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The Dam Busters

The first Wallis-designed 'earthquake' bomb was the 12000lb (5 tonne) Tallboy. The Grand Slam was 22000 lb (nearly 10 tonnes) and I think its first major successes were the destruction of the Bielefelde viaduct and the Saumur railway tunnel (which stopped the Wehrmacht moving Panzer reinforcements by train to the Channel coast after D-Day).
There's a Grand Slam at Cosford Museum - it's big! The amazing thing is that if a crew couldn't locate the target they were ordered to return and land with the un-dropped Grand Slam still on board, because they were so expensive and time-consuming to produce. Not even the B29 Superfortress had the lifting capability to carry one.

I've got the Paul Brickhill book. It was the first published account of the Dams Raid, and in novel rather than documentary form, with imagined conversations between the characters (something I can't stand in a 'history' book). There are much better, more recent, books about the Dam Busters - a search on Amazon will locate them.

I was working for Foseco Ltd at Borken, not far from the Dutch border, a bit in the middle of nowhere. That was in the days when the Luftwaffe and other European air-forces flew the dodgy European-built F104 Lockheed Starfighter. The Germans I worked with had learned to recognise the sound of them approaching, and visibly flinched, as many Starfighters, being faulty, flew into the ground.......

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I had to look on the map for Borken, it's not a place I'd heard of but it doesn't look to far from Muenster, where I was posted for a while. The last few years of my time in Germany were in the Sauerland which was a training area. The hated Starfighter used to maneouver over the town and made a hideous screeching sound as they did so. I remember at the time they used to be called the "Flying Coffin".
 
I said Borken is in the middle of nowhere! Like a lot of small German towns, it closed down at around 9.00pm. The guy who took me to see the Mohne Dam wasn't very clued up about what happened the night of the Dams Raid, but I don't think he was a local; I remember him telling me that it would probably have been subject to a news blackout in Nazi Germany at the time.

I can remember seeing a Starfighter at a Gaydon Air Display in the early 1960's, and couldn't help but be impressed. Fortunately it was a US-built one. I just googled it, and was surprised to learn that it was still on active service with the Italian Air Force in 2004.

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I have found a picture of one of the bombs
Captured_Bouncing_Bomb-HU_62922.jpg


A German official stands next to an unexploded, British Upkeep bouncing bomb. The weapon was recovered from the wreckage of Avro Lancaster ED927/G 'AJ-E', piloted by Flt Lt Barlow. The aircraft crashed at 2350 hours on 16 May 1943 after striking power lines 5km east of Rees, Germany. All on board were killed.
 
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