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Dam Busters: Owners’ Workshop Manual, Haynes 2011.
You’ve all seen the film, probably several times. Heroic Guy Gibson (Richard Todd) leads 617 Squadron on the raid to demolish those Ruhr dams using a bouncing bomb designed by the eccentric Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave). Much of the film was taken up with the development of a bomb which could nestle close to a dam wall to burst it. They could have done with this book, which reveals the secrets of the bouncing bomb and the later series of Tallboy bombs, which the squadron used to great effect. At the time the film was made, many of the details were still secret, but now all can be revealed.
Title
Dam Busters – Owners’ Workshop Manual 143 onwards (all marks and models)
Author Iain Murray
Publisher Haynes Publication date 2011
Reviewer Colin Ledsome MEng CEng FIMechE FIED MCMI FBIS MDS
ISBN 978 0 85733 015 4
At the core of this story is Barnes Wallis, an aircraft engineer working for Vickers- Armstrong. He had been on the team, which produced the efficient geodetic structures of aircraft like the Wellington bomber. In his spare time he began to work on ideas for weapons to shorten the war. Much of German industry depended on the water and hydro- electricity produced by the dams in the Ruhr area. Destroying them would significantly cripple the war effort. In addition, the flooding which would result would cause devastation over an important part of German industry.
It wouldn’t be easy, in an age before rocket propulsion; explosives were delivered by gravity and the speed of the bomber dropping them. Tests on model dams and a real redundant one in Wales, showed that an underwater explosive charge very close to the dam would have the desired effect. The problem was how to get it there. Wallis had the idea for a backward spinning cylinder, which would skip over any protective booms, nestle against the dam wall and roll down until it reached the right depth. The same bomb could be used against ships in harbour, skipping up to a ship’s side and rolling
down under the ship to blow it up. He even envisaged a forward spinning version, which could roll across the ground until it reached a canal or defensive wall.
His record in aircraft design gave him the credibility to allow testing of model dams and spinning bombs. After a lot of ups and downs, the results were good enough to order modifications to some Lancaster bombers and the formation of a special precision bombing squadron, 617. Components were scavenged from other weapon systems. The motor for spinning the bombs was used on submarines. The fuse to trigger the bombs was from a depth charge. The resulting bomb, known as ‘Upkeep’, was so big it could not be wheeled under the Lancaster nose to reach the bomb bay. A crane had to lift the tail high enough to get the bomb in from the back.
The book details the solutions to the challenges of flying at the right height, using spotlights on the plane, and releasing the bombs at the right distance, sighting on features on the dam, to let the bomb do what it was designed to do. The photographs of the results show how well it was achieved. The resulting devastation significantly disrupted German industry and had affected morale on both sides at a key time in the war.
Having built a special operations squadron, Wallis then put forward a series of other proposals for weapons they could deliver. These ranged from the 12,000 lb Blockbuster, a giant blast bomb with a thin skin, designed to flatten a large area simply by creating a huge shock wave; through to the Tallboy series and the 10 ton Grand Slam bombs designed, with a heavy cast shell, to penetrate deep in the ground and create an earthquake effect. The
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