Chastise. Max Hastings. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Max Hastings
Издательство: HarperCollins
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Жанр произведения: Историческая литература
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9780008280543
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began tests in June which continued over twenty-two days, at intervals until September. If the pace of progress appears slow, it must be remembered that Britain was still conducting its war effort on desperately short commons, while Wallis was earning his bread working on the Windsor bomber.

      Tizard himself attended some tests at Teddington, as did Rear-Admiral Edward de Faye Renouf, a former torpedo specialist who was now the Admiralty’s director of special weapons. Renouf and several of his staff watched a demonstration in which a two-inch sphere was catapulted down a tank, bouncing along the water until it struck the side of a wax model battleship and rolled down beneath its hull. The admiral, a gifted officer recently recovered from a nervous breakdown after a succession of terrifying experiences while commanding a cruiser squadron in the Mediterranean, urged Sir Charles Craven of Vickers to give priority to Wallis’s weapons research. Renouf envisaged a projectile that might be released from the new twin-engined Mosquito light bomber.

      That month, May 1942, Wallis produced a new paper incorporating all this research, entitled ‘Spherical Bomb, Surface Torpedo’. His thinking still focused entirely on round weapons, described in a note from Winterbotham to the Ministry of Production as ‘rota-mines’. Wallis’s paper cited earlier work by a German scientist, and also showed that for a bomb to get close enough to a dam to enable the principle of ‘Conservation of Suspended Energy’ to work, it needed to impact upon the water almost horizontally, at an angle of incidence of less than seven degrees, which meant that it must be dropped from an aircraft flying very low indeed: at that time, 150–250 feet seemed appropriate. Wallis envisaged its release from a range of around twelve hundred yards, to allow time for the attacking pilot to turn away and escape before flying headlong over the target and its defences. Not until months later was a requirement accepted for the aircraft to carry its bomb much closer, and thereafter to overfly the objective.

      Further tests confirmed the result, and on 16 July Wallis received an invitation to attend a full-scale demonstration a week later. He was nettled by the short notice, and warned a little pompously that he was working under such pressure – presumably on the Windsor bomber – that he would probably be unable to get away. Nonetheless, he was present at Nant-y-Gro when, on the 24th, army engineers blew a 279-lb charge of which the effects were filmed with high-speed cameras brought to North Wales from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough. The test explosion proved a triumph, blasting a breach in a masonry construct that was, for practical purposes, a small-scale version of a German dam.

      In the late summer of 1942, a situation obtained wherein Barnes Wallis had devised a revolutionary weapon, of which the scientific principles were agreed by most of the experts who studied them to be sound. The Royal Navy was excited about its possibilities for use by the Fleet Air Arm. Widespread scepticism nonetheless persisted, shared by MAP’s David Pye and his deputy, Ben Lockspeiser, about whether the resources could be justified to pursue a speculative technology that could only be used over water, and which demanded superhuman courage and skill from aircrew who would have to launch it against an enemy. Moreover, every aircraft which carried such a bomb would require expensive modification.

      It is striking to notice, at this stage, two camps in the service ministries and the defence scientific community about the whole project. One faction believed that Wallis’s weapons were fanciful; would never work. The other cherished wildly over-optimistic fantasies concerning their war-winning potential. Fred Winterbotham wrote to the parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Production on 14 September 1942, speculating about what Wallis’s bombs might achieve: ‘If this new weapon is intelligently used, e.g. for simultaneous attacks on all German capital ships and main hydro-electric power dams, there is little doubt but that Italy could be brought to a complete standstill and that industry in Germany would be so crippled as to have a decisive effect on the duration of the war … To attain this result much preparation and careful planning are clearly required and meanwhile I repeat nothing is being done.’ Here was a manifestation of a British yearning, characteristic of its time and place, for some dramatic stroke that might sidestep battlefield slaughter and bring the war to an early closure. Winterbotham’s note took no heed of the Alpine difficulties in the way of his fantasy, prominent among them that its fulfilment would require hundreds of bombers to be modified to carry Wallis’s weapons. Meanwhile its expectations about what these, or for that matter any, bombs might do to the Axis drifted into fairyland.

      Two days later, on the afternoon of the 4th, the Wellington took off for Dorset, where on Chesil Beach a camera crew waited to record the trial bomb-dropping. The first two tests, with non-explosive fillings, resulted in the spheres bursting on impact. When a subsequent succession of droppings took place, Wallis watched from the shore. Outcomes suggested that the technologies for releasing the bomb from an aircraft, and for its subsequent bouncing progress, were viable. Yet repeated collisions with the sea at speeds of over