The weapon that defeated Hitler’s supergun
Published On Thu 19 Nov 2015 by Roddy Isles
A University of Dundee lecturer will give an insight into the British secret weapon that spiked a Nazi `supergun’ on a Channel 4 documentary this weekend.
`Building Hitler’s Supergun’ is broadcast at 8pm this Sunday and features a contribution from Dr Iain Murray, computing lecturer in the University’s School of Science and Engineering and an authority on the life and work of Sir Barnes Wallis.
The documentary concerns the V-3 `supergun’, a Nazi secret weapon which would have rained tons of shells onto London every day had not the British developed their own weapon to counter it.
The documentary features a simplified reconstruction of the gun, and a description of the British Tallboy deep-penetration bomb, designed by Barnes Wallis.
Dr Murray has written three books about the work of Wallis, who designed the Tallboy bomb as successor to his famous `bouncing bomb, which was successfully used by the Dambusters in 1943.
The documentary makers consulted him about aspects of the making and dropping of the huge 6-ton bomb, which was designed to explode deep underground. The Nazi’s `supergun’ was built underground to make it impregnable to bombing, but the Germans reckoned without Wallis’s special bomb, which destroyed the underground workings before the gun was completed - hence the V-3 never became operational, so is much less well-known than the V-1 and V-2 rockets.
In filming the documentary, Dr Murray was given access to the `Barnes Wallis Office’ in the RAF Museum at Hendon in north London. “It was great to get inside this office”, he said, “as it contains many genuine artefacts of Wallis’s projects, including the famous aerial photo of the breached Möhne Dam signed by Guy Gibson and many others from 617 Squadron.”
The filming at Hendon included an actor playing the part of Wallis sitting at his drawing board, and Dr Murray said it was “quite surreal” to be in that office with “Wallis”.
In further filming at Brooklands Museum in Surrey (where Wallis worked), Dr Murray also met John Bell, who was a Bomb Aimer with 617 Squadron in 1944, and who dropped more than 20 Tallboys on targets in France and Germany. Dr Murray said, “It was great to meet John, and to stand with him beside a Tallboy and ask him about his many exploits with the bomb - although he is 94, his memory of events was truly excellent, and he had many tales to tell.”
Some of the Tallboy bombs were made at Nairn’s linoleum factory in Kirkcaldy, which was given over to munitions production during the war.
The Channel 4 documentary “Building Hitler’s Supergun: the plot to destroy London” has been made by Windfall Films, who previously recreated the bouncing bomb for another documentary.
* image shows Dr Murray with "Barnes Wallis" (aka actor David Tabor) in the Wallis office at the RAF Museum, with the famous signed photo of the Mohne Dam behind
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