Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943

Instead, however, on 12 February 1943 a blow descended. Ben Lockspeiser told Wallis that AVM Linnell had become concerned that the engineer’s labours on his bombs – nobody used the word obsession, but this was obviously in many service minds – was impeding his ‘proper’ work, development of the Windsor bomber. Linnell did not explicitly oppose the bomb scheme – he was too canny a service politician for that. He merely reported on its speculative character to AVM Ralph Sorley, assistant chief of air staff for Technical Requirements, further emphasising the drain that the project was imposing on resources. Once again, it seems worthy of emphasis that Linnell did not thus play the part of a myopic senior officer flying a desk, but was instead assessing Wallis’s project from the viewpoint of a department besieged by competing demands for facilities to develop new aircraft and weapons systems. Meanwhile Syd Bufton, deputy director of bomber operations, told a 13 February meeting at the Air Ministry that he, as an experienced operational pilot, considered it impracticable to drop Wallis’s bombs in darkness, at low level over enemy territory.

Gp. Capt. Sam Elworthy, a Bomber Command staff officer who attended the same meeting, was charged with reporting on its findings to Harris’s headquarters at High Wycombe, which he did on the following day. The consequence was a note on the ‘bouncing bomb’ drafted by AVM Robert ‘Sandy’ Saundby, senior air staff officer to his chieftain. This, in turn, prompted the C-in-C to scribble one of his most famous, or notorious, judgements of the war: ‘This is tripe of the wildest description … There is not the smallest chance of it working.’ And much more of the same.

Wallis now wrote an anguished personal note to Fred Winterbotham, expressing his frustration: ‘We have just worked out some of our results from the last experiment at Chesil Beach, and are getting ranges nearly twice those which would be forecast from the water tank, that is, with a Wellington flying at about 300 miles an hour and dropping from an altitude of 200 feet, we have registered a range of exactly three-quarters of a mile!!’ He said that the problems of constructing prototypes to be carried by a heavy bomber would be easily solved. ‘It follows that sufficient bombs for the Lancaster experiment (if, say, thirty machines were to be used, to destroy simultaneously five dams, that is, six machines per dam to make certain of doing it) can be completed within two or three weeks.’ He added that modifying the Lancasters would be a far more time-consuming process than manufacturing the weapons, and concluded ‘Yours in great haste,’ adding a handwritten scrawl: ‘Help, oh help.’ It was characteristic of the strand of naïveté in Wallis that in calculating the number of aircraft needed to destroy five dams in enemy territory he was heedless of the possibility that the German defences might remove from the reckoning some, if not all, of the attackers.

Winterbotham responded by writing on 16 February to AVM Frank Inglis, assistant chief of air staff for Intelligence. He extravagantly described the bouncing bomb as an invention ‘for 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 Windsor project. The air marshal had explicitly demanded that Craven call a halt to Wallis’s ‘dams nonsense’.

This was what the Vickers chairman now did. A shouting match followed, in which the designer offered his resignation, and Craven shouted ‘Mutiny!’ They parted on terms of mutual acrimony. Moreover, while Wallis was not often a grudge-bearer, he never forgave AVM Linnell for the part he played in attempting to kill off Upkeep. He went home despondent to Effingham, sincerely determined upon resignation, as was scarcely surprising after the humiliation he had suffered. Craven, whose responsibility was to Vickers, can scarcely be blamed for his behaviour, after being told by the Ministry of Aircraft Production – upon whose goodwill his company depended for orders – that its chiefs were tired of his nagging, insistent assistant chief designer (structures). Why should such people as Linnell, Craven and indeed Harris have accepted at face value the workability of a new weapon which represented a marriage of technologies of extreme sophistication with others of almost childlike simplicity, which when fitted to a Lancaster caused it to resemble a clumsy transport aircraft with an underslung load?

Yet Wallis knew that, whatever Craven said about the MAP’s view of Upkeep, the Admiralty remained enthusiastic about Highball. On 26 February, by previous arrangement he drove to London to attend a meeting that was to be chaired by the now-detested Linnell, to discuss measures to improve the aerodynamics of what some described as ‘the golf mine’ – because of its resemblance to the shape of a golf ball. After Wallis was told that Roy Chadwick of Avro, designer of the Lancaster, would also be attending, he understood that Craven had got things all wrong the previous day: the RAF had not abandoned Upkeep.

When the delayed meeting finally convened at 3 p.m. that Friday, in Linnell’s office at MAP on London’s Millbank, it was to receive tablets from on high. Sir Charles Portal was not only chief of air staff and a former C-in-C of Bomber Command; he had also been among the first enthusiasts for attacking Germany’s dams. He was troubled by doubts about Sir Arthur Harris’s obsession with destroying cities. His reservations were founded not upon moral scruples – no senior wartime airman admitted to those – but instead on uncertainty about its war-winning potential. Portal never summoned the courage to sack Harris, even in the winter of 1944–45, when his subordinate directly defied targeting orders. But the CAS was always at heart a proponent of attacking precision objectives, if means existed to make such a policy work. Now, Barnes Wallis promised to provide these; to make possible fulfilment of the RAF’s 1937–38 dream, of an assault upon Germany’s dams.

The array of brass assembled at the MAP on the afternoon of 26 February 1943 was told that the chief of air staff had given his assent, or rather had issued an order, to proceed with immediate development of Upkeep. Portal wrote: ‘I think this is a good gamble.’ The reaction of Sir Charles Craven, who was also present, is unrecorded. He must have felt privately foolish, if not furious, following his ugly dressing-down of his designer four days earlier. What the CAS demanded, however, Vickers must seek to provide.

Linnell, too, can scarcely have enjoyed announcing – against his own strong personal conviction – the decision to prioritise Upkeep over the Windsor bomber. ‘The requirement for bombs,’ this MAP potentate now said, ‘has been stated as one hundred and fifty to cover trials and operations’ – one hundred and twenty were eventually made. It was further stated that studies of the German dams showed that 26 May – just three months ahead – was the latest date in 1943 on which they could plausibly be attacked. It would thus be necessary to build thirty ‘Provisioning’ Lancasters, as they had been codenamed, and to produce a sufficiency of bombs by 1 May, to provide reasonable time for aircrew training for the operation. The MAP’s budget for research on Upkeep, which in August 1942 had been raised from £2,000 to £10,000, was now further increased to £15,000, and later again on 1 April to a princely £20,000.

While Portal made a personal commitment that enabled Upkeep to be unleashed, it deserves emphasis that he placed a relatively modest bet. Only air-power fantasists could suppose that a single squadron of Lancasters, a maximum of twenty bouncing bombs, would cripple the entire water system of the Ruhr, an aspiration demanding a much larger force even if Wallis’s weapons were half-successful – almost no new weapons system in history has performed better than that. Yet a squadron was all that the Air Ministry would authorise, in the face of Harris’s virulent hostility, a limited supply of aircraft and uncertainty about the viability of Upkeep. British war-makers have for centuries displayed a weakness for ‘gesture strategy’ – deploying a disproportionately small force as a means of displaying interest in fulfilment of a disproportionately large objective. Mass matters, however, to the success of all military operations, and in this case it would be lacking. Though the RAF neither then nor later admitted this, its commitment to an assault on Germany’s dams was marginal, a tiny fraction of the forces that set forth upon almost nightly attempts to burn cities. To borrow a modern phrase, this would be a niche operation.

Wallis’s commitment to Upkeep, by contrast, was total, and now confronted him with a dramatic challenge. At breakneck speed he must convert his theoretical concept into a viable bomb, while work was simultaneously rushed forward on building the modified Lancasters. Avro, the plane’s manufacturers, agreed to fit the necessary electrical release gear, along with strongpoints where the bomb doors must be removed, and hydraulic power for backspin pulleys. Vickers would meanwhile make protruding retainer arms for the Upkeeps, to be attached to the strongpoints; a rotational driving mechanism; and the bombs themselves. All the latter work would be carried out at Weybridge, with Avro dispatching a team to work on the Vickers site. Wallis promised to provide working drawings of the latest version of Upkeep within ten days. Craven expressed concern about whether a revolutionary weapon of such size could be machined within the necessary time-frame.

Before the final decision, some minor obstacles had to be swept away. By coincidence Combined Operations, then headed by the frisky Lord Louis Mountbatten, was proposing an attack on the Möhne, which Mountbatten described as ‘one of the great strategic targets’. Special Operations Executive also suggested an assault by parachute saboteurs. Both bodies’ proposals were now quashed, fortunately for those who might have been charged with implementing them, in favour of what was designated Wallis’s ‘rolling bomb’. It would be the RAF which destroyed the dams of north-west Germany. Or nobody.

3

Command and Controversy

1 TARGETS

At the end of February 1943, more than six years after the RAF first discussed the feasibility of attacking Germany’s dams, and over three years since the war began, air chiefs and engineers embarked upon a ten-week dash to launch the operation that was shortly thereafter codenamed Chastise. The strategic planning – above all, about target priorities – took place within the Air Ministry. This was gall and wormwood to Sir Arthur Harris, who regarded his own headquarters staff as the only proper people to arbitrate on such matters.

Wallis, in a paper headed ‘Air Attack on Dams’ that had been circulated to a range of interested parties on the secret list back in January, identified six plausible targets – the Möhne, Eder, Sorpe, Lister, Ennepe and Henne – of which the reservoirs held a combined total of almost nine thousand million cubic feet of water, while seven other, smaller dams retained just 423 million. Breaching the Möhne alone, he promised, would cause ‘a disaster of the first magnitude’ extending to the lower reaches of the Ruhr. He appears to have intended this judgement to describe solely the industrial consequences, and to have given no consideration one way or another to the inevitable human cost among civilians caught in the path of the intended deluges, whom air-raid shelters would avail little. Thereafter, to a remarkable degree the Air Ministry made its Chastise targeting decisions on the basis of the assessment advanced by Wallis, a professional engineer but an amateur analyst of Ruhr industries.

From the Directorate of Bomber Operations, Gp. Capt. Syd Bufton* wrote to AVM Norman Bottomley, Portal’s deputy, urging the primacy of the Möhne over the Eder – also mentioned by Wallis: ‘The former is much more important, and tactically the more suitable. We should, therefore, ensure that an adequate effort is devoted to this objective before considering the possibility of an attack upon the Eder.’ He added in a covering note: ‘I feel a lot of time would be wasted if we go to the lengths of making a minute examination of all possible targets.’

Intelligence was a fundamental weakness of Britain’s strategic air offensive. Bomber Command’s decisions about targets were often made on the basis of their accessibility or vulnerability to attack, which had earlier in the war prompted an emphasis on relatively easily-located coastal objectives. Before an operation, immense effort was expended upon fixing routes, providing electronic aids and counter-measures, deciding bomb and fuel loads, and nominating diversionary landing fields. By contrast, examination of targets’ economic significance was often as superficial as post-attack damage assessment. In planning for Chastise, the Möhne and the Eder were prioritised because both were masonry structures, and thus most likely to succumb to Wallis’s bombs. Yet while the Möhne was a hub of the Ruhr industrial water system, the Eder was unrelated to it. At an early stage of the war, the Ministry of Economic Warfare’s experts had concluded that if the Möhne and the nearby Sorpe could both be breached, the effect on Ruhr water supplies might well be catastrophic. If only one was destroyed, however, stated the MEW, the Nazis could probably contain the threat to Ruhr industrial activity.

The Sorpe was an immensely thick earthen dam, which sloped steeply on the reservoir side in a fashion which ensured that a mine which was bounced up its lake towards the wall must roll away backwards on impact. On 18 March an Air Ministry ad hoc Chastise committee, chaired by Bottomley, agreed that the Sorpe’s construction thus ruled it out as a target. It was also decided that a strike with Highballs, carried by Mosquitoes of the RAF’s Coastal Command, should be attempted more or less simultaneously against Tirpitz or another German battleship in the Norwegian fjords. Bottomley reported to the chiefs of staff, outlining progress: ‘the speed with which [Highball and Upkeep] have been developed has been so high and the time available to complete them before the required date is so short, that there is a considerable element of gamble’.

A fierce division of opinion about scheduling now emerged between the RAF and the Royal Navy. The airmen had become committed to attacking the dams before the end of May. The sailors, however, recognised that the first use of bouncing bombs, whether Upkeeps or Highballs, could also prove the last, because the Germans would adopt counter-measures to protect vulnerable watery targets. Thus, the navy wanted Chastise deferred until Coastal Command was ready to attack German warships with Highballs, an operation codenamed Servant. It was acknowledged that the tri-service chiefs of staff might have to be asked to arbitrate on this knotty issue.

The airmen meanwhile reached an irrational compromise about the Sorpe dam, such as was typical of the entire bomber offensive. While acknowledging that it was unsuitable as an objective for bouncing bombs, it was restored to the target list because of its agreed strategic importance. Wallis thought that four or five of his Upkeeps might breach it without being bounced. He cited the precedent of the 1864 natural collapse of the Dale Dyke dam near Sheffield, which destroyed six hundred homes and killed at least 240 people. An earth dam with a concrete core, he claimed, would become ‘practically self-destroying if a substantial leak can be established within the water-tight core’.