The Night the Dams Burst Read online

  Air Marshall Linnell telephoned him, and with a clear note of triumph in his voice ordered him to stop work on the Dams Bomb.

  It had been decided that there was to be no further action on it. Wallis again felt himself without friends. Dr Baker, the elderly superintendent of the ship tank at Teddington laboratory, mercilessly told him, “Stop playing the fool and go and do something useful for the war …”

  That evening, Wallis had a private call from Flight Lieutenant Green, his liaison officer to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. Green confirmed his fears. In his diary, Wallis wrote: “Green says that DSR [David Pye] having ensured CRD's [Air Marshal Linnell's] refusal now pretends to back the scheme.”

  A few days later, injury was added to insult: a brown paper envelope arrived, and Wallis learned that he had been fined two pounds for the speeding offence in Putney Vale, despite a plea by the security service to the magistrate, that Wallis was working on the most urgent Government business.

  *

  Wallis swallowed his pride, and asked Dr Baker to let him prepare one final experiment in the lab's busy ship-testing tank. It would have to be an experiment capable of making even the most hard-boiled civil servant sit up and take notice.

  He built a model dam across the water tank, and catapulted the two-inch balls at it. A girl cinematographer submerged in an airtight glass tank filmed the spinning spheres as they struck the dam and sank. Wallis showed the film to the Air Staff – there were audible gasps as the submerged camera showed the spinning balls “cling” to the model dam's face as they sank.

  There were louder gasps when Wallis showed them and some admirals an even more spectacular experiment in the tank at Teddington: he had moored a large model ship across the tank to represent the Tirpitz. On a signal from him, the assistant fired the first two-inch steel ball. It streaked down the tank, struck the model ship and sank, still spinning, out of sight – to reappear suddenly on the other side of the battleship, having passed right beneath the model's hull.

  “I think I have made my point,” said Wallis quietly.

  He was able to show film of this experiment to Sir Charles Portal and the First Sea Lord on February 19. Portal was now willing for the RAF to begin planning an attack on the dams, but he could imagine what Bomber Command's reaction was likely to be.

  In fact, he had discovered that Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris – “Butcher” Harris – was hostile to any idea of a dambusting operation. Harris needed every Lancaster he could get for more urgent assignments over Germany, with conventional and trusted weapons like blockbusters and incendiaries. He had run into inventors who thought they had a simple way to win the war before.

  As Portal watched the film with Barnes Wallis he thought of the letter he had received that morning from Harris. In this, Harris – whose Intelligence “grapevine” was evidently operating at high efficiency – complained, “All sorts of enthusiasts and panacea-mongers are careering round the Ministry of Aircraft Production suggesting that about thirty Lancasters should be taken off the line and modified to carry a new and revolutionary bomb, which exists only in the imagination of those who conceived it…”

  Strictly speaking, that much was true, of course. Barnes Wallis had not yet built, let alone tested, a full-size “Upkeep” rotating bomb. After seeing Wallis's amazing new film, the Chief of Air Staff wrote back to Harris. “I will not allow,” Portal promised, “more than three of your precious Lancasters to be diverted.”

  Before he got more, Wallis would have to show that his bomb worked in the full scale. To Wallis, in the meantime, Portal heartlessly offered no words of encouragement at all.

  Wallis, independently, decided to tackle Harris, the awesome bomber commander, himself. He telephoned his chief test pilot, “Mutt” Summers.

  “Mutt,” he said, “we'll have to find some way of showing this film to ‘Butch’ Harris. You know him personally, don't you?”

  “Sure, we were in the Royal Flying Corps together.”

  Summers rang up Harris's deputy, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Robert Saundby. A trip to the RAF Bomber Command headquarters outside High Wycombe was arranged.

  Once more Wallis stowed his precious films into the back of his Wolseley, and this time he sat “Mutt” Summers in the front. Together they drove to High Wycombe on the afternoon of February 22.

  As he was shown into Harris's office the air chief marshal glowered. “Now what the hell is it that you want?” he rasped. “I won't have you damned inventors wasting all my time!”

  Barnes Wallis was unaware of Harris's unflattering remarks about him in his letter to Portal. But Harris's aversion to all inventors was understandable. As a fighter pilot at Northolt outside London in the First World War, he had been plagued by them and any one of them might willingly have been his downfall.

  Several legends surrounded this. One inventor had shown him a grapnel, and proposed that Harris should sling it out at the Zeppelin airships wreaking havoc in English towns at that time. Harris had bluntly replied, “My aircraft's horsepower is 80, the Zeppelin's is 1600. Before I start hooking my plane onto a Zepp, I shall want to know who is going home with whom!”

  Undeterred, that inventor had reappeared at Harris's airfield with the thing in a suitcase, which he set down on the ground. He said, “I've got it now,” he said. “I've put a small explosive charge on it. All you do is press this” – and the rest of the sentence was abbreviated by a shattering roar as the suitcase blew up of its own accord.

  “I HAVE AN IDEA for a bomb,” began Barnes Wallis now, blinking short-sightedly at Harris and groping for his spectacles. “A bomb which will destroy the Möhne Dam.”

  Harris groaned silently. “I've heard about it,” he said. “It's far-fetched.”

  Wallis mentally noted that Harris had been “very much misinformed re job” (as he put it in his diary).

  He launched into a long technical explanation of the principle of the spectacular weapon and concluded: “… You see, if the bomb has a back spin on it, it will be forced against the dam face all the time it is sinking, and it will explode in contact, just as we require.”

  Harris was taking more notice now. There was something about this quiet-spoken engineer that separated him from the rest. In any case, the genius who had designed the sturdy Wellesley and Wellington bombers could not be ignored. Nodding at the projectionist threading the film into the machine, Harris grunted to Wallis: “If this thing's as good as you say, the fewer people who know about it the better.” He turned to his deputy. “Saundby, you work the projector.”

  In the headquarters cinema, with nobody watching except the two air marshals, Wallis, and his test pilot, the top secret films of the underwater antics of the rotating bomb “Upkeep” and the airborne trials of “Highball” off Chesil Beach were shown again. No sound was heard except the whirring of the projector. When the lights came on again, Harris's pink-complexioned, puffy face was expressionless. He tossed a letter to Wallis, and said, “You'd better read this.”

  It was the letter from Sir Portal, requiring Harris to lend three Lancasters to Wallis for the full-scale “Upkeep” trials.

  Wallis had no idea of how well he had scored personally with Harris. He could not penetrate the mask of the air marshal's face. As they left, he took Summers’ arm and said in relief, “Well, that wasn't too bad after all, was it!”

  In fact his troubles were not over. Harris – impressed though he was – still refused to withdraw a Lancaster squadron from the front line to train for the dams attack. And at this moment, another force intervened with Wallis – almost certainly guided by the hand of the shortsighted Air Marshal Linnell, who had blocked “Upkeep” at every stage.

  At ten a.m. on the morning after his face-to-face meeting with Harris, he and “Mutt” Summers were ordered to report to Major Kilner's office at the Vickers works. Kilner unhappily told them that Sir Charles Craven, Vickers's chief executive, had ordered them both to London at once.

  At Vickers House,
the air was frigid with hostility. “I have been asked to tell you,” Craven snapped at Wallis, “that you are to stop your nonsense about destroying dams. I have been officially advised that Mr Wallis of Vickers is making a damn’ nuisance of himself. You are wasting the Government's and the firm's time and money – you are to start working on something useful for once. You are forbidden to work any longer on this absurd bouncing-bomb project.”

  In a final grotesque outburst, he shouted hysterically at Wallis. “And what happened on the Golf Links at Ulverston?”

  To Wallis, the whole row was beyond comprehension, let alone Craven's final cryptic challenge. The slight white-haired engineer looked the powerfully built former naval commander in the eye and said, “Well, Sir, if I'm not serving the best interests of the company and the country, I had better offer you my resignation.”

  It was coolly said; it was meant; and it was too much.

  Like Captain Bligh of the Bounty, Sir Charles Craven stood up, and crashed his fist down onto the desk, bellowing, “Mutiny, mutiny, mutiny!”

  Barnes Wallis stalked sorrowfully out. In his diary he wrote: “Private interview afterwards with [Major] Kilner, and told him again [am] anxious to go … ”

  He lunched at the RAF Club in Piccadilly with the Secret Service officer who had given him such support before, and both recognised that their only hope now was Mr Churchill.

  *

  The way through Lord Cherwell was evidently barred. But Mr Churchill was also known to rely extensively on a scientific committee set up earlier in the war by Mr Oliver Lyttelton, and it was to two of this committee's three members, Sir Sydney Barratt and Professor Merton, that Wallis went, in Richmond Terrace, that afternoon, still shaken by the mauling meted out to him by Craven.

  The two scientists could see that something out of the ordinary had happened.

  Wallis answered their questioning looks: “I'm done for,” he murmured. “I've resigned from Vickers. The dams plan is off.” Barratt, who would later become chairman of the mighty Albright & Wilson chemicals concern, questioned Wallis for ninety minutes on the scientific basis of the case, and then Wallis left for home.

  This meeting proved to be the turning point, Mr Churchill called for the papers on “Upkeep” and then, his imagination fired, gave the order for the dams raid to be prepared on top priority. At three o'clock on the afternoon of February 26, Barnes Wallis's hour of sweet revenge arrived, when he and Craven were summoned to the room of his old enemy, Air Marshal Linnell.

  Evidently controlling himself with some difficulty, Linnell informed Wallis that the War Cabinet had directed that the development and testing of the dambusting bomb, and the modified Lancaster bombers that were to carry it, were to proceed at once. Choking with rage, he told Wallis: “The Air Staff have ordered me that you are to be given everything you want.” A few days later, Linnell announced his intention of resigning.

  TO SAY THAT “Bomber” Harris remained privately unconvinced would be wrong: In fact, he was outraged. He continued to deprecate any diversion of his precious new Lancasters from Bomber Command's main task of pulverising Germany's cities.

  After Saundby first told him of Wallis's proposals, Harris wrote an acid denunciation of the scheme in February 1943. He protested to the Air Staff that the bouncing bomb was tripe beyond the wildest description: “There are so many ifs and buts,” he wrote, “that there is not the smallest chance of it working.” He pleaded with them not to put any of their new Lancasters aside “on this wild goose chase,” as this would only dilute his saturation bombing campaign. He predicted that the war would be over before the Wallis bomb ever worked, adding, “and it never will.”

  A few days later he described the weapon to his superior, Sir Charles Portal, as “just about the maddest proposition we have yet to come across.” He was prepared to bet his shirt, he added, that the bomb could not be produced within six months, and “will not work when we have got it.”

  Yes, Harris was a bluff commander, one of Britain's greatest, and he did not mince his language. He proposed to the Air Staff that they give Wallis and his enthusiasts “one aeroplane to go away and play, while we get on with the war.” It was one battle that Harris lost.

  Portal overruled him, and Harris had to obey.

  The Air Staff now formed a new Lancaster squadron, No. 617, under the command of Guy Gibson, a particularly experienced pilot. Eventually it would adopt a famous motto: Après moi de déluge.

  MANY YEARS AFTERWARDS Wallis would explain: “Half the joy in life really consists in the fight, not in the subsequent success.”

  Now his fight against bureaucracy was suddenly and unexpectedly over – but the result of the long delays was that he had now only eight weeks left to do the job. As he left Linnell's room, he felt physically sick, and lonelier than ever before in his life. They've called my bluff, he thought. And out loud he said, “If only I had somebody to lean on…”

  The Director of Technical Development, Norbert Rowe, must have overheard him, for next morning there was a letter in the post at Wallis's drawing office: “Dear Barnes Wallis,” it read. “I was so distressed to hear your involuntary exclamation after the meeting yesterday. We Catholics always pray to St Joseph when we are in special difficulty.” He enclosed the wording of the prayer, and Wallis was not ashamed to say the prayer every morning for the next two months.

  Even now Wallis was not given everything he needed. For a start, he had to have two hundred tons of steel billets to make the dies for the manufacture of the perfectly spherical bomb casings. This was refused him, and he had to content himself with designing the “Upkeep” version of the bombs as boilers, and padding them out to the spherical shape with wooden casing, held tightly in place by thick steel bands.

  Conference followed conference. One spectre haunted him – the spectre of failure.

  The A V Roe company's Roy Chadwick, the famous designer of the Avro Lancaster, came to discuss the bomber's necessary modification to carry the weapon; Group Captain Sidney Bufton arrived to work out the special bomber tactics to be used; armament experts came, to advise on the design of a pressure detonator (a hydrostatic pistol) robust enough to withstand the bomb's first 250 m.p.h. impact with the water, yet delicate enough to go off when the bomb had sunk precisely thirty feet. A V Roe promised to let Wallis have the first of the three experimental Lancasters by the first day of April 1943. Wallis moved in distraction between his secret country-house drawing office in the former Golf Club house at Burhill, the arsenal at Woolwich where the test bombs were being filled, and the experimental dropping grounds. Soon he was working ninety hours a week.

  He himself designed and built the powerful calliper arms which were to grip each side of the rotating bomb as it was suspended in the Lancaster's bomb bay. He put to leading Government scientists like Professor Patrick Blackett complex questions like how much time would have to elapse before the waves on the Möhne lake's surface subsided after each bomb's detonation, should one bomb not be enough to breach the dam. On a test rig at Weybridge the four-foot bombs were spun at slowly increasing speeds then suddenly dropped into a specially-prepared pit of grease and sandbags to test the equipment's release action. All seemed to be going well.

  On March 24, 1943 “Mutt” Summers drove down to Burhill, bringing a passenger with him in his little Fiat – a babyfaced Cornishman with smiling eyes and the uniform of an RAF Wing Commander.

  Summers introduced him:

  “This is Gibson – Guy Gibson.”

  “Gibson,” wrote Wallis in his diary, “is doing the big job.” Gibson had already survived doing 173 other “jobs” for Bomber Command, which made him a very rare bird indeed.

  Of this first meeting with the bomb's inventor, Gibson himself later wrote:

  “He looked around carefully before saying anything, then said abruptly but benignly over his thick spectacles:

  “I'm glad you've come; I don't suppose you know what for.”

  “No, I'm afraid not.
SASO [Senior Air Staff Officer, Sir Robert Saundby] said you would tell me nearly everything, whatever that means.”

  “He raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you mean to say you don't know the target?’ he asked.

  “Not the faintest idea.”

  “That makes it very awkward, very awkward… Only a very few people know, and no one can be told unless his name is on this list.”

  Wallis waved a list of names in front of Gibson. Gibson's name was not on it. The upshot was that the young wing commander returned to his special squadron fully informed about the new bomb, and about the low-level tactics his bombers would have to employ, but with no idea as to what kind of target they would be attacking.

  HEROES Guy Gibson, the young commander of No. 617 Squadron, The Dambusters, and some of his men. Within two years, nearly all are dead

  THE DAM AND ITS NEMESIS. The Möhne Dam, photographed before the war by British Intelligence. Barnes Wallis’ secret bouncing bomb, suspended between two callipers beneath a Lancaster bomber, was given a powerful back spin before its release. One bomb is on display at Duxford war museum

  THE NEW BOMBER squadron, No. 617 Squadron, was formed at Scampton, late that March. Guy Gibson, recalled one of 617’s pilots, was a magnificent squadron commander and his men followed him implicitly. “You either loved Gibson,” said Dave Shannon, of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), “or you were scared of him. He could be ruthless when the situation demanded it… He had an eye for the ladies, and off duty he was a great boozer.” Shannon had been Gibson's co-pilot on many operations since June 1942 in No. 106 Squadron, and shared his hatred of “the Hun and all he stood for.”

  Gibson's pilots were all hand-picked men. He had called up Shannon and said, “I am starting up another squadron for a special raid. I can't tell you where or what it is, but if you'd like to join me again, I would only be too willing to have you back.”