Enemy Coast Ahead
A year into the war, bomber pilot Guy Gibson tells us he still finds the night sky to be "very, very big."
The bombers go out nightly. Sometimes they find their targets, and sometimes they don't. Sometimes their planes and equipment work right, and sometimes they don't. On one night of heavy cloud, Gibson tells us, they "wandered all around England looking for a flare path."
Meanwhile, behind the scenes the pilots must wait while "the boffins complete the trials" of their new weapons.
Flying is nerve-wracking but so is waiting around. Like other night flying pilots, Gibson has trouble sleeping. The pilots and crew wait, they fly, they come home to Scampton for bacon and eggs and coffee before they sleep.
When they return from a raid, sometimes their fellows are wounded or missing, and sometimes they aren't. Sometimes they actually witness the crashing planes of those who fail to return, and sometimes they don't.
Whenever the bomber pilots get a chance, they drink and party. A couple of times, Gibson unmasks his headlights to see his way home from the pub in a nearby village. He gets away with it the first time, but the second time he doesn't. He is made to pay a fine for his infraction.
One by one, the others in his squadron are picked off. Among the pilots, navigators and gunners he knew and flew with, Guy Gibson is the only man left alive.
Within the RAF, there is strong rivalry between the bomber pilots, called "bus drivers," and the much more glamorous fighters. Gibson finds himself transferred to another aerodrome where he will join a fighter squadron. After first cold shouldering him, they accept him as one of their own.
In 1943, with much night flying experience, Guy Gibson is asked to form his own special squadron for an especially secret mission. As his handpicked bomber crews fly low over water and drop fake bombs, they have no knowledge of what awaits them when the short weeks of training are over.
In the event, this is the squadron that will go down in history as the Dam Busters, after they drop the bouncing bombs especially designed for the purpose of destroying the Eder and Mohne Dams. The mission succeeds. Though he losses are heavy (eight aircraft and fifty-three men), two dams are breached and a huge wall of water goes thundering down the Ruhr Valley, the industrial heartland of Germany.
Guy Gibson's eye witness account of his life as a bomber and fighter pilot in WWII is wonderfully written. It reports salient details and evokes the time in ways that only a first-hand witness can do.
This book was originally published in 1944 and re-issued in 1946 and 1976. Based on the book and using the title The Dam Busters, a film starring Michael Redgrave was made in 1955.
Sadly, Wing-Commander Guy Gibson did not survive the war. He was shot down and killed over Holland in a bombing raid in September 1944.