Dam Busters

Ted Barris, with a foreword by Peter Mansbridge, retells the covert strike on the Ruhr River dams in Germany, an operation that reshaped the Second World War. Planning took years and depended on a bomb that had never been used in combat. The men chosen to fly it were among the finest aircrew in RAF Bomber Command, and many were Canadian.

On the night of May 16, 1943, nineteen Lancaster bombers left England carrying 133 airmen. The crews, selected and specially trained, flew at treetop height into the industrial heart of the Third Reich. Each aircraft carried a weapon that had to be released about sixty feet above the reservoir, where it would skip across the water like a stone, sink against the dam and explode.

The raid breached two dams and damaged a third. The released floodwater tore through power plants, factories and infrastructure more than a hundred miles downstream. The airmen knew before takeoff that their chances of surviving were slim. Eight of the nineteen bombers never returned, and fifty-three men died, fourteen of them Canadian. Of the sixteen RCAF crewmen who came back, seven were decorated for their service.

Barris draws on interviews, personal accounts, flight logs, maps and photographs of the Canadians involved to follow these young Commonwealth crews as they carried out a high-risk mission against a determined enemy.