The Dam busters - Sort of

[Helldiver]

Look, I watched an unfortunate thing on Nova. These clowns got a DC-7, a Lake in Canada, bunch of cast cement barriers and a welding touch. These nuts are all in their sixties. At night they'd get plastered on beer and sing the Dam Busters March. "Dah-dah the dah daddy dah..."
Your right Bunky. They're about to re-enact Guy Gibson's famous feat. The more or less build a leaky dam at one end of the lake and try mightily to drop a bomb. on it. Course the first thing was to get the bomb spinning. Once they got that solved they realized that the bomb has to be balanced. Then they noticed that the splash from the bomb almost hit the tail. Altitude was a best guess on the part of the pilot. This comedy of errors goes on with daily nightly singing. They even start to harmonize. Even the rest of the bar joins in, with toasts to Barnes Wallis and a tip of the hat to Micheal Redgrave.
They even got a 90 year old survivor of the raid. He was quite out of it and couldn't understand why these Canadian blokes were bothering him.
"You say I did what?"
Suffice to say even when they happen to get an unbalanced bomb, flying at fifty feet instead of the recommended eighty. the pilot drops it too late and scored a perfect hit on the dam. Just as well they did. I begun to hate the Dam Busters March.
Not recommended for children. - Or adults for that matter.

[weeebbz]

i think what you watched was a special epiosde of Ice Pilots NWT which is about a canadian airline in the north west territoires flying DC-4's C-47's C-46's and L-188 Electra's.

[Lewis-A2A]

Sounds like the dambuster documentary. I thought it was really well made, and really pressed home the message of just how hard it was to do. The professor in it is a cambridge expert and even to him, with all the knowledge it was still very very very hard to re-produce.

If you mean this;

gJz5UdWQv-U

[ronvking]

Seems Helldiver saw a different version than I did, like Lewis I though it was an excellent program. The pilot knew what he was doing and due to his fire fighting background judged the heights as planned and unable to use lights as they did it in daylight.

[LCBORDEN]

I watched the nova special "Bombing Hitler's Dams" and I was impressed mostly with the ability of this 60-ish (probably 70) pilot (30,000+ hours) flying a DC6 altered cargo version to eyeball 50 ft altitude over an extremely calm lake, at 250 IAS, line up his approach over "Pool" floats painted orange, and hit a trench 100 feet wide on the first try "KA-SMACK" . Nova and the Cambridge professor nut working all this out, were quite sure to repeatedly say how difficult it was for the 617 squadron to do this under combat conditions.
Another point of interest was actual film footage of how trial and error arrived at the ideal altitude to drop the real 8,000 pound drum bombs. A few aircrew sacrificed themselves doing this, for what $165.00 a month back then. My hat off to the "Real Men" of the RAF that stood up, took their orders, and did the job. A dedication to country,family,and comrades that stands the test of time. It (Nova) spedial was certainly done like a comedy of errors though, not overally funded for sure.


Ol' Jarhead :wavey:

[Helldiver]

Youse guys haven't any sense of humor. I'll be needing some pall bearers pretty soon. You guys busy?

[PRB]

DC-4... That was a fun show.

[Eoraptor1]

I saw it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/bombing-hitler-dams.html

Not always easy to convey humor over the internet.

JAMES

PS Next week Nova will be "3D Spies of WWII".

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/spies-3d.html

[FlameOut]

I'll be needing some pall bearers pretty soon. You guys busy?

Keep your ol' arse here. I enjoy your feisty, unfiltered way of thinking :salute: :salute: :salute:

[PRB]

You people ever see that show “Junkyard Wars”? Well, this NOVA episode was like Junkyard wars with a huge budget, and with real engineers. I loved how they built an “altitude measurement gauge” with sticks and string (it worked), and how they went out to the local Wall Mart to get kid's bright colored floaty toys to mark the approach path to the target (that worked too), and how Arnie, the 34,000 hr Buffalo Airways pilot nailed the tiny dam, even though he dropped the “bomb” from too low, and got his DC-4 wet from the splash, which could have been a disaster... Good stuff.

[Lewis-A2A]

If the 3d spies documentary is operation crossbow another British documentary, then once again I cant recommend it enough. Fascinating seeing how aerial photography was secretly converted to 3d in the 40's and esp how this led to them making out the rockets, and tell tale shapes, launch rails etc of the V1 and V2. Plus of course plenty of PRU spitfire footage which is always a bonus.

[Helldiver]

Hell. we had 3D as far back as the 1910s. Nothing new about that. You looked at them with a hand held Strereo Opticon. It was taken with a camera with two lenses about the same as the interpupillarly distance of a pair of eyes. My Library had one. Maybe some of you old codgers might even remember them. Although pretty out dated, it still was interesting. By WWII it was old hat.

[Lateral-G]

Guess you saw a different show than I did. I thought it was pretty cool. Especially when you consider the technical challenges the RAF was presented with.

My wife asked me why they were doing it and I told her they were trying to re-create a key piece of history and learn how the RAF solved the problem without the benefit of modern technology.

I actually learned something I hadn't known regarding the height of the splash when the bomb hit the water and the danger to the aircraft from it. In fact it caused significant damage to one of the Lancasters during their practice runs. That Buffalo pilot has some pretty good skills to hit the target on the first pass....some pretty mad skilz.....

I think how long it would take them to go from idea to implementation today. Those engineers and pilots pulled off a tremendous accomplishment in a very short period of time.

[PRB]

At first I was confused a little. "What the big deal"? I thought, the USAAF 3rd Attack Group B-25s and A-20s were skipping plain old regular bombs into Japanese transports without any fancy spinning bomb systems for months. Just fly low and drop the darned thing, it'll skip! But after watching this program, I suppose the RAF had a different problem to solve. They had to get the bomb, not only to skip over the anti-torpedo net, but stop skipping and sink down to "detonation depth" and remain close to the wall. 500lb bombs simply exploding against the side of the dam, above water, wouldn't have had much dam effect. Good stuff.

[johannesl]

I too found the Nova program interesting and will be watching the one on 3D spys as my job is something akin to that. By the way the kind of photography they used in WWII and still used today is one camera, one lens, taking one 9" by 9" picture at a time with an overlap of 60 percent to get the proper stereo effect. It's tricky doing this in a single engine Cessna with a cameraman to handle some of the work, but alone in a PR Spit or F-4/5 (P-38) with flak and fighters trying to kill you it's impressive. Then someone on the ground has to view those pictures and make sense of the unknown such as V1 launch rails and V2 rockets that no ones seen before.

[PRB]

I remember those stereoscope viewers. Used em in science class when I was a wee lad. Were photos taken of the moon for use with these devices? I think it was moon pics I was looking at. Been a while. I remember being amazed at the magic 3D effect.

[browngib]

Look, I watched an unfortunate thing on Nova. These clowns got a DC-7, a Lake in Canada, bunch of cast cement barriers and a welding touch. These nuts are all in their sixties. At night they'd get plastered on beer and sing the Dam Busters March. "Dah-dah the dah daddy dah..."
Your right Bunky. They're about to re-enact Guy Gibson's famous feat. The more or less build a leaky dam at one end of the lake and try mightily to drop a bomb. on it. Course the first thing was to get the bomb spinning. Once they got that solved they realized that the bomb has to be balanced. Then they noticed that the splash from the bomb almost hit the tail. Altitude was a best guess on the part of the pilot. This comedy of errors goes on with daily nightly singing. They even start to harmonize. Even the rest of the bar joins in, with toasts to Barnes Wallis and a tip of the hat to Micheal Redgrave.
They even got a 90 year old survivor of the raid. He was quite out of it and couldn't understand why these Canadian blokes were bothering him.
"You say I did what?"
Suffice to say even when they happen to get an unbalanced bomb, flying at fifty feet instead of the recommended eighty. the pilot drops it too late and scored a perfect hit on the dam. Just as well they did. I begun to hate the Dam Busters March.
Not recommended for children. - Or adults for that matter.




It is unfortunate that a person of your mature age did not recognize that they were trying to confirm the genius of Barnes Wallis all with limited time, budget and background. Just after this the RAF finally created a larger, more powerful Lancaster to hold a 20,000 pound Earthquake bomb (invented by Barnes Wallis) to demolish the submarine pens of the French Coast. Barnes Wallis was a brilliant scientist engineer. Guy Gibson and his squadron were a brave group of aviators. I am sure Guy never thought he would be awarded the Victoria Cross nor did he think he would lose his life a short time later on a routine mission. I did note that the research done by the group was incomplete and in error in several places. The most obvious was where the narrator said "Guy Gibson received his VC from the Queen." It was King George VI. Princess Elizabeth was about 18 at the time of the mission and Queen Elizabeth (wife of King George and mother of Queen Elizabeth II) did not award medals at investitures at Buckingham Palace.

In this age they could have added a Radar Altimeter to the old prop plane since they didn't fly at night.

Gilbert E. "Gib" Brown, Jr.
Commander, U. S. Coast Guard (Retired)
Coast Guard Aviator #795, Helo Pilot #395
Member, Coast Guard Aviation Hall of Honor

[Helldiver]

No disrespect of Barnes Wallis. None intended. It just that a bunch of half-baked guys got tegether and tried to copy what Guy Gibson had accomplished. They were flying the wrong plane using a differnet weapon in daylight. I've since watched it a second time and the bomb skipped right over the "Dam". But they blew it up for the hell of it. Just from an Engineers viewpoint the whole business was a lark. Some guys have no sense of humor.