One needs to be careful with this film - at the time it was made the design of the bombs and the dropping mechanism was still classified so things in the film were sometimes deliberately distorted presumably to to confuse Soviet agents who might be sitting in the cinema taking notes.
In reality the Germans had already worked out the principles soon after the raids and started their own development programme to produce an anti shipping weapon following the same principles. In the UK the Highball project was also set up to produce a Mosquito borne anti shipping bomb on the same lines. By the time the film was produced there was probably very little that was not known but the Whitehall mandarins still insisted on changes to the film.
Incidently one of the bombs from the raid was found, unexploded, buried near one of the dams in the early 1960's. German bomb disposal had no idea how to defuse it and a British unit was despatched to do the job. Appartently because of the secrecy they were also partly in the dark but managed to make the thing safe.
One effect of the raids was to give credibility to Barnes Wallis's theories and ensure the development of the tall boy and grand slam bombs. The impact (in all senses) of the former of these on both massive concrete reinforced V-3 super gun launch site in France and the U-boat pens should not be understated.
06-11-05, 15:23
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