This is John Bachelor. I spoke with my colleague Gregory Coplay, editor and publisher of Defense and Foreign Affairs,

about the very famous damn-busting of 1943,

comparing contrast to the damn-busting of 2023.

Gregory tells a wonderful, magical story of his 13-year-old magazine put together for the Air Force cadets in Australia,

and his interview and tasking of one of the survivors, one of the heroes of the damn-busters in the rural valley in May of 1943.

He makes reference, of course, to the damn-busting in Ukraine today and what it means going forward, not only for the terms of the combat,

but afterwards for the recovery of Ukraine. Here's Gregory.

617 Squadron, the damn-busters. I knew Squadron leader Lance Howard, who was an Australian, who was flying with 617 on the raid,

and had him write a little piece for my magazine. This was when I was 13 years old for my aviation magazine at the time for the Australian Air Force cadets.

And it was about these special bombs, the bouncing bombs, designed by Barnes Wallace, who was an aircraft designer.

These were ball-shaped bombs, which were set in rotating motion before they were dropped,

so that as the Lancaster bombers of 617 went along the mass of the damn, the reservoir of the damn,

and dropped their bombs, the bombs would then skip along the surface.

And if you hit the water at the right place, they would just before they got to the actual damn face,

they would sink and blow up literally down the bottom, down the midsection of the damn.

That worked very, very well. Two dams, the moon and the Eida were breached, and the sorper was only minor damage.

But this really was a major strategic blow to the industrial capacity of Germany and literally contributed to shortening the war.

And the, and actually 617 went on to be a major, still a major squadron in the Royal Air Force.

They had Vulcan nuclear bombers, they now have, they're now into tornado strike fighters and the like.

But now we see the Cacov-Cadam on the NEPA, damage in a very similar way,

but it was certainly done by emplaced explosives. And it must have been substantial amounts of explosives.

And there is absolutely no clarity yet as to whether this was done by Ukrainian dissidents or by the Russians.

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