Original subtitles

(PLEASANT MUSIC DRIFTING)

(BIRDS CHIRPING)

I can't find it, Daddy, I've looked EVERYWHERE!

All right, don't worry, we'll find it in the morning.

I've got another one here.

Ready?

Stand by.

Four, three, two, one...

Fire! (SHOT)

Oh, I'm sorry, it's no good.

It's over there in that flowerbed somewhere.

The glorious spectacle of The Dam Busters begins in the spring of 1942

in a pretty cottage under a silver sky

where a bespectacled man is playing marbles

with his children.

How unassuming, how very British...

Based on real events,

the 1955 epic is considered one of the most complex, rousing

and realistic of war movies.

Would you say it has a legacy as a sort of historical document?

And I mean in the sense of what we understand and know of that whole mission,

Operation Chastise,

really comes from the film.

I mean, I think you could argue

that it's probably the most useful film to understand World War Two overall

because this was a war

that was fought through technological innovation and mechanical production,

coupled with suitable intelligence

and the odd daring feat, you know?

I mean, this was a war where the industrial power of the two different sides

was critical.

(ATMOSPHERIC MUSIC)

(CONTINUES)

(FADES)

The man in question is the brilliant and eccentric aircraft engineer

Barnes Wallis,

played with strange nobility by Michael Redgrave.

Rather than a game,

he is figuring out how to get a marble to skim along a tub of water

and hit a specific target.

He has already dreamed up his miraculous bouncing bomb.

(SIGHS) Watch it, Christopher.

Four, three, two, one...

Fire! (SHOT)

Fire, that's good!

Mark it, Mary!

Barnes Wallis was an engineer and inventor

who began work in the shipping industry, in fact.

He was trained as an engineer,

he got a degree in engineering.

Clearly, it was in his blood

and he started to work

basically sort of improving on various elements in shipping.

Very quickly, he decided that he preferred aviation.

He was very, very gifted

in terms of finding new ways of constructing all kinds of machinery

and especially plane fuselages that were lighter and stronger.

In fact, he invented the geodesic structure

which made that the bombers and the planes that were flying

in this construction

were far lighter and less likely to actually suffer material damage.

Do you know how much water it takes the Germans to make a ton of steel?

Haven't the least idea. One hundred tons.

Now, just look at this.

The whole of this great arsenal of war factories in the Ruhr

depends for its water on three enormous dams.

The Mohne, the Eder and the Sorpe.

Directed with documentary poise and understated emotion by Michael Anderson,

The Dam Busters is a film in two halves.

In the first, we follow Wallis' attempts to prove his ingenuous bomb will work.

In the second comes the mission itself

led by the dashing Wing Commander Guy Gibson,

played by Richard Todd in a monument to un-showy valour.

Tell me a little bit about the real history of The Dam Busters,

the famous Operation Chastise.

Operation Chastise was a British operation

to try to destroy...

Well, to at least cripple

large parts of the German industrial machine, which was based in the Ruhr Valley,

where they had coalmines,

steelworks,

uh, and they were supplied by three or four significant dams for electric power

and to hold back the waters of the river,

the Ruhr River.

The idea was that if you destroyed these dams

you would cripple German industrial production

and that would delay all sorts of things

from armaments manufacture to development of new weapons.

And it was seen really...

Actually almost from the beginning of the Second World War as an important operation.

The problem was the technology wasn't there to hit a dam.

The Germans had prepared against it with nets to prevent torpedoes.

Conventional bombs would run the risk of not hitting the dam at all,

so the British had to work out a way of getting a bomb up against the dam

to blow the dam apart

and that was...

It was as much a technical feat of engineering invention

as it was a feat of flying expertise.

In the end,

what happened was the inventor Barnes Wallis

came up with what we now know as the bouncing bomb,

which was a cylindrical bomb with a particular kind of backspin

which once it hit the wall of the dam would sink straight to the bottom

and that's when it would detonate its charge,

which would mean that the charge would go off at the base of the dam.

It would take more than one bomb but they would eventually blow the dam apart and release it

so it was...

We think of it as an incredibly romantic adventure film

but really it's a film and a story about technical and engineering expertise

up against a really complicated problem

and then new ways of delivering that payload.

All set? Yes, sir.

Well, you've done a fine job with this team.

I couldn't have asked for a better one.

Good luck. Thank you, sir.

Good luck!

(CAR DOOR CLOSES)

Come on, then.

(DOOR CLOSES)

(REVVING)

This is the tale of two contrasting men

who went beyond what was required of them,

a vision of the courage it took to strike at the heart of the enemy

in one of the most unconventional missions of World War Two

by bouncing a bomb into three dams,

devastating German industry and turning the tide of the war.

I had at the back of my mind

the idea that while you couldn't float anything along the surface,

you couldn't tickle it with an existing bomb of any kind

and you couldn't float torpedoes down towards it

because of the netting, which hung down...

The only thing to do is to make something which hopped

so I made something which hopped!

After a conversation with a friend of his who was a keen cricketer,

he discovered that if he put a backspin on the bomb

then it would perform exactly as he wanted it to.

Now, he put all these things together

and that was an incredible sort of feat of engineering that had to be achieved,

not just in terms of the bomb itself

but also in the way it was delivered.

The wonderful thing about this, in terms of the film,

is that you see this in quite a lot of detail,

the development of how he actually managed to achieve this,

the successes, the failures,

it was a...

It's like a sort of rhythm that goes like this.

You know that he's going to achieve it

because of course we know the history of it

but the effort and the failures in between

are what gives the film its suspense.

And it all centres on this figure of Barnes Wallis

who was, let's say, to put it politely,

an eccentric gentleman!

He was...

I mean, he was a dedicated aerodynamic engineer

all of his life, really.

He started off...

His father was a GP but was ill.

They lived in a state of gentile distress, he said,

so he became an engineering apprentice,

moved very quickly into aircraft manufacture at Vickers

and began work on the airships, the R-80 and the R-100,

and this is where he developed what we would call the geodesic design...

But if you think about the way an airship is designed,

these struts that are very, very firm,

very strong,

these lines that go from one end of the airship to the other

and then the outside of the airship is covered in fabric.

He moved that into bombers.

So, if you think about it, it features in the film, in fact,

the Wellington bomber, which is structured much the same way.

A very, very strong basis for the fundamental structure of the object.

I mean, after the war, he was involved in the aerodynamics that would produce Concorde.

He was very interested in flow and strength

and all these sort of very nerdy details about how minor things would work

and how you could get the best possible effect

from the trickiest little engineering adjustment.

Yet, more than simply depicting a fascinating episode of military history,

The Dam Busters is a meditation on national identity in the face of crisis,

held aloft by one of the most stirring scores ever written.

I'll see what we can do. Oh.

Well, goodbye. Goodbye.

Goodbye. Goodbye.

Goodbye.

And keep at it... I think you've got something!

(STIRRING MUSIC)

(BLOWS)

(SHOT)

(TRUNDLING)

Contact port outer!

Contact port outer!

(ENGINES CONTINUE AND FADE)

In the vast tapestry of World War Two,

few missions stand out like Operation Chastise.

On the perfectly moonlit night of May 16th 1943,

the 617 Squadron of Lancasters

took off from RAF Scampton near Lincoln

to bomb the Mohne, Edersee and Sorpe Dams in the Ruhr Valley

using bouncing bombs dropped from only 60 feet.

Two of the dams were destroyed.

Barnes Wallis and Guy Gibson are very real heroes.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

The king and queen are welcomed by Wing Commander Gibson

while visiting The Dam Busters.

His majesty congratulates Australian Flight Lieutenant Martin, who won the DSO.

The queen has a word with an American

serving with the Canadian Air Force,

Flight Lieutenant McCarthy, another DSO winner.

While Gibson's own Lancaster stands majestically in the background,

the king meets members of the crews of the special task force

involved in the breaching of the Mohne and Eder Dams.

These men, hand-picked, were withdrawn from Bomber Command

to train in secret for this attack, which had been long in prospect.

Wing Commander Gibson received the VC for his gallantry

to add to his four other decorations.

The operation achieved its aim,

in two ways, actually...

It did destroy two of the dams at least,

they had slowed down the industry.

Also, at the same time,

it created a HUGE morale boost for the British,

which gave them sort of added impetus to continuing the war.

There was some criticism about it,

that it wasn't a wholehearted success,

but...

'Cause the Germans did actually rebuild the dams and were sort of back functioning,

but it nonetheless...

The actual operation worked as well as it could under the circumstances

and did indeed slow down the German war machine.

Now, obviously, in a romanticised sense,

it makes for a great movie

but in a historical sense there's some debate about whether the dam busting was successful,

isn't there?

Yes, I mean, it was literally successful

in that two of three dams they set out to destroy were destroyed.

And the Ruhr Valley was flooded...

What Barnes Wallis and other people had hoped

was that the RAF would then carpet-bomb the area

during the rebuilding

but there's a figure in the film, the head of bomber command,

Bomber Harris,

who really didn't hold with this mission.

In the film, he is shown as the guy who backs the mission to the hilt

in the face of opposition from the ministry

but, really, he was not into low-flying.

He was not into this sort of derring-do.

He thought the operation was a waste of time.

He thought it was a great feat of flying but he didn't follow up.

So, the British didn't bomb the valley

and the Germans were able to rebuild the dams in, you know,

a number of months, less than a year.

The Germans themselves were not as convinced that the raid had been a failure.

They were very, very dismayed by it.

Albert Speer, after the war,

talked about the damage to the German industrial production.

Significantly, it also meant that a lot of people working on the concrete emplacements

for the D-Day landings

to protect against the Allied invasion

had to be moved from the beaches back to the Ruhr Valley to rebuild the dams.

So, that meant that the...

When D-Day arrived,

this was not the intention of the raid

but it meant that when D-Day arrived the defences there were weaker.

It's sort of a success of unintended consequences.

It probably made the war shorter but not in the way that was planned,

in a sense.

Now, there's a full moon tonight

so normal ops are out.

We'll be the only people flying

and to avoid the fighters we'll have to keep a zero beat

all the way there and back.

(COMMOTION)

(ENGINE STARTS)

With World War Two such a rich source

throughout the late '40s and '50s,

The Dam Busters story was an ideal subject.

Howard Hawks had planned a version with a script by Roald Dahl.

Michael Balcon tried at Ealing.

Producer Robert Clark at the Associated British Picture Corporation

succeeded by convincing both the Royal Air Force and a sceptical Wallis

that he would stay true to the events.

But it was a sort of symbolic success

and that's probably one of the reasons why it becomes a celebrated film!

It was.

They sent a Spitfire over the following day

just to try and film the success.

I mean, this was the point at which they were starting to use cameras a lot in aircraft.

Guy Gibson, one of the central characters in the film,

was obsessed with using cameras.

He was very keen on filming the raids,

filming what was happening

and they sent a Spitfire out to film the damage that had been done

and then the following day the pictures were all over the front pages of the newspapers

and it was seen, spiritually, within the UK,

as a significant turning point in the war

and we took the fight to heart of Germany.

It was also very important for two reasons with the Allies.

Stalin at this point was fighting on the Eastern Front

and feeling VERY abandoned by the West.

He was concerned that the Russians were having to shoulder the vast bulk of the war fighting

and the idea that the British were at least doing something mollified him a little,

made him feel that there was a genuine alliance there

and also in America...

The Americans weren't particularly interested in aerial bombardment,

it was something they didn't really see the strategic significance of

and it was after the raid...

Guy Gibson's publicity tour of the United States

was very, very important in bringing the...

Not just public opinion round again to the British way of doing things

but also this idea of bombing as being a critical part of the war,

which, of course, in the end it was.

Authenticity was everything.

Screenwriter R.C. Sherriff,

best known for his poignant World War One play, Journey's End,

drew from the historic account by Paul Brickhill.

This remarkable Australian writer had flown Spitfires

and escaped from a German POW camp

and also wrote the book that inspired The Great Escape

and To Serve Them All My Days.

And Sherriff actually met with Wallis,

who gave him a demonstration of his home-made experiments.

When you're ready!

This should get our feet wet!

Watch it...

Fire!

(BOOMING)

(DEBRIS FALLING)

(TENSE BEAT)

Good heavens, that's wonderful!

Wonderful!

The person who really made the film come to life

was an Australian journalist called Paul Brickhill.

He had a rather extraordinary early life.

He was a copyboy, he went into journalism,

he joined the Australian Royal Air Force

during the war.

He became a prisoner of war in Germany

and it was while he was in the prisoner of war camp in...

In fact, it was Stalag III,

that he became involved in an extraordinary escape plan.

The problem was that he, during the course of this,

he was going to escape with everybody else,

developed claustrophobia,

so he was left behind.

As he was left behind and he was with a few of the other lads

who couldn't in fact go on the plane,

they decided that what they would do is...

They all had stories about escape plans,

that they write them down on tiny little bits of paper

so the Germans wouldn't find them.

Finally, he was released and he wrote a book about his experiences

and it was called The Great Escape.

Extraordinary success!

As that book came out,

or in the process of him writing that book,

somebody approached him to say,

"Well, look, you know, we love this so how about The Dam Busters story?"

He got immediately interested in that

and so he was actually writing almost the two books simultaneously!

He'd sort of more or less finished The Great Escape

but then he started to work on The Dam Busters book.

Incredibly, at the same time as The Dam Busters book came out,

Douglas Bader,

who was trying to write his own biography

of being a sort of heroic figure in the RAF,

approached him and said,

"Will you write my autobiography?"

Extraordinarily enough, he then wrote a third book called Reach for the Sky

about Douglas Bader.

Director Michael Anderson had only a handful of B-movies to his name

but had worked alongside Anthony Asquith and David Lean.

He had a reputation as a formidable first assistant director.

Having served with the Royal Corps of Signals,

his planning was meticulous

and his dedication to realism such that he would send footage to Wallis for his approval.

So, what is so extraordinary about The Dam Busters?

It's virtually a docudrama

and you have all this vast amounts of information and detail

and you needed a director in Michael Anderson

who could pull it all together and make it a compelling narrative!

Yes, Anderson is a very interesting director.

By the time The Dam Busters comes around,

he is building a very strong reputation on set

but he hasn't yet found the material to direct his great film.

He had started off as an actor

then he moved into assistant directing.

He was production manager,

he worked on In Which We Serve with David Lean

and then war broke out

and he was in the Royal Signal Corps.

It's not clear what he did there, but certainly part of that is in comms.

It's not clear whether he was filming.

And then he worked with Peter Ustinov making films in and around the war effort

and finally came out and started working on sort of neo-realist films.

There was a British film he made called Waterfront,

which was about Liverpool during the Depression,

which was very, very much a sort of a precursor to the Grim Up North films

of the sort of the late '50s and '60s.

He wanted to do a very, very realistic version of events.

I mean, if you read about what he did, in terms of realism,

it is...

It is extraordinary!

I mean, he went to Wallis and said...

Showed him footage and said, "Is this how it happened?"

They wanted to shoot real Lancaster Bombers.

He even wanted to cast people who looked exactly like the real figures they played!

And of course, they also used actual footage

from Barnes Wallis' test runs.

He shot footage of the tests of the bomb

to persuade the ministry and to persuade the RAF

and, uh, Michael Anderson cut in the literal footage from those tests into the film,

which is why it's in black and white,

so that those bits of real-life footage can be used.

Now, these are the first dropping tests

at the Chesil Beach near Weymouth.

Here comes the Wellington.

Matt Summers is the pilot and I'm working the release gear.

(WHIRRING)

Now, in a moment, you'll see the bomb.

There it goes... Now watch!

(WHIRRING CONTINUES AND FADES)

(ENGINE ROARING)

Well, I suppose there's nothing much we can do.

Except wait...

The AOC's waiting to take us back to Grantham.

(SEARCHING MUSIC)

Michael Redgrave was an established star by 1955.

He had The Lady Vanishes and The Browning Version behind him

and was lauded on stage.

He had also served in the Royal Navy.

While he was a risky choice for Wallis, being ten years younger,

Redgrave understood that he was a reclusive genius

but with this unwavering belief in his idea,

rolling up his trousers to retrieve bomb test fragments from the sea

and staring down rooms full of glowering civil servants...

The great thing about it was of course that Redgrave could act the part.

He was a superb actor,

one of the great lights of the theatre.

And so, he took great care in emulating

without being a sort of impersonating Barnes Wallis

in his sort of slightly boffin-ish air...

But what he really had was this determination,

this sort of drive to solve any problem.

This was what it was,

it was an engineering problem for him.

This is why the film has such an extraordinary level of intensity

at the beginning AND at the end

because he realised that he was a man, a scientist,

whose sole purpose at this particular time

is focused on solving

this incredibly difficult problem of precision.

Anderson was so committed to accuracy

that he wanted his actors to resemble their real counterparts.

That was one of the reasons that made Richard Todd so perfect for Gibson,

he looked just like him!

He also happened to be on contract at Associated British

following active service as a captain in the parachute regiment,

dropping into Normandy on D-Day,

something he replayed in The Longest Day.

(SIGHS)

I'm afraid I'm asking a great deal of you...

Do you think you can fly it to those limits?

Well, it's hard to say off hand.

The altimeter is no good at that level

but, well, they've given me some of the best pilots in the Air Force

so we'll see what we can do.

You haven't tested the full-sized bomb yet, have you?

No, it's being assembled now.

I hope to try it in a week or ten days.

Do you really mean that a five-ton bomb can bounce along the water

like a ping-pong ball?

It's been hard to persuade some people that it will

but I've every reason to believe it will behave exactly like those miniatures.

Well, how far from the target do we drop the bomb?

Ah, that's the third factor that I'm afraid requires absolute accuracy.

I've got a little more work to do on it

but I think it'll be 600 yards.

Did you invent this thing out of your own head?

Well, yes, I...

I think I might say I invented it!

Well, I think it's terrific!

How would you describe the film?

Because it's not a documentary...

Somehow, Anderson has found a way of making a very stirring,

a very passionate film

yet with this extraordinary sort of British reserve.

Yes, it is, I think, almost unlike any other war film

in that it's a film of two halves.

The first half is the individual against the system film,

the one man, you know, trying to get his idea across

against bureaucracy.

Sort of Kafkaesque in a sense as he moves around the...

This is Barnes Wallis? This is Barnes Wallis, yes.

This is Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis,

moving around the corridors of Whitehall,

trying to get seen, waiting outside offices.

Somehow gripping because they're showing the invention.

We know it will work, we've seen...

Of course, partly because we're watching the film,

but we know, we've seen he's made it work, we're backing him,

the humble guy up against the ministry.

And then it flips at the moment that he meets Gibson

and it starts to transition into a heroic men on a mission movie

where Gibson's putting together the team

and off they're going on the heist sort of film.

And the crossover is very, very gentle,

it doesn't quickly stop and then you go over to the air crew.

Gibson is with Wallis during the test runs,

Gibson is backing Wallis.

I mean, Gibson takes the whole process very personally

and they work together and they appear to like each other,

so it's a very...

It's about these two men, the moment they meet,

how they work together

and then, if you like, Wallis hands over the baton of this mission

to the heroic pilot

and then all he can do is pace and wait.

The camera drifts around the rooms filled with British and Australian aircrews,

capturing entire lives in the accumulation of pre-flight rituals.

Putting on a brave face takes on a universe of meanings.

The detail of flying resonates with the pragmatic courage it takes to get into the air

against a barrage of flak.

And that is Robert Shaw as Gibson's copilot,

Flight Sergeant John Pulford.

Shaw was a friend of Redgrave's

and Anderson was struck by how much he too resembled the real man.

Virtually the entire cast and surely most of the crew

came with first-hand experience of the war.

This lent the film an invaluable integrity.

They were not only honouring the men of the mission

but their own comrades.

There is something enormously moving

about the way Todd delivers Gibson's casual instruction

for the men to begin their mission.

"Come on, then."

(TENSE MUSIC)

(INDISTINCT CHATTER)

One of the things that Anderson does really well

is to take this really, really big story and personalise it.

He REALLY gets into intimate details of the characters

and he does this by looking at them individually

and also in...

In groups.

One of the things that Anderson is really good at

is showing how the pilots prepare themselves before this mission

which is almost suicidal...

And it's the calmness, it is the calm before the storm.

The two Australian pilots, for example, who are sharing a room,

they're sort of reading magazines

and then just throw them across the room to each other to sort of share their mags.

There's a little bit of jazz playing in the background.

They could be just waiting for their girlfriends to arrive.

Another man is just writing a letter,

um, as many of them would have done,

and then he starts winding his clock,

which he just leaves on his dresser.

There's even somebody who, actually,

just in fact when they're out, sort of waiting to be picked up,

have a small game of cricket.

You know, and all of these things,

all of these things show a relative normality,

a relative sort of almost Zen kind of piece

before this mighty storm that's approaching.

And I think that that is really important

because what happens then and what Anderson does brilliantly

is to show exactly the same rooms afterwards,

empty.

And you understand,

you feel the cost without having to show people being killed.

You see the emptiness and the vacancy

of where a human being once was.

Anderson approached the film with a documentary clarity,

consciously shooting in a sober black and white

in order to incorporate real footage of the test runs

as well as shots of the conveniently flooded Ruhr Valley of 1955.

That is the real RAF Scampton where the 617 was based.

Only the scene of Gibson devising the targeting spotlights

while watching dancing girls is a delightfully cinematic addition to history.

(UPBEAT MUSIC)

(CONTINUES)

(DRONING)

Up a bit... A bit more.

Now hold it!

That's too much!

Down, down...

Now hold it now! Fine!

For the incredible shots of their four Avro Lancasters

pirouetting over Lake Windermere and Derwent Reservoir,

which stood in for the German reservoirs,

real-life bomber pilots had to fly as low as 30 feet above the water.

It was the only way for the perilous flying to be effective on camera.

Meanwhile, a full-scale fuselage was built on a gimbal

to bank and tilt against back projection

with the actors stoically at the controls.

So, let's talk about the realism of the flying

because I think everyone remembers the model work

and they remember also the music, of course,

but the aerial photography in The Dam Busters is peerless,

isn't it?

Yes, by the time the film was made the Lancaster Bomber had been retired by the RAF.

They still had a number mothballed and they were...

The RAF lent them to the production

for what I think in today's terms would be roughly £1.5 million!

So, it was...

You know, it was a publicity film for the RAF,

but they were still going to get their money!

And the bomber,

the Lancaster Bomber had been replaced

by something called the Lincoln Bomber,

which had a lot of similarities in the way it was flown,

so the pilots for the Lincoln were also allowed to fly for the film.

So, they had three Lancasters to represent the bombers

and one Lancaster to do the filming.

I mean, funnily enough,

the raid itself required the bombers to fly at 60 feet above the water.

The filmmakers, when they saw the Lancasters at 60 feet,

it actually didn't look that dramatic to them

so they asked the Lancasters to fly lower

at 40 feet above the water!

Wasn't it 30 feet? I think they came down to 30 feet!

Yeah, they started at 40 and then they went down to 30,

to the point where sometimes the propellers were actually almost doing water spouts on the lakes

as they went over!

At one point, the pilot said,

"Well, what happens if we crash and die?"

And they said, "Oh, well, we probably won't do the film!"

So, it was hardly reassuring!

When you see the film, there are two dams they go into,

which are represented by two actual dams in the Lake District,

two actual areas in the Lake District,

one of which was as dangerous to fly down as the film depicts

and the pilots were terrified when they were flying down there

because to pull up in time was GENUINELY dangerous!

So, they were flying WAY beyond the extremes for these aircraft!

They were flying at a level that Guy Gibson wasn't flying!

The model work,

including a 40-foot dam built at Elstree to crack like piecrust,

was done before the main shoot

so that the aerial shots could build towards a specific climax.

Famously, the plunging Lancasters

were the inspiration for the Death Star trench run

in George Lucas' original Star Wars.

Lucas even employed Gill Taylor,

who had masterminded the special effects photography

on The Dam Busters.

(DRONING)

Down, down, down, down...

Down...

We're too high! Down...

We're too high, skipper, we won't make it!

Steady... Hold it there!

It's too late, skipper, it's too late!

(ROARING)

(JOYFUL MUSIC)

(FADES)

Eric Coates had no interest in writing music for film,

which is exactly what he told the producer

but Robert Clark wouldn't take no for an answer,

convincing the classical composer

this was a matter of honouring history

at which point Coates mentioned he had written the perfect piece only the day before!

The stirring, patriotic, legendary Dam Busters March has never been matched.

Indeed, it has become the unofficial anthem for the Royal Air Force.

The story goes

that he was experimenting with Elgar-style marches.

He wanted to do something in the form of Elgar

and when he was approached to write the score for The Dam Busters,

he turned it down because he wasn't interested in film music,

he really wasn't...

However, when he was told that this was a film of national significance

and importance,

he sort of changed his mind and he started to work and then he...

He thought, "I have something that might work!"

Which was The Dam Busters March,

to all intents and purposes which he'd already written.

It was his sort of tribute to Elgar.

They brought that in.

Clearly, it was absolutely perfect for it!

He didn't want to write too much of the rest of the music

and, in fact, Leighton Lucas wrote a great deal of the other music, such that it is,

incidental music and things like that.

What's fascinating is for a piece of music

which is now SO famous

and is, you know, in the repertoire of every military band

that ever existed,

especially during the flypasts on the queen's birthday,

things like that...

Is that it's used fairly infrequently in the film.

In fact, the most significant part of it

is NOTHING to do with the flying,

it's to do when they're waiting to get into the lorries

to take them to the Bombers.

It's kind of ironic really, though, isn't it?

It's become triumphal,

yet, actually, if you watch the film,

that's not kind of the message of the film.

The film is very poignant and very considered.

I mean, it takes a lot of unpacking, I think,

that whole thing.

There's something about the film that is...

It's a very un-triumphant movie,

it's a very sorrowful movie towards the end.

It's about a mission

that we're not entirely certain was as successful as it was intended to be

and yet the music,

it's become this symbol of sort of a jingoistic patriotism

which you think that almost no one involved in any part of that

would have had any interest in, really!

There was a...

One of the original pilots was on set during filming

and he said, at one point,

"I think you're making a bit too much of this mission, we just did our job!"

No one at any point saw this as being this symbol of jingoistic patriotism

but the music itself has created this sort of mythical power

which I think, actually, almost no one would have wanted,

in a strange way.

The power of The Dam Busters lies in what is UNSAID.

So much of the story is told in uncomplaining faces.

The lower half of his face concealed beneath an oxygen mask,

Todd works wonders with only his eyes

as he receives news of the planes that have gone down.

Redgrave's Wallis is quietly devastated

at the human cost of his great idea.

Rather than jingoism,

Anderson concludes on a note of great solemnity,

the camera steadily watching the returning hero Todd walk into the distance,

his first duty being to write to the families of the fallen.

Anderson, I think, does an extraordinary job of communicating what it's like

to be on board,

and more power to Richard Todd

because he does so much acting with his eyes,

because his face is covered with a mask,

and still conveys great emotion and great courage

with very minimal gestures!

There is a particular point where the three wings of the raid

go over the coast

and each...

The captain of each of those wings says, "Enemy coast ahead!"

And at that point all of the stars put masks across their faces

and from then on you don't...

All you've got is your eyes!

And they're conveying everything from their terror

to their lack of understanding...

People keep popping up and popping down,

it's a very active process!

But there's... You can't see their faces!

Imagine that now,

that you would show the stars of the film

but they would be completely hidden from the audience's view!

It's a very, very, very powerfully done piece of acting by everybody.

Not just Richard Todd, but all of the actors,

all of the bomb crew managed to bring us on board with them!

Is it true? All those fellows lost?

Only two aircraft went down in the attacks,

that was Hopgood's over the Mohne and Maudslay's over the Eder.

Astell got it soon after crossing the coast

and Dinghy Young was shot down over the sea on his way home.

And the rest we don't know about...

They've been calling them since midnight but they haven't answered.

The flak was bad, worse than I expected.

Fifty-six men...

If I had known it was going to be like this, I...

I'd never have started it.

Now, you mustn't think that way.

If all these fellows had known from the beginning they wouldn't be coming back,

they'd have gone for it just the same.

Isn't a single one of them would've dropped out, I knew them all, that's true.

It's a REAL downbeat ending

but what it does is it shows...

And in fact, Richard Todd has said that that was the hardest scene for him to do

and as he's walking away he was crying

because, of course,

as somebody who had been in the war himself,

had been a captain, parachute regiment,

he had himself had to have written those letters

so he knew EXACTLY what was going through the mind of Guy Gibson

at that time

and I think that that is achingly beautiful,

a wounding ending to the movie,

which is as significant as it could possibly be.

Effecting the perfect balance of patriotism and poignancy

for an audience still nursing the wounds of World War Two,

The Dam Busters became the biggest British film of 1955.

The scope of the production marks it out as a blockbuster of its day

and it garnered an Oscar nomination for its special effects.

But what endures is its breathtaking detail...

It was a revelation for the viewer.

So, tell me,

what became of both Guy Gibson and Barnes Wallis?

You know, after the mission?

Well, Guy Gibson went on a large publicity tour of the United States

and spent a long time out there sort of drumming up interest in the idea of bombing,

in the British war effort.

He became frustrated, he came back

and he then wanted to get back into action

so he joined a Mosquito Squadron.

It was a plane he was not experienced in.

He did...

Led a mission he was not necessarily experienced to lead

and it is not certain whether he was shot down

or whether he actually ran out of fuel

because the Mosquito had these two fuel tanks.

They found his plane many years later buried underground

and it's possible that he just was not...

You know, he wanted to win, he wanted to fight

and he wasn't ready for that plane,

which is quite heartbreaking, in a way,

if you think...

The idea that at the end he died in the air

but not in the way that he would have wanted to, who knows...

Barnes Wallis then went on inventing.

I mean, he went on inventing till his retirement in 1971.

He contributed to designs that led to Concorde.

He was...

He never produced anything as epoch-making as the bouncing bomb

but his bombing ideas did lead to significant bunker-busting bombs.

He probably has more influence on warfare

than he would like to admit.

Certainly, after the raid,

when he saw the human cost,

he was so horrified that he refused to let a test pilot into any of his inventions

until it had been very, very significantly tested by models.

He was terrified of losing a single other pilot's life.

The Dam Busters is not simply a captivating men on a mission movie

or an account of great British guile

or, for that matter,

a shining example of the ingenuity of British filmmaking in the '50s

in the quiet dedication of these men,

led by Wallis and Gibson,

but Anderson's objective was to document a history that had been mythologised.

Remarkably, in 1955,

there were elements of Operation Chastise that were still classified.

The fact that the bombs spun backwards for stability

had to be covered up in the real footage.

Nevertheless,

the film stands as the defining testament

to the achievements of two remarkable men.

Aren't you going to turn in, Gibby?

No, I... I have to write some letters first.

(BIRDS CHIRPING IN DISTANCE)

(TENDER MUSIC)

(CONTINUES)

(FADES)

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