J
jollyjacktar
Guest
Shared with the usual caveats. Looks like an interesting program to watch out for, especially if you're a fan of Ice Pilots. Full story and photos, video at link below.
The daring Dambusters raid was one of the most audacious in World War II. But can a team of engineers recreate it 70 years on?
The daring 'Dambusters' night-time raid when the RAF bombed three heavily defended dams deep in Nazi Germany is the stuff of legend. The attack in the country's industrial heartland was immortalised in the 1955 film and starred Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis the inventor of the 'bouncing bomb' which was used to such devastating effect. The bravery of the 19 Lancaster bomber crews that fateful night on May 16, 1943, is well documented but the science behind the mission has never been fully understood as research papers were for decades shrouded in secrecy.
But now Dr Hugh Hunt, an engineer from Cambridge, has for a Channel 4 documentary attempted to show just how skilled Barnes Wallis was to engineer such a devastating device by bouncing a bomb across water in Canada in an attempt to blow up a make-shift dam.
Dr Hunt told the Daily Telegraph: 'Nothing describes accurately what happened, because it was so shrouded in secrecy during the war that none of the information was available for 30 years afterwards, and since then a lot of the information has been lost.' 'So we thought the best way to figure out how it was done was just to do it.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1381486/Dambusters-documentary-recreates-science-WW2s-audacious-bombing-raid.html#ixzz1KrXTTdsZ
The daring Dambusters raid was one of the most audacious in World War II. But can a team of engineers recreate it 70 years on?
The daring 'Dambusters' night-time raid when the RAF bombed three heavily defended dams deep in Nazi Germany is the stuff of legend. The attack in the country's industrial heartland was immortalised in the 1955 film and starred Michael Redgrave as Barnes Wallis the inventor of the 'bouncing bomb' which was used to such devastating effect. The bravery of the 19 Lancaster bomber crews that fateful night on May 16, 1943, is well documented but the science behind the mission has never been fully understood as research papers were for decades shrouded in secrecy.
But now Dr Hugh Hunt, an engineer from Cambridge, has for a Channel 4 documentary attempted to show just how skilled Barnes Wallis was to engineer such a devastating device by bouncing a bomb across water in Canada in an attempt to blow up a make-shift dam.
Dr Hunt told the Daily Telegraph: 'Nothing describes accurately what happened, because it was so shrouded in secrecy during the war that none of the information was available for 30 years afterwards, and since then a lot of the information has been lost.' 'So we thought the best way to figure out how it was done was just to do it.'
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1381486/Dambusters-documentary-recreates-science-WW2s-audacious-bombing-raid.html#ixzz1KrXTTdsZ