Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943 by Max Hastings reviewed

For obvious reasons, tales of Second World War daring sit prominently in the public consciousness at the present. The beaches, the Few, the Blitz spirit: they’re used almost daily to stake out the political landscape. As Britain’s sense of national identity feels increasingly attenuated, there is more “patriotic” writing around. Authors such as Damien Lewis make a good career by recasting history in a very modern guise: populist, calculated, and treading a somewhat perilous line between fiction and the facts they claim to portray. (One of the most cynical moments comes in the author’s note to his SAS Ghost Patrol when he ties himself in knots trying to justify the marketing-friendly “SAS” in the title when the book is really about the “Special Interrogation Group” or SIG.) Into that same marketplace lands Max Hasting’s newest book, though its ambitions are very different and extremely welcome.

Chastise tells the story of the Operation Chastise and “Upkeep”, the “bouncing bomb” that breached the Möhne and Edersee dams, made famous by The Dam Busters, the 1955 film starring Richard Todd and Michael Redgrave. As recalled in that film, it’s a tale straight from plucky old Blighty where technical wizardry is combined with the bravery of upstanding young men to pull off an audacious raid that played a significant role in shortening the war. It bears a more than slight resemblance to the plot of Star Wars Episode IV and for good reason. As an archetype, it’s utterly compelling.

While few war stories are so well known (certainly within the UK), at the same time even fewer are so poorly understood. Most of us will have learned the facts from the film, as well as learnt how to whistle the stirring theme tune. And that, really, is the problem. The film is so good at establishing one story that the real events are barely remembered. As Hasting says: “Much that we think we know is wrong.”

Hastings provides us, then, with a story that is altogether more rounded, more salient, and, ultimately, more rewarding for all its sobriety. Forget Richard Todd, shirt sleeves rolled up, smoothly shaved and with a bounce in his step as he leaps from the cockpit after his latest mission. Hasting’s version of Guy Gibson suffers an “inflamed foot condition” due to exhaustion. He is as sensitive as he is resolute; a figure made harder to know through subsequent media manipulation, censorship, and revisionism, notably around his dog-with-the-problematic-name. The dog-with-the-problematic-name is still here but as an adjunct to the commander-with-the-problematic-nature.

Already suffering physically from a long tour when asked to undertake one extra mission, Gibson is a man whose virtues are betrayed by his vices; his quick temper, sometimes callous treatment of the men beneath him, as well as his numerous infidelities. “Casual anti-semitism” is more than hinted at, including one unpleasant incident recounted by Gibson himself at the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1940 when he angrily turns on “an old man who looked like a rich Jew”. That doesn’t mean he’s not sympathetic but, like so much of the story, he was shaped by the brutal complexities of war in which bomber pilots shared with submariners the highest casualty rates.

These were extremely young men, inexperienced in most things except the science of killing from altitude. Given the scale of the losses, the number of individual sacrifices, it makes it hard to know them beyond the cursory (often touching) details. It leaves Barnes Wallace as the only character who remains close to his fictional self. There’s little here that is too incongruous with Michael Redgrave’s performance as the committed engineer, but Hastings does add important nuance. The film sets up a drama between a genius and a government dominated by a Blimp mentality, but here we see an Air Force firmly committed to his ideas – indeed, ambitious plans to bomb the dams preceded Wallace. The exception is Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of Bomber Command, whose doubts about the mission became an eagerness to claim the plaudits in light of its success.

This is all told effortlessly and moves more swiftly than Hasting’s more recent offering, his denser history of the Vietnam War. Unlike that book, Chastise can be read in one or two sittings and is a gripping retelling of a largely familiar tale. The chapters that cover the bombing are unsurprisingly the best parts. The raid is wonderfully recounted but where Hastings adds real value is around the aftermath. He looks at the consequences of the raid and quite rightly sets it inside the context of the broader moral complexity of the allied strategy. This was hardly an era of accurate bombing but Bomber Harris took what was already a blunt instrument and used it even more bluntly.

To the modern reader, the fire-bombing of Dresden can appear as morally questionable as the Nazis’ firebombing of Coventry. Both are the consequence of waging “total war” even if the politics and psychology differ enormously. It leads to surprising facts – the American fire-bombing of Japanese cities in 1945 killed far more civilians than did their nuclear strikes. Hastings is extremely deft on all this and admirably argues a case for the morality of the allied bombing campaign. At the same time, he stares uncompromisingly at reality. The destruction of the dams led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians, many of whom were foreign workers forced to work the land. It’s a side of the story absent from the film and our collective memory of its events.

Rather than representing a strategic victory, Hastings argues that the raid was a chance to raise morale at a time when Britain’s commitment to fighting the Germans was questioned by our allies. Again, it’s an important point that is rarely repeated.

He is also keen to point out that the plan to attack the dams was heavily reliant on their breeching the Sorpe, and by that measure it was a failure. The attackers dropped two Upkeep bombs on the target but the earthen construction of the dam was unsuited to this kind of attack. The bombs were not bounced in but dropped with the intention that they would roll down the water-side embankment before detonating. It was futile. The Sorpe would be attacked again in 1944, this time using Barnes Wallace’s Tallboy bombs. Even those five-ton monsters produced nothing beyond a few craters. With the Sorpe left unbreached, the destruction of the Möhne caused significantly less damage and the Edersee even less (it was little more than a target of convenience). More telling is that the Möhne was not attacked again during its reconstruction and that Harris turned his aircraft away from the Ruhr valley just when water shortages would have meant firebombing would have bit most deeply.

There is so much here that it’s hard to do it justice in a review. Quoting Walpole, Hastings thesis is that “No country is ever saved by good men, because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.” There might be better books about the raid – Hastings admits that he doesn’t go into many technical details and highlights, also, that Gibson’s own Enemy Coast Ahead is a particularly sensitive account – but, arguably, there isn’t a more important version. This feels right for our time, reminding us to avoid reductive tropes. Winning the war might have elevated the victors but victory has long since occluded many of the difficult, challenging, and sometimes questionable things done to make it possible.

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