Dams Raid question.

Ah, the first thread I ever started at this place. Here you go Von T, but I'd like to know everyone elses opinions now.

http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5922&highlight=Dams+raid

 

In hindsight it may be ssen that it was worthwhile for the propaganda effort, but the actual effect on the German industry was minimal. However, at that time, the British were not to know that the Germans would have been so capable at retoration. So yes, it would have seemed worthwhile if the "sums" had added up in the end. Considering the loss v gain rate, it was a relatively "cheap" attack too - and I'm not disparaging the men who died in the enterprise.

 

16th-17th May 1943.
Was it worth it?

Cheers,
Adam.

Maybe you should ask George Johnson (Bomb-aimer on Joe McCarthy's plane, which bombed the Sorpe Dam). I had an excellent conversation with the man earlier this year. George gets fed up to the back teeth with the question of Was it worth it? He will give plenty of reasons as to why it was worth it.

 

My old user name was Mosquito617. Guess what i think about the raid.

 

I stick to what I said in the original thread:

Much has been said about this previously and the opinions differ greatly.

Initially the plan was not feasible however the successful testing of the bomb, the "cream" of pilots and crews and the chance to hinder production by telling the Germans that if it is used in war production we can destroy it.

The loss of 7 crews was in hindsight a waste of life however these crews could have easily been lost blowing up a ball bearing factory under intense flak on any given day. Many were not lost over the dams.

The damage was minimal to halting production in the full context of the German war machine, yet it was a major propaganda coup.

 

I believe it was very much worth it.


The Dams Raid

The Reasons

During the 1930s Adolf Hitler came to power in a politically fragmented and bankrupt Germany. During the following years it became apparent that Hitler was rebuilding Germany following the First World War and had military ambitions which made the country a threat to those about them and their allies. Most of the central European countries were catalysed (to varying degrees) by these developments and Great Britain commenced a late, but timely re-armament program.
It is fair to say that the operation to destroy the German dams in the Ruhr began on Tuesday July 26th 1938 at a meeting chaired by Air Vice Marshall W Sholto Douglas, Assistant Chief of the Air Staff. This was a meeting of the RAF Bombing Committee and one of the main items on the agenda was to bring to the meetings attention, a potential weak point in the German industrial economy. This potential weakness was a number of reservoirs that supplied power and water to manufacturing industries which in the time of war would be turned over to war manufacture. The object of the meeting was to enquire into the extent to which effective air action against the Dams of the reservoirs until similar targets would be possible. Bombing Committee paper number 16 was circulated and this document described the types of construction and siting of the Dams along with notes on the potential damage that was caused by a number of the air dropped weapons then available. Squadron leader C G Burge representing the Air Targets Sub-Committee of Aerial Intelligence reported that the amount of water consumed in the whole of Germany was only three times that of the Ruhr and that the bulk of it was obtained from one large reservoir contained by a single large dam known as the Möhne Dam. He added that there were also four or five other reservoirs in Germany which fed the inland waterways. The destruction of which was likely to leave the waterways high and dry which would severely effect the German transportation system. It also seemed reasonable to believe that the damage caused would be extremely difficult to put right.
At this stage all discussion was about bombing the dams with existing weapons. The largest of these was then the 500lb semi-armour piercing bomb designed to be used against ships. When dropped from a sufficient height, it had penetrated in tests 5ft into concrete and the thickness of a dam at a depth of 40ft was estimated to be approximately 12ft. It was felt that if a bomb could be driven into the wall to a depth of 5ft, the remaining 7ft should be severely damaged or breached but no discussion was given to special weapons. It was recognised during the meeting that any bomb would be far more effective when placed on the wet side of the dam, rather than the dry side. The possible use of torpedos was also discussed. The final outcome of the meeting was that at the present time it is considered that the attack should be directed primarily against the high water side of the dam. Attack against the lower side is considered less likely to be effective unless a bomb can be devised that which will develop sufficient striking velocity to achieve the necessary amount of damage at low altitude.
The seed had been sown and then matters rested for three years. In essence however the basis of Operation Chastise had been established.

• That the destruction of the Möhne dam would remove a large percentage of the water required by the Ruhr Valley industries to produce war materials along with a substantial amount of hydro-electricity.
• The destruction of the smaller Ruhr dams would cause some loss of electrical power and great disruption to the German inland waterway system upon which a great proportion of German industry and war making capability depended.
• An additional fringe benefit would be the damage caused to industry and infrastructure by the release of large amounts of water from these reservoirs.

 

52nd, I had no idea whatsoever that this was such a hot old chestnut in Bomber command circles, you appear to be saying I am implying some insult?
Nothing of the kind.


Sorry VP, It wasn't supposed to come across as an insult. The point I was trying to make, was, no one considers the views of the surviving members of the dams raid.

 

This is the righ tplace Von T.

Off the top of my head I believe 6 million work hours were lost in the Ruhr valley as a direct result of the Dams Raid. Another aspect rarely considered is that the flood waters scoured the valley clean of the highly fertile soil used to grow crops. Estimates after the war said it would take 50 years to be regenerated to the pre-raid levels.
The raid wasn't the all out success hoped for as more bombs were needed per dam, and a considerable number were lost through crashes or turn backs before the raid commenced. If the Sorpe could have been breached as well as the Mohne, it would have been a different story, maybe the Ennepe should have been the third target insted of an earthen gravity dam?
The physical damage was repaired quickly, but the psychological? One squadron was all it took to bring the Ruhr industry to a stand still, even if it wasn;t for as long as hoped for. One squadron of 19 Lancasters where the entire might of Bomber Command had yet to succeed. Must have made the Germans think. And if Hitler hadn't had one of his infamous changes of mind, Upkeep would have been used against us, and kiss goodbye to the Sheffield steel industry.

 

That's cool mate.
I take it this crops up a lot then.

Err, You could say that!! mainly by so called historians who weren't there and then adding there reasons for the raid actually being a failure. Hence why the survivors get irate and upset.

For me, I think the raid was worth it. To achieve precision bombing on such a difficult target it was unbelievable. It certainly gave Hitler something to think about, knowing the RAF had the capabilities to destroy more of german industries etc.. with such precision. It may of been costly in the way of crews, but for propaganda and the civilian morale it was huge.

 

Excellent precision bombing and it proved that a special duties squadron with the proper training were capable of destroying an economical target which previously had not been thought to be vulnerable by the enermy

The raid, apart from the "tried and tested" aspect of "Upkeep" was based on the effect that a loss of water supllies would have on Ruhr steel manufacturing output.The research on the economics of steel making revealed that 80 tons of water were required to produce a ton of steel.This was the prime motivation for the raid.As it was, Speer, much to the surprise of the British, had the damage which was quite severe on the Mohne and Eder dams repaired and back to normal within 3 months.

The valour of the BC crews to accomplish the operation was typical of those who from the early days of the war were able to carry the war to the German homeland.However,aircraft and aircrew losses were much heavier than any other raid in terms of percentage lost.

As regards a strategic blow against the enemy,I feel the raid on Peenemunde had a better return in that it forced the Germans to vacate the Peenemunde test site down to the tunnel complex at Nordhausen and forced a delay in the deployment of the V2 weapon in the west.

There is also the incidental point that the disarray after Peenemunde brought Himmler,through Kammler to gain control of the V2 project which did not enhance the performance of the project.Himmler was more concerned at building his own empire within the Third Reich and never saw himself as a team player in maximising the war against Germany's enemies.

 

Just a point on the electrical generation from the dams.In my view this is hardly worth considering.The hydro generation capacity was quite small in relation to the capacity of the main generating stations.The hydro plant from these dams was "low head" and therefore,small capacity hydro output.

What is a glaring deficiency in the bombing campaign was that the whole of the German electrical generation system was not sytematically destroyed,which early on would have severely effected the German industry to provide a means to wage war.There were major losses of electrical generation in the latter stages of the war but apart from operations against random power plant targets there was no strategic onslaught.The reason given by the Allied planners was that it was thought that the German electricity system was so intensely interconnected that the destruction of individual plants would have little effect of the ability to transmit electricity from generation centres to the load centres.After the war,the German electricity system was found not to be as intensely interconnected as previously thought.

 

Speer, writing of the damage and the direct hit on the centre of the Sorpe Dam said: "I inspected it that same day. Fortunately the bomb hole was slightly higher than the water level. Just a few inches lower - and a small brook would have transformed into a raging river which would have swept away the stone and earthen dam".

"The losses sustained by the Germans were not insignificant: repairs took most of the summer of 1943. A torrent of water had flooded the Ruhr Valley. That had the seemingly insignificant but grave consequence that the electrical installations at the pumping stations were soaked and muddied, so that the industry was brought to a standstill and the water supply of the population was imperiled. .........The British had not succeeded, however, in destroying the three other reservoirs.Had they done so, the Ruhr Valley would have been almost completely deprived of water in the coming summer months .........A few days after this attack seven thousand men, whom I had ordered shifted from the Atlantic Wall to the Mohne and Eder areas, were hard at work repairing the Dams. On September 23, 1943, in the nick of time before the beginning of the rains, the breach in the Mohne Dam was closed. We were thus able to collect the precipitation of the late autumn and winter of 1943 for the needs of the following summer." (Inside the Third Reich p.281)

 

From Royal Air Force Air Power Review Volume 7 No 1 Spring 2004


The effect in Germany
Breaching the Möhne and Eder dams unleashed huge amounts of water. At the Möhne 116 million cubic metres of water escaped within the first 12 hours (approximately 88% of the total contents of the reservoir) while at the Eder, 154 million cubic metres of water were lost (approximately 76% of
its total contents). Downstream of the Möhne, in addition to the damage done to its two electricity
generating stations, significant damage was inflicted by the passage of the flood-water. Bridges
were destroyed up to 50 km away and buildings up to 65 km away.

The official German figures give the final death toll for the Möhne as 1,294 killed or missing while
11 factories and 92 houses were destroyed, 971 houses and 32 farms damaged, 2,822 hectares of
farmland made useless with a further 1,221 hectares damaged, and over 6,300 cattle and swine
killed. In addition, nearly 50 road and railway bridges were damaged and several kilometers43 of
railway embankment required repair. On top of this, a large number of power or pumping stations
and gas or water supplies were damaged44.

The results below the Eder caused less loss of life. Only 47 people were killed, but the effects reached
far from the dam. Floods requiring the use of boats for mobility were recorded up to 140 kilometers
away and the damage to the river system was considerable: both the Rivers Fulda and Weser had to be dredged to restore them for navigation.

Over 5 km of riverbank needed rebuilding and 50 hectares of land was made unusable. It is worthwhile
to digress at this point on the morality of this attack and the legality of the target. By today’s standards the collateral damage, the loss of non-combatant life would be unacceptable: the current RAF would not countenance attacking such a target. But in 1943 high levels of civilian casualties were part and parcel of the strategic bombing offensive. The need to aim at city centres because bombing accuracy was insufficient to allow anything else was bound to mean significant levels of collateral damage. The civilian casualties caused by Operation CHASTISE would be eclipsed within 3 months by the Battle of Hamburg. On the night of 27-28 July 1943, Bomber Command’s incendiary attack raised a firestorm, which within 30 minutes, had covered 22 sq km of the city. The exact casualty numbers will never be ascertained but figures of 40,000 killed with a similar number of injured seem likely45. In such a climate, the loss of around 1,300 lives was considered entirely acceptable in the pursuit of the disruption of German industry;

Harris even defended the results of the attack on Hamburg:
“In spite of all that happened at Hamburg, bombing proved a comparatively humane method. For one thing, it saved the flower of the youth of this country and of our allies from being mown down by the military in the field, as it was in Flanders in the war of 1914-1918.”46

Albert Speer who had responsibility for the German war economy as Minister of Armament and War Production led the German response to the raid. He flew from Berlin the following morning to inspect the damage, initially from the air.

Speer recorded that the flooding of the valley below the Möhne had caused the “seemingly insignificant but grave consequence that the electrical installations at the pumping stations were soaked and muddied, so that industry was brought to a standstill”.47 He rapidly mobilised manpower to repair the damage: 7,000 men were diverted from constructing defences on the Atlantic Wall to repair the dams.
Sweetman48 records that a further 20,000 workers, again many of them drawn from the Todt
Organization’s workers on the Atlantic Wall, were diverted to help with the clean-up. It seems likely,
therefore, that a total of over 10,000 construction workers were diverted from constructing defences
against the invasion of Europe, which would occur the following year for a period of several months.
What impact might the fortifications that they would otherwise have built, have had on that invasion? In addition to construction workers, both military and civilian specialists of many types were involved in the clean-up operation.

In order to restore electricity and water supplies in the Ruhr, Speer ordered the requisitioning of electric motors and the importation of experts from elsewhere in Germany regardless of the consequences. His aim was to restore armament production in the Ruhr to half-production within one week and to full production within two weeks49. While this did not represent the total or prolonged suspension of production that Wallis and others had hoped for, it did represent the loss of three-eighths of the Ruhr’s monthly production: not an insignificant achievement considering that it takes no account of production losses elsewhere caused by the concentration of efforts into the Ruhr.Any attempt to quantify the actual production losses caused by the raid is fraught with difficulty. At this stage of the war, the German economy was (surprisingly) still transforming itself onto a war footing and output was rising rapidly so
production losses are difficult to show definitively. What can be shown is that water production in the
Ruhr dropped by 75% in the aftermath of the raid and took six weeks to return to normal levels, Ruhr
steel production of over 300,000 tonnes was lost in both May and June (normal production loss was
less than 100,000 tonnes per month) and gas availability fell by 50%.50

Commentators have argued that this did not represent a good return on the training time invested in preparation for the raid or on the lives of the aircrew lost. The flying hours put into training for Operation CHASTISE were approximately equivalent to those taken up in a 500-bomber raid on the Ruhr, yet CHASTISE caused far more damage than any normal raid. No normal raid halved the Ruhr’s production for a week and, at a 4.7% loss rate51, a 500 aircraft raid would have expected to lose 23 or 24 aircraft
compared to Operation CHASTISE’s eight: for the effect achieved the loss was acceptable, if heavy to
bear for a single squadron. Another rapid response to the raid was the strengthening of defences around German dams. The level of commitment can be illustrated by reference to the Eder dam. A total of 48 barrage balloons, nine searchlights, six rocket-launching vehicles, 36 anti-aircraft guns varying in calibre from 20-88 mm and a smokescreen system were provided. In addition, there was an infantry
company to guard against parachute attacks so that up to 1,500 men were tied up in protecting
one dam. Taking all the German dams into account 10,000 front-line troops were involved, the
equivalent of a full division that could not be employed elsewhere.52 The final effect, and surely not one that the Allied planners intended, was that on German air plans. Hitler was furious: an entry in the Reich’s Propaganda Ministry’s log recorded: “The Führer is extremely angry and impatient at the inadequacy of our defensive measures”53 and he blamed the Luftwaffe for failing to prevent the attack. This failure reinforced Hitler’s prejudices about air power; he did not believe that an effective defence
against bombing could be mounted. He refused to allow the Messerschmitt Me-262 to be developed
as a pure fighter (a role in which it was pre-eminent) instead insisting that it be developed as a
fighter-bomber.

 

Informative stuff, as ever.
Is it possible to quantify the effect high quality crews/crew-members amongst the less experienced could have on the massed Bomber formations? Would these men on the dams raid have been flying in pathfinder and other specialist roles anyway? The impression I've always had was that training was one of the most useful roles for highly experienced crewmen.
In context, maybe the raid was less of a risky gamble when balanced against the extremely high loss rates in Bomber Command, regardless of whether a raid was 'conventional' or specialist.
This is imponderable territory, some questions just can't be answered.
Trickyone this. It's always said that they were the best of the best, but several of the men picked were only just into their first tour of duty, whilst the rest had either completed and were onto their second or third, and there were a lot of medals in evidence. Yes they were good, but some of them them were just starting. It was the training that went into it. Standing orders were that all bombers on navs were to fly OVER the pylons near to Scampton. It became common practice to fly the Lancs under the pylon lines. Also at the Derwent (and it never has been found out which crew was responsible) one Lanc was at the designated 60 feet above the water and running into the Derwent Dam, when another Lanc flew underneath it then climbed in front of it's nose and took tail. That's the level of flying skill the training produced.


My personal impressions so far are:
The tactical (or maybe 'technical') achievement was very great.
The Strategic effect was probably negligible.
The Propaganda effect is unmeasurable.
The raid was worth it ... though so many factors come into play I still find it hard to fully justify why.
I'm just glad I'm not the poor bastard Air-Marshal that would have to make these brain-meltingly difficuilt decisions in a time of total war.

Book recommendations anyone?
Either Specific to the raid, or perhaps concentrating on how decisions were made at the highest strategic levels of all arms. Read a fair few memoirs by Staff officers but this is making me realise I could do with some more 'scholarly' works on military decision making without the "it wasn't me" blame-laying usually found in personal accounts.

Cheers,
Adam
Anything by Sweetman, the best of the writers, but very detailed and dry. I've yet to get through his book. There is the new Barnes Wallis's Bombs which is a damn good read on the development of all four bombs. And The Men Who Breached the Dams by Alan Cooper and The Dambusters by Paul Brickhill, both very lighthearted look at the actual crews and their antics. All worth a read, and if you can find it Dambusters Away.

 

This link is worth looking at.


http://www.dambusters.org.uk/index.htm

 

Ooh! That's changed since the last time I visited there.