Some legends flourish …

Confronted by the dead Athenian heroes of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles gave voice in his funeral oration to an idea that explains better than any other why we are so obsessed by our military past. The freedom intrinsic to democracy, he said, made the unconstrained decision of its citizens to risk their lives in war more honourable than the choice forced on the soldiers of a militaristic system such as the Spartans’. ‘The man who can most truly be accounted brave,’ Pericles concluded, ‘is he who knows best the meaning of what is sweet in life and of what is terrible, and then goes out determined to meet what is to come.’

This definition of courage as a readiness to enter into mortal danger freely and knowingly makes it easier to understand the extraordinary hold exerted on the national imagination by the Dam Busters. In strategic terms, the raid by 617 Squadron in May 1943 to breach the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams was not especially effective — the dams were rebuilt by the following autumn — and within the general scope of Bomber Command’s delivery of more than one million tons of ordinance on Germany, the 60 tons of explosive dropped by the Dam Busters was nothing.