Recreating the Dam Busters attack

[John Kettler]

A Cambridge engineer set out not only to duplicate the bomb, on a smaller scale, but built and put all the necessary gear to properly drop it aboard a plane and ran an attack at 60 foot altitude, against a dam purpose built for the experiment. Must see.

Though I've yet to watch it, here's a long documentary on the real attack, OPERATION CHASTISE. Have to say, given the purpose of the attack, the codename was brilliant.
 

Regards,

John Kettler

[Douglas Ruddd]

Thanks John for posting, excellent videos! Just amazing.

[John Kettler]

Douglas Rudd,

A little digging turned up an excellent post on the workup of Squadron X (later, 617 Squadron), ingress and the attack on the Moehne Dam. Unfortunately, the 2014's post was supposed to have a Part 2, but doesn't yet. The site is still active, with a new post on New Year's Day. Guess the guy, a Canadian, found too many other things to write about. I knew about the whys and method used to fly at 60 feet, but I didn't realize the release distance was 425 yards. This is why the new effort, with a far lighter bomb, thus considerably less KE,  has such a ridiculously close drop point. Simply put, it won't skip as far as the real one.

http://danielwyatt.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-dambuster-raidpart-one.html

This has some excellent grog goodies in it, including some background on the planned Howard Hawks film, the various official views of its feasibility, fabrications in the 1955 film which outraged Gibson, technical data on the dam, recon photos and more.

http://www.neam.co.uk/dambusters.html

OPERATION CHASTISE was one of my favorite WW II things, but the casualties were murderous. Worse, one bomb didn't detonate and was recovered intact. A nightmare for the British who feared getting the same treatment.

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited January 9, 2017 by John Kettler

[Michael Emrys]

Two or more likely three years ago, PBS ran the original movie of this experiment. The experiment mashed up so many factors trying to scale down the original design specs that the final outcome was laughably absurd. They had to fake so many factors to get the final footage, that it proved absolutely nothing. It may have been a fun movie project, but science it wasn't. Not even close. I haven't recently checked to see if the Nova website still lists the movie as available for viewing, but if you are really interested you might take a look.

Michael