Chastise: The Dambusters Story 1943. 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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Nant-y-Gro dam. On 10 May 1942 Wallis and his wife Molly travelled to Wales with Collins’s team to witness experiments on the full-sized dam. These established that if an explosion took place at any significant distance from its wall, the blast was too weak to precipitate a fracture. Collins wrote: ‘A solution to the problem was, however, found almost by chance shortly afterwards.’ His team needed to remove one of the damaged scale models at Harmondsworth, and used a contact charge to shift the concrete. The result was devastation, on a scale unmatched by any ‘near-miss’.

      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 200 mph imposed enormous stresses on the projectile during its bouncing progress. Half-sized prototypes disintegrated. Their begetter undertook modifications and adaptations, still convinced that the principles of his creation – or rather, his instrument of destruction – were sound.

      Following these further developments, Wednesday, 20 January 1943 found Wallis ensconced in Weymouth’s Gloucester Hotel, from which he wrote to Molly: ‘I do wish you could come & share this lovely room. It would be just perfect with you here. If you could come tomorrow by the mid-day train, do … Now we are scheduled to start [tests] at 10 a.m. … so I must go to bed. All my love little sweetheart, and come if you can …’

      … A lovely time it’s been. This morning I drove out with him and the others to the nearest point I was allowed [to the bomb tests] & then I got out and walked back. 8 miles of lovely road, high up with the Downs one side & the sea to other. It was sunny & clear. I did enjoy it. Of course it’s quite mad that they shouldn’t let me watch the proceedings seeing as I’ve lived with it since last February & probably know more about it than anyone save Barnes. But it’s quite true – policemen do bob up and turn you away. I suppose the others would say ‘If that wife why not my wife’ little knowing what a very special wife this one is.

      Darling Barnes. You should see him among these admirals and air vice marshals patiently explaining and describing to them & they drinking it all in – or trying to. And he’s so quiet and un-assuming none of them could imagine what pain & labour it’s been. How he’s got up in the middle of the night to go up to the study & work summat out. No wonder he looks drawn and tired. I suppose if he were a self-advertiser he’d have been Sir Barnes in the New Year Honours. Oh well, it’d have been a nuisance. But it’s an exciting life & no mistake.