European Aviation History

  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 ...

They were formed for a single mission -- and lost eight out of seventeen aircraft in one night.  Rather than being disbanded, they were handed over to a new CO -- who was killed on his fourth operation, along with his crew and four other aircraft of the eight participating on the raid. That was a loss rate of 63%. Hardly surprising that by October 1943, 617 Squadron was viewed by aircrews as a "suicide squadron" or the "death or glory boys."  Yet by the end of the war the squadron was known as the RAF's foremost "special operations" squadron. It was the squadron which demonstrated the most cutting edge technologies and techniques and attacked the most difficult and most vital targets from the Ruhr Dams to the battleship Tirpitz . The survival of 617 was by no means a foregone conclusion. After the Dams raid, Wing Commander Gibson was promptly given a Victoria Cross and was sent off to Canada and the United States on a public relations tour. But the RAF...

  On the morning of 17 May 1943 photo reconnaissance over the Ruhr Valley revealed extensive devastation caused by the successful bombing of two key dams the night before. Rather than keeping these highly sensitive images secret, His Majesty's Government decided the time was ripe to brag about a remarkable achievement. Instantly, a hero was created, the 24-year-old commander of the squadron tasked with the operation: Wing Commander Guy Gibson.  While the "Dambuster Raid" was undoubtedly a daring exploit demonstrating an exceptional example of British ingenuity (the "bouncing bomb" designed by Barnes Wallis), Guy Gibson owes his fame more to the efforts of Bomber Command to create a glamorous hero than to the raid itself. Bomber Command, that is Air Marshal Harris, made a conscious decision to make a media figure of Gibson. He did so not only by awarding him an immediate VC and bar to his DSO and creating photo-ops with the King and Queen and Prime Minister, but ...

Despite routinely being accused of doing only "area bombing" one of the most precise -- and arguably the most effective RAF raid of WWII -- was the RAF attack of 16/17 May 1943 on the Ruhr Dams. The raid was immortalized in the post-war film "The Dam Busters."   It all started with Barnes Wallis, an innovative engineer. At the outbreak of the war, Wallis was already 52 and recognized as one of the leading aircraft designers of his generation, but he found himself wondering what he -- as an engineer -- could do to shorten a war that he knew would be horrible. Freed from work on any specific project, he started to experiment with a variety of ideas. No longer tied to government specifications, his imagination took flight, and while many of his ideas were dismissed by contemporaries as impractical if not ridiculous, Wallis' philosophy was to see criticism as a stimulus to keep perfecting an idea. (Below Barnes Wallis) He also spent time studying the industrial ...

It has become a cliche to claim that the RAF conducted "area bombing" at night and the USAF conducted "precision bombing" by daylight. As with most cliches, there is a kernel of truth in it, but it is also a gross oversimplification. It is certainly true that after taking over as C-in-C of Bomber Command, Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris embraced the idea of whole-scale destruction and scorned most efforts to attack specific targets as pointless. However, it is wrong to claim that the RAF as a whole never attempted or achieved precision.  For a start, the RAF began the war with a doctrine of strategic bombing that was not materially different from that of the USAAF. Furthermore the crews -- and the public -- were religiously assured that all targets were "legitimate military targets" and that the objective in all bombing was to obtain the greatest possible accuracy and minimize collateral civilian damage. Indeed, the RAF's failure to achieve the a...

  The Battle of Britain had a human cost. 544 RAF pilots paid the ultimate price by giving their lives. There were others who suffered in another way. The combination of high-octane aviation fuel and incendiary bullets made the risk of "flaming out" huge for airmen in this era. Many aircrew only managed to escape the flames of their burning aircraft after sustaining first degree burns covering their faces, hands and other parts of their bodies. Crash-landings also sometime resulted in complete disfigurement.  For these men the road to recovery was long, hard and painful. Yet they were remarkabl y lucky too -- due to one man: Dr. Archibald McIndoe In an age when plastic surgery was still in its infancy, reconstructing faces was largely an experimental process. British airmen were lucky to have the services of one of the great pioneers in this field of medicine: the talented and compassionate New Zealand plastic surgeon Dr. Archibald McIndoe. Over 600 patients benefited...