George "Johnny" Johnson RIP

[NutmegCT]

The last living Dambuster.

Tributes paid as last surviving Dambuster Johnny Johnson dies

Sq Ldr George 'Johnny' Johnson, 101, was part of the World War Two operation involving bouncing bombs.

www.bbc.com

 

[Gliderman8]

Thanks for posting.

 

[equiprx]

The last living Dambuster.

View attachment 83974

Tributes paid as last surviving Dambuster Johnny Johnson dies

Sq Ldr George 'Johnny' Johnson, 101, was part of the World War Two operation involving bouncing bombs.

www.bbc.com

I really enjoyed the movie they made about that mission.
Don't know if it was tarted up for Hollywood or was accurate.

 

[mikephillips]

Incomplete might be a good description. Fitting everything into 2 hours usually means details are omitted, characters are condensed or combined into fewer or one. So the story overall may be accurate as to what happened but lacking the full scope of what occurred.

 

[NutmegCT]

The "bouncing bombs" needed to be released at very low altitude. If I recall correctly, one of the documentaries on the "Dambusters" operation mentioned how difficult it was to measure altitude above surface when flying so low. Someone came up with the idea to have two bright beam lights (aldis signal lamps), on the a/c belly. The lights were angled so that when their beams converged, they were at the desired altitude to release the bombs. A "inversion" of two spotlights following a trapeze artist.

Euclid would have been proud.

Dambusters - on triangulations and forgotten boffins — 42!

Last week was the 77th anniversary of the famous “Dambusters” raid on German dams in the Ruhr valley. There are many sources of stories online describing Barnes Wallis’ innovative ‘bouncing bombs’, and the bravery of Wing Commander Guy Gibson and his 617 squadron crew. However, I wanted to shine

devan.codes

Lockspeiser's original drawing:

I think the use of the lamps was shown in the 1955 movie.

 

[YakkoWarner]

There was a documentary-type program I watched at a friend's house (he had high speed internet) of a group attempting to reproduce the bouncing bomb success....it was a lot harder than it looked (even with what remaining documentation they could find). They used a older 4 engine propliner as their bomber and got permission for low level passes over a lake, built a small dam off one of the branches to use as a target and a lot of trial and error to get one of the (inert) bombs to bounce across the water and spin down the face of the dam. It was a bit overproduced (they even went as far as putting dynamite on their small dam so if they succeeded in getting the dummy bomb on target they could have an explosion) but still quite interesting.