The Dam Busters (1954)
Directed by Michael Anderson

Plot Summary: The true story of the development of Barnes Wallace's bouncing bomb & its deployment by 617 Squadron of the Royal Air Force to attack the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams in Germany's industrial Rühr in WW2.

This is one of British cinema's true classics. It excels in recounting a remarkable true tale in gripping, unsentimental style. The writing, directing, cinematography and performances are all first rate. Michael Redgrave in particular, is totally immersed in the character of Barnes Wallace; the slightly eccentric and near obsessed inventor of the bouncing bomb. Richard Todd also convinces as Wing Commander Guy Gibson; the man chosen to put together 617 Squadron for the daring raid. Look out for a young Robert Shaw as Gibson's co-pilot, and British viewers should spot a young Richard Thorpe (Alan Turner from Emmerdale) as Squadron Leader Maudsley & an un-credited Patrick McGoohan (No.6 from the mind blowing 1960's TV series The Prisoner, arguably the best television series ever) as the guard at the door.

During the second world war, British scientist Dr. Barnes Wallis calculates that for every tonne of steel Germany produces it needs 100 tonnes of water. He finds that the major steel producing plants are all within an area of major dams. Destroying these dams would significantly damage the enemy's production. He begins work on a bomb that will detonate at the base of a dam and destroy it using the force of water behind it. However to drop it he needs a low flight path, a perfect height and speed and then a bomb that will bounce it's way to the dam wall before sinking. After much lobbying he gets his plan in action, but has only two months to get everything on line.

Adapted by R.C. Sherriff from the book by Paul Brickhill, who also wrote The Great Escape & Guy Gibson's book Enemy Coast Ahead, The Dam Busters is a docudrama following the conception and implementation of a new British weapon for smashing the German dams in the Rühr industrial complex during World War II.

In 1942, Dr Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave) was possessed with a seemingly absurd idea - the creation of a revolutionary bouncing bomb to destroy the Rühr dams and paralyse Germany’s heartland. This film describes the development of the bouncing bomb, showing Barnes Wallis shooting marbles across a bath tub of water as the idea begins to form, through to devising a particularly simple bombsight and altimeter that had to be developed. The film is a tribute to the genius of Barnes Wallis who fought persistent skepticism and disbelief from Whitehall that such a feat was possible. Major disappointments accompany the initial trials, the casing of the bomb has to be drastically re-designed, and it transpires that the aircraft will need to approach the dam considerably lower and faster than had been predicted.

A special Squadron 617 is formed and selected to carry out the attack on the dams harnessing the energy of the rivers Möhne, Eder and Sorpe, led by Wing-Commander Guy Gibson (Richard Todd) who is given responsibility for the sortie and intensive training. The climax of the film, the actual attack on the German dams is rather a disappointment due to some unimpressive special effects.The resultant floods, should the dams be breached, would seriously damage Germany's munitions productivity.

When I was living in Germany during the 1990's I visited the Möhnesee Dam with an acquaintance of mine. As we walked across the top of the dam he informed me his grandmother who lives in the area told him of that eventful night back in May of 1943 when the entire region was subjected to massive flooding when the dam wall was breached. Being British I had a sense of pride but at the same time having lived in Germany for many years it is very much home away from home & I also felt guilt. Nonetheless there was a war being fought & Britain was fighting for it's survival. There is a plaque on the dam giving a brief history of it's construction but interestingly enough no mention of the air raid on the dam.

Good use is made of genuine Air Ministry film of the bouncing bomb tests. If the ultimate effect on Germany's war capacity is exaggerated (the dams were repaired and back in service within four months), this can be forgiven. It is worth remembering that some details were still secret at time of filming (for example the bomb in the film was round because it was still classified that the bomb had been more cylindrical).

Ten years after the Second World War ended, the British film business had covered most theatres and many episodes of daring do. But the bomber offensive against Germany presented a problem. On the one hand, it was a huge and daring venture, more costly of life than almost any other. But even before the war ended "area" or "carpet" bombing had been denounced, within Britain as well as by Dr Göbbels, as a callous terrorisation of civilians. Thousands had burned or suffocated in Hamburg and Dresden. How to make celluloid heroics out of that?

The solution was to depict a strategic shift from blanket to pinpoint bombing: the raid on the three key Rühr dams. Historians have disagreed about its effects on Nazi Germany's war effort; after all, Albert Speer's astonishing improvisations kept industry churning out weapons until 1945. However, the heavy new Lancasters which breached the dams using Dr Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bombs struck an almighty blow against Germany's prestige and morale: comparable only with the A-bombs on Japan, impressing the rest of the world and encouraging the British while we waited for America to augment our land and sea forces for the liberation of Europe.

The film's screenplay by RC "Journey's End" Sheriff is a model of direct, purposeful exposition. We go from A to Z with no sidetracks, no "balancing" subplots or obtruded light relief. When posters complain that today's big budget films are let down by inept storytelling, this is the skill they are missing. Special effects are sometimes hokey, more suited to a cartoon than live-action, but it matters little. It is among the most mature and memorable pictures of reluctant warrior-dom.

"The Dam Busters" conveys the dogged skill of Bomber Command pilots who flew hundreds of miles at zero height, below radar cover, to deliver their payloads with fantastic exactitude. Eight "Lancs" and 56 men did not return. But most of the film is about the delays, false trails and frustrations Wallis endured trying to make the bombs bounce and the bureaucrats and brass hats okay the project. Had the film's director, Michael Anderson, seen Powell and Pressburger's "The Small Back Room", released five years before? Wallis's disconsolate trail through the committee rooms of total war, his dogged faith in his concept, and the young Guy Gibson's patient nursing of 617 Squadron into a finely honed instrument for delivering the triple punch unfold in concise scenes, carefully paced and reeking of the atmosphere of quiet suspense between 1940 and 1944.

The film is yet another beneficiary of the low-key, documentarist spirit which continued to infuse British fiction films long after John Grierson had migrated to Canada. Some American viewers may well feel exasperated by its downbeat quality. Nothing about the girls the pilots left behind. No evil Nazis- the enemy is barely mentioned and hardly seen except for a few figures fleeing the floods. No big speeches about saving Democracy, no invocations of service tradition: the RAF was barely 20 years old, though it was the world's first independent air force. Not even much jolly banter in the mess, and no dogfights in the skies either. Just a bunch of "types" thrown together by the need to get a tough mission over and done with. There is even a moment where Bomber Command's chief, Sir Arthur Harris (Basil Sydney), who was still very much alive and kicking, is implicitly criticised. Wallis recalls how the Luftwaffe wrongly thought London could be blitzed into ruins, hinting that the British are now making the same blunder about Germany.

Typical of Anderson's throwaway approach is the scuffle in the mess between 617's members and other pilots who jovially accuse them of shirking. As soon as the fight breaks out, he cuts away to Gibson saying that he must get his boys settled down. After the raid, the camera roams round the deserted sleeping quarters of the men who didn't come back. It is more cinematic to show symbols of fear and loss than to chatter about these emotions; here the British stiff upper lip, the equivalent of the grace under pressure which the anglophile Hemingway looked for in Americans, works in the service of visual communication.

Redgrave likewise shows his character more than he talks. His body language evokes the boffin who is better at thought than speech. He fiddles with his spectacles, shambles around with an un martial gait, bunched up with his arms pressed to his sides as if pinioned by frustration. When the bomb finally bounces, he says nothing but flings his arms aloft for once. He utters mildly, donnishly, and at moments of maximum feeling he cannot speak at all. His performance is all of a piece: the best movie work by one who in other roles often looked unsuitably stiff on screen.

The aeroplanes are posted "missing" on a blackboard; a BBC radio announcer with only a hint of triumph tells of the raid's success and cost. Wallis and Gibson exchange awkward congratulations, tinged with remorse, in the justly famous final scene. "The flak was bad, worse than I expected" says Gibson, beginning to apologise for his triumph as soon as he lands. Perhaps only a Brit, soaked in the mythology of honourable defeats such as Dunkirk and Coruna, can understand such understatement. We are superstitiously afraid to gloat over victories, as Orwell noted.

Back at base, the surviving crews return to their rooms, as a radio announcement confirms the raid's success. Gibson and Barnes Wallis discuss this and concern is voiced over the considerable human cost of the mission, with eight out of 19 aircraft missing. Gibson walks into the distance, with a number of letters to write before turning in.

Eric Coates's splendid march is played in full only at this finale, as if to reward the audience for understanding why the chief protagonists' hearts are too full for rhetoric. And even then the string-based orchestration sounds sober and slightly plaintive, not jaunty like Sousa or Miller, or bombastic like a German brass band.

In the spirit of economy which guides "The Dam Busters", no real life sequelae are given over the credits. "Gibby" was killed on a sortie after receiving the Victoria Cross (Britain's equivalent of the CMH) and publishing a guarded memoir, "Enemy Coast Ahead". Wallis was knighted and hailed, but Harris was insulted at the war's end by being denied a peerage- unlike Fighter Command's Dowding, winner of the Battle of Britain. Harris was also refused permission to issue a final despatch on his campaign. For the rest of his days he resented the slight on "my bomber boys", of whom 50,000 died. Like Wallis he lived into his tenth decade, old enough to see Speer confirm in his autobiography that area bombing had indeed devastated the Nazi war effort. War can be cruel even after it is over. But a statue of Harris now stands opposite Dowding's outside the RAF Church.

Scenes from this outstanding film can be seen on you tube:

The Dam Busters - The First Dam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&hl=en-GB&v=lCRIsjJFRNo
The Dam Busters - The Second Dam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM1VGw0wM7k&feature=related
Dam Busters - Non-politically correct (by todays standards) bits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-s5rtj_gh4k&feature=related
The Dam Busters - A Dog Called Nigger: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgePEO7GUtE&feature=related
The Dam Busters - Carling Black Label ad from UK television from 1988 showing the Dams raid as a football match with a German Guard acting as goalie trying to intercept the bouncing bombs-very funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKHc-U2FNHk

Dam Busters Trivia:
(1) Flt Lt Edward Johnson- at 31 one of the oldest men on the raid- died aged 90 on October 1, 2002. He invented the simple Johnson Sight for aiming as shown in the film.

(2) The Germans were impressed enough to invent a smaller rocket-propelled bouncing bomb, code named"Kurt", which was never used in anger.

(3) The planes came in at 60 feet above the water at night, and dropped their bombs. The bombs did not destroy the dam but put a big enough hole in the dam so that billions of gallons of water rushed through the opening and swept down the Rühr Valley. Thirteen hundred people were killed as a result of a relatively small hole in a very large dam, including villagers as well as many Ukrainian women and children, trapped in a prisoner of war camp below the Möhne dam.

(4) I've heard that George Lucas of "Star Wars" fame got inspiration for the "Death Star" bombing mission at the end of "Star Wars" from this film's dam busting film scenes, with it's ferocious flak and tight confines to manoeuvre in as well as the fictional war film "Mosquito Squadron" where the rolling bombs had to land inside a small tunnel. However, a much better comparison for "Star Wars" is with the final scenes of another fictional WW2 movie, "633 Squadron". In that film, the Mosquito aircraft have to fly down a narrow Norwegian Fjord before 'hurling' their bombs not at the target itself, but at a large crop of rock above the target.

(5) The Dam Busters-617 Squadron-who carried out the "bouncing bomb raid" on the Rühr Valley dams were based at RAF Scampton, near Lincoln, the film was shot at nearby disused RAF Hemswell.

(6) In US prints a Flying Fortress appears at least once in place of a Lancaster. The US version ran for 105 minutes, the UK version for 124 minutes.

(7) The Castle above the Eder-Dam is shown on the southern-side of the lake. In reality, this castle is on the northern side.

(8) The idea of the triangulated spotlamps to set the aircraft height is shown as being Gibson's, during a visit to the theatre; in fact it was Benjamin Lockspeiser (Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Supply) who came up with the idea, it having been used as far back as World War I. Also in the film, the height spotlamps are shown under the nose and tail of the Lancasters; in fact the second spotlamp was in the rear of the bomb bay. In many art prints of the dams raid, the spotlamp beams are incorrectly shown shining down directly beneath the aircraft where they could not have been seen from the cockpit.

(9) Guy Gibson was killed in 1944 his Mosquito crashed in Holland, killing him and his navigator.

(10) Barnes Wallis said that he never encountered any opposition from bureaucracy. In the film, when a reticent official asks what he can possibly say to the RAF to persuade them to loan a Vickers Wellington bomber for flight testing the bomb, Wallis suggests: "Well, if you told them that I designed it, do you think that might help?" Barnes Wallis was involved with the design of the Wellington, but not as the chief designer.

(11) Instead of all of Gibson's tour-expired crew at 106 squadron volunteering to follow him to his new command, only his Wireless Operator, Hutchinson, went with him to 617 squadron.

(12) Crews for the operation were not all highly decorated and personally selected by Gibson; some crews were simply posted straight in.

(13) Rather than the purpose as well as the method of the raid being Wallis' sole idea, the dams had already been identified as an important target by the Air Ministry before the War.

(14) The wooden "coat hanger" sight intended to enable crews to release the weapon at the right distance from the target was not wholly successful; some crews used it, but others came up with their solutions, such as pieces of string in the bomb-aimer's position and/or markings on the blister.

(15) Gibson's dog was not the victim of a hit-and-run; in fact, the driver and passenger in the car were injured as the former tried to avoid the collision. This happened the day before the mission & not on the day as portrayed in the film.

(16) Composer Eric Coates is well-known for his contribution to the film score for The Dam Busters (1954); he composed the famous main title march. He was unwilling to write the entire score when asked by the film's producers, but warmed to the idea of writing a signature march around which the rest of the film's score was based - in fact, he submitted a piece that he had recently completed, so the famous Dam Busters March was not itself composed with the film in mind. The final film score was completed by Leighton Lucas.

In an age before namby pamby Political Correctness

Nigger was the code word for the successful breaching of the Möhnesee Dam (translated Möhne Lake Dam). Gibson chose this code word in honour of his black dog Nigger a fairly common name for a black dog in Britain at the time. If the dam was not breached the code word was Gonner. After breaching the Möhne Dam the remaining aircraft of the Möhne formation then flew on to the Eder Dam. The first two mines failed to breach the dam, but shortly before 2am, when the third Lancaster had attacked, Gibson signalled the code-word Dinghy, indicating success with the second part of the operation. Other aircraft attacked the Sorpe and Schwelme Dams but did not succeed in breaching them.

In 1999, British television network ITV broadcast a censored version of the film, with all utterances of "Nigger" removed. ITV blamed regional broadcaster London Weekend Television, which in turn alleged that a junior staff member had been responsible for the unauthorised cuts. When ITV again showed a censored version in June 2001, it was condemned by Index on Censorship as "unnecessary and ridiculous" and that the edits introduced continuity errors.

U.K.'s Channel 4 screened the censored American version in July 2007, in which the dialogue was dubbed so as to call the dog Trigger, this screening taking place just after the 2008 remake was announced. For the remake, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson has said no decision has been made on the dog's name, but is in a "no-win, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't scenario", as changing the name could be seen as political correctness, while not changing the name could offend people. In September 2007, as part of the BBC Summer of British Film series, The Dam Busters was shown at selected cinemas across the UK in its uncut format.

US releases of the film had all references to "Nigger" the name of Wing Commander Guy Gibson's dog & the code word for the successful breaching of the Möhnesee Dam cut or overdubbed with "Trigger", although the Morse code transmission heard still said "Nigger" and it does appear in the US DVD release of the film.

By the way the black dog used in the 1954 original really was called Nigger.

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