Guy Gibson(1918–1944)

Guy Gibson was born at Simla, in the cool-season capital of British India, in August 1918, the second son of Alexander Gibson of the Indian Forest Service. The family came home to England when his parents' marriage broke up in 1924, and he was schooled at St George's, Folkestone and then St Edward's, Oxford, the second-tier public school that also produced Douglas Bader. He applied to the RAF in 1936, was rejected on his first interview for being too short, was accepted at the second attempt that autumn, and was commissioned a pilot officer in 1937 at the age of nineteen. He had wanted to be a test pilot. War made him a bomber.

He flew Hampdens with No 83 Squadron at Scampton through the first winter of the war, then transferred to Beaufighters and Mosquitos on night-fighter work with No 29 Squadron when the Blitz turned the air war over Britain. He went back to bombers in April 1942 as a wing commander commanding No 106 Squadron on the new Lancaster, and over the next twelve months flew the squadron through the heaviest period of the Ruhr offensive. He was, by the spring of 1943, twenty-four years old, holder of the DSO and bar and the DFC and bar, and had completed more than seventy-five operational sorties on three different types. Arthur Harris and Ralph Cochrane took him out of the line in March 1943 and gave him a new squadron with no number yet and no operational record, formed at Scampton on the secret task of 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 surface of the reservoir to the dam wall, took off from Scampton in three waves. Gibson led the first wave of nine aircraft against the Möhne. He attacked first, drew the flak, then circled the reservoir alongside each successive attacker to draw the gunners off them, an act of cold tactical control under fire that the citation called sustained for nearly an hour. The Möhne wall broke on the fifth attack. He flew on to the Eder and circled there too, calling in the successive attacks; the Eder wall broke on the third. The Sorpe, attacked by the second wave, was damaged but not breached. Eight of the nineteen Lancasters did not come back, and fifty-three of the hundred and thirty-three aircrew who flew the operation were killed. Gibson was awarded the Victoria Cross on 28 May.

What followed was the publicity tour the Air Ministry needed and that Gibson, by the testimony of those who flew with him, did not. He was taken off operations, sent to North America with Churchill for the Quebec Conference in August 1943, made a series of broadcasts and lectures, met Roosevelt at the White House, wrote the memoir *Enemy Coast Ahead* in his spare hours, and stood as a Conservative candidate for selection before withdrawing. He wanted back on operations through the whole of it. He was given a staff job at the Ministry, fretted, finagled his way back into the line in the summer of 1944 and was attached as Master Bomber to No 627 Squadron at Woodhall Spa, flying Mosquitos.

He took off from Woodhall Spa on the evening of 19 September 1944 to mark targets at Rheydt and Mönchengladbach in the western Ruhr. He marked accurately, called the main force in, stayed over the target until the bombing finished, and turned for home. His Mosquito came down at Steenbergen in the Netherlands shortly after eleven that night. He and his navigator Squadron Leader Jim Warwick were both killed. The cause has never been settled: fuel transfer mismanagement, a flak hit on the return run, or a friendly bomber dropping its load on the unseen Mosquito below all remain on the table. He was twenty-six. He is buried in the Catholic churchyard at Steenbergen, where the town keeps the grave and the memorial to this day. The Dam Busters story, which entered British culture through Paul Brickhill's 1951 book and the 1955 film, has never settled out of it; the Gibson name carries its weight on the Tyne and Tees Gibsons whose patronymic is otherwise the quiet industrial north's standard signature.