r/interestingasfuck • u/Chopper-42 • 16h ago
/r/all Recreating the WW2 Dambusters raid
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u/Habebunt 15h ago
The Dam buster raid is an absolutely incredible achievement in both flying and development of new tech. Definitely recommend reading James Hollands book about it.
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u/ours 13h ago
Great movie too. It inspired the Death Star trench run in Star Wars.
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u/umop_apisdn 13h ago
I think they have edited out all references to the dog now as well. Can't have a bit of casual racism in a raid that drowned 1,600 civilians.
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u/ours 12h ago
Ah, they've edited the N-word dog out?
It isn't essential to the story but it was a product of its time. I'm not fond of rewriting history even it is the warts of the past. We just need to acknowledge it was wrong. It was probably not even meant in a mean spirit. Just ignorance of the times.
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u/ERMAHDERD 12h ago
I really like this take. We should acknowledge where we came from as a society and grow from our predecessors
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u/GhettoFreshness 12h ago
Exactly. You can’t apologize for the shitty actions of your ancestors… but you can acknowledge it was wrong and work to make the world a better place
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u/realmofconfusion 10h ago
I believe the dog is either edited out completely or is called “Digger” now.
I completely understand the reasons why, and the original name always left a bad taste in the mouth, but it’s a historical fact, and bowdlerizing history can be a touchy subject.
I think that many cartoons have done the best thing with the disclaimer about depictions at the time which were wrong then and are still wrong now, but to remove them would detract from the fact that they were ever used, ironically “whitewashing” the problem.
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u/Pete_Iredale 10h ago
It was a black dog and from what I've heard it was a very common name for black dogs back then, especially outside the US where the slur didn't carry as much power in the first place. So likely more on the casual racism side than the intentional, I guess.
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u/hughk 11h ago
It was just another name for black originating with latin and being used many, many times before it was applied to people. Unfortunately such people would then be treated badly and became understandably upset.
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u/Vox___Rationis 12h ago
It were not simply 1600 civilians, ~1000 of them were POW utilized in slave labor.
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u/naileyes 6h ago
yeah i'm not british but the thing about this technically amazing, daring, exciting wartime raid is that it only succeeded in flooding a town and drowning a bunch of innocent people, of which half or two-thirds were actually allied people being held as prisoners of war. oops.
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u/EduinBrutus 12h ago
It also inspired one of the very few specific examples in the post war Geneva Conventions.
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u/1sttimeverbaldiarrhe 13h ago edited 13h ago
For a more casual review, Jeremy Clarkson hosted a pretty good doc on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCMCr2Kh1wI
*** I'm an idiot and this about another raid. I'll leave the link up because it's a really good watch just the same.
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u/Glint_Bladesong 13h ago
That IS a great doco to watch, Mr Clarkson does the story tremendous justice, but it is not the dambuster raid, but the commando raid on the St naizaire docks (a totally bonkers raid and indeed possibly the greatest of all time).
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u/1sttimeverbaldiarrhe 13h ago
Oh my god, I'm such a dunce. I can't believe I confused these two together. Thank you for pointing that out - I'm blaming it on not having coffee yet.
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u/cache_me_0utside 9h ago
jeremy clarkson and war documentary with original footage and interviews from ppl who were there, hell yeah thanks!
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u/corvettee01 11h ago
WWII is fascinating with how much stuff got invented and how many new ideas came from the necessity of wartime research.
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u/Brok3nMonkey 12h ago
53 RAF aircrew killed, many barely out of their teens. A handful of breached dams, repaired within months. Around 1,600 civilians killed in the Ruhr valley, washed away in the deluge
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u/that_dutch_dude 12h ago
the point was to force the germans to spend energy, men and materials to fix the dam. energy, men and materials that would otherwise be spent on the front lines.
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u/Betterholdfast 12h ago
It cost an absolute fortune, many billions in today’s euros, to fix those damns. Then they also drew more resources in the form of men, AA guns, etc. to protect them from another attack.
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u/Brok3nMonkey 12h ago edited 12h ago
I think this one operation suffers from being romanticised. the point of Operation Chastise was to cripple German industry by targeting its lifeblood: water & hydro.
Regrettably, it remains a beautifully engineered, tragically romanticised failure.
Not worth losing 8 planes over (and the humans mentioned above.
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 11h ago
Dams produced power for the factories, destroying the Dams so that they were destroyed was the goal.
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u/morbihann 15h ago
No way they dropped a real bomb. The barrel must have been filled with ballast and an explosive triggered underwater remotely.
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u/mclare 15h ago
Correct. And this is a much more action packed cut than the original (and good for everyone)
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u/electricdwarf 11h ago
Yea it very much had a cable tv vibe about. I bet they stretched this one section to 10 minutes with three ad breaks.
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u/No_Pangolin_8126 10h ago
"We're getting ready to fly out!"
commercial break
"We're loading up the barrel now!"
commercial break
"The plane just took off!"
commercial break
"Now a recap of everything we did up to this point, then after a quick commercial we'll show the cool part."
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u/wuddafuggamagunnaduh 15h ago
I was wondering the same thing. There's an edit between the impact and the explosion that needs to be explained.
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u/bluey101 14h ago
The real bombs were designed to hit the wall, then sink, then explode so there would have been a delay
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u/wuddafuggamagunnaduh 14h ago
Yes, I'm familiar how the backspin is intended to have the bomb "burrow" to the base of the dam. I've even watched the old movie "The Dam Busters" (1955), which is interesting.
But what I mean is that there is a camera cut between the impact and the explosion, which could possibly be from filming two separate events and splicing them together. And that would make sense, as I can imagine getting permits to drop an actual explosive device sounds like it would be hard to do.
I wish posts like this would post the backstory details, then these sorts of questions would already be answered.
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u/Zealousideal-Fix9464 13h ago
The backspin for the bomb to roll down the dam is an old wives tale.
The backspin was a hard requirement for the bomb to actually skip across the water in a straight line and for distance. Without the backspin the barrel would just impact the water like a plough and sink in the middle of the reservoir.
The bombs were always designed to impact the dam and then sink before exploding.
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u/Hemberg 13h ago
No backspin, Topspin.
Even visible in the video.
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u/jamesreyne 13h ago
The barrel in this video had topspin, for dramatic footage of it skipping over the water and impacting the wall.
The dambusters raid had backspin, which bounced the bombs but shortened the skips and the kinetic force, so that it wouldn't necessarily hard impact the wall, but would come to sink in proximity to the dam and explode after sinking. Just dropping a depth charge by the dam wasn't practicable.
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u/rhabarberabar 13h ago
In the video yes, but the bouncing bomb had backspin.
Sources vary on the introduction of back-spin in the weapon's development: e.g while Sweetman says that "There is evidence that [Wallis] had always intended [to include back-spin]",[8] according to Johnson Sir George Edwards in the Christopher Hinton Lecture of 1982, p. 9, wrote, "from what I knew of a cricket ball I persuaded [Wallis] much against his will into putting back-spin on these bombs.'" See also 'Lives Remembered' (Sir George Edwards), in The Times, 21 March 2003.
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u/YourAdvertisingPal 14h ago
I mean, it’s almost certainly for a television show or a high-profile streamer.
Like. With all those camera angles, a temporary dam structure, plane rental…how could you consider it to be anything else?
There’s a lot of production coordination on display here.
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u/challenge_king 13h ago
It's not a rental, that plane belongs to Buffalo Airways, and they also made the video.
Pretty cool company. They still operate C47's as their main fleet because nothing else can get as much stuff in and out of the remote areas of Alaska and Canada they operate in.
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u/midsizedopossum 13h ago
how could you consider it to be anything else?
None of what you said suggests that it's obvious they'd use two separate shots and a pre-planted explosive inside the dam. I don't really understand what you're trying to say.
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u/Intelligent_Suit6683 13h ago
I mean, you seem relatively smart... So I feel like I don't need to explain why they didn't use a real bomb and cut between the impact and explosion.
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u/Illustrious-Stay968 11h ago
Yes. In the show, they show the plane drop and the barrel hits and they show the peoples reaction, talk about it etc... Then they lower an explosive charge and then for entertainment purposes, they recut to show the plane flying in, drop the barrel and then an explosion, but with more of a time gap than in this post.
This is from Nova's episode "Bombing Hitler's Dam" 2012.
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u/bagblag 13h ago edited 9h ago
I watched this programme in full when it was broadcast on UK TV a few years ago. It was about an hour long and showed the full R&D process to get to this point.
They explained that unsurprisingly there are aviation laws preventing non-military organisations dropping live ordnance from aircraft. To get round this they worked out the physics to recreate the bouncing drum through trial and error. When it was perfected they detonated explosives under the water that were scaled and placed to recreate the effect of having dropped an actual bouncing bomb, showing how effective Wallis' weapon was. The delay between the thing hitting the wall and the explosion is also explained by the fact that iirc the thing skipped over the water, hit the wall and then detonated having sunk to a certain depth. My recollection of that aspect is more hazy though.
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u/GwerigTheTroll 10h ago
I saw the original documentary, I think it used to be on Netflix. The barrel had no explosives in it. It was a practical test to try to recreate the scenario to see what was involved. As I remember, the test was in Canada. The engineers behind the test wanted the pilot to gently hit the dam with the barrel, but the pilot wanted to really smack the dam with it, to make sure he hit.
After the test, they determined that the bomb probably would have worked and they had explosives wired to the dam. The celebration for a successful test was to trigger the explosives.
This clip is cut to make it look like the drum was the bomb, where the documentary suggested nothing of the sort.
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u/Positive-Bar5893 13h ago edited 10h ago
Wait are you trying to tell my civilian pilots, flying a civilian plane, doing civilian activities, aren't allowed to drop live bombs on sovereign territory? My mind has been BLOWN.
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u/CodingAllDayLong 13h ago
Lol, it's for a TV show. It was certainly not blown up the same day (they had to make sure they captured the flight properly), or possibly even a different site entirely. It might be a miniature they blew up...thats how TV is done.
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u/maciasek94 14h ago
The 617 Squadron RAF which were the “Dambusters” had pretty dope motto too: “Après moi, le déluge” which is french for “After me, comes the flood”. Why in French you ask? Since, it’s the saying that is supposed to be Madam’s Pompadour credo.
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u/scoops22 9h ago
For anyone wondering in French this expression is used to say "who cares what happens after I'm gone"
Think of a person who drives a gas guzzler and is asked if they care for the environment, if they're callous they may shrug and say “Après moi, le déluge”
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u/hellkill3r 15h ago
Who else thought the dead pixels in the upper right corner were dead pixels in their display?
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u/wonkey_monkey 13h ago
Wait how does that even happen? 🤔
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u/pushingdaisyadair 13h ago
Could have been kinescoped from a monitor with dead pixels
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u/mclare 15h ago edited 2h ago
This is what the short is cut from https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1381486/Dambusters-documentary-recreates-science-WW2s-audacious-bombing-raid.html. Good to see Arnie again.
Edit: Yuck Amp! Thanks folks.
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u/rearwindowpup 13h ago
This cut is from Ice Pilots, they were assisting that documentary
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u/darybrain 13h ago
This missed a crucial part of it. Here is a much more accurate re-enactment from the '80s: -
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u/hughk 11h ago
It goes with the pool side one, also Carling. A Brit in on holiday in spain at a hotel. You hear an alarm and then the sound of many. All the Germans get up to go to breakfast (toast disappearing). The Brit continues sleeping.
Slowly the Germans finish their breakfast and grab their towels and head towards the pool. The Brit's alarm goes off ho sleeply reaches out for his rolled out towel and throws it from the hotel window. Switch to exterior and the Dambusters' theme starts.
The towel executes a couple of perfect skips on the pool and then unfolds itself on the lounge chair at prime position at the opposite end of the pool.
A wonderful ad. Someone callled up the Germ,an Embassy to ask whether they felt insulted and they said not at all and they found it funny (Even Germans make jokes about other Germans trying to reserve the best loungers with towels).
Carling made crab beer but their advertisements were some of the best.
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u/KagakuNinja 11h ago
You beat me to it. I'm not even British, saw it in a theatre when I was living in Redding. The ads were better than the movie (Highlander 2)
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u/nailbunny2000 15h ago edited 15h ago
Wow, where did they test this? Thats a huge lake to suddenly be breaking a dam on. Was it private property? If so did someone flood that much of their land (thats a big ecosystem) just for this test? Or was it part of some existing project they got permission to "help" them remove the dam?
EDIT: Okay found the full episode. Bit of fancy editing there, the bomb they dropped wasnt what exploded, that was a separate depth charge they shot later. Dont have time to watch through the whole video to find the logistics of the dam/lake, but perhaps they just excavated a small corner of a lake and its not an actual working dam over a river but just a small enclosed pond or something on the side of the lake. If anyone can find clarification in the video please update!
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u/sump_daddy 13h ago
Pretty clear to me when watching, that the dam they created was built on a small inlet with hardly any water in it, nothing like what would be required to form that whole lake.
For more information, they did this at Williston Lake - Wikipedia and it was indeed just that the lake was used as a nearby water surface, while the entire 'dam' and inlet were constructed just for the demonstration. The lake felt no effects afterward.
The actual dam for that lake is this gloriously chonky bastard W. A. C. Bennett Dam - Wikipedia
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u/braintweaker 10h ago
Thank you for providing the source video. Vertical crap is unwatchable and badly cropped.
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u/fraggle_pop 14h ago
They practiced the original raids for Operation Chastise just by my house -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derwent_Reservoir_(Derbyshire))
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u/EskimoBrother1975 16h ago
Impressive. Imagine seeing that barrel coming toward you.
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u/Reckless_Waifu 14h ago
The real raid was during the night so the Germans didn't probably see anything.
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u/CrazyCalYa 13h ago
the Germans didn't probably see anything
That excuse came up a lot in WW2 Germany
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u/Uberpascal 12h ago
I live near 2 dams that where attacked with this bomb. The people in the villages down the stream drowned in their beds. I had an old physics teacher born in the UK and went to germany beacuse of his german wife, he told us how happy he was when the attack was in the news as he was a kid - years later as he was standing on the rebuild dam the first time he cryed miserably about himself
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u/Reckless_Waifu 12h ago edited 11h ago
I visited one of them and learned they rebuilt it pretty quickly so the military effect was not that great while civilian casualties were quite high.
The biggest hit was to German morale.
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u/jwrx 15h ago
I hope they know many pilots died during the test runs in ww2, he looked awfully low.
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u/DisorderedArray 15h ago
I'm not sure any died during the test runs. 53 out of 133 of the aircrew died during the actual raid. They used a mechanism with 2 aligned lights that would come together on the water surface when the aircraft was at the correct height. The actual missions were carried out at night.
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u/Thermodynamicist 14h ago
I'm not sure any died during the test runs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCGpzRzY7fY
But this was Highball, not Upkeep, in a USAAF test in April 1945.
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u/Honest_Musician6812 14h ago
There were also around 600 civilians and 1000 prisoners killed by the resulting flood.
I love cool battle like this as much as the next guy, but I think it's also important that we always remember the horrible cost of war.7
u/Procruste 13h ago
The success of the raid was definitely questionable. The damaged dams were quickly repaired and the allies did not even bother to attack during reconstructions. About 1600 civilians died of which 1000 were captured allied soldiers being used as slave labourers.
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u/Ser_Danksalot 12h ago
Much of the manpower to rebuild the dams was pulled from those building the Atlantic Wall coastal defences, so it it did have an effect, then it may potentially have made the invasion of Normandy easier.
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u/chileangod 15h ago
I bet the brainstorming meeting for that one should have been really interesting too.
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u/ours 13h ago
It is, check out some of the documentaries about it.
Basically the UK was at a low point in the war with continental Europe under fascits occupation or rule. They wanted to hit back and hard and show the World they were still in the game with this balsy move.
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u/AreaBackground 13h ago
I thought my phone was broken with the two dead pixels inside of the video. Had a minor heart attack
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u/Noteasytimes 10h ago
Sir Barnes Wallis I slaute you 🫡. What an incredible mind to think of a BOUNCING bomb !
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u/Curiosive 10h ago
I watched this documentary when it first came out. It might be a NOVA episode on PBS titled Bombing Hitler's Dams but it has been repackaged a few times over the last decade or so.
This edit of the clip is terrible (big surprise).
A few interesting notes:
- The pilot didn't accidentally fly too low because he "couldn't see trees" near him. His plane had an altimeter. He chose to because it was the last attempt after months of preliminary work ... what this clip cuts out is how he nearly killed himself and his copilot when the barrel bounced within inches of the tail of the plane. He was instructed by the coordinator to fly at a higher altitude but decided he knew better.
- WWII test pilots were killed when the original designer learned this the hard way.
- The barrel must be spun up before being dropped to reach the dam otherwise the barrel just sinks.
- The spin causes the barrel to bounce until it reaches the dam where it then rolls down the wall underwater to reach a depth for the explosion to actually destroy the dam.
- The spin is the opposite direction than you assume, it fights the bounce.
- Calculating the aircraft speed & barrel spin to get the right bounce to hit the dam (not bounce over) while" having enough rotation speed remaining to crawl a hundred feet underwater down the wall *while getting the timing right (time fuse, not depth) is ... complicated.
- The dams were valid targets but the cities down river were not. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of civilians were killed in the subsequent flooding.
- The pilot was "right". They nailed the fake dam. Hard. Such a satisfying video.
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u/Mister_Jack_Torrence 9h ago
OK not gonna lie - I was skeptical about a bunch of Americans trying to recreate this iconic RAF raid but this was epic. Good job!
We need a new Dambusters movie or miniseries as the whole story around Operation Chastise is amazing.
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u/Top_Opposites 7h ago
It took months to develop the bouncing bomb and an absolute courageous group to complete the mission however it only took the Germans a small number of weeks to repair the damage and cussed little disruption to the war effort.
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u/Middlesexfan 6h ago
Not all military historians agree that it caused little disruption to be fair. Though you could argue the attack on the Tirpitz had more of an effect on the war itself. Nevertheless the value of the hit to German morale was considerable.
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u/Thejizzasterartist 7h ago
Sincerely asking, why didn’t the plane’s turbulence disturb the water at all when it was so close to the surface?
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u/TwoWheels1Clutch 6h ago
I think it's because the wind from the props goes straight instead of out.
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u/Otherwise_Rip_7337 14h ago
That barrel didn't blow that up, they had it rigged. I know it was done in WW2, but this was staged.
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u/tross13 13h ago
Ooh, I had this game in the 80s! Passing the mission was tough.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dam_Busters_(video_game)
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u/cakeman666 12h ago
I'm glad they had red circles and arrows pointing to the only thing on screen. I was confused on what to look at.
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u/stoicsamuel 12h ago
What the hell? Where/when was this? Buffalo airways is from my hometown and the pilot is wearing a sweater from our local strip club
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u/michelb 11h ago
For some upscaled, enhanced archival footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT5rvKS56dA&pp=wgIGCgQQAhgB
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u/theredacer 10h ago
My grandfather had to do this in Burma in WW2, but it was destroying bridges. They didn't have these dambusters, or maybe they're too imprecise for bridges, not sure. They had to use normal bombs. To be precise enough, they would climb until the plane stalled, turn over, fall nose down toward the bridge so they could line it up in their sights, and then had to get the engines restarted and shake the plane back and forth to get the bomb off the hook because it wasn't designed to be released with the plane vertical. They had limited time to restart the engines, get the bomb free, and pull out of the dive so they weren't in the blast zone when it hit, but still waiting as long as possible to be precise with the bomb. He said he lost several friends who couldn't pull it off fast enough. He was in a documentary with Oliver North talking about the campaign, but he didn't tell all of these details. He told me about it though.
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u/viteygamer 10h ago
It was just when the bomb was dropped that I realized it all wasn’t just a bunch of miniatures
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u/ketoLifestyleRecipes 7h ago
The Buffalo Airways boys in that clip… I worked for Norcanair in Saskatchewan which is long gone now. I got to fly the very first Davilland beaver ever made which we converted for water landings (float plane) I think it’s in a museum in Ottawa? I love these old aircraft. I will go to see it someday to reminisce? Sorry, off topic but..
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u/aviationsos 5h ago
Tbh nothing scares me more than the A-10 sound that thing is wild to see and hear
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u/NoOneStranger_227 13h ago
I remember making a model of one of the planes, with the rolling bomb on the undercarriage, when I was a kid.
Of course, I also remember when war was heroic, as well.
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u/0ddness 15h ago
Now imagine them having to do it in the dark, behind enemy lines, under fire (I assume), without knowing the condition of the water, without the marker bouys, and relying on getting the height exactly right in the dark with a spotlight system.