European Aviation History

  The men who flew with Bomber Command were viewed by contemporaries as an elite force.  Throughout the war, they were appreciated and admired -- particularly by the opposite sex. They enjoyed status and privileges envied by their non-flying comrades. Although a remarkably diverse group, they nevertheless shared many characteristics and their image was unique and distinct from that of the "Fighter Boys." Because of the prevailing doctrine that "the bomber would always get through" and the associated conviction that a war would be won by the side that bombed the best and the heaviest, the RAF (like the Luftwaffe) emphasized bombers and bomber training throughout the interwar years. Although this doctrine nearly cost Britain the war (through neglect of the Fighter Arm until it was almost too late), it re-asserted itself almost the moment the Battle of Britain was over.  In order to hit back at Hitler, distract attention from the Eastern Front (i.e. to provide a "...

After the attack on the Ruhr Dams, the second most famous achievement of 617 Squadron was the probably sinking of the German Battleship Tirpitz. By the time 617 was tasked with her destruction, she had withstood more than 30 other attacks by conventional bombers, dive-bombers, torpedo planes, and mini-submarines. But 617 Squadron also found the Tirpitz a tough nut to crack. It took them three tries.    The Tirpitz was the terror of the Royal Navy because she was the largest battleship ever launched by a European power. She possessed tremendous firepower in eight 15-inch, twelve 6-inch, 16 4-inch and 28 smaller calibre guns. Despite being heavily armored, she had a top speed of 30 knots -- faster than any British battleship. Clearly, if she got in among the convoys, she would wreck havoc, and the Royal Navy were determined to prevent that. From 1942 onwards, the Tirpitz was based in Norway, threatening the convoys that kept the Soviet Union supplied with the munitions and equi...

Hitler's Wonder or Vengeance Weapons ( Wunderwaffen or Vergeltungswaffen ) killed roughly 9,000 civilians in the UK and damaged half the housing in the British capital. The V1 was the first "cruise missile" and the V2 was the first rocket-delivered explosives in history. While few believe they alone could have altered the outcome of the war, the damage they inflicted called for a vigorous response. Yet the RAF's options against these new weapons were limited.   Just one week after D-Day, the first of Hitler's Vengeance weapons struck British soil. They instantly killed 6, injured 30 and made 200 people homeless in a single unopposed attack that risked not a single German life. Three days later, V1s had taken 499 lives and injured 2,000 while 137,000 buildings had been damaged. The V1 was a drone, or a flying bomb as it was called at the time, roughly the same size as contemporary fighters, but unmanned. They were also very crudely controlled. Essentially, they wer...

  No one is more closely associated with 617 Squadron then Wing Commander Guy Gibson. He formed the squadron, hand-picking many of the pilots. He led it to fame on the Dams Raid. Yet he literally only flew on one operation with the squadron, and his command ended after less than three months. No other wartime CO was on the squadron for a shorter period. The CO who commanded the squadron longest -- albeit, even then, only eight months -- was also the man who gave it a mission. Thus even if his name is not so immediately associated with 617, he was in fact more influential than any of the five men who led the squadron in WWII.    Cheshire, who by September 1943 already had a distinguished war record and was the youngest Group Captain in the RAF recruited to command 617 Squadron in order to help solve a pressing problem. With their backs increasingly to the wall, the Germans had unleashed their creativity to develop four devilishly advanced and potentially game-changing ...

  617 Squadron took on the toughest targets -- the Ruhr Dams, the battleship Tirpitz, U-boat pens, the V1 and V2 launch sites -- yet in two years of operation only one target killed the squadron's CO. It might just have been bad luck, of course, but on 15 September 1943 an attack on this target resulted in the loss of six of the nine aircraft sent against it. At 62%, this represented the highest percentage loss of any 617 operation.  It was the Dortmund-Ems Canal.   The Dortmund-Ems Canal -- what the Germans call the Mittelland Kanal -- was a 160-mile-long  infrastructure link between the ports of the Baltic and North Seas and the industrial heart of German. The barges that traveled sedately upon its waters carried enormous quantities of coal and iron ore from the East, including from Poland and Sweden, to the steel plants and foundries of the Ruhr. It also transported finished arms and ammunition to the Eastern Front and prefabricated parts for U-boats being assembl...