617 Dam buster AEC Matador Sold

[Phil Waterman]

I have always enjoyed the original movie about the Dam Buster and over the years I have seen bits and pieces in various books about this development effort. One problem with many books is that they take bits and pieces from different sources and connect them correctly or incorrectly. In doing this they sometimes carry forward previously misleading statements. One of the things I enjoy about MLU is that people making post seem to make an effort to document information to original sources and when not sure of a source they say so. All of this is rather interesting for the internet. Having said this here are some more bits to add to the Dam Buster discussion they are from a Large Format beautifully illustrated aircraft book THE GREAT BOOK OF WORLD WAR II AIRPLANES published in 1984, and is actually a compilation of books about individual aircraft.

The first photo is of a Mosquito dropping a barrel or sphere shaped bomb low over water so that it skips, there is a similar sequence in the original movie, but the text describes this as development of an anti shipping bomb. Later in the book it covers the Lancaster bomber and includes the drawings shown of the Dam Buster bomb system, this is the earliest write up that I remember as the Lancaster section of the book was first printed in 1982.

From another source which I have not been able to find again was a statement that a Ford engine possibly a flathead V8, was used to spin up the bomb. Could this possibly been from an old thread on MLU?


Cheers Phil

[Lang]

From what I have read (once again from untested articles) the Mosquito was the first choice for the raid but size of the weapon made it all too difficult. I think the shots in the original movie of the Mosquito were of scaled down "proof of concept" experiments. There were many, many more experiments and tests carried out than the dramatised version shown in the original movie or mentioned in the book.

The Americans became very good at skip bombing from B25 Mitchells in the Pacific on anti-shipping attacks. They used standard 250lb and 500lb bombs and dropped from 50-100 feet. There are many photos and movies of them making successful attacks on Japanese shipping.

Of course this would not have worked on the dams which required underwater explosions.

As a comment I think the back-spin was totally to do with stabilizing the weapon during flight and bouncing. The "crawl up to the wall" theory would not work as it was spinning in a direction to take it back, not forward, once it hit the wall or bottom.

[Richard Coutts-Smith]

Originally yes, in practice no. the following excerpt is from:

http://www.outermarker.co.uk/Article...h/chastise.htm

"The bombs were to be spun by the addition of a Ford V8 engine but this changed such that the hydraulic supply, which normally powered the mid-mounted gun turret that had been removed as part of a weight saving exercise, was used to power a hydraulic motor."

I always assumed it was generated by wind from the airspeed of the aircraft. Wrong again..
Rich.

[Phil Waterman]

Hi All

The NOVA PBS program on the Canadian recreation is being aired at this time in the US. Here is a link which I hope will work outside the US. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/militar...tler-dams.html very interesting program.

Cheers Phil