leeper@mtgzz.UUCP (m.r.leeper) (06/18/85)
DAM BUSTERS by Paul Brickhill
and
DAM BUSTERS (1954)
A book/film review by Mark R. Leeper
I remember seeing this film as a teenager and being very impressed by
it. There were quite a few British (and American) war films made in the
1940's and 50's. Most were about the glory of being a soldier or a pilot or
a bulldozer operator in the face of the enemy's attacks. Some can be quite
good, but they tend to run together. DAM BUSTERS was a different sort of
film. The hero gets nowhere near battle. He's not a soldier; he's an
engineer. His virtue is not heroism (at least not predominantly); it is
intellect and persistence.
The hero of this true story is Barnes Wallis, an aircraft engineer who
manages to realize at the beginning of the war just what kind of attack
would hurt the Germans the most: the destruction of the three dams of the
Ruhr Valley. The problem is that it is totally impossible to destroy the
dams in an air-raid with the sorts of planes and bombs available at the
beginning of the war. The book treats the whole plan as the giant
engineering problem that it really is. It is a sort of SOUL OF A NEW
MACHINE AT WAR. The bombing in questions, it turns out, requires a whole
new concept of bombing. The bomb has to be dropped at precise altitudes,
precise speeds, and precise distances from the targets, and each is handled
as an engineering problem with an "Aha!" sort of solution that would please
even a Martin Gardner. At every step along the way, Wallis finds ways to
fight the bureaucracy of the War Department that are as creative as his
solutions to the physics problems posed by the raid.
This is truly a war story for engineers and mathematicians. Toward the
end of the book, the concentration is more on the airmen who must pull off
the raid, a much more familiar sort of war story, but even then the thrill
is more to see all the mechanisms developed earlier actually working than it
is to see the heroism of the men.
WOR-TV recently showed a much abbreviated version of the film, and
unfortunately what they cut was mostly the engineering part of the problem.
and fighting the bureaucracy. The filmmaker had already cut out a fair
amount of this part of the story, and the local station nearly finished the
job. (I am partially remembering the quality of the film from very old
memories.) I would say the book is very much more recommended than the
uncut film; the uncut film is much better than WOR's version. Even that I
give at least a qualified recommendation.
Mark R. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!leeper