Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the bouncing bomb that was successfully deployed on the Dambusters raid of May 16/17 1943, had to work hard to have his ideas accepted by RAF chiefs. According to his daughter, Mary Stopes Roe, in an exclusive interview to the RAF Benevolent Fund, he would occasionally vent his frustration with this process, though she only learnt of this much later.
'There is something that I discovered lately,' says Stopes Roe in this clip, 'in reading one of the Dambusters books, by James Holland. He dug out a letter that BNW wrote to this chap that lived in Effingham -- Wing Commander Winterbottom. At the end, in BNW's own handwriting it said, "Help. Oh, Help!" So sometimes he gave a crie de coeur and people answered. I was really moved by that, actually.'
