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redeyedroid · 11 months

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This week saw the 80th anniversary of one of the most famous and heroic deeds of the Second World War – 617 Squadron’s attack on the hydroelectric dams of the Ruhr.

Flying at extremely low level in 4-engined Lancaster heavy bombers, the men of 617 Squadron displayed extraordinary skill and courage in the attack, using specially designed bombs, codenamed UPKEEP to strike at the dams. The bombs were large, drum-like in construction and spun up before being dropped. The spin caused them to skip like a stone across the waters of the reservoirs and hold close to the walls of the dam before exploding. Because they had to be at an altitude more precise than the instruments of the day could measure, the Lancasters were equipped with spotlights that intersected at the correct height, a weaponisation of maths as old as war itself.

The stone walls of the Möhne and Eder dams were breached that night, though the earthen construction of the Sorpe resisted.

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617’s commander, Guy Gibson won a Victoria Cross on the mission, repeatedly circling round to make dummy attacks on the Möhne and trying to draw flak away from other planes as they made their runs, then flying to the Eder and doing the same. Gibson would be die in 1944. Having finished his tour and been removed from operations and used as a popular hero for propaganda purposes, he would return to ops and be killed when the Mosquito he was in was crashed in the Netherlands.

Leonard Cheshire – also a holder of the VC - became commander of 617 Squadron and led it through the rest of the war and it’s later successes such as the Limoges raid, where he flew over a factory at 20 feet to give the French workers inside warning before the bombs fell; and the sinking of the German battleship, Tirpitz, capsized by 12,000lb Tallboy earthquake bombs. After the war, Cheshire would found a charity that helps disabled people live independently and which still bears his name.

The dams raid itself was a propaganda and political success. The dams were repaired in short order – the RAF did not follow up the raid and refused the opportunity to harass the repair work, but the work cost a huge amount - billions in today's money. The Upkeep bomb was never used again. A smaller version, intended to be used against ships like the Tirpitz and which was codenamed HIGHBALL was never employed, either.

8 aircraft were shot down on the raid. Only 3 of the 56 aircrew on these machines were lucky enough to survive the high speed, low-level crashes. Around 1,600 people were killed in the floods caused by the breached dams. Over 1,000 of them were POWs and slave labourers, mostly Ukrainian and Russian women from the Nazi-occupied USSR.

A lot of resources were expended on a mission that probably had a noticeable impact on the German war effort. The price paid in lives was low, considering the slaughter in Russia, China and the Pacific. It was the very essence of the Allies philosophy of using technology in place of humans. Steel not flesh.

But if we're being honest, the raid’s fame today derives mostly from the film.

There are many British movies about the Second World War. We’ll probably never stop making them. But those made in the 1950s and early 60s often shaped the consciousness and understanding of the war in the public’s imagination. They often star men who had served, and fall into two groups: stories written and made by people who were there that are entirely fictional; and fictionalised accounts of real events.

The best of them is The Cruel Sea which was based on a novel by Nicholas Monsarrat, who served in the Royal Navy during the Battle of the Atlantic. Anchored by a magnificent Jack Hawkins, it tells of the men and service of the fictional HMS Compass Rose, a Flower-class corvette on convoy duty, played in the film by the actual Flower-class HMS Coreopsis on which much of the film was shot.

The most famous, though, is The Dambusters, which is a remarkably accurate representation of the attack, has an all-time great theme tune and a strong central performance by Richard Todd as Gibson (Todd, a paratrooper during the war, was among the first men to drop on D-Day as part of the amazingly named Geoffrey Pine-Coffin’s 7th Parachute Battalion. He found Gibson’s closing line in the film of “I have to write some letters [to the families of the dead] first” very hard to deliver, having done it himself, for real).

Yet the film, in it’s original cut, is today unwatchable.

The problem is the dog.

Like many squadron commanders, Guy Gibson had a pet dog. And like many of these, the black labrador became a mascot for the whole squadron and was spoiled rotten. It was knocked down and killed by a car the morning of the raid, and it’s name was used as a codeword for the successful strike on the Möhne, ringing out across Europe that night and making the dog and it’s profoundly offensive name a part of the story.

Because the name of the dog was the n-word. It’s use peppers the original cut of the film, because the dog is in many scenes (equally horrifically, the dog that appeared in the film had the same name. You wonder how many homes in 1950s Britain had pets with astonishingly offensive names) and this means that multiple edits and overdubs have been shown down the years (I recently discovered the one on Amazon Video in the UK is the original, which is how I know it’s unwatchable). Peter Jackson floated the idea of a remake after making The Lord of the Rings. The project never went anywhere and I have to think that the problem of the dog was part of why (also, it’s a struggle to make American money men cut loose for movies that don’t tell stories of American heroism, but that’s another thing entirely).

James Holland and Max Hastings – white Englishmen both - have written books about the raid in recent and both have wrestled with the dog devoting pages to the issue and pointing out that, yes it’s very offensive, but it was a long time ago and it’s part of the story. Then they use the name repeatedly throughout their books.

(To be clear, I like both historians and they have done very good work, but, to me, it’s very unconvincing to write about how bad the name was without then making any effort to avoid using the word. Though I don’t think I do much better when all is said and done).

Today, because everything is terrible, it has become a front in the culture war. A few years ago, during the BLM protests of 2020, the RAF changed the dog’s gravestone (because yes, they buried it at 617’s wartime base of RAF Scampton and gave it a gravestone) so that it no longer features the name. They were immediately accused of rewriting history and how dare they bow to the woke BLM snowflakes it’s part of the story it’s just a name and how offensive can a dog be anyway. Someone started a petition trying to get Parliament to debate it and have the original headstone put back.

History is messy and many, if not most, of our nation’s heroes do not stand up to scrutiny, but the feelings of people complaining about a headstone that should never have been put up in the first place can get in the fucking sea. Like statues, it’s not rewriting history to say that something or someone does not deserve that place in society today. The feelings of RAF servicepeople of colour over the 75 years the original headstone was in place were never considered, but that doesn’t matter to these people. Nor that people knew it was horrible and offensive at the fucking time, but didn’t care, because it was a word and attitude that was socially acceptable. Hammering on about it does distract from the story of the heroism of 133 men, 53 of whom never came home that night in 1943. But there's no way round it. The heroism and racism go hand in hand.

(As an illustration, I’ve written more here about the fucking dog than I did about the actual raid).

Most recently the raid has been back in the news, because our authoritarian, fascist-leaning Conservative government have decided to dump shipping containers all over RAF Scampton and use it as housing for asylum seekers. The worst people in the world are crawling out from whatever fetid sewer they exist in to complain. Housing these people at Scampton would be a disgrace to the memory of the raid, they say, trying to turn it and the raid into a symbol of xenophobic nationalism, no matter that the RAF had men and women from all over the world in it during the Second World War. Adding to it, there’s a proposal to move the dog’s grave to 617 Squadron’s current base at RAF Marham so it is not damaged by the inmates of our new concentration camp.

Opposition to this plan mostly hinges on there being an existing plan to use the airfield as part of a regeneration scheme, bringing jobs and money to an area that desperately needs it. Left out of the argument is that people will be housed there is abominable conditions, dehumanised and misrepresented, their very existence treated as criminal. And this will happen because the government’s asylum policy is a fucking obscenity, in flagrant opposition to international law, and – much like the attacks on the rights of trans people – a crisis artificially created by the Tories so they can distract us from how fucking terrible they are at running the country, the continuing destruction of public services, and the enrichment of their friends.

People use the Second World War to make political points. They always have. History is written and then rewritten again and again. Myths die hard – even today the idea the German Army was supreme and only lost because it sabotaged by Hitler’s incompetence is still taken at face value; while the myth of the clean Wehrmacht, separate from the crimes of the Nazi regime and SS, persists. Both come from the self-serving memoirs and testimonies of German generals. History is always rewritten and the people who oppose the changes are the same who complain about statues being removed or talk about Britain's role in the slave trade. They want history to be a monologue of the bits that make them feel good. They don't want to engage with the uncomfortable and and bad things that were done by this country, or it's racist heroes. They don't want history to be a dialogue where they have to listen to the people on the other end of the discrimination, or the imperial repression. Or the bombs.

And it is hardly new for dickheads to repurpose it for their own ends. In a couple of weeks politicians with fake tans and faker teeth will task their interns with posting social media tributes to the D-Day landings. A few will use images of German soldiers, betraying the performative hollowness of the public face. Other, less famous blue tick accounts run by truly fucking awful human beings, will make shit jokes about there being no safe spaces on the beaches, or drag BLM. Transphobia will run rife in the hashtags, possibly alongside the odd WWG1WGA. Tankies will make fanposts about the war’s other great mass murderer, Joseph Stalin and assert that it was the USSR which really won the war and diminish the contributions of the USA and Britain.

And I will look at it all, and think about it all, and be angered and saddened. When I can find something worth fact-checking, or think of a funny and/or interesting dunk to make, I’ll probably post about it. Because what else is there when the most complex events in human history are distilled down to the worst people in the world standing up for a dog’s hideously offensive name?

#ww2 #war is fucking awful #wwii #history #I don't like using the original gravestone but I wanted to illustrate how big a bunch of cunts the Mail are #The Dambusters March is a great theme #Dambusters #however bad you've imagined war to be it is much much worse

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