Guy Gibson(1918–1944)

Guy Gibson was born at Simla in British India in August 1918, the second son of an officer of the Indian Forest Service. He was schooled in England at St George's, Folkestone and St Edward's, Oxford, applied to the RAF in 1936, and was commissioned a pilot officer in 1937 at the age of nineteen.

He flew Hampdens with No 83 Squadron through the first winter of the war, then Beaufighters and Mosquitos on night-fighter work through the Blitz, and returned to bombers in 1942 as a wing commander commanding No 106 Squadron on the new Lancaster. By the spring of 1943, at twenty-four, he held the DSO and bar and the DFC and bar and had completed more than seventy-five operational sorties on three types. Arthur Harris and Ralph Cochrane took him out of the line in March 1943 to form and lead a new squadron for a secret task: attacking the dams of the Ruhr with Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb.

Operation Chastise was flown on the night of 16 to 17 May 1943. Nineteen Lancasters of No 617 Squadron, each carrying a four-ton mine designed to bounce across the reservoir to the dam wall, took off from Scampton in three waves. Gibson led the attack on the Möhne, going in first, then circling the reservoir alongside each successive aircraft to draw the gunfire off them, an act of sustained cold control under fire that the citation singled out. The Möhne wall broke; he flew on to the Eder and the Eder wall broke too. He was awarded the Victoria Cross on 28 May 1943.

He was taken off operations and sent with Churchill to the Quebec Conference, met Roosevelt at the White House, and wrote Enemy Coast Ahead, the foundational memoir of Bomber Command, in his spare hours. He wanted to be back in the air through all of it, and in the summer of 1944 he made his way back into the line as a Master Bomber flying Mosquitos.

He was killed in action over the Netherlands on the night of 19 September 1944, aged twenty-six, after marking his target and seeing the main force in. He is buried at Steenbergen, where the town keeps his grave to this day. The Dam Busters story entered British culture through Paul Brickhill's 1951 book and the 1955 film and has never left it; the Gibson name carries his memory as the surname of the pilot who led the most daring single bombing operation of the war.