One Night to Break the Dams

You do not break a nation’s industrial heart with a single airplane. For decades,

that is the rule everyone believes. Dams are too massive. Too reinforced. Too well defended.

They sit behind belts of flak, guarded by geography and physics itself. Engineers insist

only sustained bombing campaigns can even scratch them. Military planners agree.

One bomber, one night, one weapon? Impossible. Germany believes

this rule with absolute confidence. By 1943, the Ruhr Valley is the engine room

of the Third Reich. Its dams—Möhne, Eder, Sorpe—do more than hold water.

They regulate electricity. They cool steel mills. They feed factories that build tanks,