LITMIR.BIZ

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this proposal from his new office in 10 Downing Street on 5 July 1940: ‘My dear Fred … The view held [here] is that such a project as you describe could not come to fruition until 1942, even if then.’ This period was, of course, Britain’s darkest of the Second World War; only by straining every sinew could the Ministry of Aircraft Production create a bare sufficiency of fighters, never mind a speculative giant bomber.

      Nonetheless, through Winterbotham again, Wallis secured an audience with Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, at which he pressed his Victory project. The gnome-like tycoon seemed more interested in persuading his visitor to travel to America to explore pressurised aircraft cabins, but their meeting yielded one positive result: it enabled Wallis to secure access to the government research facility at the former Road Research Laboratory at Harmondsworth, just west of London, together with the Building Research Station near Watford in Hertfordshire.

In August 1940 Wallis began tests related to the projected deep-penetration bomb, for which he was also admitted to the wind tunnel at Teddington’s National Physical Laboratory. In retrospect it seems astonishing, and yet also a triumph of official imagination, that even while Britain faced its darkest days, and Fighter Command was challenging the Luftwaffe against odds, a ‘boffin’ was able to undertake such futuristic research almost literally on the ground beneath which the Battle of Britain was being fought. From October onwards Wallis attended a series of meetings with the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s Air Vice-Marshal Francis Linnell, Controller of Research and Development, and Dr David Pye, the MAP’s director of scientific research, together with his deputy Ben Lockspeiser. The last, especially, would play a role in the Chastise saga which continued until the day the operation was launched.

      In November the RRL’s Dr Norman Davey began construction of a 1:50 scale model of the Möhne, across a small stream in secluded woodland at the BRS in Hertfordshire. This project reflected the interest not merely of Wallis, but of the RAF’s most senior officers, who had identified the dam as a target. At the same period Wallis was granted access to the Air Ministry’s 1939 research on the Möhne, emphasising the fact that he and the uniformed planners had been thinking along parallel lines. This made Wallis all the more irritated that so many bureaucratic obstacles were placed in the way of what seemed to him an obvious war-winner. In November 1940 also, he wrote a testy note to AVM Arthur Tedder, then serving at the MAP: ‘As a result of the continuing opposition that we have met, it has been necessary to resort to these laborious and long-winded experiments, in order to prove that what I suggested last July [destroying targets with deep-penetration bombs] can in reality be done.’

Norman Davey’s team employed technical data on the Möhne dam’s construction published at the time of its opening in 1913, though the Watford modellers somewhat distorted their own outcome by treating metres as yards in the scaling exercise. Hundreds of thousands of hand-cast mortar blocks were made and laid in the freezing conditions that prevailed through that winter. The model was completed on 22 January 1941, and explosive tests began a few days later. The first results of these were felt by nearby ‘Dig for Victory’ vegetable allotment-holders, who found their plots at Garston suddenly flooded by an inexplicable onrush of water. This also bewildered the BRS testers, because while their dam was damaged by successive explosions, it was not completely breached.

      In March 1941 Wallis circulated a long paper entitled ‘A Note on Methods of Attacking the Axis Powers’, in which he wrote about water and coal seams as targets. Such natural resources, he observed, had the great merit that they could not be moved or dispersed: ‘If their destruction or paralysis can be accomplished, THEY OFFER A MEANS OF RENDERING THE ENEMY UTTERLY INCAPABLE OF CONTINUING TO PROSECUTE THE WAR.’ He distributed a hundred copies of this paper, with its extravagant predictions, to his aviation contacts – several journalists received it, together with four Americans and Frederick Lindemann, soon to become Lord Cherwell. Wallis’s daughter later remarked on her father’s carelessness about security: ‘I can hear him now, describing to a friend some interesting feature of his work, laughing, “Frightfully secret, my dear fellow.”’

      W/Cdr. Sydney Bufton, an officer with operational experience over Germany who had recently become deputy director of Bomber Operations at the Air Ministry, was sufficiently interested to visit Wallis in his office at Burhill Golf Club, near Weybridge, where the design team found a wartime home after the Vickers plant was bombed. A dams sub-committee was formed at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, which in the following month discussed the Möhne as an important target. Initial calculations suggested that a bomb weighing twelve tons would be required to destroy it.

On 11 April 1941, David Pye of the Road Research Laboratory convened a meeting about Wallis’s various advanced weapons concepts with the AAD – Aerial Attack on Dams – Advisory Committee, which was also attended by the great scientific civil servant Sir Henry Tizard. At this it was concluded that the science of Wallis’s ideas about destroying dams seemed sound: the intractable problem persisted, however, of devising a means of delivering to Germany a weapon such as might create the impact that he sought. This was no mere detail, but the core of the issue with which the Vickers engineer and the many technicians associated with his project would wrestle for the next two years.

      Their progress was impeded, not by a mindless bureaucracy, but instead by practical difficulties which had to be addressed with severely constrained resources. Wallis scarcely helped his own case by arguing as if he, and he alone, held the key to winning the war. This was a vice to which bigger men were also prone. In September 1941 Churchill rebuked Portal, the chief of air staff, for submitting to him a paper which promised that if Britain built four thousand heavy bombers, the RAF could crush the Nazis within six months, without need for assistance from the other two services.

The prime minister responded in one of his most brilliant memoranda: ‘Everything is being done to create the bombing force on the largest possible scale … I deprecate, however, placing unbounded confidence in the means of attack, and still more expressing that confidence in terms of arithmetic … Even if all the towns of Germany were rendered largely uninhabitable, it does not follow that the military control would be weakened or even that war industry could not be carried on … The Air Staff would make a mistake to put their claim too high … It may well be that German morale will crack, and that our bombing will play a very important part in bringing the result about. But all things are always on the move simultaneously … One has to do the best one can, but he is an unwise man who thinks there is any certain method of winning this war, or indeed any other war between equals in strength. The only plan is to persevere.’

      The prime minister would assuredly have said the same wise things to Barnes Wallis, had he been party to the correspondence about his putative wonder-weapons. On 21 May 1941 the engineer received a letter from Sir Henry Tizard, telling him that his ideas for both the Victory bomber and the deep-penetration bomb had been rejected by the Air Staff. Wallis was distraught. His fortunes had reached their lowest wartime ebb.

      What followed, albeit painfully slowly in Wallis’s eyes, reflected an important contradiction about the conduct of the Second World War. As a fighting force, man for man, from beginning to end the Wehrmacht showed itself more professionally skilful than either the British or American armies. Yet the Western Allies nonetheless contrived to make better war than did the Axis powers. An important part of the reason for this was that they empowered many of the brightest people in their societies to deploy their talents, with an imagination which the dictatorships never matched. The codebreakers of the US Navy’s Op20G and the US Army’s Arlington Hall, together with Britain’s Bletchley Park, provided conspicuous examples of this phenomenon. So, too, did a host of projects commissioned and undertaken by scientists and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Although Barnes Wallis’s Big Plane, Big Bomb proposals had been formally rejected in May 1941, he nonetheless persuaded the MAP’s David Pye that he should retain access to government facilities, to continue his experiments on the ballistics of dam-breaking. Through that autumn tests continued, to determine the necessary weight of explosives, and the conditions in which they must be detonated, to contrive breaches in huge structures.

      It was an elaborately formal age. Many of the papers in what became a mountainous correspondence

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