A Dambusters Question
 

Forgive me if this has been asked before (I may even have asked and forgotten the answer)...
The aircraft used on Operation Chastise had been extensively modified, including, IIRC, the removal of the dorsal turret. Why did they then fly on the raid with complete crews of seven?

Wikipedia is your friend...

Bet that made the Nav happy, bad enough when the pilot wants to carry a map.... :hmm:

I sometimes wonder about Wiki . OK, I'm being pedantic.

And what was Gibbo's dog called again? :)

The Bomb aimer often doubled up as the forward gunner.

I believe that the original crew strength was 8 (2 pilots)

AIUI, the mid-upper gunners operated the front turret on the run in to the dams. There is a drawing somewhere of a natty little stirrup arrangement which ensured that his feet didn't get in the way of the high-tech sighting systems the bomb aimers were using...

The idea was that the bomb aimer could concentrate on that task, without having to hop between bomb aiming and gun firing.

The dog was called Nigger, I believe.

The crews consisted of 7 members on the night of the raid as did all other 18 aircraft.

They were made up thus as in the case of it's leader Guy Gibson.

W.Cdr G Gibson Captain
Sgt. J Pulford F/Engineer
F/O H T Taerum Navigator
F/Lt R E G Hutchinson Wireless Operator
P/O F M Spafford A/Bomb Aimer
F/Sgt G Deering Front Gunner
F/Lt R Trevor-Roper Rear Gunner

Curiously, the official records of the raid give the word 'Dinghy' as being the signal sent when a dam had been breached. The world knows it as 'Nigger' - just as was in the film shown on TV this week.

Strange that.

Different code words for different dams, I think:

'Nigger' for the Moehne and 'Dinghy' for the Eder.

According to Paul Brickhill's excellent book "The Dam Busters", "Nigger" was the code for the breach of the Moehne Dam with "Dinghy" being the code for the destruction of the Eder dam.

Shucks, beaten to it!

A friend of mine was a Lancaster bomb aimer at Skellingthorpe, he always helped the navigator by map reading to the target and he even won the DFC for shooting down a JU88 night fighter from the front turret.
They dont make them like that nowadays!!

The film was on TV a couple of weekends ago .... and brilliant it was too ... until the dog was renamed DIGGER ..... :ugh:

Thats what you would need if you wanted to give him apat on the back these days tbh.

Yep that is right guys. Dinghey for the Eder, I should have read the ops record a little more carefully.

Thanks all- although I should have added that we didn't need another thread about the (expletive deleted) dog! I do not support the supposedly PC need to shield the world from being offended by the past, but does it have to be the prime topic of EVERY thread about the Dambusters? That particular topic was done to death a long time ago, and I am deeply suspicious of the motives of anyone who keeps reintroducing it.

Because as Carlton says, it's just tedious to keep going over it when it has been covered in such depth many times before.

It's now mentioned every time just so that people can say "oh look how brave I am, I won't let the PC brigade muzzle me. I'm going to type Nigger even though everyone who reads this thread knows that was the dog's name, the code word and how it's now been changed"

By repeatedly covering the same ground you run the risk of being as boring as BEagle who prints the same tired old picture of a VC10 and Bear any time there is even remotely any connection with QRA.

Harrumph, an officer in the tail turret! What on earth has the RAF come to?

SNAFU, the Rodney is at the rear making a Charlie of himself....

Presumably navs would be quite grateful for this help, seeing as the bomb aimer had a much better forward view...

And did navs used to crawl to the back end of the cockpit to make observations of the stars through the astrodome, or was that just a design feature which was too much trouble to use?