Dambusters' WW2 damage to be shown in exhibition

An exhibition showing the devastation wreaked by the RAF's Dambusters during Word War Two opens in Lincoln this autumn.

The exhibition, at the International Bomber Command Centre, will include hundreds of photographs and film recordings shot during the aftermath of the raid on the Möhne Dam on the night of 16/17 May 1943.

It was one of three dams in the Ruhr Valley - Germany's industrial heartland - attacked by 617 Squadron's Lancaster bombers using Barnes Wallis's 'bouncing bomb'.

After Me, The Flood - the English translation of the squadron's French motto, Après moi, le déluge - will run from 6 October until 28 February.

However, the raids, led by Wing Cdr Guy Gibson, came at a price.

Eight of the 19 aircraft were destroyed, with the loss of 53 airmen, and the resulting floods killed nearly 1,300 people.

According to IBCC, the material for the exhibition was sourced from town archives, private collections and local historians across the Möhne region. It has never before been displayed collectively.

As well as photographs taken by Nazi officials and local residents, the exhibition will include letters between Wallis and the German historian Dr Helmuth Euler.

It will also shine a light on reconstruction, with visitors able to see a diary kept by Piet Hilkmann, a Dutch prisoner forced to work on the reconstruction of the Möhne Dam.

Organisers said the exhibition is "the result of the friendship" that has developed between the people of Scampton in Lincolnshire, where the bombers took off for the raids, and the German town of Körbecke on the Möhnesee lake.

"Many people's idea of the Dambusters comes from the film, but it is incomplete. The new exhibition shows the harsh reality and shared suffering of war," van der Drift said.

"The dams were a strategic target but the effect on the civilian and POW populations was devastating."

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