Historical person
Barnes Wallis
1887–1979
Sir Barnes Neville Wallis was a British engineer whose work ranged from airship and aircraft structures to specialised wartime weapons. During the Second World War he developed the rotating mine popularly known as the bouncing bomb, designed to skip across water and explode against major German dams.
The weapon became central to Operation Chastise in May 1943, when 617 Squadron breached the Möhne and Eder dams. Max Hastings’s Chastise follows Wallis’s technical work, the institutional struggle to turn the idea into an operational weapon and the human consequences of its use. The book is nonfiction.
Non Fiction
Non Fiction featuring Barnes Wallis (2 books)
Biographies, histories and other non-fiction are listed separately from the historical novels above.
