He circled the dam to draw the guns onto himself: Guy Gibson VC and the Dambusters

Remembrance | By Matt, Editor

He had already attacked the Möhne dam. He could have turned for home. Instead Wing Commander Guy Gibson circled low over the dam for 30 minutes, drawing the anti-aircraft fire onto his own Lancaster so the crews behind him had a clearer run. He was 24 years old.

A pilot who would not stop

Guy Penrose Gibson was born on 12 August 1918 in Simla, India, and grew up partly in Porthleven, Cornwall, according to the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association. He joined the RAF in 1936 and flew bombers from the first days of the war.

His Victoria Cross citation in the London Gazette describes a man who kept asking for more. On his “rest” nights he made single-handed attacks on targets such as the German battleship Tirpitz. When his first bomber tour ended, he asked to stay operational and went to night fighters, where he destroyed at least three enemy bombers. He then went back to bombers again. Berlin, Cologne, Danzig, Genoa, Milan, Nuremberg and Stuttgart were among his targets.

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The dams, May 1943

After his third tour he was chosen to command a new squadron “forming for special tasks”. It became No. 617 Squadron. On the night of 16 to 17 May 1943, nineteen of its Lancasters set out from RAF Scampton to attack the dams of the Ruhr with Barnes Wallis’s bouncing bomb.

The Gazette records that Gibson personally made the first attack on the Möhne dam, “descending to within a few feet of the water and taking the full brunt of the anti-aircraft defences”. He then circled very low for 30 minutes, “drawing the enemy fire on himself in order to leave as free a run as possible to the following aircraft”. He led the remaining aircraft on to the Eder dam and did the same again. Both dams were breached.

The cost was terrible. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that eight aircraft were lost and 53 airmen killed. The CWGC also notes that around 1,300 people died in the floods that followed, most of them civilians and prisoners of war, and that Gibson’s response to his own Victoria Cross was subdued because he felt responsible for the men he had recruited who did not come back.

His last sortie

By then Gibson had flown more than 170 sorties and over 600 hours of operational flying. He could have stayed safe. He did not. In September 1944 he returned to operations as a master bomber, flying a Mosquito with his navigator, Squadron Leader Jim Warwick.

On the night of 19 September 1944 their aircraft crashed near Steenbergen in the Netherlands on the way home. Both men were killed. Gibson was 26. The CWGC record shows that they are buried side by side at Steenbergen-en-Kruisland Roman Catholic Cemetery, where local Dutch people organised their funeral.

The Gazette closed his citation with words that still fit: “he has shown leadership, determination and valour of the highest order.” We remember him today, and the 53 men of 617 Squadron who did not return from the dams. We will remember them.

Sources

• London Gazette 36030, p2361 (VC citation, 28 May 1943)
• CWGC casualty record; CWGC: Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC; CWGC: the Dambusters
• Victoria Cross and George Cross Association profile

Images: Wing Commander Guy Gibson VC, 1944, RAF official photographer (IWM CH 13618), public domain; the breached Möhne dam, 17 May 1943, Flying Officer Jerry Fray RAF, public domain.