The Dam Busters Read Online Free Page A

you couldn’t make a torpedo do a bit of hurdling—over an anti-torpedo net for instance.
    Hullo! That was an idea! If a bomb could hurdle a dam wall it could also hurdle an anti-torpedo net. Such nets were a good hundred yards away from dam walls to keep any explosions at arm’s length. A bomb didn’t have to keep skipping for ever. May be it could be so judged to skip the torpedo net and not skip the dam wall. Hang it all, why not? He felt sudden excitement surging inside him. There would probably be three or four feet of dam wall above the water. Supposing the skipping of the bomb were timed (if it could be done) so that it was slithering to a stop on the water as it reached the wall. Why then, the wall would stop it dead and it would simply sink into the water, by the wall, as deep as you like. You could have the fuse fixed with a hydrostatic trigger so that the bomb would go off when the water pressure reached the right amount. Set in for fifty feet down or a hundred and fifty feet down. Please yourself. Hang it, the more he thought about it the more he liked the idea, even if it did sound a bit odd.
    Wallis went home, dragged a tub into the garden of his house at Effingham and filled it right to the top with water. Then he rigged up a catapult a few feet away just a few inches above the level of the water. A few feet on the other side of the tub he stretched a string between a couple of sticks so that the string was also just above the level of the water. Then he borrowed a marble from his young daughter, Elizabeth, and shot it from the catapult at the water. It skipped off and cleared the string by several inches. Elizabeth and the other children looked on, wondering what he was up to. Elizabeth brought the marble back and Wallis fired it again, this time with a little less tension on the rubber of the catapult. The marble zipped off the water and only just cleared the string. “Ah,” thought Wallis, “that’s it.”
    He and the youngsters spent the whole morning playing with the marbles and the water and the catapult and the string, trying different combinations of power and height while Wallis was finding out how much he could control the skip. To his deep joy he found out that with a regular shape and weight like a marble on smooth water he could control it quite well. At least well enough for it to be distinctly encouraging. But could he control several skips, which might be necessary? Aha, that remained to be seen. They went into lunch eventually, all thoroughly splashed. Wallis was very cheerful, and also, the children thought, very mysterious about it all.
    Always sensitive to ridicule, Wallis told no one the details, not even his friend Mutt Summers, chief test pilot for Vickers and the man who had tested his old warhorse, the Wellington. Captain Summers was a hefty extrovert and not the type to take a freak idea seriously.
    The day of the meeting of the Air Attack on Dams Committee Wallis went early to London, buttonholed the chairman, Dr. Pye, and privately explained his new theory, so earnestly that Pye did not laugh though he looked a little sideways.
    “I’d rather you didn’t tell the others yet,” Wallis said. “They might think it a bit far-fetched.”
    “Yes,” said Dr. Pye. “I see that. What do you want me to do?”
    “Give me time to find out how much RDX will blow a hole in the Moehne Dam if it’s pressed up against the wall.”
    Pye talked eloquently to the committee without giving Wallis’s secret away. The members were reluctant when they heard the results of the last model’s test and Wallis was like a cat on hot bricks till they consented to one more experiment.
    Glanville built him a new model dam, and Wallis started with small charges, sinking them in the water and exploding them when they were lying against the slabs of concrete. The effect was shattering—literally. He smashed wall after wall seeking the smallest charge needed, and soon he knew that in a contact