Today
is the 80th anniversary of the Dam Busters Raid. Nineteen Lancaster bombers
powered towards German targets. Eight crashed or were shot down. Fifty-three airmen
were killed. Some were captured. It was an important raid and the survivors
were lauded. A book was written about the raid; a film lionised them. But the raid
left a traumatic legacy for some of its survivors including survivor guilt. A
legacy we don’t often consider. As part of my PhD studies – and in my next book
– I consider how the Dam Buster Raid affected one Australian survivor.
*****
Twenty-one
year old Anthony ‘Tony’ Burcher of 617 Squadron RAF was a gunner on one of the
aircraft which bombed the Möhne Dam during Operation Chastise – the dam buster raid. The
Lancaster was mortally damaged but its pilot, John Hopgood, aware
that in effect he was committing suicide, continued to fly, gaining height to
ensure his still living crew had the best chance of baling out. Just about to
jump, Burcher saw John Minchin, the RAF wireless operator, crawling on hands
and knees, dragging his leg, carrying his parachute. He ‘was in a hell of
state’. And then Minchin stopped moving. Burcher thought, ‘there’s only one
thing to do’. He pulled the parachute’s D-ring, shoved Minchin through the rear
door, and followed him down. Minchin did not survive. ‘I don’t know to this day
whether I did the right thing or not. I still do agonise about it.’ Burcher
and bomb aimer John Fraser, the only other survivor of their aircraft, along
with Frederick Tess who was downed during the same raid, were captured almost
immediately. Burcher eventually found his way into Stalag Luft III.
In trying to understand why both men committed suicide
in late life, Burcher indicated that it was linked to the ill-treatment after
capture which both (he imagined) experienced at the hands of the Gestapo.
Burcher implied his guilt at their fate, and perhaps vicarious culpability in
their deaths, by highlighting the disparity between his friends’ treatment and
his own. He had been taken to a hospital and received the best of care. ‘But if
they were got hold of by the Gestapo, I think that might have worried them.’
Burcher was a prisoner of war for two years; he had enlisted while still an
18-year-old and was only 21 when captured. His reference in interview to
his friends’ suicides, his anguish over Minchin’s death and Hopgood’s sacrifice,
and his later contention that he had cheated death implies that at one point he
suffered survivor guilt.
Burcher’s
guilt was not complicated by any feelings of personal culpability regarding the
human cost of the dams’ raids, which included at least 1650 German deaths in
addition to those of 750 POWs and labourers, as well as the thousands of
displaced persons whose homes were destroyed. It may, perhaps, have been
exacerbated by the almost universal public acclaim the ‘dam busters’ received.
His Distinguished Flying Medal (following rapidly on the heels of his
commission) was one of twenty-four awards granted to Chastise’s eighty survivors; their leader, Guy Gibson, was honoured
with a Victoria Cross. RAAF historian
John Herington acclaimed the Australian survivors as ‘Homeric figures’.
Their actions were further lauded in 1951’s The
Dam Busters by fellow former kriegie Paul Brickhill, the 1955
film-of-the-book (which Burcher described as ‘quite authentic’, and in ‘The Dam
Busters March’, the film’s theme music by Eric Coates. In popular culture,
Burcher and all of the Chastise
airmen have become the Dam Busters.
Ethics and ethical behaviour may also be compromised
if someone is morally troubled. Criminal behaviour is one possible outcome.
Philosopher and ethicist Ned Dobos recognises as moral pain USAAF pilot Claude
Eatherly’s conscience-stricken anguish after flying a reconnaissance mission
over Hiroshima before the atomic bomb was dropped. Despite having no role in
the destruction of Hiroshima, Eatherly was consumed by an all-encompassing
guilt for which he could not atone. Reflecting intense moral troubling –
perhaps moral injury – Eatherly expressed his pain in a number of ways,
including by committing petty crimes for no gain which, in his mind, proved his
guilt. Like many former POWs, Tony Burcher had difficulty adjusting to
post-captivity life. Different work, marriage within weeks of liberation (he
was then 23 years old), and the birth of a daughter fourteen months later,
contributed to his unsettledness. His air force career was blighted by personal
and domestic problems and he resigned his commission in 1952 (the year after
publication of The Dam Busters)
following a series of negative
assessments. Eleven years later, still living in Britain, he was gaoled for
conspiracy to defraud a hire purchase company. Recognising the former airman’s
wartime valour, the judge considered his case ‘tragic’. Burcher’s reflections
on his war experiences suggests that he suffered more than moral troubling. Was
his crime, like Eatherly’s, an expression of his moral
troubling or injury emanating from his survivor guilt which revealed his sense
of moral culpability? Or an indication of his inability to live up to the
lionisation accorded the dam busters?
Such
complex moral emotions, however, appear to have been assuaged by Burcher’s
belief that the dam buster raids were worthwhile. They were, he believed more
than simply a morale boost for the allies, they significantly disrupted German
industry and war effort by creating floods and ensuring electricity loss. He
appreciated the psychological value of the raiding force: ‘it must have really
shocked the Germans to see 19 bombers flying out of the moonlight that
evening’. That martial achievement gave meaning to his friends’ deaths and he
felt it terribly when the provocative, holocaust-denying historian – that
‘controversial creature’ – David Irving claimed the dam buster raid was
unsuccessful. ‘It’s very upsetting when someone talks about your mates dying in
vain like that.’ That Burcher launched his ‘salvo’ on Irving five days after
speaking about his involvement in Chastise,
his last, fateful, operational flight and his feelings about the loss of his
friends, reveals the acute state of his psychological pain and moral distress.
*****
Try as
he might, Tony Burcher could find no motives for why his friends took their own
lives. ‘We can’t understand why they both should
commit suicide’. As I have already suggested, Burcher’s
crime may have reflected his survivor guilt. It may also indicate moral injury.
The legal process may, in some way, have allowed him to assuage his vicarious
culpability. His late-life assessment – two years before his death – that he ‘came
out mentally okay’ suggests that he was able to put aside his
guilt and achieve a degree of moral serenity.
.jpg)