Читать книгу Engineering Hitler's Downfall - Gwilym Roberts - Страница 51

After serving an apprenticeship and acquiring an external engineering degree, he joined Vickers in 1913, with whom he continued until his retirement in 1971. Working on airship design he created the geodetic airframe (comprising a spiral crossing basket-weave of load-bearing members) which was used on the Airship R100 and then on the Wellington bomber.

Recognising the potential of selective as well as saturation bombing, he designed the bouncing bomb, (used to attack the Ruhr Valley dams), and deep-penetration bombs. These weighed up to 10 tons each and were used against U-boat pens, the Tirpitz battleship, and V2 rocket launch sites.

Post-war he led Vickers’ R&D division where he investigated supersonic flight and swing-wing technology. He also developed an experimental rocket-propelled torpedo. In 1955 he was appointed consultant to the project to build the Parkes radio telescope in Australia and five years later proposed developing large cargo submarines for the transport of goods.

Due to the high casualty rate in the bomber crews who attacked the Ruhr Valley dams, he later strove hard to reduce the risks for test pilots, extensively testing his designs on models and becoming a pioneer of the remote control of aircraft. Awarded £10,000 for his war work, he donated it all to Christ’s Hospital for the benefit of the children of RAF personnel who had been killed or injured.

He was still full of new ideas in his retirement – and bemoaned the fact that the aircraft designers of the day would not take them up! He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1945 and knighted in 1968. He died in 1979 and is buried in Effingham, Surrey, where his headstone carries the Latin inscription Spernit Humum Fugiente Penna (‘severed from the earth with fleeting wing’).

Wellington bomber fuselages prior to covering with waterproof fabric. IWM

Among the bombers used in this period was the Wellington, whose airframe was designed by Barnes Wallis on the geodetic principle – a basket-weave of diagonally crossing load-bearing members. As such it had significantly more strength that conventional airframes, and there were many examples of seriously damaged Wellington aircraft returning to their bases. The downside of the technique was that the planes were more complicated to build, and it was not repeated in later aircraft.

But Britain now had to use all its ingenuity and resources to defend her island home and to ensure her survival…