It's just crazy enough to work, defined


If a scientist came to you and said, "You know when you skip a rock across the water? Well, I want to do that with a 6000 lb bomb…" you'd probably have him committed and taken off of your staff. Well, I had the recent fortune of getting a hold of a post WWII movie called the Dam Busters (1954), and you'll never believe what they did.

I read about this movie a few years ago. It has never been released in the USA because there is a black lab in the movie named "Nigger." Those of you who have seen Pink Floyd The Wall, yes, it's that movie.

Dam Busters is based on a real event that happened during WWII, and most Americans don't know it happened because of the lack of a US release, and it's just about the craziest thing I've ever heard. A group of pilots flew bombers down a narrow river, at night, at an altitude of 60 feet and a speed of 250 mph. When the two towers of the dam were lined up in a hand made viewfinder and the two searchlights attached to the bottom of the aircraft were aligned, they were at the right distance and height to drop a 6000 lb bomb from the plane, where it would skip along the river, over the protective fences and drop right next to a dam where the heart of Germany's power and steel industry was located. The river basin would flood and all would be destroyed. Did I mention that they did this to two dams in the same night? Yes, that's right. Like I said, this really happened.

I first learned about this movie while researching… you guessed it, Star Wars. I knew that George Lucas was inspired by, if not directly duplicating older movies such as Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress, Ford's Searchers, and The Dam Busters by recreating a scene shot for shot. Well, The Dam Busters is where Lucas got the idea for the attack on the Death Star. Many of the shots building up to the attack are shots that I immediately recognized as shots Lucas used in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. There are also several lines of dialog during the radio communications that were also recreated in Star Wars. Lucas' reasoning behind it was that this event helped prove any plan is worth trying. With proper execution even something that sounds really really really crazy and unlikely can be pulled off with great success. After all, the exhaust port on the Death Star was only two meters wide.

The movie is terribly exciting. The whole thing starts with a man's idea and you see it through the attack of the dams. There's not a lot of character development or sub plot, though you do follow several characters from beginning to end. Much of the footage you see during the film is the actual stock footage of the test runs and experimentation of bombers skipping bombs along the water. Even knowing many of the details of the process, it was exciting to see it all unfold and carried out to completion. After years of never knowing this movie existed, and learning about it because of a couple of other movies, made it like solving a mystery to me. It's not too tough to find these days in the world of Netflix and the like, but it is a rare gem, that I hope we will see a good solid remake of it in the not too distant future. There are rumors of Peter Jackson remaking it, but he's currently denying it, but I'd sure like to see his version of the movie. I don't really think it needs to be remade, but making a version that would be shown in the USA, would introduce a whole new generation of people to an event that was seemingly crazy in it's creation, but through support and careful planning created one of the most significant attacks by the English during WWII. I think it's something that should be remembered.