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Between 1940 and 1942, only 11,228 Germans were killed by Allied bombing. From January 1943 to May 1945, however, a further 350,000 perished, along with unnumbered tens of thousands of foreign PoWs and slave labourers. This toll compares with 60,595 British people killed by all forms of German air bombardment including V-weapons between 1939 and 1945. During 1943, Bomber Command’s night offensive grew dramatically in strength, and the USAAF began to deploy formidable forces. Its chief, Gen. ‘Hap’ Arnold, brilliantly promoted his service’s expansion, ‘supported as he was by a thoroughly able and quite unscrupulous staff’, in the words of an admiring British colleague. The USAAF’s wartime manpower rose from 20,000 to two million, from seventeen air bases to 345, and from 2,470 aircraft to 80,000, while the US Navy acquired 7,500 planes of its own. A steadily growing proportion of American bomber strength was deployed against Germany from British bases.

The outstanding precision-bombing feat of the war was the RAF’s May 1943 attack on the Ruhr dams, an epic of ingenuity, skill and courage, though its economic significance was modest. As early as 1937, the Air Ministry identified Germany’s water supply as a key factor in steel production, and in 1940 Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal urged an attack on reservoirs. The difficulty was to find appropriate means. Scientist and aircraft designer Barnes Wallis was independently pursuing the same purpose, and conceived the notion of bouncing depth-charges against dam walls. In February 1943 his project won official backing, despite the scepticism of Sir Arthur Harris. Wallis was asked to produce the weapons in time for an attack in May, when the Ruhr reservoirs would be full. A senior staff officer wrote, with conspicuous naïveté: ‘The operation against the dams will not, it is thought, prove particularly dangerous,’ because the targets were defended lightly, or not at all. Initial tests were carried out with a spherical charge, but in April Wallis determined upon a cylindrical alternative, backspun before release by an electrically-driven pulley so that it would ‘crawl’ down a dam wall to detonate thirty-three feet below the water’s surface. Astonishingly, in barely a month the four-ton weapons were built, and Lancasters specially modified to carry them.

The specially formed 617 Squadron trained throughout April and early May to carry out the attack. Contrary to popular myth, not every man was a volunteer, nor were all crews highly experienced. Some had flown fewer than ten previous operations against Germany, and several flight engineers had never been in action at all. This makes all the more remarkable the achievement of twenty-four-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, a fierce disciplinarian and obsessively dedicated airman, in preparing his unit to launch the attack on the night of Sunday, 16 May. Nineteen crews took off. The Möhne and Eder dams were identified as priority targets; it was recognised that the third objective, the earth-banked Sorpe, though industrially vital, was less vulnerable to Wallis’s depth-charges.

The Möhne was breached by the fourth weapon dropped, the Eder by the third and last available to the attacking Lancasters. Most of the aircraft directed to the Sorpe were shot down en route; two crews returned home without attacking; the two charges dropped failed to breach the dam, as did another aimed at the Bever, mistakenly identified as the Ennepe. Eight crews were lost, a punitive casualty rate: six of them fell victims to anti-aircraft fire during the deck-level flights to and from the Ruhr in bright moonlight, indispensable to bombing accuracy.

The destruction of the Möhne and Eder created a sensation. The moral impact of the attack was enormous, not least on Germany’s leaders, and much enhanced the prestige of Bomber Command. Gibson received a VC. Some of the popular enthusiasm for ‘the Dambusters’ derived from the fact that destroying industrial targets seemed much less morally uncomfortable than