Truth About RAF Attack on German Dams

A few years ago, I happened to be speaking with the legendary Capt. Eric “Winkle” Brown, arguably one of the greatest aviators ever, who, as a test pilot, flew a staggering 485 types of aircraft, a record that will never be broken. He once met Guy Gibson, he told me, and the two talked at some length. “Do you ever feel scared when you’re flying?” Gibson suddenly asked him. Brown responded that he did not. “You’re lucky,” Gibson replied, admitting that “I’m absolutely terrified every time I set foot” in a plane. It was a remarkable yet very human admission from one of the most famous British pilots of World War II—a man who liked to portray himself as the ultimate “press on” bomber commander: fearless, aggressive and always cheerful in the face of adversity, ever willing to do more than what was asked of him. It was this character that Richard Todd—who had himself been a British paratrooper on D-Day—so memorably portrayed when he played Gibson in the 1955 movie “The Dam Busters.” Yet as Max Hastings reveals in his fascinating and immensely readable “Operation Chastise: The RAF’s Most Brilliant Attack of World War II,” almost everything we think we know from the film and popular mythology is wrong.