Marbles, Skipping Bombs and Nazis

As I was getting ready to eat dinner, I happened to luck across a great PBS documentary just coming on the television. I’ve seen a few episodes here and there of the Secrets of the Dead series, and it’s all been fairly fascinating.

But tonight, it was a documentary on Barnes Wallis and the method he created of destroying dams. Basically, he mapped out how a plane could drop a bomb from a low height, spin the bomb, and let it skip across the water until it rested *against* a damn’s wall. Incrededible stuff.

Much like Wallis’ experience, while watching this documentary I was fully excited at the intial experiments and calculations. It’s awesome to see them build these miniature scale-model damns (that took a few months to construct) and then detonate tiny bombs. It’s amazing to hear about all the various "types" of balls they tried to skip across water, and to learn the reason behind why golf balls are dimpled. And as Wallis perfects the calculations to destroy a damn using a skipping bomb, the documentary shifts to the young pilots. Their stories get told, as they’re the ones who have to deliver the bombs flying low, over enemy territory, taking tremendous flak and damage from ground artillery.

When Wallis realizes how many pilots and planes were lost… and the actual loss of life confronts him, I started to realize what was at stake for the Allies. And on top of that, I began to realize the death toll on the German side (they were bombing German dams) and the destruction and loss of life that occured for them.

What started off as an incredibly intriguing, mentally stimulating show that dealt primarily with physics and numbers… ended up being quite somber and sad. Good good stuff, that PBS.