May 17th, 1943
Battle of the Ruhr - Operation Hammerfall (May 17th) is the contribution of the No.8 Group to the attack on the German dams.
All available Victoria and Lincoln bombers (36 machines) are engaged against the two dams not destroyed by Sqn 617. The idea is to take advantage of the damage already done by the Lancasters. The Victoria, with 8,000 lb, will attack first, aiming at the most important dam, the one on the Sorpe.
The Lincolns, with a 2,000 lb bomb each, follow.
For the first time, the Luftwaffe succeeds in intercepting a VHA bomber raid.
Forty to fifty Bf 109 G1s are assigned to the defense of the Ruhr, but without success. It is indeed very difficult for the defenders to solve the problem of bringing fighters with limited endurance to the right moment and to the right altitude. The fact that most of the VHA bombing raids are carried out at night does not help.
But this time it is a diurnal and important raid, the visibility is excellent and the contrails of condensation, particularly well drawn, clearly indicate the progression of the British raid. All available VHA fighters are launched in three groups of 10 to 15 aircraft. The first one is put out of action by a change of course of the bombers and the second one is misdirected by the air control. But the third group, with a dozen aircraft, reaches the altitude of the Victoria in front of the bombers' formation and succeed in carrying out a frontal attack at the same time as the Victorias start their bombing pass, lined up as if on parade. Two of the Victorias are shot down and six are damaged and forced to release their bombs or to bomb randomly (two of them will be destroyed on landing). The bombers' gunners manage to shoot down one of the Bf 109 G1.
Thus, Victoria's formation bombs in a much more imprecise way than it could have. Nevertheless, several bombs damage the outer face of the dam, scattering huge masses of earth and cracking the concrete. The commander orders the Lincolns to turn away from the secondary objective and attack the Sorpe Dam, which they do. They do so.
Three of their bombs hit the dam directly and the north face of the dam collapses, releasing a torrent of water that empties the reservoir by almost 60% and causes great damage downstream.
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The destruction of the three dams has important consequences. In Dortmund, for example, industrial production is reduced by more than 15 %. In addition, navigation on the Rhine is disrupted for several weeks and the regional railway network is severely damaged.
Perhaps the most dramatic effect is on Hitler himself. When an appalled Speer describes the damage to him, the Führer falls into a depressed silence. But the next day, he explodes in such a violent rage that Goebbels and Himmler fear for his sanity (or for what they could consider Hitler's mental health).
Speer succeeds in calming him down by sending 12,000 Frenchmen from the Service du Travail Obligatoire and 22,000 Soviet prisoners of war to work on the repairs of the three destroyed dams. Incidentally, Speer thus gets his hands on the management of the use of prisoners of war in German industry, which does not fail to upset Himmler.
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"Since then, many people have wondered why the RAF did not bomb these dams again (they were to be repaired at the beginning of the autumn rains in September-October 1943, and the repairs were completed in February 1944). The fact is that Churchill refused to approve attacks that would have inevitably lead to a terrible slaughter of the non-German workers forced to work on the repairs, as they had been housed in camps just below the dams themselves. As the Prime Minister was to explain in his memoirs: "the Nazis let us know (and let Algiers know as well as Moscow) where the prisoner workers were and who they were, even providing a list of names of the French in order to make their blackmail more personal. It was a dirty trick, and it worked. They knew that we would back down when it came time to doom these unfortunate people to death. They knew we were far more civilized than they were. I convinced myself that, even at the cost of our own soldiers' lives, it was no disgrace for a government to deliberately refuse to commit such a massacre, on the contrary. This decision revealed a crucial difference between us and our enemies from the point of view of moral sense - besides, the dirty trick played by the Nazis fell on the Germans' heads. Having decided not to attack the dams, we were forced to concentrate our assaults on the cities of Germany. In reality, the operation cost Hamburg to the Germans. If 40,000 of them were killed by the bombardments, I think morally we had clean hands, because their government had taken tens of thousands of hostages to protect the dams on which their factories depended. What other choice did we have than to attack the factories themselves, that is, the cities where they were located?" (Paul Brickhill, The Dam Busters, Evans, 1951)
