which I was partly responsible’. He asserted that the chief of combined operations and the prime minister were enthusiastic, though there is no shred of documentary evidence of Churchill’s involvement at any stage. He then employed an argument often advanced by estate agents: if the Royal Air Force did not snap up this opportunity, the Royal Navy was eager to do so: ‘My fear is that a new and formidable strategic weapon will be spoiled by premature use against a few ships, instead of being developed and used in a properly coordinated plan.’ He urged ensuring that the chief of air staff was briefed, before it was too late.
Despite Harris’s attitude, and airmen’s continuing doubts about the tactical feasibility, on Monday, 15 February, Gp. Capt. Syd Bufton chaired a further meeting at the Air Ministry, attended by Elworthy, Wallis, Mutt Summers and others, in fulfilment of an Air Staff instruction ‘to investigate the whole [dams] operational project’. Wallis delivered a superbly eloquent sales patter. Upkeep, he said, could be released from a height of 250 feet, at a speed of around 250 mph, at a distance from the target of between three-eighths and three-quarters of a mile. Responding to Elworthy’s concern, expressed on behalf of Bomber Command, about a diversion of precious Lancasters for modification, he said that only one aircraft would be needed for full-scale trials, while those used for an Upkeep attack could be restored to normal operational mode within twenty-four hours. He suggested that while the Möhne dam was the most prominent target suited to Upkeep, the Eder – forty-five miles east-south-eastwards – was also vulnerable.
Most of this was debatable, and some of it flatly wrong. Nobody at the meeting pointed out that even if the Eder represented a suitable target for bouncing bombs, it was unrelated to the Ruhr water system, which was supposedly the strategic objective. The aircraft to carry Wallis’s weapons did not require mere modification, but would instead need fuselages purpose-built by Avro, and could not thereafter be readily returned to Main Force duty. Wallis’s persistence emphasised his gifts as a street-fighter. Where his professional passions were engaged, he was a much less gentle, more ruthless man than was sometimes supposed by those who met him casually. On this occasion, his reputation and conviction carried the day. Bufton changed his mind, renouncing the disbelief he had expressed on 13 February to report in the name of the committee: ‘It was agreed that the operation offered a very good chance of success, and that the weapons and necessary parts for modification should be prepared for thirty aircraft.’ It was thought that as long as the attack took place before the end of June, reservoir levels should be high enough to create massive flooding.
Bufton told AVM Norman Bottomley, assistant chief of air staff for Operations, ‘the prospects offered by this new weapon fully justify our pressing on with development as quickly as possible’. Bottomley, who would play an important role in securing the final commitment to the dams raid, was a veteran networker within the corridors of power. Syd Bufton said of him with wry respect: ‘Nobody could play the Air Ministry organ as skilfully as Norman.’ It was Wallis’s additional good fortune that Bufton and Elworthy – a thirty-one-year-old New Zealander of outstanding abilities who eventually became head of the RAF – were original thinkers, open to new ideas in a fashion that Harris was not. They grasped the terrific theatrical impact that the dams’ destruction would make, surely greater than that of yet another assault on German cities. Churchill once said grumpily, ‘I’m sick of these raids on Cologne,’ to which Sir Arthur Harris’s riposte – ‘So are the people of Cologne!’ – was not wholly convincing.
A weakness of the debate about Upkeep, however, was that it focused overwhelmingly on the feasibility of constructing and dropping the bombs; much less on the vulnerabilities of the water systems of western Germany, the Ruhr in particular. Throughout the Second World War, intelligence about the German economy and industries remained a weakness in Western Allied warmaking, and explicitly in the conduct of the bomber offensive.
Just three days after the Air Ministry meeting, on 18 February, following a telephone conversation with Linnell of MAP, who remained a sceptic, Harris wrote a testy note to Portal, his chief, head of the Royal Air Force. Linnell had told him, he said, ‘that all sorts of enthusiasts and panacea-merchants are now coming round MAP suggesting the taking of about thirty Lancasters off the line to rig them up for this weapon, when the weapon itself exists so far only within the imagination of those who conceived it. I cannot too strongly deprecate any diversion of Lancasters at this critical moment in our affairs.’ Wallis’s bomb, in Harris’s view, ‘is just about the maddest proposition … that we have yet come across … The job of rotating some 1,200 pounds [sic] of material at 500 rpm on an aircraft is in itself fraught with difficulty.’
But Wallis had acquired supporters more powerful even than Harris. After a screening of a new batch of films of his tests before audiences that included Portal, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound and Vickers chief Sir Charles Craven, Pound threw his weight behind the naval version of Wallis’s mine: ‘The potential value of Highball is so great,’ he minuted on 27 February, ‘… that not only should the trials be given the highest priority, but their complete success should be assumed now.’
It is hard to overstate the stress under which the bomb’s begetter existed in those days. He was still spending many hours on the design of the Windsor, Air Ministry specification B.3/42. In the mind of Sir Charles Craven, this was much more important than Upkeep and Highball: contracts for a big new bomber promised immense rewards for Vickers, contrasted with those to be gained from building a few bombs. Moreover, confusingly for Wallis and for the entire Whitehall hierarchy, Craven was intermittently seconded to assist and work in the Ministry, so that it was sometimes unclear to all concerned whether he spoke as the engineer’s employer, or as the voice of officialdom. On 18 February, Wallis worked until 7.45 p.m. at the National Physical Laboratory. Next morning, he met the Admiralty’s director of weapons development, then at 2.30 p.m. saw MAP officials to discuss unspecified aircraft de-icing problems. At 4 p.m. he was back at Vickers, where at 5.30 p.m. there was another screening of his bomb-test films, following which he drove to Dorking with Admiral Renouf. On the next morning, a Saturday, he worked in his office at Burhill, then attended more meetings in the afternoon. On Sunday he was confined to his home at Effingham with a migraine, such as he often and unsurprisingly succumbed to.
Next day, Monday the 22nd, he drove with Mutt Summers to High Wycombe for a personal audience with Sir Arthur Harris. Sam Elworthy claimed credit for persuading the C-in-C to meet the engineer. He wrote to Harris after the war, saying emolliently that ‘your scepticism of what seemed just another crazy idea was certainly shared by your staff’. But the clever group-captain had been impressed by what he heard about Upkeep – and he also saw which way the wind was blowing at the Air Ministry.
Harris was no fool. For all his bombast, he grudgingly acknowledged that he had masters who must sometimes be appeased. He knew that Portal had authorised the modification of three Lancasters to carry Upkeep. While the words ‘whether the Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command likes it or not’ were never articulated, they were understood. The Chief of the Air Staff wrote to Harris on 19 February: ‘As you know, I have the greatest respect for your opinion on all technical and operational matters, and I agree with you that it is quite possible that the Highball and Upkeep projects may come to nothing. Nevertheless, I do not feel inclined to refuse Air Staff interest in these weapons.’
That morning of the 22nd at High Wycombe, Wallis was subjected to a predictable barrage of invective: ‘What is it you want? My boys’ lives are too precious to be wasted on your crazy notions.’ Yet it is unlikely that Harris would have received Wallis at all had he not already recognised that he would have to give way, and provide resources for an operational trial of Upkeep. Having viewed the films, he professed grudging interest.
Wallis succumbed to a brief surge of optimism. This was shattered, however, on his return to Weybridge. He received an order to present himself immediately at the London office of Vickers, his employers, for an audience with the company’s chairman. Craven, without inviting his visitor to sit down, declared brusquely that MAP’s Linnell had complained that Wallis had become a nuisance; that his bouncing bombs had become a serious impediment to the vastly more important
