Chastise. Max Hastings
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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