Loosing the Flood

Nineteen Lancasters droned through the soft spring night, their dampened exhausts faintly luminescent. Below, the German landscape unrolled steadily, remote and softly gleaming in the moonlight. Fields and forests, villages and towns slipped past their wings, and then the planes were over Westphalia.

In the big bombers the men grew tense after the long monotony of their flight. The motors roared on steadily, but now their throbbing beat was swifter, and by the steady pressure in their ears the men knew they were going down. Ahead and below, the lakes that marked their targets shone like silver.

It was a matter of seconds now. The bomb bay doors were open; the flak had begun, pin points of yellow blossoming slowly upward, then sliding by with a rush into the sky above. Now the planes were roaring 50 feet above the water; now the target was dead ahead. Now the bombardiers pushed their buttons, and now the big, dark mines, each weighing 1,500 pounds, tumbled from the planes. Some landed with a splash in the water; some hit the dams fair & square. When the roar of their explosions had subsided, the sustained, deeper roar of pent-up waters, suddenly released, struck terror into the hearts of those below.

Eight of the 19 Lancasters did not see England again. They were the necessary sacrifice for one of the most daring and profitable exploits of the air war against Germany. What the big four-motored planes did that night was worth the loss of a division: they dealt a blow which German industry in the Ruhr would feel for many months.

The Waters' Destruction. British reconnaissance the same day brought photographs which told some of the story. In the valleys of the Eder and Ruhr, where the dams were blasted by the mines, there was terrible destruction. The waters of the Eder, released by the breaching of the Eder Dam, had swept the valley bare, flooding the airfield at Fritzlar, sweeping through farms and villages beyond the industrial town of Kassel, which was partly inundated (see map). The Ruhr, swollen as if by a tidal wave from the blasting of the Moehne and the Sorpe dams, had flooded town after town.

The biggest damage was done to railway communications. Actual industrial damage was secondary but no less important: entire townships of workers' homes rendered completely uninhabitable; power stations destroyed; telephone and power lines ripped out; water supplies for the big industries reduced for at least a year, until the dams could be repaired and the reservoirs refilled after the slack water season.

The bombing of the dams was no stunt by the R.A.F., but the result of careful planning and painstaking training. There were three reasons why it has not been done before: 1) the logical time was when the rivers were in flood, the dams full, the dry season approaching; 2) big four-engined planes were needed, flown by experienced crews who had had weeks of specialized training and study of the target (bombing the dams was pinpoint work from the lowest altitude); 3) for maximum effect, flood disaster had to be carefully timed in the Allies' general bombing program. Experts considered that the best moment was when really heavy bombing had already disorganized Ruhr industry to a substantial extent, and when rescue and construction services were already overstrained.

No Respite. Germany was really feeling the weight of Allied air power. By day, the big Fortresses and Liberators of the U.S. Eighth Air Force came over to bomb key bases and war plants in northwestern Germany, the Lowlands and France. With each raid the precision bombing of the Americans left its mark, the crews gained in combat wisdom. They were learning to solve the tough defenses the Nazis put up against them, and their numbers were increasing heavily.

The British heavy bombers, grounded for several days, returned to the punishing round-the-clock schedule at week's end. In a raid unparalleled in its force they beat down the Ruhr's defenses and loosed 2,000 tons of bombs over the rail and water transport center of Dortmund, already heavily damaged in previous raids. With such attacks the weight of bombs dropped on Germany was soaring to astronomical figures: after Dortmund, the R.A.F. figured that its Bomber Command had reached the 100,000-ton mark. German retaliation to the air war was, by comparison, infinitesimal--nuisance raids by day or night, averaging a dozen planes with bombs up to 500 pounds.

While the British-heavies were grounded, the R.A.F.'s sensational new bomber plane, the twin-engined, plywood Mosquito, stung the Reich by day & night with swift hit-&-run raids. On three successive nights last week Mosquitoes bombed Berlin by brightest moonlight; they made six raids against the Reich capital within eight days. From all these raids not a plane was lost; it was not until the sixth raid that Berlin gunners even scored a hit on a Mosquito. The plane they winged came back to England, flying at treetop height, with one motor shot out.

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