by Cal Meacham
Luke Skywalker’s X-wing fighter is screaming down the equatorial trench on the Death Star with Darth Vader’s TIE fighter and those of his two henchmen in hot pursuit. Wedge Antilles’ wounded X-Wing has already broken off, ignored by Vader and his men, and they have just destroyed Biggs’ ship, so that nothing now remains to block Vader’s line of fire. R2-D2 has taken a glancing hit, and is now useless. With no other ships from the Rebel Alliance in position, the entire hope of the Rebellion now rests in Skywalker’s hands.
To the astonishment of the Rebel leaders, Skywalker switches off his Targeting Computer and plots his bombing run by feel and instinct. Just as Lord Vader obtains a target lock on the X-Wing, Hans Solo’s bastard blockade runner, the Millenium Falcon, appears out of the sun and scatters the Empire ships. “Yee-hah!” he bellows into the communicator. “Let’s blow this thing, kid, and go home!” he yells to Skywalker. At the appropriate moment Skywalker fires the proton torpedoes, which disappear down the hexagonal opening of the Exhaust Port, setting in motion a chain of events that will inevitably lead to the destruction of the Death Star battle station. It explodes in a blaze of glory as the remnants of the Rebellion fleet limp back to their base on the moon of Yavin.
Star Wars took the U.S. by storm in June 1977, and the world shortly after that. George Lucas tapped into a vast audience by providing a simple story of good vs. evil, told with cinematic flair and obsessive attention to detail. Science fiction fans loved it because, even though it wasn’t really SF, it convincingly portrayed the look and feel of good SF. Lucas believed in his world, and so did the rest of us.
The great game of Star Wars was to try and figure out where Lucas got his inspiration. He clearly and openly borrowed images and situations for his magnum opus from all over. As Lucas himself admitted, the film The Hidden Fortress (Kakushi Toride no San-Akunin, released in 1958) by the legendary director Akira Kurasawa served as a starting point. Kurasawa regular Toshiro Mifune played the dashing, Han Solo-esque hero General Rokurota Makabe, and Misa Uehara played Yukihime, an independent and disguised princess in the Leia mold. But it was Minoru Chiaki and Kamatari Fujiwara as a pair of bickering peasants through whose eyes the drama unfolds that really impressed Lucas. They would morph into the “droids” C3PO and R2D2 in Star Wars.
But inspiration came from other places, as well. Darth Vader’s complete body armor and cape look just like those of Doctor Doom from Marvel’s comic book, The Fantastic Four (only dyed black), topped off with a samurai helmet from Kurasawa. The cantina scene, with its collection of odd aliens, could have come from any of a number of science fiction stories - Catherine L. Moore’s Northwest Jones stories or Samuel R. Delaney’s Babel-17 or one of those pulp stories of the forties that took its model of interstellar culture from nineteenth century colonialism. The opening “episode intro,” with its ranks of words disappearing off into a vanishing point in the stars, comes straight from the Hollywood serials of the thirties and forties.
But one of the most enduring images comes from somewhere else. It has a surprising origin, and even more surprising implictions…..
Barnes Wallis was about 50 when the second World War started. He’d designed the best British dirigible in the 1930’s, and invented the geodetic form of aircraft construction. Using this, he designed the Wellington and the Wellsley, both heavily used by the British during the first years of the war.
He also designed munitions, something Britain was badly in need of when the war started. Since the late 1930’s, British strategists had considered that an effective response to a belligerent Germany was to strike at the sources of Germany’s electrical power - the massive dams across the Ruhr that provided power to the German munitions plants. It was more efficient and effective than trying to bomb the factories themselves.
The problem was that the dams themselves were massive constructions. Dropping a bomb onto the dam itself, although obvious, would be pointless. The bombs would have to be orders of magnitude more powerful than existing bombs, and far heavier than existing planes could carry. By the war’s end Britain would have more powerful bombs and more powerful bombers, but still nothing that could bust the German dams.
Dropping a bomb in the water would be even less effective - the water itself would help to contain the blast and limit its effects. For a time he considered a heavy bomb dropped into the earth beside the dam, when its explosive force could be efficiently coupled into the ground and dislodge one side of the dam. But tests on models were not very promising.
But there was another way. Wallis conceived of one of the most bizarre bombs ever. He somehow managed to convince the British government to fund the studies, then to build the bombs and provide a squadron to deliver it. It is the ultimate successful longshot story. The crazy idea that worked.
Wallis realized that the same handicap that kept bombs dropped into the reservoir behind the dams from doing any real damage - the blanketing protection of the water - could be made to work on his behalf if the bomb were properly positioned. If the bomb was against the dam itself, underwater, then the water would hold in the effect of the explosion, magnifying those effects instead of retarding them. If you could arrange to place your charge halfway up the dam on the inside, then you no longer needed an unbelievably big bomb. You could wreak havoc with a bomb of practical size, and bring down the dam.
But how to get the bomb there? Torpedos could carry charges, but not large enough. Besides, the Germans had rigged torpedo netting to catch any tin fish. Wallis’ brilliant idea was to skip the bomb across the surface of the reservoir, like a stone thrown by someone on a lake side. The bomb would be spherical (he soon changed this to cylindrical, like a large oil drum), rotating in the direction opposite the expected spin. If released at the right height and speed it would skip two or three times, fetch up against the inside wall of the dam, then its weight and its spin would make it sink/roll down the interior face of the dam. When it reached the right depth, a pressure gage could set it off. Boom.
Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that. There were batteries of tests with models. They had to build the cradle to carry, rotate, and drop the bombs. They tested full-scale bombs on dams in the U.K. When there was too much damage to the bombs on first striking the water, the decision was reluctantly made to lower the altitude at which the bombs were released from 150 feet to a mere 60 feet.
The biggest problem was releasing the bombs at the right height, speed, and distance from the dams. Airspeed indicators served to get the speed right. To get the proper release distance, the bombsighters came up with a special gauge. It looked like an unstrung slingshot. Holding this at the proper distance from his eye, the bombadier sighted along it until the two vertical “arms” just eclipsed the towers at each end on the dam. There were special sights for each of the target dams.
Getting the altitude correct was the biggest challenge. Barometric altimeters were just too inaccurate for the task. Echo altimeters that bounced a signal off the surface of the water and timed he return weren’t fast or sensitive enough. Someone from the Ministry of Aircraft Production solved the problem brilliantly by attaching searchlights to the underbelly of the bombers, each pointing down and inward. The bombers would be flying at night to minimize the effect of antiaircraft fire, and the spots of light would be visible on the smooth water of the lake behind the dam. The lights were fixed so that the two spots converged when the height was correct. The idea had been inspired by a visit to a burlesque show in which the stripper was illuminated by two spotlights.
The raids took place on May 16 and 17, 1943. The first dam was the Moehne. The first bomb exploded, but failed to seriously damage the dam. The bomb from the second run was released too late, and bounced over the edge of the dam, exploding away from the dam. The plane crashed afterwards. The next run had to be made in the face of severe fire. The bomb was released too short, exploding in the water away from the dam. For the next run three planes went in in formation, giving protection to the bomber. Again, the bomb exploded near the dam without causing apparent damage. The next bombing run succeeded in breaching the dam, making a hole 100 feet wide in its 2100 foot extent. In a similar fashion, the Eder and Sorpe dams were breached after multiple attacks.
The raids were a success. Although the Mohne dam was repaired, the Germans did not restore electric power production during the war. The damage was impressive, and horrible. 330 million tons of water was released, it was estimated. 125 factories were destroyed or badly damaged. 25 bridges were destroyed and 21 more badly damaged. 6,500 cattle and pigs were killed. 1,294 human beings were killed as well, 749 of them prisoners (there had been a Russian POW camp downstream of the Eder).
The Germans rigged protection for their remaining dams from low-flying aircraft, but there were no more dambuster raids. The 617 Squadron and inventor Wallis turned to other plans.
Commander Guy Gibson wrote a book about the exploits of the 617 squadron while inactive, Enemy Coast Ahead, but he died on a mission in 1944 before it was published. It contained a brief account of the Dambuster mission. But a more momentous version appeared six years after the war.
Paul Brickhill of Melbourne was 24 when he volunteered for the Royal Australian Air Force at the start of the Second World War. He became a fighter pilot, flying Hurricane bombers and Spitfires in North Africa until he was shot down in Tunisia in 1943. Because he was an Air Force officer he was sent to Stalag Luft Drei in Germany. There he participated in the “X” organization that organized the famous mass escape. After the war he became a journalist. His most famous work was The Great Escape, based on the mass escape. It was filmed as The Great Escape in 1963 with a big budget and all-star cast. (It was also the basis for a less-famous 1988 TV movie starring Christopher Reeve.) Brickhill could write with inside knowledge, since he had been there (although he was not one of the escapees). He wrote other books about the war as well, including Reach for the Sky, which was also filmed (in 1956). He wrote thrillers for while as well. In 1951 he published The Dam Busters, detailing the efforts of Barnes Wallis and the men of 617 squadron. The material interested the Associated British Picture Corporation, and in 1954 the book was transferred to film, starring Michael Redgrave as Wallis and Richard Todd as Guy Gibson. The film has a very real look to it - it was probably filmed using much of the original equipment. You get to see the tests of the idea in a laboratory tank, and the release of what appears to be a mock-up bomb from the belly of a Lancaster bomber. It makes stately, ponderous skips across the surface of a lake. The climax of the film shows the attacks on the dams. The special effects and model work are very good.
(You can occasionally see The Dam Busters on American TV - but it’s not the complete version. The mascot of 617 Squadron is a black dog named “Nigger.” Whenever I’ve seen the film on commercial television all references to him are gone.)
When George Lucas was constructing his magnum opus twenty years later, he went to World War II movies showing dogfight and bomber runs as inspiration for his space battle scenes. A big part of his inspiration for the climactic fight at the Death Star was clearly The Dam Busters. Not only is the situation similar (and many of the shots, as well), but the cockpit chatter in Star Wars is sometimes taken verbatim from The Dam Busters. (“How many guns do you see, Red Leader?” “I see seven guns. Four on the ground and three on the tower.”) Lucas even took the attack formation of two bombers screening a third bomber that was dropping the actual bomb. I have to admit that the entire Death Star Trench Bombing sequence seemed very weird to me when I first saw Star Wars. It was visceral and thrilling, but why the fighter/bombers (Lucas’ craft seem to fulfill both offices) had to go charging down a narrow trench over a godawful distance in the face of severe anti-Rebel fire wasn’t clear. Why not fly perpendicular to the Trench and drop the bombs in? A targeting computer that could handle the one situation ought to be able to cover the other. I didn’t realize that Lucas was following his inspiration very closely at this point.
But… at the moment of attack, Lucas departs from the movie and the historical situation that was his inspiration in a pretty radical way. This departure is the entire reason for this little essay, and I’m fairly surprised that no one has ever drawn attention to it before.
Luke is in the cockpit of his X-wing. Wedge Antilles’ ship has malfunctioned. Biggs has been shot down by Vader. R2-D2 has been winged. Luke is completely alone. Suddenly he imagines he hears the voice of his mentor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, saying “Use the Force, Luke. Trust your feelings!”
And he turns off his targeting computer.
Lucas evidently meant to show that Luke was accepting the power of the Force, and using it to guide him, rather than relying on the imperfect human artifice of a mere Targeting Computer to guide him (A Computer which has already failed to accurately guide the Proton Torpedoes to the target shaft. “Did they go in?” “Negative. They just impacted at the surface.”). But this act by Luke and by Lucas is in direct opposition to The Dam Busters. Virtually all of that movie preceding the raid is about the preparation for this goal - the long tests, the trials, the endless practice runs, and especially the incredibly clever methods of ensuring that the bombs were properly released. The Airspeed Indicator, the Fore-and-Aft Searchlight “Altimeter”, and the Slingshot-like Distance Gauge were the elements of the 617 Squadron “Targeting Computer.” Without all of this, the Ruhr dams would never have been breached. Skywalker just closes his eyes and goes with the flow. There’s something obscenely disproportionate about it. Not until Paul Veerhoven’s adaptation of Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers would there be such a diametrical opposition between a science fiction movie and its source material.
You could argue, I suppose, that Lucas was trying to show, in his mystical and mythological way, that Luke did use the targeting computer of his mind, or of the “energy field that surrounds us” that is The Force in making his successful bombing run. But to the outside it sure looks like he’s trusting to blind luck. To put it more accurately, in order for the bombs to go in, somebody or something had to make the necessary calculations. Why is it bad for a human-built computer to do so, but not for The Force? After all is said and done, using The Force looks like a way for Luke to bomb the Death Star without having to know higher math.
You may think I’m harping too much on this, or reading too much into what is, admittedly, a kids’ movie. But even kids’ movies have philosophical underpinnings. One of Lucas’ seems to be, surprisingly, an anti-technology viewpoint. This may seem surprising in speaking about a series that s crammed to the gills with gee-whiz technology and special effects, but it’s there.
“He’s more machine now than man,” says the shade of Obi-Wan Kenobi of Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, “Twisted and Evil.” So machines are twisted and evil? It’s hard to interpret that statement in any other way - if he just wanted to say that Vader was evil, why bring up the part about being a machine? And he said this within earshot of the faithful ‘droid R2D2. If I were R2 I’d be cursing Ben out in binary.
Star Wars was the Big Hit of the summer of 1977. It came out of nowhere to capture the imagination of moviegoers. It played in unbroken runs of over a year at the same theaters around the country, and it had a very big effect on the movie industry. Many of its phrases and situations fed into the nation’s cultural memory banks. “Use the Force, Luke” was one such catchphrase. The film made such a big impact that it ended up stamping its own image on other films. Echoes of that Death Star Trench sequence showed up in two other films. Both were based on books that had no incident similar to that sequence in them, but the film adaptations very clearly did.
The first of these was the James Bond film Moonraker, released in 1979. At the end of the previous Bond film, The Spy who Loved Me, it as announced that the next Bond film would be For Your Eyes Only. But in the summer of 1977 Star Wars trumped Bond at the box office, and the producers decided that Moonraker offered a better opportunity to cash in by following in the footsteps of Lucas’ science fantasy hit.
Ian Fleming’s novel The Spy Who Loved Me was an interesting departure - the story is told from the point of view of the female lead. Bond doesn’t even appear until well into the second half of the story. It all takes place at a motel in upstate New York, and there’s nothing of Russian spies or hijacked submarines. Fleming is supposed to have stipulated, in selling the movie rights, that they couldn’t use any of the story incidents - the producers only had the use of the name. This would have been irrelevant by that point, anyway. Since Fleming’s death, the movies, which had until that point been fairly faithful to the books, began veering farther and farther from their ostensible source material. The last Fleming book to be re-released with the film of the same title was Diamonds are Forever in 1971. The difference between the plot of the film and that of the book must have seemed absurdly huge. So when Live and Let Die came out two years later they didn’t bring out a new paperback with the movie poster as the cover. The same happened later with The Man with the Golden Gun in 1975.
Except for You Only Live Twice, all the Bond films had been written, at least in part, by Richard Maibaum. The series had been veering further and further into absurd stunts and puerile situations and humor, and Maibaum elected not to write The Spy Who Loved Me or the next one, which would become Moonraker. Christopher Wood wrote the scripts for these. They arguably mark the low point of the series. The Terminator-like hit man “Jaws” appears in both (a dig at the Speilberg hit of 1975), even getting a love interest of his own. The plots and gadgets are the most overwhelming and absurd in these films. If someone were going to incorporate childish elements from a kids’ movie, Wood was the perfect guy to do it.
The original story, concerning a defense missile being built for Britain by Hugo Drax, Inc. being sent to London (with a nuclear device in the tip) was totally jettisoned in favor of a story about hijacked Space Shuttles, a scheme to kill almost everyone on Earth, and a monumental space battle (a la the sea battle in Thunderball). At the end, Bond is in Drax’ own Shuttle, trying to destroy the last three death-dealing satellites. He has a laser to do this, with its own targeting computer. In trying to shoot down the last satellite, however, the computer becomes useless. Bond is forced to shoot it down using his own intuition. “Use the Force, James.”
Fleming probably wouldn’t have disapproved. He always felt that his character was a gambler, and was frequently successful not because of good agenting practices, but because he followed up his hunches and was lucky.
The other movie influenced by the climactic Star Wars scene was 1982’s Firefox, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, and based on Craig Thomas’ paperback best-seller.
Eastwood plays Mitchell Gant, a retired top-notch fighter pilot conscripted to steal the new Soviet MiG-31, a super-fast and virtually invisible plane. (The term “Stealth Fighter” hadn’t yet become common phrase when the book or the film came out, but this is clearly a Stealth jet. Thomas even correctly reported that the anti-radar technology was not an active device, but was built into the structure of the plane. Ironically, by the time the film was released, the U.S.S.R. did have a MiG-31, but it didn’t have “Stealth” technology.) As he penetrates deeper and deeper into enemy territory the night literally gets darker and darker. His allies are as ruthless and brutish as his Russian enemies. He finally reaches the hangar, and is instructed by the plane’s engineers, who are used because the are brilliant, but distrusted because they are Jewish. The chief engineer, Obi-Wan Kenobi-like, gives Gant his final instructions, telling him about the mind-controlled weapons system (!) and reminding him that, to use it he must “think in Russian.” (One of the film’s conceits is that Gant is not only an excellent pilot, but also speaks Russian fluently. Of the things requiring suspension of disbelief, this is hardest to accept. I can believe in a supersonic stealth fighter jet that can outrace missiles, but I cannot believe Clint Eastwood as a native speaker of Russian. This is even harder after you hear him intoning Russian commands in his western drawl.)
Eventually, he succeeds in stealing the jet and taking off under the very nose of the Russian officials who have turned out to witness the maiden flight. Characteristically, the escape takes place at dawn, and Gant escapes his nightmare of darkness into a brilliant morning sky. The special effects, by John Dykstra (of the first Star Wars) are excellent.
He evades all the traps set up to catch him, but ultimately he must face a second MiG-31. They dodge and scramble, trying to get behind each other, dogfighting across the arctic scenery. At one point they dive into an ice crevasse in a scene that looks an awful lot like the Death Star Trench. At last, Gant’s plane starts to spiral out of control. He pulls himself out (the Russian pilot actually salutes Gant for his success in pulling out of the spin) and the fight resumes. The Russian MiG is behind Gant, firing bullets with tracer rounds at him (do they still use such technology in this age of heads-up displays?) and Gant attempts to fire back, but the weapons system doesn’t respond. Then he hears the voice of the Engineer in his head, intoning “think in Russian….think in Russian”. Gant does, the weapons system springs back to life, and Gant fires a rocket backwards at his enemy. Big Boom. End of movie.
Firefox was a reasonable success. Craig Thomas was moved to write a sequel, Firefox Down!, about the trials and tribulation of getting the stolen plane home. It was not made into a movie.
The interesting part, of course, is that the climactic struggle to remember to think in Russian, with the ghostly voice of the Engineer (who had been killed in the hangar, just as Obi-Wan had been) was NOT in Thomas’ book. Once again a cinematic image was imposed on a story when it was translated to celluloid. Star Wars reaped another clone.
So it’s pretty clear to me that Lucas’ masterpiece spawned a new movie icon, that whole “Use the Force, Luke” situation that resonated so well with audiences. For a year after the film’s release montage of the moments from the climax of Star Wars were used to close a weekly TV series That’s Hollywood, hyping current releases. This image of the Power of Intuition was aped in Moonraker and Firefox and, in lesser form, in other movies and TV shows, such as Battlestar Galactica. But the great irony to me is that the image is taken from a true story of careful planning and calculation, the direct opposite of the throw-caution-to-the-wind offspring.
References
Books on the Dambusters raid:
The Dam Busters, by Paul Brickhill (1951). The book that brought this mission to public attention, and the one on which the movie was based. For some reason historians are now spurning Brickhill. As one of the websites below notes, it s now “trendy” to ignore Brickhill, and to point out the numerous errors in his work. A recent book on Stalag Luft III and The Great Escape doesn’t even mention Brickhill. I don’t think he deserves the obscurity - he was a gifted writer who brought the subject matter to life. His inaccuracies are in large part the result of writing too close to the events, before much research was done and while the veil of wartime secrecy was still in place.
Allied Secret Weapons: The War of Science - Brian J. Ford (1971)
The Dambusters Raid - John Sweetman (1999 - actually written about 1986). I haven’t read this one yet, but it is highly recommend as the most accurate and heavily-researched book on the topic.
Websites
Exceptionally good site:
A site concentrating on the Film The Dam Busters is:
http://www.rbd26.dial.pipex.com/dambust2.htm
The IMDB site is:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0046889
A site telling the story is:
http://www.valourandhorror.com/BC/Raids/Dam_1.htm
A site concentrating on the science:
http://www.simscience.org/cracks/dambusters.html
A Barnes Wallis Site
http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/staff/irmurray/bigbounc.asp
A good reference site: