Last night the British television channel, Channel 4, gave us another superb documentary history programme with a great twist – the story of the Dambuster raid on the German dams in WW2. It relayed the story of how Wing Cmdr Guy Gibson (a mere 24 years old) led a squadron of Avro Lancasters to smash two dams using the famous “bouncing bomb”.
The programme makers got a group of present-day serving RAF aircrew, including two women, who work in the very different airforce of today, to try to repeat the feat of Guy Gibson’s men, using a flight simulator and a real-live Lancaster. These modern flyers are used to state-of-the-art navigation technology rather than the old pencil, map and compass techniques that had to be used back in the 1940s, when radar-based techniques were in their relative infancy.
It made for compulsive viewing. And one thought stuck in my head. Most of the flyers are about on average 10 years younger than me (I am 36). Gibson, as noted above, was just 24. I don’t think – as the Iraq campaign demonstrates – that the best of our young folk today are any less capable of performing heroic and dangerous feats than our forbears. And while I would prefer to see such talents used for peaceful purposes like entrepreneurship rather than flying a bomber, I think recent events bode rather well for our future.
That’s something to remember when London gets infested with the usual rag-bag of anti-globalistas and Saddam mourners on May 1.
I would love to have seen that program! The whole Dam Buster raid has held my fascination for many years.
I saw that programme when it ran on US television a month or two ago. Excellent piece. What struck me as much as the courage of the fighters (which was immense–a mild rebuke here, you might have mentioned that it was an international team with Canadian and US pilots as well) was the engineering feat it represented. Not only did the designer of the bomb have to overcome real technical challenges to get it to skip just so across the water–he did it practically on his own, with little support from commanding officers. And he came up with the idea all on his own, having to sell it (rather hard, really) to skeptical war officials. The DIY aspect of this mission (and the war as a whole, at least from the allied side) is something I never fully appreciated before.
Clio, thanks for the comment. Not sure why a “rebuke” was needed though since I did not mention the nationalities of the folk involved in the first instance, nor did I imply it was a purely Brit operation. Of course not, and you are quite right to point out that it involved folk from across the English-speaking world, as well as Czechs, Poles, and other refugees from the Axis (“new Europe”).
The movie “The Dambusters” is just so gloriously patriotic and un-Pc. I’d love to make Michael Moore or John Pilger watch it at gunpoint, the bastards.