with airships, he failed to perceive that winged aircraft represented the future, writing to a colleague soon after World War I: ‘All my heart is in airships, and I have worked so hard.’ He championed their cause, and especially that of the R100, even after the 1930 incineration of the R101, together with similar disasters in the United States, had laid bare inherent limitations of the lighter-than-air concept.
In 1933 the M.1/30, a prototype torpedo biplane which Wallis designed, broke up in mid-air, though the structural failure was not his fault. Its test pilot, Captain Joe ‘Mutt’ Summers, took to his parachute successfully, but the plane’s observer had a close brush with death when his straps became entangled with the rear machine-gun as the wreck screamed earthwards. The man was fortunate to escape, and to deploy his canopy, before the plane spun into the ground. While Wallis was often applauded for creating the geodetic framework of the Wellesley and Wellington bombers – latticing derived from his wiring system for harnessing the gasbags of airships, which created exceptional fuselage strength – other nations concluded that it was too complex to be cost-effective, and the RAF spurned geodetic frameworks for its later heavy bombers.
Between 1941 and 1943 the foremost brains of Vickers-Armstrong were engaged in creating a new aircraft, christened the Windsor, armed with 20mm cannon, capable of carrying a bomb load of fifteen tons at a speed of 300 mph. Rex Pierson, Barnes Wallis – who held the title of Assistant Chief Designer (Structures) – and supporting teams of engineers and draughtsmen devoted countless hours to this project, which never advanced beyond the prototype stage. The ever-improving performance of the Avro Lancaster, which entered service in 1942, made the Windsor redundant, though work on it continued through 1944.
None of the above is intended to detract from Wallis’s achievements – merely to explain why it was not unreasonable for those in authority to greet with caution his higher flights of imagination. At one time and another of his life, large sums of public money were expended on the development of devices, weapons, and indeed aircraft which failed after he had proclaimed their virtues at Whitehall meetings with the same messianic fervour he deployed in advocating his winners.
Moreover, Wallis was only one among a host of enthusiastic inventors peddling ambitious schemes to the armed forces. Lord Cherwell, the prime minister’s favourite scientist, railroaded into the experimental stage an absurd scheme for frustrating enemy aircraft with barrages of aerial mines. Cherwell likewise promoted a CS – Capital Ship – bomb that was an expensive failure, as were early British AP – Armour-Piercing – bombs. Lord Louis Mountbatten, as director of combined operations, sponsored a scheme for creating aircraft-carriers contrived from ice blocks. Barnes Wallis attempted to persuade the Royal Navy to adopt a smoke-laying glider of his invention. The Americans conducted experiments in fitting incendiary devices to bats, to be dispatched over enemy territory, an abortive operation codenamed X-Ray. Evelyn Waugh’s description, in his satirical war novel Unconditional Surrender, of Whitehall recruiting a witch doctor to cast spells on Hitler, did not range far beyond reality. Aircraft designer Norman Boorer said: ‘There were many, many crazy ideas being put forward by all sorts of scientists.’
Despite Wallis’s white hair and the faraway look that was often in his eyes, he was anything but unworldly – indeed, he might be considered a veteran ‘Whitehall warrior’. Over two decades of nurturing and supervising complex projects he had honed skills in haranguing committees; guile in exploiting personal relationships; boldness in bullying companies and institutions to assist him in pursuing his purposes. Like many brilliant men, he existed in a default condition of exasperation towards the failure of others to see things as he did. In 1940, when he was working on modifications to the Vickers Wellington and also on a six-engined ‘Victory’ bomber of his own conception, he wrote to an old World War I colleague: ‘Life is almost unrelieved gloom – worse than 25 years ago, except that this time I can feel that I am doing something useful whereas last war I certainly was not … Tremendously busy – on big developments, which if they had been put in hand two years ago would have won us the war by this time. Too late as usual.’
His ‘Victory’ bomber, claimed Wallis in July 1940, ‘is going to be the instrument which will enable us to bring the war to a quick conclusion’. Since these aircraft would operate at an altitude beyond the reach of German fighters, they could fly ‘at their leisure and in daylight … Irreparable damage could be inflicted on the strategic communications of the German Empire by … ten or twenty machines within the course of a few weeks.’
Here was characteristic Wallis fervour: he deserved full credit for conducting unfunded and unsupported research on the science of destroying large structures from the air, at a time when the RAF was institutionally indifferent to this vital issue. However, Wallis was as wrong as the ‘bomber barons’, and remained so throughout the war, in cherishing exaggerated expectations about what air power might achieve. He was as mistaken as Sir Arthur Harris, though from a different perspective, in believing that the RAF, or indeed the USAAF, could alone defeat Nazism, or even wreck the German economy. This objective was unattainable, regardless of which targeting policy the air forces espoused, or what bombs he might devise for Allied aircraft to carry. Yet Wallis cherished one remarkable idea, that would secure his place in history.
2 GESTATION
Barnes Wallis knew nothing about the Air Staff’s exploration of targeting dams when, early in the war, he himself began studying the vulnerabilities of German power supplies, and explicitly of hydro-electric plants, during spare hours snatched from his ‘proper’ work on a projected high-altitude Wellington, and later the Windsor. He spent months considering the possibility of breaching dams with ten-ton bombs dropped by his own proposed ‘Victory’ aircraft from an altitude of forty thousand feet – three times the operating height of contemporary RAF ‘heavies’. An early enthusiast for his ideas was Gp. Capt. Fred Winterbotham, head of air intelligence at MI6, and a pre-war pioneer of the exploitation of high-altitude aerial photography. He was introduced to Wallis by a mutual friend, City banker Leo D’Erlanger, who had endeared himself to the engineer’s children by once presenting them with a pink gramophone. In February 1940 D’Erlanger brought the air intelligence officer to lunch at Effingham, thinking that Wallis and Winterbotham had common interests. Winterbotham was much taken with the cheerfully bustling Wallis household and its noisy children, the exuberant piano-playing, the obviously blissful partnership of his host and wife Molly.
Winterbotham was something of a charlatan, who played a less important role both in the Second World War and the evolution of Wallis’s schemes than he himself later professed. He was no fool, however, and like many intelligence officers was a keen networker and intriguer. He invited Wallis to lunch at the RAF Club in Piccadilly, and was persuaded by him to lobby the good and great about the Victory bomber, with a wingspan of 160 feet (against the Avro Lancaster’s eventual 102 feet) and its accompanying ‘earthquake’ bomb. Desmond Morton, Winterbotham’s old intelligence colleague, responded to this proposal from his new office in 10 Downing Street on 5 July 1940: ‘My dear Fred … The view held [here] is that such a project as you describe could not come to fruition until 1942, even if then.’ This period was, of course, Britain’s darkest of the Second World War; only by straining every sinew could the Ministry of Aircraft Production create a bare sufficiency of fighters, never mind a speculative giant bomber.
Nonetheless, through Winterbotham again, Wallis secured an audience with Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, at which he pressed his Victory project. The gnome-like tycoon seemed more interested in persuading his visitor to travel to America to explore pressurised aircraft cabins, but their meeting yielded one positive result: it enabled Wallis to secure access to the government research facility at the former Road Research Laboratory at Harmondsworth, just west of London, together with the Building Research Station near Watford in Hertfordshire.
In August 1940 Wallis began tests related to the projected deep-penetration bomb, for which he was also admitted to the wind tunnel at Teddington’s National Physical Laboratory. In retrospect it seems astonishing, and yet also a triumph
