Traumatic Legacy of the Dam Buster Raid: Tony Burcher, 617 Squadron

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. 

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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 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.

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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 related to his fraud 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.