The Dam Busters

A war film set in Britain. Barnes Wallis is an engineer. He has an idea: if the dams in Germany's Ruhr are broken, the industry stops. The problem is technical. There are torpedo nets in front of the dams and an ordinary bomb is not enough. He looks for a solution. If the bomb is dropped at a certain angle and spin it will skip across the water like a stone. He tests it in his garden. In a tub, with a catapult. From there the film is a story of development. Tank tests, scale models, trials on a lake, and constant failure. The ministry is not interested. Wallis is refused at every meeting. Then approval comes. The second part is training. A squadron is formed and Guy Gibson is put in command. The operation is very hard. The aircraft must fly at night, at sixty feet, at a fixed speed, and release at exactly the right point. Measuring the height is a problem. The altimeter does not work to that precision. The solution is two lamps. Two lights are fitted under the aircraft; when the beams meet on the water the height is right. The speed is solved with a simple wooden frame. What the narrative is interested in is not victory but calculation: the whole first half describes an engineering problem and how the solution was found. The raid takes place in 1943. Two dams are broken. More than half the aircraft do not come back. The last section is about that. Wallis learns the number lost and holds himself responsible. The narrative builds no scene of celebration. There is a dog in the film whose name is a racial slur of the period; the name was censored or changed in later broadcasts and the matter has been debated many times in Britain. The low-flying sequences were shot with real aircraft. The music and the raid sequence influenced later war films and science fiction productions. Michael Redgrave, Richard Todd and Ursula Jeans are in the cast. Michael Anderson directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes British war films and narratives about technical problems. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a critical view; the narrative never enters the civilian consequences of the target.