Paul Brickhill - The Dam Busters

Next he bailed up Summers and demanded an interview with Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, chief of Bomber Command. Summers had known Harris for years, well enough to call him by his first name, which few people dared to do. Harris, it was freely acknowledged, could crush a seaside landlady with a look.

Summers and Wallis drove into the wood outside High Wycombe where Harris had his headquarters, and as Wallis put his foot on the threshold of Harris’s office the booming voice hit him like a shock wave.

“What is it you want? I’ve no time for you inventors. My boys’ lives are too precious to be wasted by your crazy notions! “

It was enough to strike fear into the heart of the sturdiest inventor. Wallis almost baulked, then pressed on and there was the bulky figure of Harris, grey eyes staring coldly over the half-moon glasses perched on his nose.

“Well?” Harris was a man of few words and forceful ones.

“I have an idea for destroying German dams,” Wallis said. “The effects on Germany would be enormous.”

“I’ve heard about it. It’s far-fetched.”

Wallis said he’d like to explain it, and Harris gave a grunt which Wallis took for yes and went ahead, trying not to be too involved and yet show how he had proved the theory. At the end the bomber chief had absorbed it all. Not that there was any encouraging reaction. Harris said bluntly:

“If you think you’re going to walk in and get a squadron of Lancasters out of me you’ve made a mistake. You’re not! “

Waiiis started to bristle and Summers, who knew Wallis’s obstinacy and Harris’s explosive temperament, kicked Wallis’s shin under the desk. Wallis controlled himself.

“We don’t want a squadron,” he said, “…yet. We’d like a chance to prove it in trials with one Lancaster first.”

Harris eyed him stonily. “Maybe,” he said. “You really think you can knock a dam down with that thing.”

“Yes,” Wallis said. “Or it may take three or four. We can put them all in the same place.”

Summers said peaceably, “We’ll prove it’ll work, Bert.”

“Prove it and I’ll arrange a squadron,” Harris said, and then with his old fierceness, staring at Wallis, “but I’m tired of half-baked inventors trying to run things.”

Summers kicked Wallis once more under the desk and broke the tension by saying, “We’ve got some films here that show clearly how it works.”

“All right. Let’s see them.” They trooped out to the Command projection room, picking up Harris’s chief lieutenant, Air Vice-Marshal Saundby, on the way. Harris curtly told the projectionist to clear out. “If it’s as good as you say,” he told Wallis, “there’s no point letting everyone know. Saundby can run the films through.”

Saundby’s training had not concentrated much on film projection work and for a while there was a tangle of celluloid, but eventually he sorted it out, clicked the lights off and they watched in silence the antics of the bombs dropped at Chesil Beach and the tricks of the model under the water at Teddington.

When the lights went up Harris had his poker face on. “Very interesting,” he grunted. “I’ll think it over.”

Not long after, Wallis got a summons to a senior executive whom he knew quite well and who in the past had encouraged his bomb work.

“Wallis,” he said, “I’ve been asked by—” (one of the two cautious ones) “to tell you to stop your nonsense about destroying dams. He tells me you’re making a nuisance of yourself at the Ministry.”

For a moment Wallis was stunned, then recovered and answered quietly, “If you think I’m not acting in the best interests of the war effort, I think I should offer to resign from all my work and try something else.”

For the fast and last time he saw the executive lose his temper. The man shot to his feet, smashed his fist on the desk and shouted “Mutiny!” Smashed his fist down again with another “Mutiny!” And again with a third explosive “Mutiny!” He subsided, red and quivering, and Wallis walked out of the room. He had lunch somewhere but does not remember where, and afterwards went and told the whole story to Sir Thomas Merton, one of the Supply Ministry’s inventions tribunal. Merton promised support, but Wallis came away still depressed, knowing of nothing more he could do; it seemed too late now to organise things for the coming May, and after a couple of days he was resigned to it.

That was the day, February 26, he got a summons to the office of one of the cautious ones, and there he also found the senior executive who had shouted “Mutiny!” Proceedings opened by the cautious one saying, a little stiffly:

“Mr. Wallis, orders have been received that your dams project is to go ahead immediately with a view to an operation at all costs no later than May.”

AFTER battling for so long, Wallis, in the weeks that followed, sometimes ruefully thought he had got more action than he could stand. Life was work from dawn till midnight, planning, draughting, thinking and discussing, grabbing a sandwich with one hand while the work went on.

He told his workers briefly what he wanted them to do, but not what the bombs were to do, or when, or where. Only he, Harris and a selected few others knew that, and apart from them a curtain of secrecy came down. Each craftsman worked on one part and knew nothing of the others. One of the first things Wallis himself had to do was to work out at exactly what speed and height the aeroplane should fly when they dropped the bombs, so that the bombs would reach the dam wall at the right height and speed.

The full-size bomb was to be a steel sphere seven feet in girth. Roy Chadwick, chief Avro designer, started taking the bomb doors off Lancasters and doing other strange things to them so they could carry it. Explosives experts, tactical authorities, secret service men and hundreds of others had a part in it, and over Germany every day a fast Mosquito flew 25,000 feet over the dams taking photographs. Deep in the underground vaults of Bomber Command men studied the photographs through thick magnifying glasses to check the level of the rising water and the defences. If the secret leaked out they would see the extra flak and the raid would have to be called off. It was going to be suicidal enough as it was. There seemed to be at least six gun positions around the Moehne alone, and that was no matter for comfort because the bombs would have to be dropped from very low level, so low that a pilot could lean out and almost dangle his fingers in the water. They would have to fly between two towers on top of the dam, and some of the guns were in these towers.

The Mosquitoes flew a devious way and crossed the dams as though by accident so the Germans would not be suspicious. An ugly sign appeared in the first few days: photographs showed the anti-torpedo boom in front of the Moehne was being repaired; it had been loose and untidy, and now it was being tightened. Nothing else appeared to be happening though, and after a while it was reasonable to assume that it was only a periodical check. While the work pressed on in England, it seemed that the Germans were doing nothing significant.

At his headquarters in the wood Air Marshal Arthur Harris (“Bert” to his friends and “Bomber” to the public) had been pondering how the attack should be made—and who should make it. On March 15 he sent for Air Vice-Marshal the Honourable Ralph Cochrane, who two days before had become Air Officer Commanding No,. 5 (Bomber) Group.

“I’ve got a job for you, Cocky,” Harris said and told him about Wallis’s weird bomb and what he proposed to do with it. At the end he said: “I know it sounds far-fetched, but I think it has a good chance.”