that decisively altered the course of the Second World War. Peter and Dan Snow, 20th Century Battlefields s1e2: 1942 Midway, BBC 2007
America had lost the best part of its Pacific fleet. ibid.
Stalingrad: Over sixty years ago a battle was fought in this great Russian city that would be the turning point of the Second World War. Peter & Dan Snow, 20th Century Battlefields s1e3: 1942 Stalingrad
In May 1942 Hitler put his plan into action. He sent two million men, nearly two-thirds of all his troops in the Soviet Union, through the Russian steps towards the oil-fields. ibid.
Stalingrad was all but destroyed. ibid.
Paulus chose not to commit suicide but to surrender himself. ibid.
June 5th 1944, England: The biggest air and naval fleet in history is taking off for France to free Europe from Nazi Germany's clutches. D-Day Sacrifice, National Geographic 2014
2,000,000 men all ready to sacrifice their lives. ibid.
The Americans orchestrated a gigantic deceptive military operation called Operation Fortitude with a decoy army in Dover. ibid.
They’ve been waiting for fifty hours ... The Anglo-American allies have recruited two million men. D-Day Sacrifice II
The objective therefore, now more than ever, remains Cherbourg. ibid.
It will still rage on for a whole year. ibid.
He was a little man. About five foot five. In his sixties. Rather tubby. Enjoyed his drinks and his smokes. An unlikely hero perhaps but in the dark days of the twentieth century he helped save Britain. And he was one of the biggest mass murderers in history. Stalin was his party name. David Reynolds, World War Two: 1941 and the Man of Steel, BBC 2012
In 1941 the Man of Steel blew it ... One of the most spectacular military blunders in history. ibid.
He was regularly beaten by his shoemaker father. ibid.
He never lost his thick Georgian accent. ibid.
His specialty was bank robberies ... Here was a gangster. A street thug. ibid.
Subjecting thousands to macabre show trials. ibid.
Barbarossa had hardly come out of the blue. ibid.
He signed a pact with Germany that would carve up eastern Europe. ibid.
The Germans expected to be in Moscow within a month. ibid.
Stalin had nearly come close to a nervous breakdown. ibid.
It was the Germans who were now encircled. ibid.
In 1940 the British army was kicked off the beaches of northern France. Instead of trying to get back there, it spent the next four years fighting around the Mediterranean. David Reynolds, World War II: 1942 and Hitler’s Soft Underbelly, BBC 2012
Why did the British and Americans spend so much of the war paddling around the Mediterranean? ibid.
Churchill would persuade them to target not France but supposedly easier territory in north Africa and later Italy, what he called ‘the soft underbelly of Hitler’s Europe’. ibid.
Britain’s whole war effort had become hostage to a desert victory. ibid.
Churchill’s leadership was now being questioned. ibid.
Relations between Britain and America provided Churchill’s only bright spot. ibid.
The British mounted a small-scale lightning raid on the Channel port of Dieppe in August 1942. But it turned into a complete disaster with the Canadian Second Division losing 70% of its men. ibid.
Britain becoming the junior partner in the alliance now that the vast power of Russia and America had been fully mobilised. ibid.
In the entrails of the soft underbelly we can discern the death-pangs of the British’ empire. ibid.
To explore the deeper meaning of the Great War and its momentous legacies ... The War made politics red-hot. It gave birth to an age of mass-democracy. David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: Ballots or Bullets, BBC 2014
Italy emerged from the war divided and frustrated. ibid.
Churchill lavished praise on Mussolini. ibid.
Britain’s biggest warship of WWII – the mighty Hood … Hood was hit and sunk in just three minutes: 1,415 men were killed. How the Bismark Sank HMS Hood, Channel 4 2012
How could the pride of the fleet have been destroyed so quickly, and who was to blame? ibid.
The battleship Bismark was much more modern than Hood with better guns and armour. ibid.
Three days after sinking Hood, Bismark was also destroyed. Over 2,000 men died. ibid.
A lucky shot tore through the Hood’s defences at their weakest point. ibid.
Could the disaster have been avoided? ibid.