One of my favourite movies is the Dam Busters. It was made in 1955 in black and white. Supposedly there’s a remake in the works, coming out in 2010, but I’ve been hearing about this for several years and not seen anything. The movie covers the events leading up to Operation Chastise, a bombing raid carried out by the RAF in Germany in May 1943 in which a number of dams were bombed and some breached, flooding the Ruhr valley which was the industrial heartland of Germany. The most interesting feature of the raid was that it employed specially designed bombs that were released at extremely low altitude (60 feet), some distance from the dam face and which bounced across the surface of the water until they hit the dam wall. The bombs then rolled down the face of the dam wall on the inside and exploded at a certain depth.

My reason for mentioning this is that the leader of the squadron, Guy Gibson, had a pet black labrador whose name was the N-word. In those days, it wasn’t considered particularly objectionable to do this, and the film naturally has many occurrences of the word, particularly as Gibson chose the code-word for a successful breaching of a dam to be the name of the dog.

I really don’t know what the new film will make of this. On the one hand, it’s unpleasant to keep hearing the word being used, although some would argue that if that was the dog’s name, and the code-word, it should be used. I heard that they may use the name “Digger”, which makes sense, and for those who haven’t seen the original movie or don’t know the story, it’s a good compromise.