Extracted from Secret Heroes of World War II: Spies, scientists and other heroes by Eric Chaline, published by Exisle Publishing, RRP: $44.99.
We think of war as a quintessentially human pursuit sustained by the courage and fortitude of soldiers, sailors and airmen, and the leadership, vision and strategic genius of generals, and we can easily forget the importance of science, technology and engineering in its conduct and outcome. If World War I was the first mechanised war that saw the introduction of tanks and aircraft into what had for centuries been the preserve of the infantry, cavalry and artillery, World
War II was the first technological war. The second world conflict was not only fought by men and their weapons on bloody battlefields across the globe, but also in secret laboratories, by scientists and engineers working in computing, cryptography, physics, chemistry, medicine and avionics, who fought just as hard to give their side the technological edge over the enemy.
Barnes Wallis
NATIONALITY: British
BIRTH: 26 September 1887
DEATH: 30 October 1979
PROFESSION: Inventor and engineer
CATEGORY: Backroom hero
ACHIEVEMENT: The designer of the ‘bouncing bomb’ that was used in the Dambuster Raid.
Although Barnes Wallis is now widely remembered for one extraordinary weapon, the ‘bouncing bomb’, which he designed to destroy the Axis powers’ hydroelectric power infrastructure, he also made significant contributions to aircraft safety and performance with his innovative geodetic airframe and to the effectiveness of precision bombing with his ‘earthquake bombs’.
This book features many entries that describe the activities and achievements of heroes who were in their 20s and 30s at the outbreak of war. Inventor and engineer Barnes Wallis, by contrast, was 52 when Britain declared war on Germany. He came from an earlier generation that had lived through World War I. It is often said that war, like life, is a young person’s game, but there have always been exceptions. These men included Wallis’s contemporaries, Field Marshal Bernard ‘Monty’ Montgomery (1887–1976) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who could bring their vision and wisdom to bear on present difficulties, tempering innovation with experience and acting as figureheads who might inspire their younger subordinates and provide much-needed focus within such a vast and multifaceted operation.
In the frame
Barnes Wallis began his career in marine engineering in 1905. In 1913 he joined British aviation company Vickers, who would later employ his younger contemporary, Spitfire designer Reginald Mitchell.
Wallis first worked on what was then the cutting-edge of aviation technology: Britain’s R-Series airships. He designed the lightweight framework that held the vulnerable gas bags of the R100 and her sister ship, the R101. But the future was not with lighter-than-air aircraft that were prone to catastrophic failures – the R101 crashed in France in October 1930, effectively ending Britain’s airship programme; the Hindenburg disaster seven years later marked the disappearance of large passenger airships from world skies for many decades.
The future was not in lighter-than-air rigid aircraft but in heavier-than-air fixed-wing aircraft, and it was to the design and construction of aircraft fuselage and wings that Barnes Wallis applied the skills he had learned in designing lightweight airship frames. Vickers applied his geodetic (also geodesic) airframes to Rex Pierson’s (1891–1948) Wellington mid-range bomber, and to Wallis’ own Wellesley light bomber. The duralumin latticework frame created a light but very strong structure that was resilient to major combat damage. Although whole parts of the fuselage could be destroyed, the geodetic structure preserved the load-bearing integrity of the whole, allowing seriously damaged planes to return to base.
Booms and busts
Another advantage that the older Barnes Wallis had over someone younger, such as Reginald Jones, was that he had long-established contacts in military and government circles. He had elaborated his own distinctive ideas about how to defeat Germany with a highly focused bombing campaign. In 1941 he sent ‘A Note on a Method of Attacking the Axis Powers’ to one hundred of his military and political contacts. The principal tactic he advocated was to attack and destroy Germany’s energy infrastructure, including coal and oil fields, hydroelectric dams, and
underground oil storage tanks. He concluded, ‘If their destruction or paralysis can be accomplished, they offer a means of rendering the enemy utterly incapable of continuing to prosecute the war’. Wallis had also begun to devise new types of super-bomb to attack major industrial, military and energy installations, but his first designs were so large that no existing aircraft were able to carry them.
Nevertheless, Wallis’s privately circulated paper made its mark, because it led to the establishment of the Aerial Attacks on Dams Committee, charged with examining the feasibility of attacking hydroelectric installations in Germany and Italy. The result was ‘Operation Chastise’, better known to generations of British film audiences and TV viewers as the Dambuster Raid after the film, The Dam Busters (1955), which immortalised the attack on three dams in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. On the evening of 16 May 1943, 19 Lancaster bombers from 617 Squadron, made up of aircrew from Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, set off for their targets, carrying Wallis’s specially designed ‘bouncing bombs’.
If you’ve ever skimmed a flat stone over the water, you will immediately grasp the principle that Wallis was using to get his bomb over the dams’ defences, and get it to just the right position so that a relatively small charge could demolish a massive reinforced steel and concrete structure. The bombers flew in fast and low, dropping their payload at 18m (60 feet) above the water. The spinning barrel-shaped bomb bounced on the surface of the water several times, jumping over anti-torpedo nets, hit the dam face and sank down, detonating at a depth where the blast wave would create the maximum amount of damage.
Despite heavy casualties among the attacking planes, two of the targets, the Möhne and Edersee dams, were breached, causing catastrophic flooding, but the third target, the Sorpe dam, only suffered minor damage. Wallis wrote, ‘I feel a blow has been struck at Germany from which she cannot recover for several years’. Unfortunately, by the end of June, the Germans had managed to restore water and electricity supplies.
Manmade earthquakes
Much of the bombing during the war was ‘area bombardment’, which targeted a whole city or district in the hope of destroying critical installations. Precision bombing was only developed towards the end of the war, making the targeting of specific facilities possible.
But even if deployed accurately, the payloads carried by Allied bombers were not able to destroy well protected installations. To address this problem, Barnes Wallis designed two massive ‘earthquake bombs’: the 6-ton ‘Tallboy’ and the 10-ton ‘Grand Slam’, which could penetrate the deepest wartime bunkers.
Combined with new precision bombing techniques, the bombs were used to destroy the V-2 flying bomb factory, sink a heavily armoured German battleship, damage the concrete U-boat pens at St Nazaire on the French coast and destroy a railway tunnel in central France shortly after the D-Day landings, preventing Panzer reinforcements reaching Normandy by train.
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