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The Dam Busters
recounts the true story of one of World War II’s more remarkable
episodes: “Operation Chastise”, the destruction of the Mohne and
Eder dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley using the infamous “bouncing
bombs” designed by scientist and aeronautical engineer Barnes
Wallace (Michael Redgrave). The Ruhr Valley was Germany’s industrial
heart, the hydro-electric power generated there driving the
surrounding manufacturing complex, and its waterways used for
transportation of both raw materials and finished products. An attack
on the three huge dams that controlled this industrial centre had long
been a dream of the British military command, and of Barnes Wallace in
particular, who believed that such a strike would significantly
shorten the war. Knowing that underwater netting was in place to
protect the dams from torpedo attacks, Wallace had initially tried to
design a conventional bomb powerful enough to destroy the dams
outright, but soon realised that the device would have to be so heavy,
no existing plane would be able to carry it. An alternative, radical
theory began to take shape in his mind: smaller bombs could
do the job if they were
dropped close enough to the faces of the dams so that the cushioning
effects of the water – the very forces that would protect the dams
from conventional bombing – could be made to work in their favour.
To get the job done, Wallace proposed to a startled RAF Command that
they use low-level flying to skim a specially-designed bomb across the
surface of the dam waters, arguing that if delivered at the correct
altitude and speed, the bombs would skip across the water, stop at the
dam face and sink to the desired depth to breach the wall. Initially,
RAF Command responded to this proposal exactly as you might imagine;
but Wallace persisted, and eventually managed to demonstrate that his
theory was correct. Finally willing to believe that such a bizarre
approach might actually work, the RAF put together “Squadron X”,
the 617 Squadron of Lancaster Bombers, an elite outfit consisting of
the very cream of Britain’s fliers under the leadership of Wing
Commander Guy Gibson (Richard Todd). On the night of May 16th
1943, the 617 set out for Germany with their experimental weapons….
The Dam Busters
is a film divided neatly into thirds: the development of Wallace’s
theory, and the move from theory to reality; the creation and training
of the 617 Squadron; and the mission. Naturally, it is the first
section of the film that is dearest to my heart – “Science!!”
– although such pains did the producers take, that I am confident
that lay-viewers will find it just as fascinating as I do. (Yes,
that’s right: they made physics interesting!
The integration of the actual footage of Wallace’s bomb tests helps
enormously.) The Dam Busters
opens in Barnes Wallace’s backyard, with the scientist using a
jury-rigged catapult system to fire marbles across the surface of a
small tank of water, his puzzled but intrigued children eagerly
retrieving their father’s projectiles from various corners of the
garden. (It should be pointed out that the producers somehow managed
to restrain themselves from stooping to a “lost marbles” joke at
Wallace’s expense.) The film then follows the scientist as he
battles endless red tape in order even to get the chance to even try
out his theory; as he demonstrates that theory with great success; and
as he suffers through the distress and humiliation of seeing test
after test fail dismally. The development of the “bouncing bombs”
was not an easy matter, and The
Dam Busters makes no effort to disguise how close Wallace came to
complete failure – nor indeed how much his ultimate success depended
upon an almost suicidal heroism on the part of the men who would carry
those bombs into Germany. Still, perhaps the moment that lingers most
when The Dam Busters has
finished is not any of the battle scenes, but the image of Barnes
Wallace, shattered by yet another test failure, resignedly rolling up
his pants legs to wade into the water of his test site in order to
retrieve the fragments of his bomb and work out what went wrong this
time. Much of the success of The
Dam Busters can be attributed to Michael Redgrave’s performance
as Wallace; one all the more remarkable when it is compared to the
actor’s far more famous role as the debonair Jack Worthing in
Anthony Asquith’s adaptation of The
Importance Of Being Earnest, made only two years earlier. The
Dam Busters, in contrast, sees Redgrave grey-haired, bespectacled
and cardigan-ed; an act of professional self-abrogation that these
days perhaps best compares with Russell Crowe’s efforts in The
Insider. There are moments, granted, when the characterisation
teeters on the brink of cliché Absent-Minded-Professor-dom, but
Redgrave’s beautifully judged performance never allows us to lose
sight of the scientist’s essential humanity – and humility. (He
also gets the line of the film when, in response to an apoplectic
official’s furious demand to know why on earth he should be lent a
precious Wellington bomber at the height of the war in order to test
out his idiotic theory, Wallace inquires diffidently whether the fact
that he designed the planes in the first place would make any
difference…?)
My
praise of the first half of The
Dam Busters, and of Michael Redgrave in particular, is not meant
to denigrate the rest of the film, which is equally fine. It is
evident just what pains the producers went to, to pay full tribute to
the men involved in Operation Chastise, many of whom were destined to
lose their lives. Guy Gibson was literally given his pick of all the
men in the RAF when he came to form his team – something which, as
you might imagine, went over like a lead balloon with the commanders
of those squadrons plundered. (Fascinatingly, the first four men
chosen by Gibson were “foreigners”: two Australians, a New
Zealander and an American, prompting the semi-comic exclamation,
“Hey, let’s not forget the British!”) As Barnes Wallace battles
to complete his work on time, the men of the 617 practice low-level
flying, overcoming such problems as inaccurate altimeters and a lack
of appropriate bomb-sights – only to have Wallace break the
unwelcome news that in order for his bomb to function properly, it
would have to be released not from the expected height of one hundred
and fifty feet, but from precisely sixty
feet over the water. So they practice that.
The home stretch of the film follows the squadron in flight,
approaching Germany from over Holland, and following a route
pre-determined to bring them under only light fire. Of course, when
you are being shot at, “light” is a relative term. Two of the
planes are lost before the target is reached; six more will be downed
before the mission is complete. The battle scenes of The
Dam Busters are a bit of a mixed bag. The photography and editing
are very good, making clear just how difficult was the task that lay
before the 617; but the special effects used to realise the
destruction of the Mohne and Eder dams are a disappointment, even
considering the film’s vintage. (A third target, the Sorpe, which
was of a different construction, was hit but not breached.) However, The
Dam Busters is one of those films whose intrinsic merits supersede
its technical limitations – and has, over time, proved enduringly
influential. Viewers coming to the film today with fresh eyes might
find sections of it strangely familiar: The Dam Busters is one of the many – many – acknowledged inspirations for Star Wars, with sections of that production’s climactic battle
scenes transferred over from their model with remarkable fidelity.
Even some of the dialogue is copied!
Historical
opinion remains sharply divided over the success or failure of
Operation Chastise, particularly in view of the losses suffered by the
British. In immediate terms, the mission certainly was a success; yet
within a year, German industry was running again at full capacity.
However, it is generally conceded that whatever its military
shortcomings, the mission was a great success in terms of morale,
raising the spirits of the British (granted, contemporary reports were
very much exaggerated) while striking a blow at the complacency of the
Germans, who had previously considered their heartland unreachable –
hence the comparatively light defences on the dams. And indeed, one
practical outcome to the mission was the strengthening of the defences
of many inland targets in Germany, with men taken away from the lines
in order to accomplish this. But all this is wisdom after the event.
One deeply significant aspect of The
Dam Busters is that it offers, in the microcosm of Barnes
Wallace’s story, a depiction of what scientists worldwide must have
experienced during war-time: the moment at which their idea stopped
being merely a fascinating theory, and became in truth the means of
widespread destruction and the taking of human life. It is, of course,
impossible to judge such matters in simplistic terms – there is no
“right” or “wrong” way to feel, or to behave, in such a
situation, let the individual react how he might. It is, however, a
fact that Barnes Wallace himself was devastated by the outcome of
Operation Chastise, which saw over twelve hundred casualties in
Germany – more than half of them, it was later discovered, Russian
POWs – and the loss of eight British planes and crews. (Three of the
fifty-six men survived to be captured by the Germans; the rest were
killed.) On Britain’s side, considering the way in which the 617
Squadron had been constructed, these losses represented a devastating
blow to the RAF; and yet the notion of elite forces for specialist
missions took hold. It is generally accepted that this attack on the
Ruhr Valley gave birth to the idea of what today we would call the
“surgical strike” – precision attacks on definite targets,
rather than the use of carpet bombings. Despite its losses, the 617
was re-built following Operation Chastise, and continued to fly these
dangerous pin-point missions – eventually, indeed, using new bombs
designed by Barnes Wallace himself who, despite his feelings of guilt
and remorse, continued to cling to the idea of shortening the war
which had drawn him to military work in the first place. (With tragic
irony, it would be during one of these missions that Guy Gibson would
eventually lose his life.)
Historically,
the screenplay of The Dam
Busters does take a few liberties. The bombs we see used in the
mission are round, not cylindrical; they are based on Wallace’s
earlier designs, before his realisation that he would have to remove
the bombs’ casings to get them to function properly. There is a
simple enough explanation for this: in 1954, the real bombs’ design
was still classified information. Barnes Wallace himself is depicted
as a lone wolf, wholly responsible for the scientific side of the
bombing project, whereas in reality he had a team of technicians who
made significant contributions to the project. Conversely, the film
does have Wallace declining to claim sole ownership of the “bouncing
projectile” idea, chalking it up instead (and, I believe, truly) to
observations made by Horatio Nelson with respect to his cannon-fire
sinking of an enemy ship. (On the other hand--- Call me a cynic, but I
somehow question whether Nelson did in fact describe the French as
being “dismissed by a yorker”. [And yes, I know there are some of
you out there who don’t know what a “yorker” is. Neither did the
French, and look what happened to them.])
The film’s one egregious mis-step comes when it has Guy Gibson
coming up with the idea of how to overcome the altimeter problem –
while watching a kick-line at a music hall! In truth, the use of fixed
beams of light to determine the altitude of a plane had been developed
during World War I. As for the rest of the film, some of its events
have been---not altered, precisely, but sanitised. As portrayed by
Richard Todd, Guy Gibson is an ideal officer, courageous and
self-sacrificing in the air, protective of his men and popular on the
ground. Sadly, this seems not to have been entirely the case. While
no-one would dare question Gibson’s abilities in the air, it seems
that on the ground he was anything but
popular, being cold, aloof, and rigidly class-conscious. (In
Gibson’s defence, in a recent documentary the woman who acted as his
driver at the time of these events advanced the scornful opinion that
he was “too intelligent to be popular”, which has a nasty ring of
truth about it.) The film’s other piece of fudging concerns the
treatment of Gibson’s outfit by the men of the other squadrons, who
were still flying routine missions while the 617 was undergoing its
training. In The Dam Busters,
the clashes between the two factions are depicted as nothing more
serious than a bit of good-natured ragging; something resolved by a
few timely mess-hall debaggings. In reality, the open hostilities that
arose between the combat fliers and the 617 over the latter’s
removal from active duty was a serious problem, hugely detrimental to
morale.
Despite
these tamperings, The Dam
Busters is as historically accurate as, perhaps, we have any right
to expect such a production to be. Of course, when dealing with a film
of this nature one must always distinguish between its qualities as
history and its qualities as cinema. There are few doubts about the
latter. The Dam Busters bears a warranted reputation as one of the great
British war films – and is made all the more interesting by its
overall tone. There is no question that there was a wide attitudinal
difference between the war films produced in Britain and those
produced in the United States, particularly those made during the
actual time of the conflict. The reasons for this are debatable.
Difference in cultural temperament accounts for some of it; the
“vetting” of American films by the Office of War Information
(which nursed a strange delusion that the forced insertion of lengthy
speeches explaining “Democracy” and “What This War Is About”
into screenplays would “gently propagandise” [their term] the
American public without it being aware of the process) for some more.
The most significant factor, however, is undoubtedly the fact that the
war hit the British civilian almost as hard as it did its armed
forces. Consequently, there was little room in British films of the
era for speeches, or kind lies, or platitudes; the people had seen too
much, and suffered too much, to put up with that. It was not until the
highly unpopular Korean conflict that the tone of American war films
began to shift, becoming more questioning and ambiguous. British
films, devoted as they were to celebrating the heroism of their
people, had always had such undertones; and The
Dam Busters lies firmly within this tradition. Although the film,
as it stands, tells the story of a military and technological triumph,
the hard questions asked about Operation Chastise after the event were
beginning to cast a long shadow. The Dam Busters ends on the bleakest, most downbeat note imaginable.
No celebration here; no speeches; no flag-waving. Instead, we conclude
with a pan around the mess-hall, showing the places set for the men
who would never return; with shots inside the deserted rooms of some
of the casualties; with Barnes Wallace in tears (“All those boys!
All those boys!”); and with Guy Gibson going sadly to his quarters
to “write some letters”. The audience itself is left to confront
the unanswerable question of what, exactly, constitutes an
“acceptable loss”.
For
all its merits, The Dam Busters
is not much screened these days; not because of the continuing
disagreements over the success or failure of Operation Chastise, but
rather because shifting social mores have made the film something of
an embarrassment. One of the key subplots of The
Dam Busters involves Guy Gibson’s beloved dog, which unhappily
was run over and killed on the very eve of the historic mission. As a
tribute to his pet, Gibson requested that its name be used as the
codeword to signify the successful destruction of the German dams. As
it happens, however, the name in question is a word that has since
become socially unacceptable in the extreme. (Call me mealy-mouthed
– mealy-fingered? – if you like, but I prefer not to write it.
Let’s just say that the word is a reference to the coat colour of
Gibson’s black Labrador, and leave it at that.) Appalling as this
word usage may seem to modern sensibilities, it is evident that no
conscious malice was intended either when Gibson named his pet, or
when the film was made – which is precisely what makes it so
difficult to cope with. Contemporary films in which the word was
indeed used with malice – the vitriolic tirades of Richard
Widmark’s character in No Way
Out, for example – are easier to accept simply because we are
given a context in which to deal with it. In The
Dam Busters, it’s simply – there. (Watching this film with an
unprepared modern audience is a fascinating experience: you just sit
back, and listen to the sound of jaws thudding into the floor….)
Over time, of course, social conditions began to change – and The
Dam Busters become something of a hot potato, finally suffering
censorship in most parts of the world; when, that is, it was screened
at all. In Britain, the contentious material was often cut out
altogether, leaving the latter portions of the film disjointed and
confusing. In the US, rather more sensibly, the offending word was
simply overdubbed. At the present time, Australia is one of the few
countries where The Dam Busters
continues to be screened intact. Whether that says good things about
us or bad things, I haven’t quite been able to decide.
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Director: Michael
Anderson