What Would Barnes Wallis (WWBW) do with Iran?

As the world’s aviation nerds gathering for EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”; July 20-26), let’s think a bit about the impact of aviation on human conflict…

The Dambusters Raid, one of the most famous uses of aircraft during World War II, was the brainchild of Barnes Wallis, an aeronautical engineer who sought a clean-sheet-of-paper answer to the question, “What’s the most effective way to reduce Germany’s ability to fight?” Sir Arthur Harris‘s plan was simple: kill as many German civilians as possible via firebombing of cities because a factory whose workers have been killed isn’t going to be productive (and the productivity of workers who survived would be reduced since they’d be homeless). Wallis settled on the idea of destroying hydroelectric dams in Germany’s industrial heartland, thus simultaneously denying German factories the electricity, coal, and water necessary to achieve full production. He looked at the inputs to German manufacturing, especially energy, and tried to destroy those inputs so that it wouldn’t matter how effective Germany was at dispersing factories.

The vulnerability of a dam seems to have been understood by both the Germans and the British, i.e., an explosion right up against the interior wall at a time when the dam was nearly full. As such, the Germans had strung torpedo nets in their reservoirs to prevent traditional torpedoes from being used. Barnes Wallis came up with the idea of a bomb that would skip along the surface of the lake impounded by the dam, roll down the water-side dam wall, and explode. A tremendous number of engineering problems needed to be solved to make this a reality. Paul Brickhill’s classic book is excellent, especially since the author was himself a WWII military pilot, but I recently listened to a 2013 book by James Holland that adds much interesting detail and makes it clear that Barnes Wallis wasn’t quite the lone inventor that we meet in Brickhill’s earlier work.

Arthur Harris was initially skeptical, to say the least: “This is tripe of the wildest description. There are so many ifs and buts that there is not the smallest chance of it working.” A combination of engineering persistence and incredible bravery and sacrifice by 617 Squadron, however, proved that Wallis had been on the right track. Revisionist historians later minimized the damage done to Nazi Germany by the 19 planes sent out on May 16, 1943 by noting that the Germans successfully scrambled to rebuild the dams, as well as many washed-out bridges and factories, before winter. James Holland points out in his book that forcing the Germans to divert tens of thousands of workers and perhaps $10 billion adjusted to post-Biden dollars. The breached dams had terrible consequences for German arms production just when they needed to support their campaigns against the Russians and against the Allies in Italy. The breached dams also took labor and money away from beefing up the Atlantic Wall against the invasion that actually happened in 1944.

Another passion for Barnes Wallis was precision bombing with 10-ton bombs that he designed. These pioneering “bunker busters” were used to good effect against various German installations, including for submarines and V-2 rockets, as well as to sink the battleship Tirpitz. Any time that we’re bombing fortified infrastructure in Iran, therefore, we’re channeling the spirit of Wallis.

What Would Barnes Wallis (WWBW) do with Iran? More or less the opposite of what the U.S. has been doing. Wallis would almost surely have recommended taking out the Iranian oil industry, a critical energy input to everything else that happens in Iran, and the industrial-scale electric power generation currently available to the Islamic Republic to run any factories that it still has and/or rebuilds. Wallis probably would also try to destroy Iran’s ability to move energy and materials, e.g., by taking out bridges, railroads, airports, etc. At a minimum, this would keep the Islamic Republic busy rebuilding and people who are busy rebuilding can’t put their energy into weapons production or military facility construction.

Maybe the U.S. strategy of slowly surrending to Iran will, in the long run, prove to have more merit. I hope so!