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Left to right: Les Munro, King George VI and Guy Gibson on 27 May 1943.

Squadron Leader John Leslie “Les” Munro, CNZM, DSO, QSO, DFC, JP, the last surviving pilot of the “Dambuster raid”, passed away on 4 August 2015 in New Zealand, aged 96.

Munro was born in 1919 and joined the RNZAF in 1941. He made a first tour of operations with No 97 Squadron flying the Manchester and later Halifax, in 1942-1943. He volunteered fo No 617 Squadron and joined the unit at its creation in March 1943. He was part of the famous raid against the Rühr dams on 17 May 1943, but was forced to return home with his anti-dam mine after he was hit by Flak over the Netherlands and lost all communications.

He took part in Operation Taxable, the plan to deceive the Germans into believing the Allied invasion was taking place in the Seine Maritime region rather than Normandy.

He left the Air Force in 1946 having flown 58 combat missions. After his return to New-Zealand, he took an interest in local politics and served as an adviser and mayor.

A full obituary can be found on The Telegraph.

Les Munro’s Lancaster during Operation taxable, on 5/6 June 1944.

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An Upkeep bomb, preserved in the Imperial War Museum (Photo Martin Richards (CC BY-SA 3.0))

The bomb that was used to destroy the Ruhr dams during the infamous 1943 Dambuster raids, known as the “Upkeep”, was recreated and tested in Canada. The Upkeep was designed by Barnes Wallis. The raid has been reenacted many times, notably by the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight’s Lancaster but, by a twist of fate, the bomb’s original design and calculations were lost in 1960 in a flood. 

Dr Hugh Hunt, from Cambridge University’s department of engineering, wanted to find out if Wallis’ achievement could be done again and began working on it. Starting with a small-scale model, his team eventually re-created the bomb and dropped it from a Buffalo Airways DC-4 against a dam built for this purpose. The dam was obliterated by the bomb.

Read more about this experiment on the Daily Mail website (with pictures and videos).