The Night The Dams Burst

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A SPECIAL THREE-PART HISTORY of the RAF's brilliant attack on the Ruhr

Dams in May 1943, immortalised by the film The Dambusters. These

articles have been written on the basis of interviews and released

official British and German documents, arid particularly on the private

papers and diaries of Barnes Wallis -- the British scientist who

invented the unique "bouncing bomb" that smashed the dams.

Picture: David Irving interviews Sir Arthur Harris in 1962

The Night the Dams Burst

by David Irving

First published in The Sunday Express, London, May 1973

[In which Mr Barnes Wallis fights for acceptance of his revolutionary new

weapon but then sees it fail its tests.]

THIRTY-NINE MILE an hour, I makes it," said the plain-clothes policeman. He

ponderously opened his notebook and eyed the watch in his hand.

The white-haired driver of the small black Wolseley Ten saloon blinked at

him absently from behind metal-rimmed spectacles.

"By Jove, was I really doing that, officer? My mind must have been miles

away."

Mr Barnes Wallis looked at his own watch anxiously: it was half-past

eleven, and at noon he had to be at the Vickers building in Westminster.

But here he was, still in Putney Vale.

"I am on urgent business, officer -- Government business. It's top

secret," he stammered.

The policeman grunted, unimpressed. "Really?" he said, licked his thumb,

and turned over a new page in his notebook. Wallis groaned. He knew that

he was carrying a top-secret film and that he should have an armed RAF

guard with him. But this morning the instructions to report to London had

come too suddenly for that.

Just two hours before, Sir Charles Craven, the Chairman and Managing

Director of Vickers-Armstrong, had telephoned him at his drawing-office

near Weybridge, and ordered him to come up to town at once: "The First Sea

Lord wants to see your film of 'Highball'," he said. "The one you dropped

at Chesil Beach."

To cap it all, just as he had been leaving the Vickers Works, the works

foreman had run out and told him that a crack had been found in a

Wellington bomber's spar, and it needed an urgent decision. Barnes Wallis

was the famous aircraft's designer. That had delayed him for a good half

hour. And now this.

"Can I see your driving licence, Sir?" Wallis fumed. He was deceptively

mild-mannered, slight in build, and with innocent grey-blue eyes behind

those metal frames. Keeping the Sea Lords waiting was one thing, but he

dreaded the wrath of Sir Charles: Commander Sir Charles Worthington Craven

was a powerful man, and Barnes Wallis had more than once fallen foul of

him in his long career.

He was nearly half an hour late when he finally stumbled into the private

cinema in the Vickers company's headquarters building in Westminster,

clutching the precious reel of film under one arm. Four or five admirals

were standing around, shifting from one foot to another in extreme

impatience. Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord was talking to

Craven, and Wallis could see that the glowering Vickers chairman was not

in a benign mood towards aircraft engineers today.

What saved Wallis from Sir Charles now was the amazing film he had brought

with him.

Onto the screen flickered a title: "Most Secret Trial Number One." Then

the camera's telescopic lens focused onto the dark shape of a Wellington

bomber, flying low over the waves just off shore.

"That's Chesil Beach," explained Wallis. "Now -- watch that bulge hanging

beneath the plane ..."

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The bulge was a large black ball, about four feet six inches in diameter.

It was obviously spinning backwards at high speed. A light flashed in the

cockpit, and the steel ball dropped towards the sea.

That was when the surprises began. Not only did this strange heavy ball

fall much more slowly than seemed normal, but when it struck the sea it

bounced -- it bounced not once but twelve or thirteen times, with Wallis

jubilantly counting each bounce out aloud. It had bounded about half a

mile along the sea's surface before it finally ploughed into a wave and

sank.

"That's it!" announced Wallis. "That bomb answers most of the problems

facing the Air Force today. Dropped at high altitude over Germany, it will

float down much more slowly -- so it can be dropped from further outside

the range of specially defended targets. Used as a naval weapon, it will

bounce over any of the booms and torpedo nets that the enemy at present

uses to protect his warships at anchor -- and his huge dams." He chuckled,

like a conjurer who has just pulled off a particularly pleasing trick.

"And," he said, "when it strikes a battleship's side, because of its

back-spin, it will actually curve inwards beneath the ship's hull as it

sinks -- so it can be exploded just where the enemy has never bothered to

put any armourplate."

SINKING BATTLESHIPS alone would not win the war. Wallis believed however

that there was one operation that just might do that:

he had been fighting for years for one massive attack to be carried out on

Germany's most vital dams -- a project he had dubbed "An Engineer's Way to

Win the War."

This was typical Barnes Wallis. He was outstandingly capable of thinking

up new ideas -- almost all of which met with fierce opposition from

officialdom: he probably preferred it that way. When Professor Sir Thomas

Merton, one of Winston Churchill's leading scientists, had first been

approached by Wallis with the Dambusting bomb idea, his first feeling was,

This man's absolutely cracked. But, he later told me, "after Wallis had

been there for half an hour, I realised that I was talking to one of the

greatest engineering geniuses of the world's history."

Much of Wallis's wartime genius had been applied to ball-shaped things.

Once he had written to a newspaper that he could

design a cricket-ball which would put both sides "out" twice in a day, and

would be indistinguishable from a standard ball. The Cricket Club

secretaries had persuaded him in anguish not to proceed with the idea.

What Wallis had in mind for the four-ton ball he called "Upkeep" was not

cricket.

"There are five dams in the Ruhr. gentlemen," he told the admirals.

"Without them, Germany's power -- stations can't make steam, her canals

will either overflow or run dry and her most vital factories will be

devastated by flooding. One dam, in particular, regulates the supply of

the only sulphur-free water available to the Ruhr's steelworks. Do you

know, it takes over 100 tons of water to make one ton of steel? This dam,

the Moehne Dam, holds back 134,000 tons of water...

He continued enthusiastically, "I and my staff have shown -- we have tried

it out on model dams -- that even with a charge as small as 6,500 pounds

of RDX explosive, we can destroy the Moehne Dam, the biggest of the five,

provided that the explosion occurs in actual contact with the masonry.

"My bouncing bomb will do just that. Just as the naval version will curve

underneath the enemy's warship, so the dambusting weapon, over seven times

as heavy, will curve in towards the dam-wall as it sinks and cling to it

all the way down until the charge goes off."

The admirals had not come to listen to talk of attacking dams -- they

wanted to

sink the German Navy, and in particular the Tirpitz. If Wallis's theory

was right, the bomb need be no bigger than could fit snugly into the

twin-engined Mosquito bomber's bomb bay. This was just what they needed.

After the film show, Air Marshal John Linnell, the Controller of Research

and Development at the Ministry of Aircraft Production

-- and one of Wallis's most determined opponents -- grudgingly agreed to

lend him two of the precious Mosquitoes for trials of the anti -- Tirpitz

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The Night The Dams Burst

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