Engineering Hitler's Downfall. Gwilym Roberts

schooling at Winchester, Peter Danckwerts read chemistry at Oxford before joining the Royal Navy in 1940. Having volunteered for special duties, he was assigned to undertake bomb and mine disposal.

      After a short training period, S/Lt (Sp) Danckwerts RNVR led a small team defusing magnetic and other mines dropped in the Thames Estuary between Teddington and Southend. He was awarded the George Cross later that year for ‘great gallantry and undaunted devotion to duty’ whilst neutralising enemy mines.

      In 1942 he was posted to Gibraltar to deal with the threat of Italian mines, including limpet mines attached to ships by frogmen riding midget submarines. Then, after a spell in Algiers, he participated in the invasion of Sicily but, ironically, he had the misfortune to tread on a small anti-personnel mine. After hospitalisation in Portsmouth, he spent the last year of the war with the planning staff at the headquarters of Combined Operations.

      Following demobilisation, he studied chemical engineering at MIT and then worked as an academic in Britain before joining the UK Atomic Energy Authority. He was appointed professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College and then at the University of Cambridge. He was elected president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers in 1965 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969. After retiring from the University of Cambridge in 1976 he became the executive editor of Chemical Engineering Science.

      He died in Cambridge on 25 October 1984.

      The demagnetising of metal ships was accomplished by degaussing the hulls of the ships. Initially this was done through a process known as coiling, which involved wrapping electromagnetic coils around the hulls and passing strong electrical pulses through them, thereby making the ships magnetically neutral. This was too expensive to be used universally, but Goodeve devised a cheaper system called wiping, which involved dragging a large electrical cable with a 2,000 amp current passing through it along the side of a ship. Goodeve was one of a number of scientists who received awards for the development of the degaussing technique, his prize being £7,500.

      Goodeve, Commander Sir Charles OBE FRS RNVR (1904–80)

      Born and educated in Canada, he obtained a BSc in 1925 from the University of Manitoba after studying physics and chemistry. He served in the Winnipeg division of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve before moving to University College London in 1927. Here he later became a reader in physical chemistry, his research work there resulting in his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1940.

      After transferring to the RNVR he attained the rank of lieutenant-commander RNVR and was attached to HMS Vernon, the RN’s torpedo and anti-submarine headquarters which also oversaw electrical developments. Having successfully developed countermeasures for magnetic mines, in the summer of 1940 he became the senior technical officer in the Admiralty’s newly established Department of Anti-Aircraft Weapon Development, later renamed the Department of Miscellaneous Weapon Development, (DMWD), which was also known as the ‘Wheezers and Dodgers’. Subsequently promoted to commander he was appointed the Admiralty’s Assistant Controller, Research and Development, in 1942 with broad oversight of the Royal Navy’s research and development work.

      He was instrumental in developing the ‘Double L Sweep’ for exploding magnetic mines safely and the degaussing system for making ships magnetically neutral (for which he received £7,500 from the Royal Commission on Awards to Inventors), and the Hedgehog depth charge launcher that was credited with the destruction of some 50 U-boats.

      He was knighted at the end of the war and also awarded the US Medal of Freedom.

      Post-war he served as director of the British Iron and Steel Research Association where, among other things, he introduced the principles of Operational Research. Following retirement in 1969, despite failing health due to the onset of Parkinson’s disease, he immersed himself in various activities including the establishment of the Operational Research Society. He died in 1980.

      Had these scientists and naval officers not found solutions as rapidly as they did, the early months of the sea war would have proved to be extremely costly as well as dangerous for Britain. Interestingly, the same technology is still largely applicable today.

      Double L sweep

      Flying Baskets

      The early days of the war were as harrowing in the air as on land and at sea. One air raid in late December 1939 was described in the Official History as a ‘disaster’, with over 50% of the aircraft lost, mostly to enemy fighters – an example of the difference between British and German aerial capabilities at that time. Lessons were learned, however, including the need for better radio communications and the recognition that losses incurred in night attacks were significantly lower than those in daylight raids.

      From the start of the war the RAF had also been engaged in dropping propaganda leaflets over major German cities. While the RAF hierarchy correctly considered this to be of minimal value, they recognised that there were considerable training benefits. Crews were also instructed to observe anything of interest that could be seen on the ground below.

      Wallis, Sir Barnes CBE FRS FRAeS MICE (1887–1979)

      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…

      RADAR,