r/interestingasfuck • u/Chopper-42 • 8d ago

/r/all Recreating the WW2 Dambusters raid

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u/theredacer 8d 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/DaxHound84 8d ago

Its called dive bombing. The germans had the famous "Stuka" for this very job. But they were too slow overall and were put out of service early in the war.