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World War II PBS special highlights Kent AlumBy Kayla Zenk '12, Staff Writer |
In what would become the turning point during World War II, a group of young, brave men from around the world were asked to come together as a team to perform a feat thought impossible by many. Melvin Young, Kent ’32, who graduated from Trinity College, Oxford and received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 1941, was among the Royal Air Force Pilots selected for the team, also known as the 617 Squadron. The pilots were put to the task of bombing two of Hitler’s massive dams that powered Germany’s industry at the time of the War. “If British bombers manage[d] to breach these dams, it w[ould] [have] deprive[d] Germany’s most important steel works and hydroelectric power stations of water and flood[ed] the coal mines and factories downstream.” If the men were able to carry out this plan, the United States’ enemy during World War II would be greatly weakened.
How were they to complete such a task? British engineer Barnes Wallis had an idea. He had designed a spinning, barrel-shaped bomb the size of an oil drum that would be attached to the bottom of a plane. The plane would fly in at a set distance (sixty feet) and a set speed towards the dam, and the bomb would be dropped right before the dam and skip across the water over steel nets put up by the Germans to prevent torpedo bombs from reaching the dams. It would just touch the stone wall of the dam and then sink down and explode. As simple as it may sound, this would not be an easy task by any measure. Guy Gibson, the commanding officer for the team of flyers, said that “At 60 feet, a pilot would just have to hiccup, and he would land in the lake.” There were many risks involved in the plan; for instance, if the plane flew too low, the bomb could bounce back up at the plane. The team was also risking being struck down by the enemy. As stated in the documentary, “It t[ook] a rare breed of flyer to do this. The mission [was] almost suicidal.”
The men were not informed of what they were actually about to do until the night before they were to set out. “With a mixture of excitement and trepidation,” the squadron of 133 flyers set out on May 16th, 1943 with three targeted dams to bomb. When the crew targeting the Merner Dam reached the dam, it took five bombs to blow it up. The resulting damage was enormous. “Up to 40 miles downstream,” everything was swept away. “Power stations were flooded, and the water supply to industry but off. Dozens of factories were damaged. There were at least 1,300 casualties.” While the attack “cause[d] little long term damage to Germany’s industrial output,” it “captivate[d] the nation at a time when there was no good news coming out of Europe. . .[and] the tide of the war beg[an] to turn.”
In total, 53 crewmen died as a result of the raid, including Young ’32, whose plane was shot as he was flying over the North Sea coast after coming back from a successful bombing of one of the dams.
Melvin Young’s connection with Kent went far beyond just graduating from the School. In the 1950s, Kent bought the Rawson Farm where it would build the girls’ school. Young was married to Priscilla Rawson of the Rawson family, the sister of his Kent classmate, Edward Rawson ‘32. We honor Young today with the Melvin Young Room in Old Main (Admissions) which was dedicated by his mother-in-law, Clementine Rawson. It is now the very room where every new student at Kent enters and where many Guild Papers have been presented. A plaque and a picture of Young hang over the fireplace today. His, as well as the rest of the 617 Squadron’s effort to fight back against Germany during the War, will most certainly not be forgotten.
Works Cited: Bombing Hitler’s Dams. Nova Wednesdays. PBS, 11 January 2012. DVD.
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