is intelligently used, e.g. for simultaneous attacks on all German capital ships and main hydro-electric power dams, there is little doubt but that Italy could be brought to a complete standstill and that industry in Germany would be so crippled as to have a decisive effect on the duration of the war … To attain this result much preparation and careful planning are clearly required and meanwhile I repeat nothing is being done.’ Here was a manifestation of a British yearning, characteristic of its time and place, for some dramatic stroke that might sidestep battlefield slaughter and bring the war to an early closure. Winterbotham’s note took no heed of the Alpine difficulties in the way of his fantasy, prominent among them that its fulfilment would require hundreds of bombers to be modified to carry Wallis’s weapons. Meanwhile its expectations about what these, or for that matter any, bombs might do to the Axis drifted into fairyland.
That autumn of 1942, the bomb project languished. Oxley Engineering experienced difficulties in constructing the test weapons, and in October Wallis was kept at home for several days by illness. Only on 2 December did he at last board a modified Wellington, piloted by veteran test pilot Mutt Summers – the very same who had parachuted more than a decade earlier from one of the engineer’s less successful prototypes – for a trial of the backspin technology. It worked, though no test bombs were dropped.
Two days later, on the afternoon of the 4th, the Wellington took off for Dorset, where on Chesil Beach a camera crew waited to record the trial bomb-dropping. The first two tests, with non-explosive fillings, resulted in the spheres bursting on impact. When a subsequent succession of droppings took place, Wallis watched from the shore. Outcomes suggested that the technologies for releasing the bomb from an aircraft, and for its subsequent bouncing progress, were viable. Yet repeated collisions with the sea at speeds of over 200 mph imposed enormous stresses on the projectile during its bouncing progress. Half-sized prototypes disintegrated. Their begetter undertook modifications and adaptations, still convinced that the principles of his creation – or rather, his instrument of destruction – were sound.
Following these further developments, Wednesday, 20 January 1943 found Wallis ensconced in Weymouth’s Gloucester Hotel, from which he wrote to Molly: ‘I do wish you could come & share this lovely room. It would be just perfect with you here. If you could come tomorrow by the mid-day train, do … Now we are scheduled to start [tests] at 10 a.m. … so I must go to bed. All my love little sweetheart, and come if you can …’
She came. Almost two decades of marriage had done nothing to cool the couple’s passionate romance. Molly, still only thirty-seven, was now responsible for six children, including a niece and nephew whose parents had been killed in the blitz. This brood was surrendered to their nanny while she set forth for Dorset. On 24 January she wrote to the children from Weymouth about her visit to their father:
… A lovely time it’s been. This morning I drove out with him and the others to the nearest point I was allowed [to the bomb tests] & then I got out and walked back. 8 miles of lovely road, high up with the Downs one side & the sea to other. It was sunny & clear. I did enjoy it. Of course it’s quite mad that they shouldn’t let me watch the proceedings seeing as I’ve lived with it since last February & probably know more about it than anyone save Barnes. But it’s quite true – policemen do bob up and turn you away. I suppose the others would say ‘If that wife why not my wife’ little knowing what a very special wife this one is.
Darling Barnes. You should see him among these admirals and air vice marshals patiently explaining and describing to them & they drinking it all in – or trying to. And he’s so quiet and un-assuming none of them could imagine what pain & labour it’s been. How he’s got up in the middle of the night to go up to the study & work summat out. No wonder he looks drawn and tired. I suppose if he were a self-advertiser he’d have been Sir Barnes in the New Year Honours. Oh well, it’d have been a nuisance. But it’s an exciting life & no mistake.
The contrast seems extraordinarily moving between the private domesticity and indeed passion within the Wallis family, and the devastating public purposes which its principal was pursuing. Some might find it repugnant, in the light of what later befell Upkeep’s victims, but it must never be forgotten that Barnes Wallis’s country was engaged in a war of national survival against one of history’s most evil forces. The engineer was straining every sinew, and all his own astonishing gifts, to assist the Allied cause. During that 24 January trial in Dorset which Molly Barnes was not permitted to witness, one dummy bomb achieved thirteen bounces. Next day, another managed twenty. Wooden test spheres, dropped from between eighty and 145 feet, travelled 1,315 yards across the water. Barnes once wrote down for Molly the closing lines of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, among his favourite poems: ‘One equal temper of heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’
Returning to London, the white-haired evangelist now strode through the corridors of ministries proudly clutching a can of 35mm film, showing his weapon skimming the sea. Eagerly, he awaited authorisation to continue with development of both Upkeep – the dam-bursting version – and Highball, the smaller naval bomb. He chafed for a swift commitment, because for optimum effect an attack on the German dams needed to take place in May, when water levels in the reservoirs were at their maximum height after winter rains and snows.
Instead, however, on 12 February 1943 a blow descended. Ben Lockspeiser told Wallis that AVM Linnell had become concerned that the engineer’s labours on his bombs – nobody used the word obsession, but this was obviously in many service minds – was impeding his ‘proper’ work, development of the Windsor bomber. Linnell did not explicitly oppose the bomb scheme – he was too canny a service politician for that. He merely reported on its speculative character to AVM Ralph Sorley, assistant chief of air staff for Technical Requirements, further emphasising the drain that the project was imposing on resources. Once again, it seems worthy of emphasis that Linnell did not thus play the part of a myopic senior officer flying a desk, but was instead assessing Wallis’s project from the viewpoint of a department besieged by competing demands for facilities to develop new aircraft and weapons systems. Meanwhile Syd Bufton, deputy director of bomber operations, told a 13 February meeting at the Air Ministry that he, as an experienced operational pilot, considered it impracticable to drop Wallis’s bombs in darkness, at low level over enemy territory.
Gp. Capt. Sam Elworthy, a Bomber Command staff officer who attended the same meeting, was charged with reporting on its findings to Harris’s headquarters at High Wycombe, which he did on the following day. The consequence was a note on the ‘bouncing bomb’ drafted by AVM Robert ‘Sandy’ Saundby, senior air staff officer to his chieftain. This, in turn, prompted the C-in-C to scribble one of his most famous, or notorious, judgements of the war: ‘This is tripe of the wildest description … There is not the smallest chance of it working.’ And much more of the same.
Wallis now wrote an anguished personal note to Fred Winterbotham, expressing his frustration: ‘We have just worked out some of our results from the last experiment at Chesil Beach, and are getting ranges nearly twice those which would be forecast from the water tank, that is, with a Wellington flying at about 300 miles an hour and dropping from an altitude of 200 feet, we have registered a range of exactly three-quarters of a mile!!’ He said that the problems of constructing prototypes to be carried by a heavy bomber would be easily solved. ‘It follows that sufficient bombs for the Lancaster experiment (if, say, thirty machines were to be used, to destroy simultaneously five dams, that is, six machines per dam to make certain of doing it) can be completed within two or three weeks.’ He added that modifying the Lancasters would be a far more time-consuming process than manufacturing the weapons, and concluded ‘Yours in great haste,’ adding a handwritten scrawl: ‘Help, oh help.’ It was characteristic of the strand of naïveté in Wallis that in calculating the number of aircraft needed to destroy five dams in enemy territory he was heedless of the possibility that the German defences might remove from the reckoning some, if not all, of the attackers.
Winterbotham responded by writing on 16 February to AVM Frank
