Foyle’s War – further comments

Hi all,

Just found this thread … some interesting comments on the show and the “bouncing bomb” material included.

Clearly the programme makers had some conflict between the fact that the fictitious group depicted was doing the work done by Barnes Wallis and his team, but that the fictitious group had to be clearly not 100% identified with Wallis. They thus fudged the edges a bit to kind of make it all fit (e.g. making the team part of the National Physical Laboratory). The only pure errors I spotted were:
– the Navy man’s moustache (as discussed on this forum).
– the mention of adding wood to “the sphere”, which should have been “cylinder” like the one standing beside him at the time (the basic bomb/mine was cylindrical and it was padded to a spherical shape by adding wooden slats; in early drops, the slats broke away but the cylinder ran on, so the slats were done away with and the bomb was dropped as a cylinder).
– security around the real project was VERY tight … I don’t think “no one knows we’re here” really does it!
– the CGI Lancaster made far too tight a turn after the test drop.
– the test drop was made with the tide out; real drops were made with the tide in so that the bombs could be recovered when the tide went out.

Incidentally, the B/W Lancaster footage was IWM footage of a real drop; the man in the group on the beach waving his arms about is Barnes Wallis himself.

The calculations and graphs on the blackboard in the lab were taken from Wallis’ own handwritten notes of the time. If you look closely, you can see the formula for calculating the lift derived from spinning the cylinder. The graph on the right relates to the single live test drop, so it hadn’t actually happened yet! You see this all better in the “making of” documentary included on the DVD of this episode.

Regards,

Iain.