Drowning the Earth, Designing Environmental Destruction: The Dam Busters

Drowning the Earth, Designing Environmental Destruction:

The Dam Busters

U.S. involvement in multiple wars got me thinking about not only the human loss, but also the environmental disaster associated with warfare, disasters that are recreated in documentary and feature films. In The Dam Busters’ (1954, Associated British Picture Association), for example, a climactic raid in Germany takes thirty minutes of screen time, cutting back and forth from the attacks to anxious ground control in Britain following every radio signal. The film’s re-enaction of the May 23, 1943 raid on three enormous dams in Germany’s Ruhr Valley is so spectacular, it is hard to imagine that it was based on fact. The four-engined Lancaster heavy bombers, flying at 100 feet or lower, provide the audience with spectacle, excitement, adventure, and tension, succeeding so well that one audience member faithfully recreated this scene in his own film, Star Wars (1977 Episode IV, A New Hope). In both films, aircraft fly low under wires and through small spaces to better reach their targets in outer space, while staff officers wait in the equivalent of ground control for news. One of the pilots asks, “How many guns d’you think there are?” and is answered, “I’d say there’s about 10 guns—some in the field and some in the tower.” Suspense is built and a spectacular battle ensues.

The attack on the Death Star is a direct homage to The Dam Busters (1954), and George Lucas was probably aided by the fact that his cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor, was the special effects cameraman for the earlier film. Also featured in Pink Floyd’s The Wall in a clip seen on a television in Pink’s room, The Dam Busters (1954) and the raid it represents have proven so spectacular that they have generated at least four documentaries and countless books and articles, even as late as summer 2005. Whether recorded on film or in texts, the raid and its aim—to bomb dams and flood the Ruhr Valley—stand out as an historic and a cinematically spectacular mission rather than an argument against ecological destruction.

It should come as no surprise then that the purpose of the dambusting mission—environmental destruction—is masked by filmic and textual artifacts of the raid. In spite of the blatant goal of the dam bombings—drowning the earth—glorification of the raid and the spectacle it produced are still the primary concerns of all of the films and historical documents highlighting the raid. All the later films and articles, too, endorse what the original docudrama, The Dam Busters (1954) illustrates, with the addition only of more detail to explain that the actual planning was an integrated and collaborative effort. Since 1954, follow-up films and texts contribute few if any moments comprehending the kind of environmental catastrophe they had planned and partially produced in the 1943 raid.