Mission to recover ‘the other’ bouncing bombs
SCUBA divers are preparing for a daring underwater mission to recover two bouncing bombs – the weapons actually seen in famed World War II movie The Dam Busters.
The British Sub-Aqua Club’s bid to raise the ‘Highball’ bombs from the bottom of a Scottish loch has been backed by the daughter of Barnes Wallis, who invented them.
Mary Stopes-Roe, who lives in Moseley, praised the team’s bid to recover two of the giant spherical bombs for display in time for next year’s 75th anniversary of the Dam Busters raid.
Highballs were the anti-ship version of the more famous cylindrical ‘Upkeep’ bouncing bombs used by the RAF in the famous Dam Busters mission of May 1943. Both were designed by Sir Barnes Wallis to bounce over water.
But it was actually archive footage of the Highballs being tested at Loch Striven during the war which later featured in the 1955 movie The Dam Busters because footage of the actual dam bombs was still top secret.
More than 200 of the bombs, codenamed Highball by the military, were tested at Loch Striven. They were intended to be used on enemy ships but never became operational and lie scattered on the floor of the loch to this day.
Now, a team of 11 scuba divers, some from Birmingham, are preparing to raise two of the bombs next month.
The aim is to put them on display at the Brooklands Museum in Surrey and the de Havilland Aircraft Museum, formerly known as the Mosquito Museum, in Hertfordshire.
Team leader Mark Paisey, from Macclesfield, says: “This is an expedition where we’re bringing together people from all over the UK.
“We intend to map the two areas where the Highballs lie using a sidescan sonar to see exactly how many there are.
“We need a fair degree of experience for the dive. One of the areas where the bombs are is 35 metres deep and the other is 55 metres deep.
“It will be great when one of the Highballs is sitting in the museum.”
The hunt for the missing bombs began when a local fisherman complained that they kept fouling up their nets.
Dr Iain Murray, author of Bouncing-Bomb Man and a trustee of the Barnes Wallis Foundation, said: “I got a little bit of funding in 2010 to engage a diver and when a local fisherman heard about it he rang me and said, ‘They’re definitely here. Now and then we fish them out of the net.
“‘We tow them to a deep bit and throw them back in!’”
An initial dive took place in July 2010 but at that stage Dr Murray had no means by which to raise the bombs, which were never made operational so do not contain explosives.
“Since then I’ve been tentatively trying to get people interested in it, but not with very much success,” he said,
“Then Mark (Paisey) contacted me out of the blue last year. He came to Dundee to see me and has now put the whole thing together.
“The big thing driving the project is the fact that there is not a Highball in a museum.
“I want one to go to Brooklands because they were very helpful with my research and it would mean they have a full set of Wallis’s bombs.
“Mark suggested the Mosquito Museum as the other because they have the aircraft which dropped his bombs.
“I’m hoping to be there when they do the recovery.
“I was beginning to lose hope that it would ever happen but now we know the exact co-ordinates for where they are, so it should be pretty straightforward.”
Also on the team is 37-year-old Phil Grigg from Cannock, who captured underwater footage of the Highballs on a previous dive at Loch Striven in 2010.
“We struggled to locate them initially,” he admits.
“But when we did finally work out where they were laying, we found a few of them.
“I always hoped go back one day.”
British Sub-Aqua Club chief executive Mary Tetley said: “We are so grateful to Mary Stopes-Roe for her backing – it means a lot to have her blessing for the project.” I’d