In World War II, British aircraft designer Barnes Wallace set about to design a way to penetrate the seemingly invincible German front. Between his creation of a rigid airship and other projects, he occupied his time searching for a way to impair Nazi Germany’s ability to manipulate steel by taking away their waterpower. Their target: Hitler’s dams. However, to do so, the British will need a bomb that can be released by an aircraft under heavy fire and can skip over the nets that prevent missiles from making it through. What he created was a bomb that skipped across the water’s surface and detonated against the side of dams. Barnes’s work was a stroke of engineering genius, and yet no blueprint of the final product remains. And so, modern day engineering Professor Dr. Hugh Hunt of Trinity College sets about to recreate Wallace’s legendary bouncing bomb.
To test Hughes’s rendition of Wallace’s weapon, the team does their best to make a comparable dam up in the Canadian wilderness, but before they go and bust up the real thing, Hughes must find a way to make his bomb skip over the surface of the water, sink, and then huge the dam’s wall. Through experimentation with cricket balls in a pool, he discovers the magical elements that combine to make the task easier than he would have anticipated. The real trick arrives when it comes time to combine the theoretical strategy with an actual explosive, and Hughes begins the final test for his bouncing bomb.
The episode of NOVA is a fascinating blend of history with brilliantly entertaining applied science. It’s amazing to see just how innovative Wallace’s idea was, and then to watch Hughes piece it together some 60 years later.
DVD Bonus Features
None.
"NOVA: Bombing Hitler's Dams" is on sale January 31, 2012 and is not rated. Documentary. Directed by Ian Duncan. Written by Ian Duncan, Oliver Morse. Starring Demetri Goritsas.
