even bigger and better bombs for the squadron. Within a few months they would all have the proof of that.
Barnes Wallis
Wallis, whose wife’s sister and brother-in-law had been killed by a German bomb in 1940, had already devised Upkeep – the ‘bouncing bomb’ used on the Dams raid. Forever innovative and forward-looking, he had never believed that carpet bombing could break German resolve, any more than the Blitz had broken Britain’s will to fight. Instead, he had argued from the start for precision bombing of high-value economic, military and infrastructure targets, and designed a series of weapons capable of doing so. He had been given the task of creating newer, ever more destructive weapons that could penetrate and destroy heavily fortified concrete bunkers and other targets, previously invulnerable to conventional attack.
A vegetarian non-smoker, Barnes Wallis came from a respectable middle-class background – his father was a doctor and his grandfather a priest – yet at sixteen years old, he had set his face against the advice of his parents and teachers and left school to take up an apprenticeship as an engineer. In later years, his daughter Mary attributed that decision to an experience when he was very young and his mother had taken him to a foundry to see the men and machinery at work. ‘The size, power, the noise of machinery in the light of the flames from the foundry furnace’ may have made a lasting impression on him.
Whatever the reasons, Wallis’s career path was set, though at first he showed more interest in the sea than in the air, training as a marine engineer, before being recruited by Vickers to work on airship design. An engineering genius, he worked as the chief designer on the R100 airship, ‘a perfect silver fish gliding through the air … a luxury liner compared with the sardine-tin passenger aircraft of today’. Having pioneered the geodetic system of construction in airships (more commonly called geodesic) – a latticework system of construction that produced a very light metal structure that nonetheless possessed great strength – he went on to apply it to military aircraft too, first using it on the airframe of the Wellington bomber. Despite his considerable achievements, he was a warm, humane and profoundly modest man. ‘We technical men like to keep in the background,’7 he said, and a friend and work colleague remarked that: ‘He would sooner talk about his garden than himself.’
Although he had designed aircraft, Wallis knew very little about bomb construction, but right from the outset of the war he resolved to put that right as quickly as possible. One of his early discoveries was that the explosive power of a bomb is proportional to the cube of the weight of the charge it carries, so that, for example, a 2,000-pound bomb would have eight times the impact of a bomb half its weight. He also learned that the pressure wave from an explosion is transmitted far more efficiently through the ground or through water than it is through air. Both of those discoveries were reflected in the design of the ‘Upkeep’, ‘Tallboy’ and ‘Grand Slam’ bombs he subsequently produced.
In addition to the new bombs Barnes Wallis was producing, 617 Squadron were now using a new and far more accurate bombsight. Shortly before Leonard Cheshire’s arrival, 617 had begun training with the sophisticated new SABS. Its only major drawback was that it required a long, straight and level run to the dropping point, reducing the pilots’ ability to make evasive manoeuvres and increasing their vulnerability to flak and fighter attack.
Wireless operator Larry Curtis always dreaded that vulnerable time, flying straight and level with the bomb-aimer in virtual control of the aircraft:
As long as you were busy, you never thought about anything except the job you were doing. But when it came to the bombing run, and to a great extent your duties were finished, it was then that you became aware that you were very vulnerable and people were actually trying to kill you. In the radio operator’s cabin there was a steel pole – some sort of support – and I used to hang on to it like grim death. I’ve always said if anyone could find that steel pole, they’d find my fingerprints embedded in it – and I’m not joking. It did come home very forcefully; I’m sure everyone would agree that was the time you dreaded. 8
There was no man on the squadron who did not feel fear at times, but, says one of the squadron’s wireless operators, ‘it was all about pushing fears to one side. I think if anyone said they were never afraid, I’d say they were either not there, or they’re lying. There was no possibility you couldn’t be scared at some points.’9
Even the squadron’s greatest heroes were not immune to fear. Wilfred Bickley, an air gunner who joined 617 at the same time as the great Leonard Cheshire, VC, once asked him, ‘Do you ever get scared?’
‘Of course I get scared,’ Cheshire said.
Bickley broke into a broad grin. ‘Thanks for that, you’ve made my day.’10
At a reunion after the war, Cheshire also said to one of his former men on 617 Squadron: ‘I could have been a pilot or at a pinch a navigator, but could never have done the other crew jobs; there was too much time to think, to be isolated, to dwell on what was going on around you. I never felt fear as a pilot, but as a passenger, I certainly felt it!’11
* * *
The use of the new SABS bombsights in training on the ranges at Wainfleet had led to a huge improvement in accuracy, but the first real chance to assess their effectiveness under operational conditions came in raids against Hitler’s new ‘V-weapons’. ‘V’ stood for Vergeltungswaffen (‘vengeance weapons’), and these ‘terror weapons’ were the Nazis’ chosen method of retaliation for the relentless Allied bombing of German cities. Lacking the heavy bombers and air superiority required to inflict similar damage on Britain, Hitler had authorised the development of three V-weapons: the V-1 ‘flying bombs’ – an early forerunner of modern-day Cruise missiles, christened ‘buzz-bombs’ or ‘doodlebugs’ by Londoners – the V-2 Feuerteufel (‘Fire Devil’) rocket, and the V-3 ‘Supergun’. Reinforced underground sites were being constructed in the Pas de Calais, in occupied France, where the weapons could be assembled and then launched against Britain. Most of the work was carried out by the forced labour of concentration camp inmates, PoWs, Germans rejected for military service and men and women from the Nazi-occupied countries. They were slave labourers, worked round the clock and fed near-starvation rations, and many did not survive.
Destruction of the plants where the V-1s were being manufactured and the ramps from which they were to be launched had become an increasingly urgent priority. 617’s aircrews were briefed about the sites and what they meant. ‘We were trying to obliterate them before they were even made.’
Intelligence on the German V-weapon sites came both from reports by French Resistance members of unusual building activity, and from RAF large-scale photographic reconnaissance missions, which covered the entire northern French coast for up to 50 kilometres inland. Sporadic attacks were launched by Main Force squadrons but inflicted only superficial damage.
The task of finding and eliminating the V-weapon sites was made harder by the camouflage used by the Germans – some nets covering buildings were ‘painted to look like roads and small buildings’.12 The wooded terrain in which most of the weapons were sited also hindered attacks, but the biggest problem was the poor visibility and persistent fogs that shrouded the Channel coast of Occupied France for many winter weeks.
On the night of 16/17 December, 617 Squadron joined the assault on Hitler’s vengeance weapons, with a raid on a site at Flixecourt, south of Abbeville, where they were led into battle for the first time by Leonard Cheshire. A system of markers was use to aid accuracy in navigation and bombing. Parachute markers that floated slowly down were used to mark both turning points on the
