One of the more daring bombing missions of the War, Operation Chastisement flown by 617 squadron of the Royal Air Force on May 16 and May 17 1943, resulted in the breaching of two Ruhr dams which caused catastrophic flooding in the German industrial heartland and reduced German war production until September 1943. Losses among the attackers were heavy, with 8 of the attacking bombers shot down, 53 aircrew killed and 3 captured. The raid was a shot in the arm for Allied morale as a result of the courage and skill with which it was executed. A first rate movie on the raid, Dambusters, came out in 1955, with its attack sequences eventually influencing the filming of the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars (1977)
Les Munro, one of the members of our local Classic Flyers Club at the Tauranga airport died back in 2015. I had met him briefly at one of the Air shows we have here every few years. Here is part of his obituary. We Will Remember Them.
Les Munro was part of the famous 617 Squadron of the RAF that carried out the ‘bouncing bomb’ raid to destroy dams in Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
On the 4 th August 2015, news came through of the death of Squadron Leader Les Munro, the last surviving Dambusters pilot, he was 96.
If I didn’t already have empirical reason to doubt “progress” in general (outside, that is, limited, technical areas such as engineering), I think I would still have to reject it on the basis of how much is lost as each successive generation dies out. Most of us commenting are old enough to feel the pain of being unable to ask questions of our grandparents, maybe even our parents, aunts, and uncles; we may also be old enough to see that the perception today’s college students have of the Cold War is very different than the perception of those of us who lived through it, as our perception of World War II was different from that of our forebears, etc. This is not just a loss of facts, it is a loss of wisdom, and it goes a long way towards explaining why the characters of nations change so much from century to century: they are like a man with no long-term memory.
Yes, books and oral traditions help, but they cannot replace what is lost in living memory.