World War II

On the night of May 16th 1943, The British Air force sent a group of "dam buster" planes to attack the Möhne Dam in the Ruhr Valley, Germany's industrial heartland. Their plan was to put a hole in the dam so that the sudden release of water would then kill many people downstream, and disrupt Germany's power source.

The planes came in at 60 feet above the ground, and dropped their bombs, not completely destroying the dam, but they did exactly what they wanted them to do. They put a big enough hole in the dam so that billions of gallons of water rushed through the opening and swept down the Ruhr Valley. Thirteen hundred people were killed as a result of a relatively small hole in a very large dam.

1954 Film: "The Dam Buster's"

Van der Graaf Generator played the film's theme "The Dam Busters' March" as an encore in the early '70's

"The Dam Busters" by Paul Brickhill:




Britain's ITV commercial network has been accused of censorship after deciding to remove all references to a dog named "Nr" from a classic British World War II film, Dam Busters, which starred Michael Redgrave. The group Index on Censorship noted that the film was based on a true incident, that the movie was made in 1954 and that the dog's name is also used later in the film as a codeword for a military operation. "Taking [the offending word] out is unnecessary and ridiculous," a spokeswoman for Index on Censorship told Britain's Guardian newspaper. "It is a '50s film, and it should be kept in context." But Ian McBride, managing editor of compliance at Granada, the ITV company that broadcast