and frustrated its leaders since 1938.
2
1 WALLIS
If Germany’s dams had been attacked with conventional bombs, rockets or shells, posterity – at least British posterity – might have taken little heed of the story. As it was, the means employed, and the man who devised them, confer enduring fascination. ‘Among special weapons,’ recorded a post-war study of RAF armament by the service’s Air Historical Branch, in language that reflects self-congratulation, ‘the “Dam Buster” must take pride of place … the story of its development and production is an epic in the history of aerial bombs.’
Barnes Wallis was the only ‘boffin’ – to be more accurate, he was an engineer – to achieve membership of Britain’s historic pantheon of World War II, behind Winston Churchill but alongside the Ultra codebreaker Alan Turing and the fighting heroes of the conflict. Until 1951, when Paul Brickhill’s book was published, scarcely anyone knew or remembered anything of Wallis. He had enjoyed some celebrity in the pre-war years, especially in connection with his work on the great airship R100. From 1939 onwards, however, he vanished behind a curtain of official security. He became famous only in the decades that followed, after the release of the film The Dam Busters, in which he was portrayed by Michael Redgrave.
The Wallis legend depicts a genius, seized with a potentially war-winning idea, fighting a lone battle against unimaginative bureaucrats to achieve fulfilment of his conception. The truth was almost entirely the other way around. What was extraordinary about the concept of what became known as the ‘bouncing bomb’ was that in the midst of an existential struggle in which Britain was striving with meagre resources, suffering repeated defeats and setbacks, some of the guiding lights of the war effort, both servicemen and civilians, grasped the potential of Wallis’s fantastic idea, supported its evolution, and within a few short weeks of securing command approval contrived the manufacture of workable examples. Moreover, officialdom proved astonishingly – indeed naïvely – willing to share the inventor’s extravagant hopes for the impact of such an assault upon the Nazi war machine. While scepticism had to be overcome about whether Wallis’s weapons would work and whether resources could be found to construct them, there was much less rigorous analysis of how drastically breaking dams would harm the interests of Hitler – except by Sir Arthur Harris, who had locked himself into a narrative of his own.
Even had Barnes Wallis failed to secure fame through breaching the dams, he would have deserved notice as a remarkable human being. He was the son of a doctor who practised in London’s humble New Cross area, hampered by having suffered polio. Barnes, born in 1887, attended a minor public school, Christ’s Hospital, only after winning a scholarship. He missed university, and instead became an engineering apprentice at a shipbuilding firm, then in 1913 graduated to working on airship development for the industrial giant Vickers. While he was adequately paid, his finances were chronically strained by his insistence upon aiding other members of his unlucky family. No stranger to pawnbrokers’ shops, he once sold a bicycle to pay for his parents to enjoy a holiday.
When World War I came, Wallis’s repeated attempts to join the army foundered because Vickers reclaimed his services. He served for a few months on airships, with the rank of sub-lieutenant in the Royal Naval Air Service, but retained a lifelong guilt that he had not fought as did most of his contemporaries. In 1922, with the post-war run-down of the armed forces, Vickers abandoned airship production and made Wallis redundant. During the years that followed, somewhat unexpectedly he served as a part-time Territorial Army soldier in an anti-aircraft artillery unit. For a time he studied for an external degree at London University, and was reduced to seeking employment through the scholastic agency Gabbitas Thring, who found work for him as a mathematics teacher at an English school in Switzerland. It was from there, as a bachelor already thirty-five, that he began writing to his seventeen-year-old cousin by marriage, Molly Bloxam, to whom he explained mathematical formulae, then progressed to discussing technical and physics issues that fascinated him. Their correspondence developed into a romance. In that long-ago era before social telephoning, he wrote ten- to twelve-page letters to his beloved, signing himself ‘your affectionate cousin’.
Molly soon pledged her heart to Barnes, but her father was wary of this middle-aged ‘cradle-snatcher’, for a year restricting their correspondence to a letter apiece a fortnight. It was only in April 1925, three years to the day after they met, that they were finally married – to live happily ever after. The Wallises never became rich, but in 1930 they achieved chintzy middle-class comfort in a mock-Tudor suburban home at Effingham in Surrey which eventually hosted the rumpus generated by four noisy children. This largely self-taught polymath rejoined Vickers in the year of his wedding as assistant chief designer, working on the R100, then the largest airship ever built. While labouring at this day job he found time for bell-ringing in the village church and service on the parish council – he was a devout Christian and vegetarian. Until war came he practised Sunday observance, declining even to read a newspaper. A friend wrote of a conversation with Wallis in which he exuberantly expressed his admiration for God: ‘My dear boy, do you realise that the Almighty has arranged a system whereby millions of electric circuits pass up and down a single cord no bigger than my little finger, and each one most beautifully insulated. The spinal cord is an absolute marvel of electronics!’ So deep was Wallis’s attachment to family that for most of his life he subsidised, and indeed supported, first his father, then his grown-up sister and her husband.
All the Wallises were music-lovers, and Barnes played an occasional round of golf on the course adjoining his garden. He proved an ingenious handyman around the house, and an imaginative wood-carver. Though not teetotal, the family drank little, and never succumbed to extravagance. Barnes took a cold bath every morning. For all his devotion to Molly, he could be a stern paterfamilias. ‘We were used to my father isolating himself in his study at the top of the house,’ said his daughter Mary. ‘Always working, often abstracted, he was frequently absent from the daily round of chat, laughter and games which large families enjoy. But when he did join in it was lively and great fun. Even in the darkest days he would burst into cheerful, spontaneously made-up doggerel verse under the name “Spokeshave-on-Spur”, which delighted us all.’ Wallis relaxed discipline on annual family camping and walking holidays. Mary described how, on a Dorset beach, he taught his children to skim flat stones: ‘Mine went plop, plop and sank. His would slide smoothly with six or seven hops and quietly submerge.’ Barnes and Molly, their daughter added, ‘succeeded in protecting us from fear, anxiety, hunger or distress’, a notable achievement for any parents.
Yet Wallis’s stubborn, spiky eccentricities not infrequently engaged him in quarrels. There was a peculiar episode when Molly met, admired and brought home to Effingham the great birth-control evangelist Marie Stopes. She and Barnes disliked each other on sight, and continued to do so, though her son Harry eventually married the engineer’s daughter Mary. At the outset, Wallis and Stopes argued fiercely over his indulgence and indeed encouragement of Molly’s semi-overt breastfeeding of her baby of the moment, a practice which the visitor deemed barbaric.
Barnes’s favourite domestic relaxation was to read aloud to Molly from Dickens, Hardy or Jane Austen while she mended the children’s clothes. The Wallises were good people, if that is not an inadequate adjective, committed to the virtues of honesty, family and honourable behaviour. This tall, angular figure was also, of course, a workaholic. ‘He was a collision of times,’ observes Richard Morris. ‘In manners and values he was of the 1890s; in aerodynamic possibility, of the 2030s or beyond. He combined confidence, self-pity, vision, regret, hope, loyalty, disdain and ten-score other characteristics.’
To understand Wallis’s wartime experiences it is important to recognise that, while his talents and imagination were remarkable, he was very far from right about everything. All his life he pursued
