SIR BARNES WALLISSir Barnes Wallis, who died on 30 October, 1979, was a visionary British scientist who produced one of the most famous and ingenious inventions of the Second World War.His ‘bouncing bomb’, as used in the legendary ‘Dambuster’ raids of 1943, was a masterpiece of British engineering and devastated several key strategic areas in Germany.Wallis was an esteemed aircraft engineer who also designed bombers and airships, but despite his monumental contribution to the war effort, he was a pacifist at heart.Barnes Neville Wallis was born on 26 September, 1887 in Ripley, Derbyshire. He left school at 17 to start work at Thames Engineering Works in London and then a firm of shipbuilders on the Isle of Wight. This led in 1913 to work with Vickers with whom he would spend the rest of his career.He was in his 30s when he undertook his degree, though by this time he was already a highly experienced and competent engineer. During the 1920s he was involved in developing airships, pioneering new techniques and materials to reduce their weight. This culminated in the R100 blimp flying to Canada in 1930.When Vickers transferred its attention from airships to planes, he developed the Wellesley and Wellington bombers, engineering the sturdy fuselages that would make them among the most durable and robust aircraft of the age.He was horrified by the war, but realised the best chance for an early resolution was "rendering the enemy utterly incapable of continuing to prosecute the war," as he wrote in a paper. His early efforts towards this aim were ‘super bombs’, explosive devices that were so large Wallis had to propose a new plane design to carry them.After this avenue failed, he began developing the idea of the bouncing bomb, or ‘surface torpedo’. Originally conceived as a method of penetrating the most vulnerable part of a ship’s hull by striking it near the surface of the water, the bouncing bomb was a cylindrical device which would skip along the water’s surface, thanks to a spinning motion created when it was dropped from a plane.He realised that his weapon, codenamed ‘Upkeep’, could be used to attack dams by jumping the nets that had previously protected them from torpedo attack. After he convinced the Chief of the Air Staff as to the potential of his maverick scheme, several dams in the Ruhr region were identified as targets as they provided power to many of the Germans’ arms factories and their destruction would severely hamper Hitler’s forces.Operation Chastise saw the famous RAF 617 Squadron attack the Möhne, Eder, Sorpe and Ennepe dams on 17 May, 1943, the events that would later be immortalised in the film The Dam Busters. Later versions of the bouncing bombs were then used by the squadron – slogan après moi le deluge – to target warships, taking advantage of their accurate aim.After the bouncing bomb, he returned to work on his super bombs, as well as early designs for swing-wings, a concept later taken up during the jet age. Another of his concepts, using large submarines to transport oil, thus avoiding adverse weather conditions, was picked up by the Germans for their Milchkuh U-boats.After the war he worked on new concepts for rocket-propelled torpedoes and he spent his later years working on planes that could travel at hypersonic speeds, though the loss of life incurred on the Dam Buster raids made him reluctant to risk the lives of test pilots. Thus he pioneered yet another field, that of remote controlled aircraft.Barnes Wallis was knighted in 1968.
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